Throughout her young childhood, Firdaus’s uncle provides her sole affectionate relationship with an adult. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Every night she watches him “beat his wife and make her bite the dust.” Firdaus has many siblings, but they often die of dysentery. Firdaus’s only recollections of her father are negative. 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.Īs 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. 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. As Saadawi narrates from Firdaus’s perspective, every single man in her life seeks to abuse or exploit her based on her female identity. 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.

Woman at point zero book