I don’t remember how old I was at the time, but I remember being old enough to understand what was going on. Old enough to say something. But I was too scared.
Nothing happened during the first 30 minutes in the taxi.
When we got closer to my destination, the driver asked me, “Front door or back door?”
He gave me a look in the rearview mirror that I didn’t understand at the time.
Several years and sexual harassment incidents later, I was finally able to decipher what that look meant: it was a look of entitlement.
He felt entitled to the bodies of women and girls. He felt entitled to show them and make them listen to whatever he wanted them to.
This sense of male entitlement is born out of the male-dominated nature of Egyptian public spaces, in which women passers-by are punished for merely existing.
I don’t feel that way abroad.
Male entitlement is one of my main fears whenever I come back home for a visit.
Egypt: My country and home, where going out is never safe.
Entitlement
2017