Our global panel of writers reflect on the great legacy of the American feminist and civil rights activist, who died last week aged 92

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Really, why wouldn’t you wash yourself after using the toilet? If you won’t listen to me, then listen to Zohran Mamdani – and get your straddle on

The first time I heard a bidet mentioned in the US – or at least what it’s used for – was at the start of an off-Broadway play I saw in 2015 called Threesome. An Egyptian-American couple are in bed waiting for a white man they’ve invited to join them for the tryst of the title. He bounds on to the stage after using the bathroom, and the couple yell at him, “Go back and wash your ass!”

Like that couple, and Threesome’s playwright, Yussef El Guindi, I’m Egyptian. In Egypt, bathrooms in every home, as well as those in public buildings, are fitted with some kind of contraption for washing after using the toilet: a bidet, a standalone low oval basin next to the toilet that one straddles – or, more popularly, a shattaf, a fixture in the toilet itself through which water streams out. Sometimes, the shattaf is a small showerhead attached to the wall next to the toilet. I’ve recently learned that its name in English is a bum gun. It’s my favourite kind of shattaf, because you can control the water pressure.

Mona Eltahawy writes the FEMINIST GIANT newsletter. She is the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, and Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

After Claudia Sheinbaum was assaulted this week, her opponents claimed she staged it. From their own experiences, the women I met know she didn’t have to

“Machismo in Mexico is so fucked up not even the president is safe,” said Caterina Camastra, a professor and feminist, when I talked to her in Morelia, a city west of the Mexican capital this week. Succinct and to the point, it is a sentiment shared by many women in Mexico after watching the now viral video of a drunk man groping the country’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, as she walked from the National Palace to the education ministry on Monday. Sheinbaum, who has pressed charges against the man, said much the same at her daily press briefing on Wednesday: “If they do this to the president, what happens to all the other women in the country?”

Sheinbaum’s unprecedented position has made this a teaching moment in a country where women have long complained that sexual harassment and assault on streets and public transport were too often normalised and not taken seriously. The leftist Sheinbaum’s political opponents on the right have done just that by claiming her sexual assault was staged to distract from the assassination of a local mayor, Carlos Manzo, an outspoken critic of organised crime who had called on the government to do more to protect him and others. Most women here, on the other hand, know that sexual violence does not have to be set up – half of them have experienced it at some point in their lives.

Mona Eltahawy writes the Feminist Giant newsletter. She is the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution