[Content Warning: This article mentions FGM [female genital mutilation]
When Nour Emam and I meet she’s just began fasting for Ramadan, easing her into a month of checking in daily with her body and spirit. Despite missing the kick of coffee that morning she tells me, “This year I have set an intention to slow down for myself, because it's been a very hectic year and a half since we launched Mother Being. I feel like I need to take this time to rest and be with family and eat good food and maybe move a bit.”
Founded at the start of 2020, Mother Being is an online platform dedicated to creating informative content centering women's bodies and health. With more than 600,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram combined, Emam’s work is filling an overlooked need for inclusive sexuale education. People have questions, and Emam shares answers through her podcast, webinars, and viral-friendly skits on topics from how to use a menstrual cup to a breakdown on the use of cesareans during birth— often in Arabic, but occasionally with English subtitles. What started as a passion-driven search for knowledge following post-partum depression, she says, has grown into a three-person team and recently registered company. Alongside Emam, Mother Being is nurtured by Shahd Omar, Head of Research & Innovation and Fayrouz Ibrahim, Administrative & Creative Assistant.
“The platform started out as a way to communicate birth rights and bodily autonomy in the birth space, mainly doula related stuff. It's shifted so greatly since its launch in January 2020, that it's really no longer just about motherhood or pregnancy. We realized very quickly that you can't really focus on one topic and disregard reproductive education in general. Especially because most women don't have this kind of knowledge and aren't taught this knowledge,” Emam shares. “So I realized I can talk about birth, but I also need to talk about periods and I need to talk about pleasure. And so now people ask me, why are you ‘Mother Being’ but you talk about sex and I'm like, ‘because we all came from our mothers and our mothers were our first schools.’ We have a saying here in Egypt, الأم مدرسة , meaning ‘the mother is the school.’ She is the school of life. She is your first window into life and everything that you're taught until you go into real school is from your mother, or your caretaker or whoever was taking care of you since you were a baby,” she explains.
Previously a music producer who frequently toured the European club circuit and later a music curator and aspiring sound art lecturer, it’s been two years since Nour Emam became a doula. Some would wonder: why did a musician with a Master’s in Sound Arts from Goldsmiths who performed at a feminist festival in Brussels while seven months pregnant, shift their time and energy into reproductive health education? After giving birth to her first daughter, she wasn’t allowed to see her child for almost three days due to jaundice complications that needed to be treated in an intensive natal care unit. Emam felt blindsided— by the forcefulness of the hospital on their recommendations and by how uninformed she’d been on her own pregnancy and its impact on her decision-making. Seven months later, she was grappling with suicidal thoughts and eventually was diagnosed with severe postpartum depression and anxiety. When her therapist suggested that she cultivate her ambitions, she revisited a childhood fascination with birth and reproductive health.
“I had started reading about doula training before I decided to have a baby and I was like, wow, this is the perfect combination of not needing to be a doctor, but also being allowed into the birth space… So I put all of my savings into a doula training based out of Toronto. That was a four-month training which helped me learn about fertility, birth, postpartum. This training was particularly niche because they really wanted to teach us how to finish doula training, but also be able to run a business. I was building the brand while I was finishing my training. I launched in January— because we only have like 6 doulas in all of Egypt that I know of, and none of them really have social media presence or talk about birth rights— from the beginning, I was like, ‘I'm going to make this platform as a way to market for myself and my services, but also to provide free accessible information to Egyptians living in Egypt’.”
As the platform gained popularity and supportt, Emam quickly realized that the majority of her audience were not mothers, but actually women and girls between the ages of 18 to 25 in search of a space where they could unashamedly learn about their bodies. This demand was one Emam could recognize in her younger self. “When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to go into gynecology,” she recalls. “My parents were like, no, you're definitely not going into med school. You're gonna waste your whole life studying and you're not gonna have a life. So I forgot about that, and continued on with other things. When I started trying to get pregnant, I realized there was so much I didn't know— like most of the things that I should have known, I really didn't and I thought that I was someone who did have this knowledge. I needed to teach myself all of this all over again, at the age of 26. About my ovulation and about cervical mucus, and about how conception happens— I had to teach myself,” she reflects. Emam describes her personal reproductive health journey as one of constant research to answer other people’s as well as her own questions.
There is versatility in Emam’s creativity; she’s been able to transfer her study of media design and music into the way she translates dense info from medical journals and Google search results into digestible videos you can share in the groupchat. During our conversation, Emam repeatedly emphasizes the most important thing to her: accessibility. “It's not necessarily that I'm using my music production skills, or my video editing skills, but more that the creative processes are the same. It's moving, just in a different area. And it's the idea that I need to create content that's relatable that's easy, that's casual. It’s not that no one needs this information from a doctor anymore, but people need to hear this stuff from real people,” she says.
“I need to make this fun.”
I ask Emam for two things she’s recently learnt that everyone should already know and she is quick to respond, “One of the biggest obsessions I've realized that we have, at least in the Middle East [MENA region], is a false understanding of virginity and the hymen. This is something that I address every single week, because it just won't go away. Science says, this is not an indication of virginity. Science says that you don't lose or ‘pop your cherry’ or whatever they say. Like it's there. You're 80 years old, and you still have a hymen. You can have had 50 kids and you'll still have it. It doesn't go anywhere. Sex is not the thing that bursts it open. It's not something like a magic seal that shuts your vagina and then you're waiting for someone to penetrate it. Also I talk about FGM [female genital mutilation] very often as well, because it's so so prevalent in Egypt.”
The medical establishment and women’s bodies have had a fraught history, further complicated by cultural politics and religion. More and more young people are looking for alternatives they can trust. Despite the procedure’s criminalization in 2008, currently 92% of women in Egypt between 15 to 49 are survivors of female genital mutilation (FGM). As part of the ‘National Strategy for the Empowerment of Egyptian Women 2030,’ the Egyptian government is putting in place measures to eliminate FGM including a National Committee for Eliminating FGM, community education programmes and supporting grassroots initiatives. “The negative impact that FGM has on the women that I personally deal with, in my classes and on the page is just absolutely horrible, because this carries on with them from their lives: how it creates sexual dysfunctions, how it creates the inability to experience pleasure and how this trauma affects them. y mission is to talk to the women who have already experienced it. ow do you seek help after this? Now we have a center here that does clitoral reconstructive surgery, and it's the first one of its kind in the MENA region,” Emam says.
It’s for this reason that although resistance towards Emam’s work continues (Facebook recently shadowbanned Mother Being’s account), she is committed to accessible sexual and reproductive health education for all, one carefully created piece of media at a time.
Nour Emam will be appearing on the Tea and a Talk: Sexual Health panel at AMAKA’s Our World Festival on May 4th, 2021. Please click the link here to register.