Sexual harassment exists everywhere, but it is particularly rampant in Egypt. It is both tolerated and perpetrated by the authorities, as well as the average everyday assholes of all ages that you encounter all over the country. If you have boobies and you walk around in public in Egypt, you should be prepared to guard them from boys as young as 5 and as old as 85.
Nature’s bastard trick on women, though, is that if we are protecting our boobies, we have an ass on the other side that is out there for the taking, yet we lack the eight extra arms that we need to cover everything when some cunt-waffle is squeezing past us to cop a feel.
Today, Egyptian bloggers are writing about sexual harassment in Egypt. Many people in Egypt are silent about this issue, act like it doesn’t exist, or blame the woman for dressing too provocatively, bringing the harassment onto herself. If you follow the “#endSH” hashtag on Twitter today, you will see from other women’s stories that it doesn’t matter if you are covered from head to toe–no woman in Egypt is immune to sexual harassment.
Men are often excused for this behavior because it is written off as being in their nature as men.
I have more sexual harassment in Egypt stories (as well as sexual harassment not in Egypt stories) than someone who looks like me should, but I am hoping to use today to do a bit of a social experiment that I have fantasized about since a day in 2008 when this son of a bitch on a microbus felt me up (against my will, which should go without saying, but for some reason I still have to say it).
This particular incident was not my first time, nor my last time, nor my worst time, being sexually harassed in Egypt. But I will write about this story because I happen to have a photo of the perpetrator. He looks like this:
I know the guy smizing in the back really captures one’s attention with his GQ pose, but the guy I am talking about in this story is actually the one in the foreground who is wearing sunglasses. Click to enlarge and memorize his features.
So, I was on this bus with a friend of mine headed from Cairo to Alexandria to meet up with some friends for a day of fun. I was sitting in the aisle seat. I popped in my earbuds and nodded in and out of sleep during the bus journey.
I felt something like movement that I thought was beneath my seat over and over, and I kept shifting and looking around to see what it was. Every time I checked, I found nothing.
It happened again, and I looked behind me. Guys were sitting back there, but nothing was happening. I looked below me. Nothing.
Was the guy behind me kicking me from underneath the seat? It stopped again and I thought, he should stop kicking my seat or whatever it is he’s doing.
This went on for a while, and it wasn’t until I felt air from the outside world entering the lower back/top ass part of my clothing–parts of my body that I thought were covered–that I figured out the trick that I was previously unable to figure out.
I swiftly turned around and looked at my chair, and found that there was a crack of space between the back of the chair and the seat where the guy behind me had been sticking his fingers and moving my jeans down to feel up my ass. I saw his hands move back quickly and he continued his nonchalant air of having no idea what is going on.
I screamed a string of insults at him in Arabic, mostly about the gulf-like wideness of of his mom’s vagina from excess of activity with random men she meets in buses. That guy in the background of the photo looked really confused about what was going on when he watched me take off my shoe, sit up on my knees in my chair to face the guy straight on and hit him across the face over and over until his nose started bleeding. My friend stood by, muscles tensed, looking on guard as if he would jump in if the guy tried to do anything to me. Finally, I stood up and went to where he was sitting and smashed my other still-shoed foot into his balls. I did it a second time in case I had missed the first time. He coughed and his face turned red and he began gasping for air and crying. I spat in his face and then sat back down and tried to calm myself down. It was scary, but I felt great.
Just kidding, LOLZ!
That is what I did in my head after I replayed the incident in my head 56 billion times. What I actually did in real life was whisper something incoherent to my friend about how the guy behind me was making me uncomfortable, switch seats with him, and then cower and try to gather my thoughts about what to do without crying.
The guy started trying to take my photo with his mobile phone. My friend turned around in his seat and stuck his own camera in the guy’s face and took the photo that you see here as retaliation.
My friend and I really did follow the guy off the bus when he got off. He got off somewhere on the highway before Alexandria, near a dirt road that went into a small village. By then I had managed to explain to my friend in a still less-than-coherent manner that the guy was sexually harassing me, though I didn’t really explain how.
Our plan after following the guy off the bus was to beat the shit out of him. That didn’t happen, mainly because it just became really confusing after that.
The guy was stone cold calm, and acted like he had no idea what I was talking about when I told him I saw his hands. He said that he was married and asked rhetorically why he would ever do such a thing. My friend got in his face and scared him, but he tried to act friendly and invite us to tea as if we had a wrong idea about him.
He was really quite decent, and I think he was trying to make me question the reality of whether what had happened actually happened. Maybe it was all in my head.
I have no doubt that it happened and that he’s the kind of guy that has probably had sexy times with his sister. But I was also so dumbfounded and lost for words and flustered, I really had no idea how to outwardly react. Especially when I expected a heated argument and got this docile conversation. I couldn’t get him worked up, or to even react.
I had this rage toward men and boys like this that I carried with me from all my previous experiences with sexual harassment in Egypt, and I wanted to take it all out on this guy. And he fucking deserved it.
But I realized that I’m just a puny girl and I’ve never actually picked a physical fight before. I didn’t know how to initiate it, especially since we were just standing around on a dirt road trying to discuss how to redress sexual harassment.
He asked me, “What do you want?” And I was really startled because it was such a good question, coming from such a barnacle of a person.
In my head, I thought of a few things. I want revenge. I want you to feel as shitty as you have made me feel, but I can’t because you’re shameless. I want to castrate you. I want your balls to hurt. I want you to never do this to anyone again. I want everyone like you to never do this to anyone again. And then I realized, it’s pointless. What am I going to do, ask him for a promise to change? Punch him in the face? I don’t know.
My friend really scared him, he was quite shaken up and he had asked a random passerby on the street to get involved. The passerby had no idea what happened and he was trying to calm me down because he was under the impression that the guy had verbally offended me somehow. He tried to tell me that it’s just words, that the guy didn’t mean it, and look, he’s being apologetic. He escorted the guy to a bus which went into the village, and when he was safely inside, he faced us and gave us the finger.
It is rare to have a chance to face someone who has sexually harassed you because most sexual harassers in Egypt are huge cowards and run off. This guy was a coward because he pretended like he didn’t do anything, but most of the time we women don’t get to have a chat afterwards. I guess you can see what I would have done differently if I had the chance, but it’s also quite different when you’re put on the spot.
Anyway, for shits and giggles I asked my friend to send me the photo he took when he stuck his camera in the guy’s face. I have always wanted to use it for some kind of revenge, but I really didn’t know how.
Now that today is the day Egyptians have chosen to collectively address the issue of sexual harassment, I give you his photo and ask you to spread it to everyone you know. The Internet really does shrink the world, and most of my “six degrees of separation” experiments have actually ended in connections after about two or three degrees.
So if any of you have seen this guy, you have my blessing to do to him what I did in my head when I thought about it later.
And if you are this guy, I have an answer to your question now.
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