Gender Sucks.

I'm sorry, but it had to be said. My personal experiences and aversion to categorization aside. Seriously. Gender sucks.

I can't speak to the Egyptian perspective. I'm not sure how harassment is different for Egyptian women than it is for American women. But all I can say is this: The strength of character required to be a woman here, maybe to be a foreign woman here in particular, is astounding. I applaud and respect those who have that, but I am also so so SO horrified and outraged that it's a necessity. I love Egypt. I love the streets of Egypt. However, I do not love—and I hate that I am forced to tolerate—the day in day out comments and worse my female classmates receive.

My experiences here are not theirs, do not hold a candle to theirs in terms of difficulty or frustration. I am a boy here, maybe even an Egyptian boy at first glance (though eventually the exclamations of "India!" and "Amitabh Bachchan!" win out). Parents? Sorry, but that's the way it is. People don't "mistake" me for a guy, they interpret me as a guy, and I am fine with that, and it's not a problem or cause for worry.

What is a cause for worry is the never-ending harassment the girls get. From the ceaseless "Oh my god!" "Fantastic!" "My future wife!"-type exclamations, to the being-followed-home-by-random-men, to the actual grabbing and being pulled into a doorway (that eventually ended with going to the police, a more or less farcical bureaucratic fiasco in and of itself), it's astounding any of the girls put up with it, and it's no wonder the more benign comments of "welcome!" or "spice girls!" are as a result also treated with suspicion. I have no idea if any of them will be able to maintain a neutral much less positive attitude toward Cairo as a place, and that saddens me.

This nonsense needs. to. change. Interpret it how you like. Men feel a lack of economic power and so they express their autonomy by subjugating women? I call BS. Everyone feels weak. That's one of the parts of life that is hard and uncomfortable, and that doesn't just hold true for financially impoverished men. Feeling weak is oppressive. Feeling weak is shameful, yeah, I know. However, feeling weak is not grounds to hurt others. And those calls? That they find funny, or empowering? They hurt. They hurt the people they're directed at and they hurt me as someone who desperately wants to love Cairo, who desperately wants to love its people, but who cannot love what all too often seems like a majority of its men, cannot even respect them.

There's a weird sense of survivor's guilt that comes with not being a girl here, and there's the frustration of not being able to do anything to help the others. Less than a week ago I wrote about not understanding the strength of the male-female divide and the comfort for women that came with gender segregation. I fear I understand now, and that sickens me so much.

Lord help me if I ever become a part of the patriarchy.

I can only hope that one day, for example, a guy in the girls' bathroom will be as negligible a threat as a girl in the guys' bathroom (though of course I hope for gender neutral bathrooms blah blah blah). Because no group of people should automatically be viewed as a threat, and no individual actors should behave in ways that enforce the perceptions that lead to that. It works both ways. And it boils down to KINDNESS and RESPECT and that's it. In the end, I can only hope that everyone, everyone, is respected and given their due as a human being. (Including animals, actually.) Is that really too much to ask?

Sorry to rant, but it had to be done. Cairo? For your own sake, change this. You want honor? You want pride? You want agency? You want power? You want respect? Change this.

Sigh. Anyway, interesting idea for a future project: become fluent in Arabic, wander around Khan el-Khalili with girl friends, question/record every single dude who says or does anything to them (good as well as bad things) about why he said/did that, compile answers, see if themes emerge and how said themes can be addressed. I'm sure people have already done this, though, right? Hm.