I used to hate the low-rise jeans trend.
I didn’t know how to get into those jeans.
I used to force myself to either wear something really long that hid my butt, which would make me look like a whale,
Or tie something around my waist.

Mariam, my daughter, came to me a couple of days ago,
Telling me that her friend, Salma, who had just turned 10,
Was being forced by her parents to wear the veil because she’s all grown up now.

I invented something called “The red lines”,
And I imagined them drawn on my body.
So that I could mark the boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed.

I was attending a movement workshop in Argentina.
I felt terrified the first day there.
Terrified of anyone touching my body.
Anywhere on my body.

We would sometimes look at each other and not say anything.
We knew what we did, but we didn’t talk about it.
It’s funny how the whole thing passed smoothly just because we didn’t talk about it.
But if the same thing had happened with other people and they talked about it,
It could have made a huge difference in their relationship.

When you would try to touch me,
I felt like you couldn’t see me.
You could only see the body you were about to touch.

My mother sat me down and told me she wanted to talk to me about something. 
She talked about some embarrassing, incomprehensible things. 
I was having lunch, so I wasn’t really listening to her. 
"Don’t let anyone touch you.”

You mean to tell me if a woman has acid thrown on her in the street and her face is disfigured, then so long as her organs are still functioning, the charge will still be ‘physical assault of a woman?’”