A maidan (NOT maiden) for everyone (from Yasmin El-Rifae) OR Reflections on gender violence in public spaces, and contemporary masculinity

     In her book, Radius, El-Rifae tells us that the motto printed in Arabic on the t-shirts of “Opantish” volunteers was “A Midan Safe for All;” midan in Arabic means traffic circle and public square. From my early years in India, I know the word maidan, meaning a public open space. I’m using maidan here as both physical public space, for example a field, a square, a street; and the public sphere of culture and politics, as expressed in language, image, gesture, and governance.
     The notion of a maidan safe for all reminds me of the “Meet to Sleep” initiative by Blank Noise in India which organizes women to sleep together in public parks. Blank Noise and Meet to Sleep aim for the “right to be defenseless” — in public. On Blank Noise’s website, a Meet-to-Sleep activist is quoted: “When my 11-year-old daughter was hearing the adults share, she kept whispering back to me, “what is the big deal about sleeping in a park.” While she may be too young to understand this, my hope is that with movements such as these, she would continue to ask this question even as an adult woman living in India.”
​     Opantish — Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment and Assault — emerged in 2012 as sexual assault of women protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square increased in frequency and severity. El-Rifae, a founder of Opantish, introduces her book, Radius,  with a mild New York city literary dinner anecdote: “A famous writer and his wife … ask me what my book is about. I say it’s the story of a group that fought circles of men that attacked women over and over again while a revolution struggled to survive. The man, the writer wants to know how this could happen, why. The woman looks at me closely and says, “It’s not the same, not the same at all, but I’ve felt something like that. At parties and dances, even back at school. Suddenly something would shift, you’d feel a circle forming around you, and I don’t know, it’s not the same, but there would suddenly be this menace, this threat, grabbing.” The cover description of El Rifae’s book summarizes Opantish’s work as “[racing] to develop new tactics, [struggling] with a revolution bleeding into counterrevolution….”
     I have not felt threatened at protests, but did feel threatened while canvassing for Zohran Mamdani at the Upper West Side farmers’ market in New York a couple of weeks ago. Around noon that day, I felt physically threatened by four men though not sexually in an obvious way. One pair, in identical black clothes, didn’t speak, but menaced past me in a walk-by. In another incident shortly after, one man leaned into verbally assaulting me while a younger man walked by and turned around to glare at me threateningly; I’m not sure their actions were coordinated ahead of time but their actions consciously connected, with eye contact and expression, on one side and the other of me. Mind you, quite a few other people — women and men — responded to my opening smile and question “do you vote in the city?" with very brusque and even angry “Not for that man!” “anti-Semite!” and so on. Not friendly, sometimes even angry, they expressed aggressive opposition but I did not feel physically threatened by anyone apart from the four specific men mentioned above. From them I experienced physical intimidation, and I experienced their intimidation as gendered.  Their menacing behavior was intended to shut me down, and cumulatively it did, not outwardly in an obvious way, but inside me a part of me shut down.
     Soon after, I saw an opinion piece titled “How Women Destroyed the West” (David French, NYT, Oct. 23, 2025). Of course I had to read it. I braced myself before starting, but it turned out not to be upsettingly tendentious, at least not for me. In the article, French discusses a speech on “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture” — described as “electrifying” and “incisive” on the political right — presented by a Helen Andrews at a National Conservatism conference in September 2025. In an unremarkable coincidence, around the same time that French’s article was being published, a woman sitting next to me at my neighborhood bar in New York city spoke to me about the “emasculation of men by Women’s Lib.” 
     None of this — the backlash on gender issues, gendered vulnerability, reactionary forces, the counterrevolution, and so on — is new. Indeed, gender-sexual conservatism has been a cornerstone of political conservatism in many parts of world in the post-colonial era, having already been present in one way or the other throughout history. That too is commonly known. Power and the law start in intimate relationships, and the family.
    And so, for me, from my perspective and experience as a woman, the question linking power and  (gendered) violence still begins with masculinity, more specifically heterosexual masculinity.
    In the spring of 2024, The Point had an issue I’ve referred to before on the question of “what are men for?” A couple of highly educated and earnestly contemporary, young, evidently-heterosexual men — I daren’t call them liberal or feminist because I’m not sure they would describe themselves thus; I get the impression they prefer to be known as alarmingly intelligent — describe their struggles with the feminization of our US culture. The issue begins with a personal and very thoughtful letter titled, “On the Crisis of Men,” by an evidently heterosexual young founder-editor. He starts by describing his experience of taking his toddler to a toddler event: “Looking at other men is a somewhat novel experience for me. In my former life as a non-father, if I took any notice of another man in the same room, it was probably to appraise him physically, on the off chance that we were to become locked in some form of primitive combat. (Would I be able to beat him in a race? How easy would it be for him to strangle me?) As a father, however, I find myself looking at other men — at other fathers — all the time, and not at all as competition. Often they look back, just as quizzically, at me. I think we are trying to figure out how we should look, how we should act, how we should deal with the perennial awkwardness of being a father in public.” Later he says, “I grew up in the age of the crisis of men,” meaning the early 2000s. 
    Parenthetically, the loveliest article in that issue, at least to my highly feminized sensibility, is one titled “The Failed Man.” I am not able to summarize it in a way that conveys what is impressive and beautiful about it, so if you are curious, do read it. The whole issue is worthwhile.
     In the political turbulence of the United States today, in Trump’s 2025, two tropes of masculinity dominate: the disaffected working class man; and the gluttonous and venal oligarch and his wannabe successors who want to become him. One important perspective on our current, and past, conservative ecology has focused on capitalist economic greed and exploitation; from that perspective, gender has typically been a separate question, often secondary but not always. In Sheila Rowbotham’s 1960s, class/economy trumped (in the old sense of the word) gender equality. In El-Rifae’s experience of Tahrir Square, many left-leaning activists effectively said, “this isn’t the time for women’s issues.” In the US today, many higher-income gender equality allies shy away from addressing the structures that reproduce and exacerbate poverty. (right now, food stamps?!)
   Regarding the emasculation of men by Women’s Lib, I countered my bar neighbor with something like “men have to change, they have to figure this out.” She responded with something like “we haven’t parented them to do that.”
    So then, in yet another unremarkable coincidence, in this concurrent recent past I was reading Edward Said on Jean Genet (in On Late Style) and he writes: “It is curious, however, that both Le captif and Les paravents end with affirmative recollections of a mother and her son who, although dead or about to die, are reunited by Genet in his own mind…. ...Genet also wants to retain for his own purposes the priority and affective comfort of the relationship between an almost savagely archetypal Mother (who is not named but referred to simply as “la mère” in both books) and a loyal but somewhat aloof, often harsh Son. Aside from the perfectly obvious absence of a threateningly authoritative Father, Genet’s imagination articulates an arguably final moment in what are for him transposed terms: both mother-son pairs are people he likes and admires, but neither in the play nor in the memoir are he and his mother present.” In both Genet’s work and Said’s commentary, gender is imbricated with revolutionary politics in the public sphere. The specific articulation in this excerpted part of Said’s essay, led me to mull, inevitably without conclusion: if the son lives, he becomes the Father. If you don’t want the Father — in this case, meaning the threateningly authoritative Father — what other plot lines are possible? And what happens when the Mother leaves? These are favorite ponderables of especially Western gender lore. They remain interesting but their clarity is further challenged as the idiomatic and practical field of gender expands. New plot lines form, meander, and lose themselves in the living.
     Meanwhile, back in the “what are men for?” issue of The Point, which to be clear is not just by or about conventional heterosexual men, there is a collection of surveyed responses from an ordinary range of people of different ages and genders. Several responses tilted my head in the “aha” of something uncovered and recognized. In response to the question, “How did you learn what it meant to be a man?” Samuel, a man in his mid-twenties in California, said: “My Dad and I always physically fought (somewhat playfully, somewhat not) when I was a kid. The goal was to make the other submit, something I achieved much to his shame when I was fourteen years old. That permanently altered our relationship, and it led me to treat him less like an authority than an equal. My dad recently confessed that he had found that fight emasculating. I remember distinctly feeling virile in that moment. If I were to abstract away what I learned, then, it’s that to be a man is to compete with and defeat other men.” Samuel goes on in response to other questions: “The biggest hurdle men face today… would be finding a social narrative that (i) guides them, (ii) gains purchase among men and (iii) is in harmony with the social narratives of other genders. I think men look to their gender identity for normative guidance and confidence, and they look to other men to see whether they are performing their gender correctly. But the performance of male gender is an utter disaster… …. There are a lot of pains associated with failed gender performance that are difficult to understand if you haven’t been policed for failing to perform that gender.”
     With my tilted head I reflect that over the last century or two, certainly in the US but also in other places albeit with different rhythms of movements and effects, failed gender performance for women has often been associated with expanded opportunities and choices. For me, being less conventionally female opened up worlds of exploration and action. I’m gathering in a distant, inarticulate way that for many heterosexual men “failed gender performance” has meant a narrowing, failure: in providing; in finding a mate; in competing with other men; in being respected by self and others. What can I do with this? At this point, probably nothing more than opening this up further for myself and others. 
     Another man, in his late forties in Alabama, said in response to the question, “What are men for?”: “Men are also responsible for making other men—only they can make that happen.” My head tilts again. 
     A thread weaving both lived experience and meaning systems connects Jean Genet, Opantish in Tahrir Square, and current gendered politics in the United States. Today, young people of all genders, and in many if not all parts of the world, are expressing themselves in the public sphere. Many are openly seeking and insisting on safety for all in the maidan. Of course, and this is also important to say at this fraught time, gender is a major but not the only source of vulnerability. Socio-economic class is always a big determinant, as is military power. In the United States, race and color often determine one’s degree of vulnerability. In the United States and my country of origin (India), immigrant status and religion may be major sources of vulnerability. In India, traditionally caste has been a major source of vulnerability. All these and more are linked and layered determinants of power and vulnerability, along with and beyond physiology, intimate relationships, and the family. In the end, safety in the maidan includes the safety of equality of opportunity; equality of access to the components of wellbeing (healthcare, food, shelter, education, green space, and so on); equality of access to beauty; and equality of access to voice in how we are governed and for what purposes. The maidan is not just the physical open field, though violence, as physical violence, is most palpable in physical open space.
     There is no end.

Fittingly, just as I finished this essay, I received a book (Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit) which opens with this epigraph:

Always two sides to every question.
But what’s the fucking question?
I didn’t hear it?
Does it peel away like an onion?
On and on and on until there’s nothing?
Does it melt like ice until it’s some kind of invisible something?
— Pope.L