I was waiting for my husband in the car one time. I remember wishing I was a man, so I could get out of the car and smack one of the harasser’s with a shoe. I wanted to tell him to have some respect.

“Why did you go there?”
Whenever someone asks me that,
I feel as if they only see me as a piece of meat that should be covered.
I get the urge to just cut parts off my body whenever I walk down the street.

I was going home after practice dressed in sports clothes.
Two men were checking me out in the street:
“Is that a girl or a boy?”
“It’s a girl, man.”

When I was in the eighth grade, there was a boy with me at school who was blond and fair-skinned. He was a grade younger than I was.
Wherever he went, the other students would harass him. He was absent a lot because of this. His father came in to complain more than once but to no avail.

Don’t you dare think of pressing charges like those women in the movie did.
A respectable girl would never go into a police station full of men and tell them that a man, for example, grabbed her here or touched her leg.
This country is full of incidents like these, and women never speak up. Don’t you go playing the hero

We were listening to music on the beach,
When three guys came and sat in front of us.
We got up and went for a walk,
But they came after us.
I kept yelling at them,
But they kept following us.

I had work in Abo el-Reish and took a minibus on my way home.
There weren’t any women in the car.
I sat in the seat next to the stairs.
There was a guy standing on the stairs.
He was a bearded man.
gender violence, harassment

I’m tired of my parents.
I don’t know why some people feel bad for orphans.
Maybe their lives are much better without parents.
I don’t want my parents.
They don’t do anything for me.
I don’t spend time with them.

My first experience with harassment was, unfortunately, from the person closest to me.
That person also happened to be my cousin who was a few years older than me. 
She would spend the summers at our place, and my parents would go to work.
gender violence, sexual violence, harassment

I wish I could be like the woman in the alley.
The one who takes off her slippers and threatens to beat 14 guys in the metro,
Until they run away.