After a certain age,
A girl no longer has the freedom to choose a suitable person to marry.

I hate feeling like a hypocrite: wearing one thing in front of friends, dressing differently in front of family.
I wish I could share pictures of me enjoying myself at the beach, but I can’t, my father would have a heart attack at the sight of me wearing a two-piece.

The first time he hit me was the day I found out I was pregnant.
He picked a fight with me when his friend and his wife were having dinner with us,
And I fried the mombar (a kind of sausage dish),
Before the chicken breasts.
He pulled me by my hair,
And dragged me to the stove,
And threatened to set me on fire to get rid of me.

Everyone felt bad for her when they broke up.
“We’ll take you to a doctor for a virginity test. We need to know if he left you because you slept together,” her father said.

I’m starting to believe that men see women merely as something that serves their pleasure.
Very few of them treat women as human beings,
Who have their own dreams, and desires,
And could be useful in things other than pleasure.
And you should ask me about men,
Because she who raises a monkey knows their games!
gender violence, hijab, romantic relationships, parents, social pressure, sex, body image, sexuality, consent

I know that a lot of women unknowingly enter into marriages with similar types of men, and that I was lucky and all that.
But I never imagined that something like that could ever happen to me.

In middle school,
I used to love wearing shorts and dancing in front of the mirror.
My mother would smack me.

It didn’t feel normal or spontaneous.
Between being scolded by your conservative [female] relative for doing something “immodest” and listening to your friends whispering about touching certain [private] areas on maids’ and female cousins’ bodies, you eventually learn to associate the opposite sex’s body with shame.
There has got to be something shameful about it.

I was always humiliated and beaten up over the most trivial reasons.
He’d hit me and flip the dining table over if there was just a little extra salt in his food.
I was never allowed to open my mouth and give my opinion.
Cooking zucchini was always a frightening experience, because if just one piece of zucchini turned out smaller than the other, it’d be a disaster.

“Be careful while crossing the street.”
“Don’t take flowers from strangers.”
“Don’t walk down dark streets.”
The things I especially could never forget were,
“Don’t walk like a girl! Walk like a man!”