A few years ago, there was a viral trend on social media appeared Which highlighted the way male writers often portray female characters. Women were invited to describe themselves as if they had been written by a male author, and many responded with similarly trite and superficial descriptions, such as “she had a beautiful figure and eyes” or she wore “soft lipstick and nice mascara.”
Female characters written by male authors are often portrayed through idealized fantasies rather than through the complex and painful realities that many women live.
Beyond the color of her lipstick or the shape of her eyes, a woman’s identity is shaped by many complex experiences, including dealing with sexual violence, trauma, and societal expectations surrounding relationships and singleness.
By contrast, when women write female characters, their portrayal often explores the nuanced and multifaceted experiences that continually shape women’s sense of self.
Women have always been under scrutiny, not just from men, but from other women as well. From the way they approach their appearance to how they balance motherhood and ambition, the experience of being a woman is not just one woman’s story; It is transmitted from mother to daughter and from generation to generation.
Below is a collection of books by Arab women writers, each of which is a window into a lived experience and, more importantly, what can be learned, carried and gained from it.
Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Shreiteh
Abeer Ward Come She comes from a conservative Lebanese family, and nothing concerns her more than preserving her reputation, virginity, and “purity.” Although her home functions as a conservative and restricted space, outside it she encounters painted images of women on Coca-Cola billboards, reflecting the tension between the modern, globalized world and the traditional expectations imposed by her family life.
Beirut itself becomes a character in this novel, with Coca-Cola billboards serving as a metaphor for the ways in which Lebanese women navigate their relationships with their bodies, and the external forces that shape them.
Abeer’s friends, Jana and Yasmine, construct their own ideas of femininity, shaped by their individual experiences and identities. Jana, a Romanian-Lebanese model, expresses her sexuality openly and confidently, while Yasmine, a boxer, completely resists traditional expectations of femininity. Although neither of them conforms to society’s ideal of a “proper” woman, they are still criticized and restricted for crossing those acceptable boundaries.
In the end, the three women Forced To confront a world that monitors and controls their bodies. From Jana’s unplanned pregnancy to Abeer’s escape from sexual violence, they confront the intersecting forces of oppression: the male gaze, colonialism, and the myth of beauty.
One of the most striking novels Features It is the extent to which the female body is openly discussed. Shreiteh writes about menstruation, virginity, desire, pregnancy, waxing, shame, and body anxiety in direct, everyday language.
The title itself is symbolic. The phrase “Always Coca-Cola” refers to global consumer culture and the confusing intersection of brands, femininity, desire and identity in the urban environment of Beirut. Coca-Cola advertising, beauty culture, and Western images of femininity coexist with conservative social expectations, creating contradictions that women must constantly navigate.
The works of Inayat by Iman Mersal
the story The story of a young woman who died by suicide in 1963 at the age of 27, before her work finally reached the public, is not a light or simple subject. Engaging with her life and legacy requires rejecting superficiality; Instead, the sheer weight of her story demands a confrontation with the horrific truths often imposed on women.
When Egyptian writer Iman Mersal discovers Inayat El-Zayat’s only novel in a library in Cairo in the 1990s, she embarks on a realistic investigative journey centered around the life of a writer who died by suicide in 1963 in Cairo before publishing her only novel. Rather than turning her story into a simple chronology of events, the book explores her life as an archaeologist, probing the emotional and social conditions facing women writers in mid-twentieth-century Egypt through interviews with surviving relatives and friends, old newspaper archives, abandoned addresses, legal records, photographs, and literary artifacts.
While it is still difficult to verify the details of Inayat Al-Zayat’s life because much of what is known comes from research into her biography, research into her life reveals a woman who suffered from depression from a young age and spent periods of her life receiving psychological treatment. Like many women of her time, Inayat married young and soon found herself trapped in an unhappy and reportedly abusive marriage. However, after their separation, she became embroiled in difficult divorce and custody disputes while struggling to raise her young son.
Her despair came from an accumulation of experiences: an abusive marriage, social expectations surrounding femininity, the pressures of motherhood, and the stigma surrounding mental illness.
It seems relevant today because of the story of Enayat Al-Zayat reverberation Recent debates in Egypt about divorce, motherhood, child custody and women’s mental health. Recent public conversations following the death of an Egyptian mother by suicide after traumatic custody battles and social isolation have made Mersal’s work seem modern. Although Inayat’s story takes place in the early 1960s, the pressures surrounding divorced mothers and the stigma associated with women who leave marriage are still evident.
Ms. Hanaa Larim Bassiouni
Some novels begin with a scene, while others unfold gradually through the inner lives of their characters. After in Ms. Hana By Egyptian writer Reem Bassiouni, the story begins in a moment of crisis. Although it may not seem like a crisis in the traditional sense, for many women it becomes the foundation of their identity.
Hana realizes that despite her intellectual achievements and professional authority, she is still socially viewed as incomplete because she is unmarried and sexually inexperienced. Fearing that she would become permanently trapped in loneliness and emotional infertility, she decided that she wanted to lose her virginity before she turned forty.
Hana’s tragedy is not just that she is not married; It is that her society taught her to experience her body primarily through shame, surveillance, and lack. Her virginity becomes a symbol of moral respectability and a prison. The novel exposes the contradiction imposed on many women, how they are expected to remain sexually “pure,” yet are simultaneously judged and devalued if they remain unmarried for too long.
She is intellectually intelligent but emotionally fragile, desiring intimacy but afraid to relinquish control. Her sexuality is intertwined with power, fear, old age, loneliness, and social pressure, turning the novel into a theme less about sexual freedom and more about the psychological violence that results when female desire is denied legitimate expression.
A distant view of the minaret by artist Alifa Refaat
Women’s voices are often conveyed through the dialogue of female characters, but in the dialogue of the Egyptian writer Alifa Refaat writingThose voices come directly from the woman’s inner thoughts. Her female characters speak frankly and fearlessly, expressing every feeling and opinion a woman may have, even in moments of intimacy with her husband.
The story begins with a woman lying next to her sleeping husband, contemplating how little he cares about her desires. Although her marriage appears respectable from the outside, she feels dissatisfied, especially sexually. Her husband approaches intimacy in a mechanical and selfish way, focusing only on his own pleasure while her needs and emotions remain neglected and unexpressed.
The bedroom becomes a symbol of inequality: even within marriage, where intimacy should involve mutual connection and pleasure, women are denied fulfillment and power over their bodies. It exposes the invisible suffering of ordinary women whose pain is often ignored because it occurs inside the home, hidden behind the facade of a “normal” marriage.
Rather than leaving women’s lives hidden behind closed doors, or buried within their thoughts and emotions, these books bring their experiences out into the open, allowing the wider world to finally see women, and truly see them through women’s eyes.