we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might. - Gloria Steinem

These patriarchal controls limit men's sexuality too ... That's why men are asked symbolically to submit the sexual part of themselves and their sons to patriarchal authority, which seems to be the origin of male circumcision, a practice that, even as advocates admit, is medically unnecessary 90% of the time. Speaking for myself, I stand with many brothers in eliminating that practice too.

I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It’s the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion — the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality.

The Arab Spring did a great deal for women because the person who spread the word in the first place was a woman. Women participated in it; they were fully out there in the street. Nawal El Saadawi is a founding figure of Egyptian and Middle Eastern feminism who wrote a book opposing female genital mutilation (of which she is a victim). She’s been banned. She’s been in prison. She’s now in her eighties and during the Arab Spring she was like the wise woman of Liberation Square, sitting in the middle of it as young women and young men came to her for instruction, for blessings, and so on. But it’s very often the case with revolutionary moments that women are present but then they’re drummed out of it afterwards.