Pervasive Sexism and Oppression Theme Analysis

Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero tells the story of Firdaus—an Egyptian woman on death row in the 1970s for killing a pimp—who suffers oppression and abuse from men for her entire life. As Saadawi narrates from Firdaus’s perspective, every single man in her life seeks to abuse or exploit her based on her female identity. Although Firdaus is a natural survivor, her story is unrelentingly bleak as she goes from oppressive situation to oppressive situation, with no hope for positive change. Firdaus’s account depicts pervasive sexism in Egyptian society in the 1970s and demonstrates how it plagues women from birth to death, exerting powerful influence over every aspect of their lives.

As a child, Firdaus’s friends and family members oppress and exploit her for being born a woman, demonstrating how pervasive sexism affects women from the earliest years of their life. Firdaus’s only recollections of her father are negative. Every night she watches him “beat his wife and make her bite the dust.” Firdaus has many siblings, but they often die of dysentery. When a son dies, Firdaus’s father gets angry and beats her mother; when a daughter dies, he eats his dinner and goes to sleep like any other day. Firdaus’s father’s utter disregard for his wife and daughters suggests that Firdaus’s family structure is inherently sexist and places no value whatsoever on women and girls. As young children, Firdaus and her friend Mohammadain often sneak away to play “bride and bridegroom,” a game in which they explore each other’s bodies—this is how Firdaus first experiences sexual pleasure. However, before she is old enough to understand her body or where the pleasure comes from, Firdaus’s mother has her circumcised, removing her clitoris with a razor blade. For the rest of Firdaus’s life, during any sexual experience, she can sense that the pleasure is missing, “like a dream remembered from a distant past,” but can never quite recover it. Firdaus never has any say in her genital mutilation, suggesting that even at any early age, she has no agency or control over her own body. Throughout her young childhood, Firdaus’s uncle provides her sole affectionate relationship with an adult. She recalls, “My uncle was closer to me than my father.” Although her uncle teaches her to read, puts her in elementary school, and eventually adopts her after both parents die, he also sexually molests her from an early age. Firdaus learns to expect his hands reaching for her with a “grasping, almost brutal insistence” and does not try to resist him, seemingly because of his authority as a man and his affection toward her. Firdaus’s only remotely positive relationship with a man is still sexually exploitative, suggesting that her whole childhood is framed by sexism and oppression from men.

Although Firdaus is intelligent and capable, her uncle’s sexist ideals prevent her from pursuing her full potential as a scholar or professional, suggesting that society’s pervasive sexism keeps women from reaching their true potential. After Firdaus’s parents die, her uncle adopts her and puts her through primary and secondary school at an all-girls boarding school, where she excels—which suggests that without men oppressing or exploiting her, Firdaus is free to reach her own high potential. Upon graduating secondary school, Firdaus ranks “second in the school and seventh countrywide.” She is obviously a talented student, and dreams of becoming a “head of state,” though she knows this is impossible due to her gender, suggesting that societal sexism causes Firdaus to limit her own aspirations. However, when her uncle’s new wife wants to “be rid of [Firdaus] by sending her to the university,” Firdaus’s uncle refuses, insisting that his niece studying alongside men would look indecorous and reflect poorly on him, since he is a religious scholar and public figure. Despite Firdaus’s intellect, her uncle’s sexist beliefs about women’s role in society prematurely end her education and stop her from reaching her full potential as a scholar. Instead of letting Firdaus study, Firdaus’s uncle and aunt marry her off to Sheikh Mahmoud, a grotesque old man who pays a hefty dowry for Firdaus, effectively buying her from her family. Sheikh Mahmoud routinely beats and rapes her until she runs away and wanders the streets, desperate for shelter and a new life. Unable to find a lawful job with her secondary school certificate, Firdaus spends most of her adult life as a prostitute, exploited and abused by several different pimps until she becomes her own manager. Her uncle’s refusal to let her study in university, based solely on his sexist ideals, sets Firdaus down a path of hardship and exploitation, demonstrating that personal and societal sexism oppress women by withholding them from their true potential and forcing them into lives of desperation and abuse.

When Firdaus finally leaves prostitution and works for an industrial company, she finds that company executives regularly harass women and pressure them to have sex with them, suggesting that sexism and oppression even dominate career women’s lives. Although Firdaus refuses to have sex with her superiors—not for their lack of trying—she watches her female co-workers “offer their bodies and their physical efforts every night in return for a meal, or a good yearly report, or just to ensure that they would not be treated unfairly” and realizes “that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life.” That is, women’s fear of losing their jobs allows powerful men to prey on them. Firdaus’s account suggests that even for professional, independent women, pervasive sexism dominates their lives and has an outsized effect on their careers. If even working women, who earn their own living and are not dependent on a husband or father, suffer pervasive sexism, then every level of society appears to be rife with gendered oppression. No woman escapes it. Firdaus’s testimony is unrelentingly dark, suggesting that pervasive sexism exists on every level of Egyptian society, plaguing women from birth to death. Though the story itself offers no hope for women, it represents the very real need for feminism and women’s liberation in the Egypt in the 1970s.