I was in highschool at the time.
It was inappropriate to tell mama about this sort of thing,
She never said so,
But I had a feeling that what happened could not be talked about.

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 was there when the catcalls on the streets started changing from “Hey, honey” to “I want to put my **** in your ****”!
I was there when they silenced everyone, and no one spoke,
I thought I was experiencing these things alone,
I hated my body, my femininity, and my life.

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 of the worst things to discover is that you're able to read the eyes of men as they look at your body.
Like when you start noticing as one guy looks at your breasts, and another at your lips, and a doorman looks at your waist, and so on.
Then you start interpreting the meaning behind these looks

I was walking down the street, it was about an hour after Eid prayers, when a guy riding past on a motorcycle tried to touch me.

I was on my way to college, and I was  in a hurry. I was looking around for an available microbus to get on, when a little boy sexually harassed me.
gender violence, harassment

I bumped into a very polite-looking man, who looked at me very politely and asked,  "Why are you hiding your tits? Come on, give me a peek".

You said I was only pretending to be a liberal,
And I turned out to be a conservative woman who had issues,
Just like any other Egyptian woman.
You said that because I refused to do what you wanted.

My body started looking different when I hit puberty.
I started getting comments from the people around me.
About the weight I gained,
And humiliating and disgusting comments about different parts of my body.
body image, harassment, the street