“This is the absolute worst place for a woman to travel alone,” she said. Men harrass me constantly. They hiss, stare, and make kissy noises."
Michael Totten's series on Egypt continues.
posted by The Sandmonkey @ 1/15/2006 07:17:00 PM
Sunday, January 15, 2006
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19 Comments:
The more the veil and niqab spreads, the more women will be harrased (wether Egyptian or foreign). The problem is that when the men get only used to seeing veiled women, the more they consider anything unveiled as "inapprporiate". Thus, more women get veiled to avoid the harrasment, then the men get more horny, and so on.
Another major issue for independent travelers in Egypt is the touts. Check out this guy's experience:
http://tblogs.bootsnall.com/theglobaltrip//updates/002806.shtml
It's so typical, isn't it?
Hey, I get harrassed for being a guy with long hair (It's not even that long, just reaches my chin). I get stared at, laughed at, pointed at, sometimes taunted, rarely insulted and on and on it goes. It's a f***ing nuisance.
Think I'll soon start blogging about the stuff that happened to me lately..
Men in Egypt are getting more & more dirty minded. I remember my friends as teenagers in the eighties & they did many stuff i did not condone but nowadays i see kids who are as 11 or 12 year olds harrassing girls & women double their age & they are doing it without any hint of embarassment, other guys are proving that my friends were actually decent after all not to mention foolish geeks.
For all the men who do it & have sisters, be damn sure your sisters & mothers, aunts & cousins are being treated the same way, even if they are covered up & hardly go out, there is always, ALWAYS a way around it.
As for Sphinx, no need to sweat about it...i had the same problem but back in 90 so you can imagine what looks i got with only a very few number of us who had long hair, mine was realy more or less same length are yours, but you know what, all you have to do is ignore them completely, try to throw an ice face to whomever says anything as if they are the idiots, which they really are. Another thing i used to say whenever an idiot asked me why i left my hair so long ( it wasnt that long) so i would throw a question that puzzled them, why is it permissible for someone to call his beard Sunnah simply because the Prophet had one & not long hair too, which he did have aswell, not to mention 4 braided locks ( dafayer)? surely if he had a beard & long hair & someone chose one of them its not bad to choose the other option, right? try it & see what they answer you.
You people are just hypocrites or just a bunch double standard schizoids, if anyone of you lives anywhere in the world outside Egypt,he or she will find that staring and commenting and whistling is as common everywhere as it is anywhere, if you sit in a coffee shop in SF and a girl enters, everyone's (almost everyone,you know SF) going to stare, have a comment, try to muster some courage to hit on her or rehearse in his mind a pick up line, so please really really spare me the this fake self righteousness this time.
Have anyone of you guys been to Italy? I need someone (a fair one) whose been to both Egypt and Italy and could have audacity to tell that women get more harrassed in the streets in Egypt than in Italy.
Jokerman, at first I used to ignore every single comment, stare, everything. Nowadays I'm getting so pissed off that I start to send back a very icy stare, answer back to the comments, give some people the good ol' mid finger if they deserve it.
About the Prophet thing, that is actually my main argument against people who scoff at me. Why is it forbidden to have long hair, when he had long sleek hair that reached his shoulders? It makes absolutely no sense. As long as I'm not doing anything forbidden or morally unacceptable, I don't care about anything. And those who just don't like how it looks.. Well, that's a matter of taste, isn't it.
There was an incident that made me want to beat the crap out of somebody. And strangely enough, that somebody was female:
After a ride with the metro, getting stared at 132958 times in an hour and getting followed by some little loud-mouth kids, I was standing waiting for a taxi at el Manial, and there was a group of young people behind me. Suddenly somebody bumped against the bag I was carrying on my back. I looked back and saw this woman behind me so I thought it wasn't on purpose.
Once I found a taxi I waved to the driver and then this woman bumps into me again. I turned around and found her going back again, laughing. I knew it was a dirty trick, but the taxi stopped, so while I was telling the driver where I was going, the b**** bumped into me again.
I flew into a rage, shouting at her, and the people with her kept saying stuff like: "Hey, it's ok, don't be mad.. But there ARE barbers here though..".
I swore at them pretty badly (I didn't give a rat's arse that there were girls around), raised both middle fingers and got into the taxi. I've never been that furious in quite a long time.
If that taxi hadn't came, I'd have taught that b**** a lesson in manners, ranging from telling her off good to smashing her around the head with the bag I had with me.
I'm starting to hate this city.
Agreed. The harassement here is simply horrible. And you won't notice that much except if you're a women (doesn't make a difference if you're beautiful or ugly, you'll get harassed no matter what), or a guy with long hair ( ^^^ see my previous comments ^^^ ). I never knew it was that bad until it started happening to me.
"he or she will find that staring and commenting and whistling is as common everywhere as it is anywhere"
That's a damned lie, Mohamed. It's so shockingly untrue, I can't even think of a way to respond to it.
Twosret, where are you? Are you going to comment on this?
Yes Twosret, please come to my rescue , I'm being completely overpowered here :).
I'll respond to you guys at lunch time.
There's no doubt that sexual frustrations and my-baybe-can-do-whatever-he-wants education are one of the plagues of the Arab world.
It's really amusing to think that most of these Arabs macho are virgins. Not so manly after all.
Yasmina,
First of all, I don't see the relation between your dad's friends marriage offers and the street harrasment thing, they didn't force themselves on your mother, your mother can say yes or no.
Regarding, the harrasment on the streets of any major city, and your claim that if you tell someone you're not interested they'll backaway, that's not true, on two separate occasions, I saw a group of guys following a girl and kept throwing words at her reaching a point of almost grabbing her, that at one of the incidents she was so frightened that she approached me and asked me if I could walk with her until those guys went away, also, there's no way you're a girl walking alone on Colombus st after 10pm and you don't get followed by some guys until you get into a cab, and colombus is by the way a very nice street in the most civilzed city in the us. Also, please yasmina try to goto a bar or a night club and tell me about the degree of insistance even if you tell a guy you're with someone.
Regarding Italy, although I really hate stereotyping and generalizing anyone, but it's been long established since the fifties that Italy's the female street harrasment capital (if anyone knows or remembers the famous 1952 photo An american girl in Rome and the image of the staring whistling and drooling italians following her). My sister lives in a small town there with every trip outside is a sure hassle.
About telling a girl no in Egypt then her turning your life into hell, please, I've had enough nightmarish experiences that I'm ten times as paranoid of falling for an unstable suicidal bipolar pshyco chick here than in Egypt.
Also, how could you get harrassed in Florida if everything's there done by driving? And by the way Florida sucks big time :).
Mohammed is actually right about Italy: Italians do follow women in the streets. Some women may feel insulted but most actually take it for a complement (and Italian men aren't particularly sleazy).
As to Egypt, the country isn't even alone. I have stories from Morocco and Tunisia where friends of women I know were offered dozens of camels to have sex with the women they were with. That's insulting, compared to this, an Italian shouting "bella signorina!" while following her down the street is clearly nothing.
some women come to cairo (or alex...especially alex) to work or study and leave soon after because they can't handle the harassment. when i was in high school most guys never seemed to view harassment as something violent. their sexuality was something to be imposed forcefully (verbally or by grabbing or by exposing themselves) on women in public or enacted secretly at home. and there was little sense of just how much it traumatised the women they'd harass. its a complex and challenging issue and someone's finally doing something about it. go to the egyptian center for women's rights' website and check out their anti-harassment campaign:
http://www.ecwregypt.org/English/
send in your stories and join the effort.
yeah i know they had a booth at auc. don't know about cairo univ. though.
cool beans!!! I hope the streets get better for my own selfish reasons and for the sake of women too..
Yasmina
You know who gets it worst? It's the majority of women from lower classes who depend on public transport to move around. The experiences they have to put up with are close to rape, with so many people confined in a small area and nowhere to go, so many perverts use this to violate the women. So it's really a major issue, and what the tourists go through is the tip of the ice berg.
Well, as a married man who currently lives in Florida, and also lived for two years in Italy as well as one year in Egypt, I'll throw in my two cents worth.
Egypt has to be one of the most hostile places in the world for women.
My wife absolutely hates the place and will never visit again. While there she was constantly harassed--mostly by teenagers, but also other men--even though I never let her travel by herself or in anything but VERY conservative clothing. Most of the harassment was verbal, and usually in Arabic so I'm not sure exactly what they said, but the way they were saying it left no doubt as to what they meant.
On the other hand, she loved Italy and to this day that was her most favorite place to live. We lived in the northern part but visited the entire peninsula. She traveled by herself freely, wore whatever she wanted, and was never harassed once. She even often jokes that she felt almost insulted that not one Italian man pinched her butt during the two years there--again joking, she certainly wouldn't really want that to happen.
As for Florida, I'm never leaving, we love living here and plan to retire here.
Don't want to leave the impression that I hate Egypt, if fact I really enjoyed my time there, but I sure wouldn't want to be a female there!
Cheers
Tater
If Egyptian men could get laid more often, these problems wouldn't exist.
But once again, Egyptians are the ones who are responsible for the religious wave, so if they are sexually frustrated, they have only themselves to blame.
Ostaz Mohamed, You typify the traditional egyptian who prefers to cover up the dirt than admit it & clean it, you are in denial BIG TIME.
Sphinx, Just be cool & dont lose your nerve out there, it is pointless. again i have had the same stuff but as a kid just because i was fair & it happened all the time, you get stupid kids asking u whats your name & what time is it & even throwing stones.
Just ignore the rabble, & if anyone says its forbidden to have long hair, it is not..simply as you know why, but it is often looked upon as being feminine, which means if a woman has short hair then she presumably is masculine...Its pathetic really.
I wouldnt advise you to have beaten that girl as she would have easily gathered the street on you thinking you are a foreigner harrassing an arab muslim egyptian woman...calamity, but you swore at her not looking at her & that wouldve puzzled her, thrown her into some dissaray!!
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