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.

I’m a 23-year-old girl.
I graduated from college,
My siblings live abroad.
One of my brothers suddenly came back home.
That’s when I started getting beaten over every little thing.

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.

We were walking down Namees street;
There was a girl coming toward us from the direction of the corniche.
It was windy, so a gust of wind blew her skirt up in the air
Exposing her legs to everyone on the street.

I used to work in a landline service store that opened on Fridays.
I would go down to the store on Fridays alone.
All of the other nearby stores would be closed that day and the store where I worked was in a narrow passageway with a dead end.

One day, he made the sudden decision to get rid of our television, claiming that it was “brainwashing and influencing” me.
Another time, after our first fight, he took my mobile away.
“You’re never seeing this phone again.”
He was so angry that I was afraid he’d do something to me.

As I walked down the street, a man my father's age tells me "Is your cunt as beautiful as you are?"
As I walked down the street, a guy from behind touches me and says, "I want to rub my penis against you"
gender violence, sexual violence, harassment, the street

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

My cousins and I were circumcised on the same day.
I didn’t feel anything because I was under anesthesia.
But I remember lying on the bed with my legs spread wide.
My relatives came over to congratulate us.
I was very embarrassed.

I was a little older at the time.
I was in the seventh grade when mama took me to a gynecologist.
The doctor said, verbatim, “she doesn’t need to be circumcised.”
I understood what they were talking about,
What they wanted to do to me.
“The doctor said I don’t need it,” I told them.
“We know better than the doctor,” my aunt retorted