Six months after I returned from Egypt, I wrote an analysis of street harassment in Egypt for my senior thesis. I feel that it completes these writings on Egypt, and therefore I am including it in this blogpost. Enjoy.
Street Harassment and the Negotiations of Public Space in Cairo
By Arielle Steinberg
Over the past few months, Egypt has wrestled its way into the global spotlight as a result of its daring revolution. The struggle of a downtrodden proletariat against the ruling elite is one that is charged with heroism and drama. To sell the story and its values to the American public, most journalists created a very simple picture of the Egyptian sociopolitical landscape, depicting the story as a struggle of good versus evil: the oligarchic state versus the people. Yet, the narrative is much more complex than that, and the media coverage woefully incomplete. Nominally, the struggle is against the government, but the tension is one that has been building since before Mubarak’s rule. It is a tension that results from rapid sociopolitical changes over the last three decades, and which manifests itself in bursts of hostility against the government, between Muslim and Christian, liberal and fundamentalist, ‘Westernized’ and traditional, and between men and women. These explosively hostile episodes can take form in large scale incidents like the New Year’s Day 2011 car bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria, and the subsequent January 25th Revolution. Yet, the tension can also be one that is felt in seemingly insignificant daily interactions in the public arena. One of the most frequent, yet often overlooked outlets of tension is in the growing problem of street harassment.
Street harassment acts as a powerful and revealing indicator of this tension in Cairo. It is a relatively recent epidemic that is a product of a shift in gender relations from sweeping changes in educational policy, economic change, religious revivalism, international and domestic migration, and the development of the megacity. In light of these changes street harassment becomes a tool of male resistance and resentment against social upheaval in which the battleground becomes women’s mobility. Antagonizing women on the street is a way for men to regain social control in the context of unemployment and women’s gains in the public sphere, as well as encroachment of Western values on traditional culture, and the constraints of an authoritarian government. In reaction, women deal with this social problem by adopting the headscarf, which in this context enables women’s public movement and seemingly protects them from unwanted attention. The adoption of the headscarf is a compromise that, while appeasing the more traditional public and allowing women to feel more confident in public, may actually be an ineffective means of resistance.
Street Harassment Defined
Street harassment occurs when strange men accost one or more women . .. in a public space which is not the woman’s/women’s worksite. Through looks, words, or gestures, the man asserts his right to intrude on the woman’s attention, defining her as a sexual object, and forcing her to interact with him” (di Leonardo 51-52).
Street harassment in Egypt made international headlines when a South African journalist named Lara Logan was sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square following the announcement that President Hosni Mubarak had resigned. Though the story was mentioned in The New York Times as well as in major online news sources, the coverage was initially vague. From reports, we can now assume that she was brutally beaten, groped, and pinched by a crowd of Egyptian men before being saved by a group of women and soldiers. The official explanation about the very minimal coverage given to Logan’s story is that it was to protect her privacy. Yet, the fact that her story was omitted for a very long time may also be due to the journalists’ inability to place her story into their overarching narrative of state versus the people. The perpetrators were the protesters themselves, which most likely flummoxed the reporters who were covering the Revolution.
Lara Logan’s assault is an extreme case of a general problem that finds its way into many facets of life in Egypt. Statistical reports issued by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights indicate that at least 98% of foreign women in Egypt and 83% of Egyptian women experience some form of harassment on a daily basis. Street harassment takes many forms, and levels of intensity as I found over a period of four months while living in Cairo.
Despite the frequency with which it occurs, the difficulty in approaching this subject is that there is not a lot discussed in the culture about it. In Egypt, street harassment is a huge shame for women. If a woman is harassed it is automatically assumed that she deserved it. Therefore, there is limited anthropological research and anecdotal evidence that verifies it. I had to rely on my own experiences for a lot of my definition of street harassment, which I admit are biased based on my identity as a young, foreign, white woman. I also include references to news stories as well as films (American and Egyptian) which touch on the subject.
The most common form of street harassment that I experienced was intense ogling from men on the street, a probing kind of violation. Another is verbal badgering. This often occurs in taxis: personal questions about being married, asking for phone numbers, and even their attempts to touch women. A higher level of harassment is men spewing lewd and inappropriate comments at women on the street, calling them whores or grunting explicitly. Even more intense is to be followed by a man or packs of boys who are only encouraged by being ignored or shooed away. A glimpse of this kind of harassment is portrayed in the movie Cairo Time, in which the lead female character, a Canadian woman who is visiting Cairo, wanders alone on the streets of downtown Cairo and is soon pursued by a group of young men. One of them whispers in her ear, “Fuck me.” Her only reprieve is to dive into a cigar shop, where the elderly storeowner protects her.
Within my first week of living in Maadi, a wealthy suburb of Cairo, I was approached by a man who I thought was going to ask me for directions, but instead solicited me for sex. The next incident was when I was with my mother in Alexandria, and three teenage boys started following me and asking me questions in English and getting way too close for comfort. I would characterize some harassment as hostile and dangerous, which is less frequent but still happens occasionally. One such incident occurred to me, which involved a group of boys chasing my roommate and me as we were walking back to our apartment from dinner. They trailed us in their car for about four blocks, and then when we rounded the corner onto our block, they revved the car to fifty or sixty miles per hour. Their aim was to get directly behind us, driving within inches of hitting us on purpose, and then to speed away before we could call the police.
From other expats, I have heard similarly disturbing stories. A young Canadian teacher told me about a man who was watching her in a public street in Maadi and masturbating. There are also other kinds of harassment, the likes of which have been passed to me on the female grapevine which include men groping women on the Metro, the solution of which is a women's train car. A high profile example of extreme harassment is one that occurred in downtown Cairo in 2006. A group of teenage girls and women were leaving a movie theater when about a hundred men and boys descended upon them and started ripping off their hijabs and grabbing at their bodies (Abdelhadi). Though, unlike the prevalence with which impersonal rape is reported in the United States, there are hardly any reports of this kind. Perhaps that is because few women are willing to report it, but besides Lara Logan in the extreme conditions of the Revolution, there have been no incidences of foreign women reporting impersonal rape or assault.
My stories can be corroborated by anecdotes from ordinary Egyptians. Though our nationality, class background, and religion are different, street harassment is essentially the same in its scope and intent, which is to intimidate and degrade. One man, Ahmed, tells his eyewitness account:
I was walking along the Nile and noticed a man standing facing the water. He had his eye on two veiled women who were seated on a bench nearby. As I approached, I noticed he was masturbating. My first instinct was to react violently, throw him in the river, but I saw a policeman standing nearby. I ran up to him and told him what was going on, sure that he would apprehend the man and make an example out of him. I was so angry when he met my words with a blank face and muttered, ‘You’ll have to find another police officer elsewhere; I don’t patrol this area.’(Illahi 60)
Although the majority of women are harassed, race may be a factor that heightens harassment. Women of Sudanese heritage, or women with darker skin color face more intense stalking. This may be a complicated result of years of Egyptian colonization of Sudan, and ideologies that represent darker Africans as inferior (Seikaly). A Kenyan woman related the events of being followed home by a man:
He actually followed me up the stairs to my flat and then took off his trousers revealing himself to me in the hallway. I screamed and chased him out of the building. I was mortified and no one tried to stop him as he fled through the street. (Illahi 62)
Relying entirely on the statistic from the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights and my own experiences, non-Egyptian women (mainly European and American tourists) experience more daily harassment than Egyptian women. I assume that this is a result of an Egyptian cultural expectation that assumes Caucasian women are promiscuous. This concept derives from American movies as well as the explicit European pornography that floods Egyptian computers. This cultural stereotype is only exacerbated by European and American tourists who wear shorts and tank tops, a complete shock to a culture in which women habitually cover the hair and wear outfits that conceal their wrists and ankles.
Class is also a component in the intensity of harassment. Logistically, women who are of the middle class are more likely to own a car, thereby avoiding the daily gendered negotiations of the street. In contrast, women who are poorer must rely on public transportation. Hind, a woman interviewed by Illahi from Shobra, a large, poor district in Cairo, detailed her unlucky encounter on a public bus:
He was sitting behind me on the bus, and I remember feeling his hand on me. I reached around, slapped him in the face, calling him hiawan [Arabic insult meaning animal], and the whole scene drew so much attention, he got kicked off the bus. (Illahi 62)
One of the most controversial Egyptian films of the past year, Cairo 6, 7,8, addresses the issue of harassment and groping on public transportation. In the film which is based on a true story, a working-class mother of three sues a man who gropes her on a public bus. She teams up with other women who have had similar experiences, including one young woman who was harassed by a crowd of men after a soccer game. In a dramatic quirk of fate during the filming process, as they were filming a sequence during a real soccer match, an actress was actually assaulted on camera proving the director’s point about street harassment in Egypt being a “social cancer” (Asfour).
Though there is a stark class difference for women in public versus private transport, the situation on the street for all woman is leveled. As Illahi emphasizes “women in the street are not shielded by their class status and professional privilege. Having a car may provide temporary refuge from street harassment, but once outside its confines, women are again exposed to unwanted attention” (Illahi 10). A university student commented that:
a colleague of mine had just parked her car and this guy came up to her and showed her his penis. Then, she just got out of the car and ran. The word had spread that this guy has been doing this to several girls who parked in that area” (Illahi 10).
Street harassment seems to be pervasive problem that with slight variations class and ethnicity affects the majority of women living in Cairo. It is also a problem whose perpetrators can be any man, and a problem against which very few people fight or even discuss. Harassment is not flattering or meant to be a form of flirtation; it is a serious infringement against women’s rights that acts a man’s performance of power in light of multiple oppressions. The question that I began to ask myself, was ‘where does this hostility come from, and why the need to humiliate women on a daily basis?’
After having visited another Muslim-majority Mediterranean country, Jordan, I found that there was a different tone to harassment. Jordan has a similar colonial history to Egypt, having been a province of the British empire, and later a casualty of post-colonialism in that it was saddled with a king who cared more about kow-towing to his British overlords than about allowing his people basic freedoms (King Farouk in Egypt vis a vis King Abdullah of Jordan). Yet while Egypt has undergone two revolutions, and major social upheaval over the past half-century, Jordan is ruled by a steady dynasty of kings that is more or less popular with the people (Seikaly). I found that when I was harassed (if I was harassed at all), it was only with a barrage of compliments about how beautiful I am, and that I am most welcome in Jordan. At times this was annoying, and was still a way that men could force me to interact with them, but it felt more playful and like courtship than the systematic humiliation and shame I felt after a round of harassment on Egyptian streets. That is what opened my eyes to the possibility that Egyptian harassment was a unique case, fostered by social upheavals explicable only in an Egyptian context.
Sociopolitical Changes and a Shift in Traditional Gender Dynamics
The situation on Egyptian streets has not always been one of discomfort and humiliation for women. A group of women interviewed by Slackman (2008), commented that “Our mothers used to walk around in miniskirts, displaying French high fashion with their hair beautifully coiffed” without encountering any problems (Illahi 64).
I postulate that the changes that have ravaged Egypt since the Nasser era, and the instability in gender roles that these changes caused, results in the daily gendered negotiations of public space. Beginning in the 1950’s after the Revolution of 1952, Nasser instituted free and compulsory education laws for women, a policy that has since boosted literacy rates among women, and has created a boom in higher university and participation in the labor force for women (Kader). Today, post-elementary education for women is a sign of family status, in that they have the resources to allow for the nominally “superfluous,” but often necessary education of girls. In fact, families will often pay for their daughters to continue in school even after their brothers drop out to work in “mechanics, construction or factory labor,” and as a result many women are even more educated than their spouses (MacLeod 54). After formal education ends, many middle-class women join the ranks of the government bureaucracy as secretaries, or become doctors, lawyers and politicians if they are of the higher classes. Lower class women typically obtain work in factory jobs, as well as embroidery or sowing, cooking, housekeeping, or being a nanny for upper-class families.
The need for supplementary household income was the nearly universal reason given by these working women regardless of their age, educational attainment, or marital status (MacLeod 55). Women use their money to save up for their wedding trusseau, help put younger siblings through school and support general family costs (MacLeod 57-59). A shortage of affordable apartments also makes female income necessary for a newly married couple to attain key money or rent payments (MacLeod 59).
These policies were a sharp turn from labor force participation and educational circumstances of women in earlier Egypt, when even the highest echelon of women had very low literacy rates, and the majority of women in many classes preoccupied themselves predominantly with family matters. Later under Sadat, women were granted the right to vote, which also ushered in a new era of women’s involvement in politics and higher office (Kader 115-116). Furthermore, the introduction of family planning in the form of oral contraceptives decreased women’s fertility, and correspondingly delayed marriage. The focus of a woman’s life shifted away from just her reproductive capacity to something more. However, the increase of women’s role in the public sphere was most likely one that was a rapid shock to traditional gender roles. Although men still disproportionately fill the highest levels of business administration, government, and education, many women are entering and having a voice in the public sphere, which is unprecedented in Egyptian society.
Another social change that had a profound effect on Egyptian society was the intifah, an economic policy instated by Anwar Sadat in the 1970s. This was a policy that opened Egypt’s economy to the free market, a change from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s more socialist policies. Sadat’s intifah not only flooded Egypt with outside investments, but it also created an environment of competition in which skilled labor was more of a necessity, but a commodity which many young men did not possess (Kader 122). To this day, the intifah has caused a mass problem of unemployment of young men. Yet this unemployment also results from an upsurge in university enrolment coupled with a stagnant availability of government jobs. As a result many Egyptian men are currently unemployed, and thus unable to marry. In the 1980s and 1990s, this problem was remedied by a mass emigration of young men from Egypt to the Gulf States to engage in hard labor (Kader 130). Yet, in the 1990s, migration to the Gulf States began to decline.
Many men returned to Egypt with not only money in their pocket, but more radical Islamic ideas that intensified acceptable gender roles for women and men (Kader 134). Yet, we should refrain from viewing this intensification of gender roles as a defeat of women. While Khomeini proposed female seclusion as the ideal, MacLeod cites one paradigm of femininity presented by the cleric Ali Shariati that is both progressive and traditional. This is the paradigm of Fatima, who “was the model of “freedom, equality and integrity most compatible with Islam” and emphasized her intertwining roles as “devoted, self-sacrificing wife and mother” and as “courageous untiring fighter for social justice,” roles she united as mother of Hasan and Hussein” (MacLeod 78). According to this paradigm, a woman should be strong, involved in the public sphere, yet also value her role as a mother. This integrated ideal is still being negotiated in Cairo. Yet, the seclusion model seems to be more dominant.
The development of the megacity is another factor that has changed the gender dynamics. Immigration from the countryside has ballooned the city of Cairo from half a million people in 1900, six million by 1970, and to its seventeen million today (MacLeod 28). During the 1970s, immigration into the city stood at a rate of 100,000 people from the countryside per year. MacLeod states, that Cairo is “a city plagued by crowding, housing shortages, inadequate water and electrical supplies, packed public transportation unbelievable traffic, and nonstop noise” (28). Correspondingly, it is considered a third-world “nightmare city” (Raymond 342). Even if women are mostly secluded in the house, the nature of the city’s housing shortages forces family members to live far apart, thus breaking down the traditional village system in which they no longer “inhabit a community where they are related to many of their neighbors and well known to the rest. Instead they crowd into urban quarters with many people who come from other villages and who may practice different customs” (Macleod 50). This has two effects: Women must travel outside the home and neighborhood compound to see family members, and the neighborhood “watchdog” system of the villages which would have allowed the women freer movement, breaks down. Thus, women have to travel more often, yet their movements are more scrutinized.
Feminist Analysis of Street Harassment
The forces of social change mingle in the Cairo streets to produce a tension, in which women’s mobility is under scrutiny and public space becomes a battleground. From a male perspective, we can see that men are faced with a special challenge to their traditional values and Egyptian masculinity. They see women entering the public space, unescorted by men, and perhaps engaging in behavior that exudes assertiveness, and subjectively borders on the immodest. Women’s presence in the street in this regard is a daily reminder of male inadequacy and the breakdown of traditional social orders. The fact of women on the street is foremost a result of male unemployment. Women would not need to roam the streets or travel to work if an Egyptian man were able to successfully carry out his societal duty as family breadwinner. MacLeod asserts, “men who cannot provide fully for their families feel diminished” and even castrated (70). Furthermore, “to be a breadwinner is not an approved or awarded social achievement for women. Therefore, a woman who earns a salary will be perceived as either masculine or castrating (MacLeod 271). As a result, men may use street harassment as a weapon to defend their own masculinity, by invading the comfort of women, and by reminding women of the irrevocable difference between them (i.e. defining women by the sexuality of their bodies and not their capacities).
In correspondence with this idea of economics as a force behind harassment, frequent perpetrators are young, unemployed men who roam the streets idly, with nothing to do except bother women. They may be responding to their own feelings of inadequacy due to unemployment or the results of it, mainly sexual repression in light of the inability to get married due to the high costs of housing, furnishings and basic security (Illahi).
Street harassment also acts as a tool to fight multiple oppressions that Egyptian men may feel as postcolonial subjects and citizens of an oppressive state. Intimidating women on the street could be an Egyptian man’s response to the destruction of the “Egyptian family” in favor of family and sexuality patterns being transformed into Western patterns. While there is no standard “Muslim family,” a cultural standard of family in Egypt is an arranged marriage in which the husband “owns” a woman’s body to ensure that the social order can be maintained. Yet, Egypt is entering an era in which women are claiming their own bodies and mobility. Mernissi, speaking of similar changes in Morocco, imagines that the “results of the break-up of traditional family life is that, for the first time in history of modern Morocco, the husband is facing his wife directly” (Mernissi 270). This undoubtedly means that men have to face their wives as equal partners, and as breadwinners, which is threatening to them. Mernissi continues by saying that the family unit has changed to more of a nuclear family as a result of the changes in housing and therefore “men and women live more closely and interact more than they ever did before, partly because of the decline of anti-heterosexual factors such as the mother-in-laws’s presence and sexual segregation”(Mernissi 270-271). She believes that these Western changes create a “confrontation between men and women brought up in sexually antagonistic traditions likely to be laden with tensions and fears on both sides” (Mernissi 271)
Although a great deal of harassment may emanate from a hostile place, many Egyptian men may see their actions as justified in light of the encroachment of Western ideals in which is represented the “mutilation of the woman’s integrity, her reduction to a few inches of nude flesh whose shades and forms are photographed ad infinitum with no goal other than profit” (Mernissi 270). Over the past centuries, men have had to endure the products of Westernization including what they see as the diminishing of honor, Westernized dressing (which can also be seen as immodest), and unveiling. These changes derive not only from globalization, but also from the very Egyptian state. State feminism took concrete form in the policies of Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak who were authoritarian leaders. The notion of state feminism is one in which the state gives women rights and privileges, making them independent citizens of the state, and less under the control of their husbands (Seikaly). In many authoritarian regimes, women are educated, have the right to vote, hold a voice in the public arena, and are encouraged to dress in a less traditional manner. This is an act by the government to take over the traditional function of the male head of the family. Destroying traditional patriarchy allows a state to build itself as patriarchal with dominion over all.
Another culprit of street harassment is the societal ideal of keeping women in a private sphere. Simone de Beauvoir introduces the idea of “ghettoization” of women into the private sphere in her 1953 treatise “The Second Sex.” Her theory is that women, either upon birth or marriage, are expected to relinquish a voice in the public sphere, and take up a role as a homemaker and mother in the private sphere. This establishes and maintains a necessary (for patriarchy) dichotomy between the genders. Cynthia Bowman expands on this idea in how this idea of ghettoization relates to American street harassment in the Harvard Law Review.
According to Bowman, street harassment is a tool with which men try to reclaim the public, and intimidate women back into the private sphere. When women enter into the public sphere they assert their right to public participation and mobility. Primarily, men use women’s emergence into the public sphere as a weapon against them. To many men, a woman’s presence in the public sphere signifies that she is “fair game,” and that if her voice is made public, that all of a woman, especially her body, and her sexuality is also open to the public (Bowman 526). Men are trying to communicate to women through street harassment that they cannot have it both ways. If they are subjects of the public, then they have no right to privacy. Thus by becoming subjects of the public, they are essentially becoming objects. Bowman succinctly summarizes harassment in that, “remarks from harassers on the street carry the implicit (and sometimes explicit) message that women do not belong in public, where they draw attention by their mere appearance, but rather in the private sphere, at home” (Bowman 541).
Street harassment restricts a woman’s interaction in the public sphere by making her feel uneasy about traversing the borders between public and private without being accompanied by a male escort. In this way, harassment forces women to be dependent on men to have a voice in the public and to interact in the public, or it forces women to give up that voice out of intimidation or reluctance to engage in the public realm. Women who want to move freely in the public sphere must be willing to do so, while every day facing the battlefield of rude comments, inappropriate touches, and humiliation. Bowman believes that an urban environment is the main condition for street harassment. Harassment can only occur when a place is “genuinely public” meaning that the people on the street cannot know each other. Her theory is that “if someone exists for you as an individual, you are less likely to harass her” (Bowman 530-531). This fits with the development of the megacity and the breakdown of the village/neighborhood systems in Cairo. Cairo is becoming more and more urban, and the self-containing neighborhoods within which people mainly traveled and knew each other are disintegrating. In its place is a megalopolis in which people in the street do not know each other, and the honor system is almost non-existent. This is certainly a contributing factor to the prevalence and intensity of street harassment in Cairo. The institutions that would prevent harassment (watchful neighbors) is non-existent, allowing men to employ any manner of rude and licentious intimidation technique without being reprimanded.
The private and public spaces to which de Beauvoir and Bowman refer are, however, somewhat different than those in Egypt. Instead of concrete spaces that constitute the private home and the public arena, the Egyptian private and public are based in the concrete but can be delineated along the lines of “a series of acts that should be protected from the gaze of others” (Ghannam 99). Private space includes the spaces in which people bathe and unclothe. For example, something that is considered private in Western culture, domestic violence, is actually very public. Neighbors are expected to rush over and defend a woman who is being beaten by her husband. However, Ghannam cites one instance in which a husband made this act “private”, by taking off all of his clothes before hitting his wife (99). The private act, and not the space itself creates the private sphere.
Sexuality is perhaps the most private of acts, and women, who are the embodiment of sexuality and reproduction in Egyptian culture, carry the weight of societal order on their shoulders. Therefore women have traditionally remained in the private world to maintain the purity of sexuality. Architecture in houses and on the street reflects the lengths to which families will go to ensure that strangers will not glimpse the nakedness of the women of the house. Families alter the height of buildings so that neighbors’ windows do not align, and windows are heavily screened or slanted so that women could see men, but men could not see women (Abu Lughod 177). Entrances of a house are blocked on the inside, so that visitors at the door can only see a large wall upon entering the house; In the same vein, doors must not face one another. Yet, the socioeconomic reality is that this physical separation is not always possible, and many poorer families rely upon a neighborhood agreement to not allow sons to peer into windows of neighbor women (178). This is sometimes made simpler by creating small quarters of people in a similar family system (Abu Lughod 177).
Then there are ambiguous spaces that are seemingly public, because they are open to the gaze of strangers, but in which “private acts” are acceptable. The mosque, market, and government office are usually unrestricted, and thus thought of as private, and men allow their wives free access to these places. Other spaces can also be called semi-private, which are called the harah, in which clothing and acts which are “acceptable for a woman within the lodging is also acceptable in the harah” (Abu Lughod 178). The harah is an area that is in public, but that is governed by civil agreements. This can best be explained through the example of a balcony. Several times, I witnessed women in my neighborhood walking onto their balcony to do their laundry or talk on cellphones while clothed only in their nightgowns with their hair uncovered. Considering that the majority of women in Egypt dress very conservatively outside the house, this puzzled me until I was enlightened by an explanation from Middle East anthropologist, Carla Daughtry. Apparently, the balcony is an example of the harah; the balcony is a space that is considered (though open to the view of strangers), part of the private sphere because it is an extension of the house. Therefore, it is more of a shame for a male neighbor to gaze at the uncovered woman, than it is for the woman to be uncovered.
The borders of public and the private space blur in extraordinary circumstances including in religious festivals, and weddings. During these special times women dance provocatively, and behaviors like gender mixing, cross-dressing, flirting, and sexuality is often excused (Madeouf 480-481). Some marginal places also become ambiguous spaces. For example, the mosque square is a place for public and “private activities.” Mainly, unmarried people tend to “socialize, flirt, and exchange glances” in the mosque square, and it is a space in which women and men equally represented (Elshestawy 307). I see these spaces and special times as a way to release any tension associated with the rigidity of the system of public and private space. Although not so clearly understood by an outsider, this system of public and private space has worked for centuries to “order” society. Egypt is currently entering an era in which people, mainly women, are not staying in their assigned sphere or acting in a manner considered appropriate to their traditional gender role.
The Veil: Resistance or Accommodation?
As a way to reorder this system within the context of new societal changes, women are figuring out a way to carry the private sphere with them into the public sphere. For many women, veiling becomes a performance of honor that reasserts gender boundaries and reclaims modesty and respect that they feel they have lost (MacLeod 100). As of my visit in 2010, an unveiled woman is the exception on the street. Veils are not necessarily full-face veils, or long black cloaks, which are often referred to as a “grandmother’s veil.” The veils in Egypt are overwhelmingly a modern creation. Women wear American and European fashions that cover arms and legs with colorful headscarves, sunglasses, jewelry, and make-up. It is an emblem of religion for women, and of cultural pride, as a way to feel like they are abiding by the traditional values, but concurrently being fully modern.
The veil has many meanings for the women who wear it in Egypt, only one of which is to reclaim a sense of propriety and carry the private sphere with them. The modern veil began to surface in the 1970s after the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel as a politicized sign of religiosity adopted by university women (MacLeod 103-104). By the late 1980s, MacLeod had found that the majority of women had begun to don some variation of Muslim dress (105).
One woman explained, “When I put on the hijab, men must respect me. It says that I am a good woman, and if they are a good man, they will see that it is right that they treat me with dignity”(MacLeod 133). Another is quoted as saying,
This dress says to everybody, ‘I am a good Muslim woman. When I started to wear hijab, I felt that everyone looked at me with new eyes. I was not just any woman that they could come up to and bother, but a good wife and a good mother and they could respect me, because they would know who I was. (133).
In the workplace, veils can be a way to symbolically remove the signs of gender, so that a woman can feel as if her sexuality is not the only thing a man sees. Many women cite the veil as a great equalizer in interacting with men.Viewed in this light, the veil takes on an agentic quality. Mohanty, a theorist in the areas of colonial and postcolonial discourses would argue that the veil is a medium of power. Indeed, the veil acts as a religious symbol for many women, as a demonstration of political solidarity with Muslims around the Middle East and North Africa, and as a way to combat the loss of respect that they feel on the street. Mohanty posits that any attempts to invalidate this claim are based on Western feminist framework that seek to generalize “third world” or Muslim women as powerless, and that their wearing of the veil is “reactive,” and not a conscious choice to combat their oppressions (Mohanty 79).
Yet, while the veil can be empowering for women, and a conscious choice, there are also sources that suggest that for many women the veil is something that is an accommodation to oppression. Religious clerics perpetuate the argument that veiling is the only solution to avoid harassment, and they continue to urge women to veil in order to evade harassment. For example, one religiously motivated email campaign urges women to veil in Egypt. It warns, “A veil to protect or the eyes will molest” (Illahi 64). The campaign features a picture that compares women to sticky candy, which if left uncovered will attract the flies (men) and dirt (harassment). Illahi claims that “this message clearly links women to notions of sexual chaos, whereby because of their presumed sexual powers, held within notions of their femininity, men are unable to control themselves“ (64). Therefore, women must cover to prevent men from harassing. MacLeod even estimates that hijab is more of a trend rather than a religious revival, in that women feel they have to wear the veil to adapt to societal expectations (110).
Many women might adopt the veil because they think it is the only way to control the situation, even if it is not something that they would want to wear all the time. Emphasizing that women should wear the veil in public places the responsibility of harassment on women. Illahi found that this attitude was pervasive among men in Egypt, who did not believe that their conduct was inappropriate. Illahi reported one man’s justification for harassment, “They say no, but they mean yes. These women walk suggestively, wearing makeup and we men are supposed to just ignore it” (Illahi 64). Similarly, the majority of men in Egypt take very little responsibility for their actions.
Whether the veil is active resistance or accommodation for harassment, one thing is certain: street harassment is clearly perpetrated by men for the express purpose of intimidating women back into the private sphere, and as a way to feel agency in a society where they are oppressed economically, politically, and socially. Any resistance that does not directly confront the inappropriateness of this projection of male frustrations onto women in the public sphere is not effective resistance. By wearing the veil, women are internalizing the responsibility for their harassment instead of pointing fingers at the real responsible party. Nevertheless, convincing the public that women are not in control of their harassment would be somewhat of a feat. The Egyptian public views the veil as a source of control and a buffer against street harassment for women, yet it is primarily a disadvantage in light of street harassment. Women are subjectively liable for male abuse if they wear something too revealing, too tight to the body, or if a wisp of hair falls free from the veil. Women who choose not veil, usually Christians or foreign women, are often the targets of more intense harassment, because in the eyes of many Egyptian men, they deserve it for not covering themselves. The veil as a means of portable privacy may also be a disadvantage to women. Carrying the private sphere with herself through veiling is almost a woman’s apology for being in the public sphere, and an assertion that women in general should not be public figures. Of course, in practice many women who veil maintain very public roles, but in theory, the idea is that women should be in the private sphere, as sexual beings maintained and kept hidden away to avoid social chaos. The 21st century is leading women into more public roles in which their bodies and their voices are no longer hidden. Thus, in the changing and dynamic Egyptian society, street harassment will continue as a way for men to vent their frustrations whether a woman is covered from head to foot, or if she is uncovered. This is the sad and complicated reality.
Afterword
How I considered being a Western feminist while writing this paper:
I cannot divorce my identity as a Western feminist speaking with an American Western philosophical background and perspective from the subject at hand. However I tried to approach the subject using Egyptian frameworks (public vs. private space as well as the agency of the veil) in order to be more fair in my analysis.
That, I think, is the key: I attempted to demonstrate how Egyptian women have agency, although I’m not sure that agency is directed toward the most effective area (agency in dressing a certain way versus agency in confronting male behavior). The veil does not attack male behavior, but assumes responsibility for it. In this respect, I see the veil as inadequate resistance.
I also try to present Egyptian men as complex subjects of a postcolonial world and not caricatures of “Muslim oppressors.” To do this, I present the problem of street harassment in an Egyptian context grounded in realities that have engulfed Egypt, and not through theoretical imaginings of a monolithic “Muslim woman” as oppressed or a monolithic “Muslim man” as oppressed. That would be narrow-minded and limiting.
Egyptian men, both Muslim and Christian are oppressors in a way, but it is a way that is expressing agency against oppression (even if that agency is also misguided.) I am also not asserting that this is the case everywhere in the Middle East, through my example from Jordan. In this way, I believe I avoid some of the pitfalls of a lot of Western feminists who assert the Middle East is one entity, and that all women as “third world women” are oppressed by “third world men,” and idea that Mohanty vehemently despises.
My perspective is also one that is critical of colonialism in how it has destroyed local value systems that ordered Egyptian society, and I hope that came through in my analysis. If not, then it is a sentiment that I am now expressing. Under the right conditions of colonial and postcolonial oppression, I feel that street harassment of this magnitude is possible anywhere.
Thank you for reading.
Sincerely,
Arielle Steinberg
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Street Harassment and the Negotiations of Public Space in Cairo
By Arielle Steinberg
Over the past few months, Egypt has wrestled its way into the global spotlight as a result of its daring revolution. The struggle of a downtrodden proletariat against the ruling elite is one that is charged with heroism and drama. To sell the story and its values to the American public, most journalists created a very simple picture of the Egyptian sociopolitical landscape, depicting the story as a struggle of good versus evil: the oligarchic state versus the people. Yet, the narrative is much more complex than that, and the media coverage woefully incomplete. Nominally, the struggle is against the government, but the tension is one that has been building since before Mubarak’s rule. It is a tension that results from rapid sociopolitical changes over the last three decades, and which manifests itself in bursts of hostility against the government, between Muslim and Christian, liberal and fundamentalist, ‘Westernized’ and traditional, and between men and women. These explosively hostile episodes can take form in large scale incidents like the New Year’s Day 2011 car bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria, and the subsequent January 25th Revolution. Yet, the tension can also be one that is felt in seemingly insignificant daily interactions in the public arena. One of the most frequent, yet often overlooked outlets of tension is in the growing problem of street harassment.
Street harassment acts as a powerful and revealing indicator of this tension in Cairo. It is a relatively recent epidemic that is a product of a shift in gender relations from sweeping changes in educational policy, economic change, religious revivalism, international and domestic migration, and the development of the megacity. In light of these changes street harassment becomes a tool of male resistance and resentment against social upheaval in which the battleground becomes women’s mobility. Antagonizing women on the street is a way for men to regain social control in the context of unemployment and women’s gains in the public sphere, as well as encroachment of Western values on traditional culture, and the constraints of an authoritarian government. In reaction, women deal with this social problem by adopting the headscarf, which in this context enables women’s public movement and seemingly protects them from unwanted attention. The adoption of the headscarf is a compromise that, while appeasing the more traditional public and allowing women to feel more confident in public, may actually be an ineffective means of resistance.
Street Harassment Defined
Street harassment occurs when strange men accost one or more women . .. in a public space which is not the woman’s/women’s worksite. Through looks, words, or gestures, the man asserts his right to intrude on the woman’s attention, defining her as a sexual object, and forcing her to interact with him” (di Leonardo 51-52).
Street harassment in Egypt made international headlines when a South African journalist named Lara Logan was sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square following the announcement that President Hosni Mubarak had resigned. Though the story was mentioned in The New York Times as well as in major online news sources, the coverage was initially vague. From reports, we can now assume that she was brutally beaten, groped, and pinched by a crowd of Egyptian men before being saved by a group of women and soldiers. The official explanation about the very minimal coverage given to Logan’s story is that it was to protect her privacy. Yet, the fact that her story was omitted for a very long time may also be due to the journalists’ inability to place her story into their overarching narrative of state versus the people. The perpetrators were the protesters themselves, which most likely flummoxed the reporters who were covering the Revolution.
Lara Logan’s assault is an extreme case of a general problem that finds its way into many facets of life in Egypt. Statistical reports issued by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights indicate that at least 98% of foreign women in Egypt and 83% of Egyptian women experience some form of harassment on a daily basis. Street harassment takes many forms, and levels of intensity as I found over a period of four months while living in Cairo.
Despite the frequency with which it occurs, the difficulty in approaching this subject is that there is not a lot discussed in the culture about it. In Egypt, street harassment is a huge shame for women. If a woman is harassed it is automatically assumed that she deserved it. Therefore, there is limited anthropological research and anecdotal evidence that verifies it. I had to rely on my own experiences for a lot of my definition of street harassment, which I admit are biased based on my identity as a young, foreign, white woman. I also include references to news stories as well as films (American and Egyptian) which touch on the subject.
The most common form of street harassment that I experienced was intense ogling from men on the street, a probing kind of violation. Another is verbal badgering. This often occurs in taxis: personal questions about being married, asking for phone numbers, and even their attempts to touch women. A higher level of harassment is men spewing lewd and inappropriate comments at women on the street, calling them whores or grunting explicitly. Even more intense is to be followed by a man or packs of boys who are only encouraged by being ignored or shooed away. A glimpse of this kind of harassment is portrayed in the movie Cairo Time, in which the lead female character, a Canadian woman who is visiting Cairo, wanders alone on the streets of downtown Cairo and is soon pursued by a group of young men. One of them whispers in her ear, “Fuck me.” Her only reprieve is to dive into a cigar shop, where the elderly storeowner protects her.
Within my first week of living in Maadi, a wealthy suburb of Cairo, I was approached by a man who I thought was going to ask me for directions, but instead solicited me for sex. The next incident was when I was with my mother in Alexandria, and three teenage boys started following me and asking me questions in English and getting way too close for comfort. I would characterize some harassment as hostile and dangerous, which is less frequent but still happens occasionally. One such incident occurred to me, which involved a group of boys chasing my roommate and me as we were walking back to our apartment from dinner. They trailed us in their car for about four blocks, and then when we rounded the corner onto our block, they revved the car to fifty or sixty miles per hour. Their aim was to get directly behind us, driving within inches of hitting us on purpose, and then to speed away before we could call the police.
From other expats, I have heard similarly disturbing stories. A young Canadian teacher told me about a man who was watching her in a public street in Maadi and masturbating. There are also other kinds of harassment, the likes of which have been passed to me on the female grapevine which include men groping women on the Metro, the solution of which is a women's train car. A high profile example of extreme harassment is one that occurred in downtown Cairo in 2006. A group of teenage girls and women were leaving a movie theater when about a hundred men and boys descended upon them and started ripping off their hijabs and grabbing at their bodies (Abdelhadi). Though, unlike the prevalence with which impersonal rape is reported in the United States, there are hardly any reports of this kind. Perhaps that is because few women are willing to report it, but besides Lara Logan in the extreme conditions of the Revolution, there have been no incidences of foreign women reporting impersonal rape or assault.
My stories can be corroborated by anecdotes from ordinary Egyptians. Though our nationality, class background, and religion are different, street harassment is essentially the same in its scope and intent, which is to intimidate and degrade. One man, Ahmed, tells his eyewitness account:
I was walking along the Nile and noticed a man standing facing the water. He had his eye on two veiled women who were seated on a bench nearby. As I approached, I noticed he was masturbating. My first instinct was to react violently, throw him in the river, but I saw a policeman standing nearby. I ran up to him and told him what was going on, sure that he would apprehend the man and make an example out of him. I was so angry when he met my words with a blank face and muttered, ‘You’ll have to find another police officer elsewhere; I don’t patrol this area.’(Illahi 60)
Although the majority of women are harassed, race may be a factor that heightens harassment. Women of Sudanese heritage, or women with darker skin color face more intense stalking. This may be a complicated result of years of Egyptian colonization of Sudan, and ideologies that represent darker Africans as inferior (Seikaly). A Kenyan woman related the events of being followed home by a man:
He actually followed me up the stairs to my flat and then took off his trousers revealing himself to me in the hallway. I screamed and chased him out of the building. I was mortified and no one tried to stop him as he fled through the street. (Illahi 62)
Relying entirely on the statistic from the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights and my own experiences, non-Egyptian women (mainly European and American tourists) experience more daily harassment than Egyptian women. I assume that this is a result of an Egyptian cultural expectation that assumes Caucasian women are promiscuous. This concept derives from American movies as well as the explicit European pornography that floods Egyptian computers. This cultural stereotype is only exacerbated by European and American tourists who wear shorts and tank tops, a complete shock to a culture in which women habitually cover the hair and wear outfits that conceal their wrists and ankles.
Class is also a component in the intensity of harassment. Logistically, women who are of the middle class are more likely to own a car, thereby avoiding the daily gendered negotiations of the street. In contrast, women who are poorer must rely on public transportation. Hind, a woman interviewed by Illahi from Shobra, a large, poor district in Cairo, detailed her unlucky encounter on a public bus:
He was sitting behind me on the bus, and I remember feeling his hand on me. I reached around, slapped him in the face, calling him hiawan [Arabic insult meaning animal], and the whole scene drew so much attention, he got kicked off the bus. (Illahi 62)
One of the most controversial Egyptian films of the past year, Cairo 6, 7,8, addresses the issue of harassment and groping on public transportation. In the film which is based on a true story, a working-class mother of three sues a man who gropes her on a public bus. She teams up with other women who have had similar experiences, including one young woman who was harassed by a crowd of men after a soccer game. In a dramatic quirk of fate during the filming process, as they were filming a sequence during a real soccer match, an actress was actually assaulted on camera proving the director’s point about street harassment in Egypt being a “social cancer” (Asfour).
Though there is a stark class difference for women in public versus private transport, the situation on the street for all woman is leveled. As Illahi emphasizes “women in the street are not shielded by their class status and professional privilege. Having a car may provide temporary refuge from street harassment, but once outside its confines, women are again exposed to unwanted attention” (Illahi 10). A university student commented that:
a colleague of mine had just parked her car and this guy came up to her and showed her his penis. Then, she just got out of the car and ran. The word had spread that this guy has been doing this to several girls who parked in that area” (Illahi 10).
Street harassment seems to be pervasive problem that with slight variations class and ethnicity affects the majority of women living in Cairo. It is also a problem whose perpetrators can be any man, and a problem against which very few people fight or even discuss. Harassment is not flattering or meant to be a form of flirtation; it is a serious infringement against women’s rights that acts a man’s performance of power in light of multiple oppressions. The question that I began to ask myself, was ‘where does this hostility come from, and why the need to humiliate women on a daily basis?’
After having visited another Muslim-majority Mediterranean country, Jordan, I found that there was a different tone to harassment. Jordan has a similar colonial history to Egypt, having been a province of the British empire, and later a casualty of post-colonialism in that it was saddled with a king who cared more about kow-towing to his British overlords than about allowing his people basic freedoms (King Farouk in Egypt vis a vis King Abdullah of Jordan). Yet while Egypt has undergone two revolutions, and major social upheaval over the past half-century, Jordan is ruled by a steady dynasty of kings that is more or less popular with the people (Seikaly). I found that when I was harassed (if I was harassed at all), it was only with a barrage of compliments about how beautiful I am, and that I am most welcome in Jordan. At times this was annoying, and was still a way that men could force me to interact with them, but it felt more playful and like courtship than the systematic humiliation and shame I felt after a round of harassment on Egyptian streets. That is what opened my eyes to the possibility that Egyptian harassment was a unique case, fostered by social upheavals explicable only in an Egyptian context.
Sociopolitical Changes and a Shift in Traditional Gender Dynamics
The situation on Egyptian streets has not always been one of discomfort and humiliation for women. A group of women interviewed by Slackman (2008), commented that “Our mothers used to walk around in miniskirts, displaying French high fashion with their hair beautifully coiffed” without encountering any problems (Illahi 64).
I postulate that the changes that have ravaged Egypt since the Nasser era, and the instability in gender roles that these changes caused, results in the daily gendered negotiations of public space. Beginning in the 1950’s after the Revolution of 1952, Nasser instituted free and compulsory education laws for women, a policy that has since boosted literacy rates among women, and has created a boom in higher university and participation in the labor force for women (Kader). Today, post-elementary education for women is a sign of family status, in that they have the resources to allow for the nominally “superfluous,” but often necessary education of girls. In fact, families will often pay for their daughters to continue in school even after their brothers drop out to work in “mechanics, construction or factory labor,” and as a result many women are even more educated than their spouses (MacLeod 54). After formal education ends, many middle-class women join the ranks of the government bureaucracy as secretaries, or become doctors, lawyers and politicians if they are of the higher classes. Lower class women typically obtain work in factory jobs, as well as embroidery or sowing, cooking, housekeeping, or being a nanny for upper-class families.
The need for supplementary household income was the nearly universal reason given by these working women regardless of their age, educational attainment, or marital status (MacLeod 55). Women use their money to save up for their wedding trusseau, help put younger siblings through school and support general family costs (MacLeod 57-59). A shortage of affordable apartments also makes female income necessary for a newly married couple to attain key money or rent payments (MacLeod 59).
These policies were a sharp turn from labor force participation and educational circumstances of women in earlier Egypt, when even the highest echelon of women had very low literacy rates, and the majority of women in many classes preoccupied themselves predominantly with family matters. Later under Sadat, women were granted the right to vote, which also ushered in a new era of women’s involvement in politics and higher office (Kader 115-116). Furthermore, the introduction of family planning in the form of oral contraceptives decreased women’s fertility, and correspondingly delayed marriage. The focus of a woman’s life shifted away from just her reproductive capacity to something more. However, the increase of women’s role in the public sphere was most likely one that was a rapid shock to traditional gender roles. Although men still disproportionately fill the highest levels of business administration, government, and education, many women are entering and having a voice in the public sphere, which is unprecedented in Egyptian society.
Another social change that had a profound effect on Egyptian society was the intifah, an economic policy instated by Anwar Sadat in the 1970s. This was a policy that opened Egypt’s economy to the free market, a change from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s more socialist policies. Sadat’s intifah not only flooded Egypt with outside investments, but it also created an environment of competition in which skilled labor was more of a necessity, but a commodity which many young men did not possess (Kader 122). To this day, the intifah has caused a mass problem of unemployment of young men. Yet this unemployment also results from an upsurge in university enrolment coupled with a stagnant availability of government jobs. As a result many Egyptian men are currently unemployed, and thus unable to marry. In the 1980s and 1990s, this problem was remedied by a mass emigration of young men from Egypt to the Gulf States to engage in hard labor (Kader 130). Yet, in the 1990s, migration to the Gulf States began to decline.
Many men returned to Egypt with not only money in their pocket, but more radical Islamic ideas that intensified acceptable gender roles for women and men (Kader 134). Yet, we should refrain from viewing this intensification of gender roles as a defeat of women. While Khomeini proposed female seclusion as the ideal, MacLeod cites one paradigm of femininity presented by the cleric Ali Shariati that is both progressive and traditional. This is the paradigm of Fatima, who “was the model of “freedom, equality and integrity most compatible with Islam” and emphasized her intertwining roles as “devoted, self-sacrificing wife and mother” and as “courageous untiring fighter for social justice,” roles she united as mother of Hasan and Hussein” (MacLeod 78). According to this paradigm, a woman should be strong, involved in the public sphere, yet also value her role as a mother. This integrated ideal is still being negotiated in Cairo. Yet, the seclusion model seems to be more dominant.
The development of the megacity is another factor that has changed the gender dynamics. Immigration from the countryside has ballooned the city of Cairo from half a million people in 1900, six million by 1970, and to its seventeen million today (MacLeod 28). During the 1970s, immigration into the city stood at a rate of 100,000 people from the countryside per year. MacLeod states, that Cairo is “a city plagued by crowding, housing shortages, inadequate water and electrical supplies, packed public transportation unbelievable traffic, and nonstop noise” (28). Correspondingly, it is considered a third-world “nightmare city” (Raymond 342). Even if women are mostly secluded in the house, the nature of the city’s housing shortages forces family members to live far apart, thus breaking down the traditional village system in which they no longer “inhabit a community where they are related to many of their neighbors and well known to the rest. Instead they crowd into urban quarters with many people who come from other villages and who may practice different customs” (Macleod 50). This has two effects: Women must travel outside the home and neighborhood compound to see family members, and the neighborhood “watchdog” system of the villages which would have allowed the women freer movement, breaks down. Thus, women have to travel more often, yet their movements are more scrutinized.
Feminist Analysis of Street Harassment
The forces of social change mingle in the Cairo streets to produce a tension, in which women’s mobility is under scrutiny and public space becomes a battleground. From a male perspective, we can see that men are faced with a special challenge to their traditional values and Egyptian masculinity. They see women entering the public space, unescorted by men, and perhaps engaging in behavior that exudes assertiveness, and subjectively borders on the immodest. Women’s presence in the street in this regard is a daily reminder of male inadequacy and the breakdown of traditional social orders. The fact of women on the street is foremost a result of male unemployment. Women would not need to roam the streets or travel to work if an Egyptian man were able to successfully carry out his societal duty as family breadwinner. MacLeod asserts, “men who cannot provide fully for their families feel diminished” and even castrated (70). Furthermore, “to be a breadwinner is not an approved or awarded social achievement for women. Therefore, a woman who earns a salary will be perceived as either masculine or castrating (MacLeod 271). As a result, men may use street harassment as a weapon to defend their own masculinity, by invading the comfort of women, and by reminding women of the irrevocable difference between them (i.e. defining women by the sexuality of their bodies and not their capacities).
In correspondence with this idea of economics as a force behind harassment, frequent perpetrators are young, unemployed men who roam the streets idly, with nothing to do except bother women. They may be responding to their own feelings of inadequacy due to unemployment or the results of it, mainly sexual repression in light of the inability to get married due to the high costs of housing, furnishings and basic security (Illahi).
Street harassment also acts as a tool to fight multiple oppressions that Egyptian men may feel as postcolonial subjects and citizens of an oppressive state. Intimidating women on the street could be an Egyptian man’s response to the destruction of the “Egyptian family” in favor of family and sexuality patterns being transformed into Western patterns. While there is no standard “Muslim family,” a cultural standard of family in Egypt is an arranged marriage in which the husband “owns” a woman’s body to ensure that the social order can be maintained. Yet, Egypt is entering an era in which women are claiming their own bodies and mobility. Mernissi, speaking of similar changes in Morocco, imagines that the “results of the break-up of traditional family life is that, for the first time in history of modern Morocco, the husband is facing his wife directly” (Mernissi 270). This undoubtedly means that men have to face their wives as equal partners, and as breadwinners, which is threatening to them. Mernissi continues by saying that the family unit has changed to more of a nuclear family as a result of the changes in housing and therefore “men and women live more closely and interact more than they ever did before, partly because of the decline of anti-heterosexual factors such as the mother-in-laws’s presence and sexual segregation”(Mernissi 270-271). She believes that these Western changes create a “confrontation between men and women brought up in sexually antagonistic traditions likely to be laden with tensions and fears on both sides” (Mernissi 271)
Although a great deal of harassment may emanate from a hostile place, many Egyptian men may see their actions as justified in light of the encroachment of Western ideals in which is represented the “mutilation of the woman’s integrity, her reduction to a few inches of nude flesh whose shades and forms are photographed ad infinitum with no goal other than profit” (Mernissi 270). Over the past centuries, men have had to endure the products of Westernization including what they see as the diminishing of honor, Westernized dressing (which can also be seen as immodest), and unveiling. These changes derive not only from globalization, but also from the very Egyptian state. State feminism took concrete form in the policies of Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak who were authoritarian leaders. The notion of state feminism is one in which the state gives women rights and privileges, making them independent citizens of the state, and less under the control of their husbands (Seikaly). In many authoritarian regimes, women are educated, have the right to vote, hold a voice in the public arena, and are encouraged to dress in a less traditional manner. This is an act by the government to take over the traditional function of the male head of the family. Destroying traditional patriarchy allows a state to build itself as patriarchal with dominion over all.
Another culprit of street harassment is the societal ideal of keeping women in a private sphere. Simone de Beauvoir introduces the idea of “ghettoization” of women into the private sphere in her 1953 treatise “The Second Sex.” Her theory is that women, either upon birth or marriage, are expected to relinquish a voice in the public sphere, and take up a role as a homemaker and mother in the private sphere. This establishes and maintains a necessary (for patriarchy) dichotomy between the genders. Cynthia Bowman expands on this idea in how this idea of ghettoization relates to American street harassment in the Harvard Law Review.
According to Bowman, street harassment is a tool with which men try to reclaim the public, and intimidate women back into the private sphere. When women enter into the public sphere they assert their right to public participation and mobility. Primarily, men use women’s emergence into the public sphere as a weapon against them. To many men, a woman’s presence in the public sphere signifies that she is “fair game,” and that if her voice is made public, that all of a woman, especially her body, and her sexuality is also open to the public (Bowman 526). Men are trying to communicate to women through street harassment that they cannot have it both ways. If they are subjects of the public, then they have no right to privacy. Thus by becoming subjects of the public, they are essentially becoming objects. Bowman succinctly summarizes harassment in that, “remarks from harassers on the street carry the implicit (and sometimes explicit) message that women do not belong in public, where they draw attention by their mere appearance, but rather in the private sphere, at home” (Bowman 541).
Street harassment restricts a woman’s interaction in the public sphere by making her feel uneasy about traversing the borders between public and private without being accompanied by a male escort. In this way, harassment forces women to be dependent on men to have a voice in the public and to interact in the public, or it forces women to give up that voice out of intimidation or reluctance to engage in the public realm. Women who want to move freely in the public sphere must be willing to do so, while every day facing the battlefield of rude comments, inappropriate touches, and humiliation. Bowman believes that an urban environment is the main condition for street harassment. Harassment can only occur when a place is “genuinely public” meaning that the people on the street cannot know each other. Her theory is that “if someone exists for you as an individual, you are less likely to harass her” (Bowman 530-531). This fits with the development of the megacity and the breakdown of the village/neighborhood systems in Cairo. Cairo is becoming more and more urban, and the self-containing neighborhoods within which people mainly traveled and knew each other are disintegrating. In its place is a megalopolis in which people in the street do not know each other, and the honor system is almost non-existent. This is certainly a contributing factor to the prevalence and intensity of street harassment in Cairo. The institutions that would prevent harassment (watchful neighbors) is non-existent, allowing men to employ any manner of rude and licentious intimidation technique without being reprimanded.
The private and public spaces to which de Beauvoir and Bowman refer are, however, somewhat different than those in Egypt. Instead of concrete spaces that constitute the private home and the public arena, the Egyptian private and public are based in the concrete but can be delineated along the lines of “a series of acts that should be protected from the gaze of others” (Ghannam 99). Private space includes the spaces in which people bathe and unclothe. For example, something that is considered private in Western culture, domestic violence, is actually very public. Neighbors are expected to rush over and defend a woman who is being beaten by her husband. However, Ghannam cites one instance in which a husband made this act “private”, by taking off all of his clothes before hitting his wife (99). The private act, and not the space itself creates the private sphere.
Sexuality is perhaps the most private of acts, and women, who are the embodiment of sexuality and reproduction in Egyptian culture, carry the weight of societal order on their shoulders. Therefore women have traditionally remained in the private world to maintain the purity of sexuality. Architecture in houses and on the street reflects the lengths to which families will go to ensure that strangers will not glimpse the nakedness of the women of the house. Families alter the height of buildings so that neighbors’ windows do not align, and windows are heavily screened or slanted so that women could see men, but men could not see women (Abu Lughod 177). Entrances of a house are blocked on the inside, so that visitors at the door can only see a large wall upon entering the house; In the same vein, doors must not face one another. Yet, the socioeconomic reality is that this physical separation is not always possible, and many poorer families rely upon a neighborhood agreement to not allow sons to peer into windows of neighbor women (178). This is sometimes made simpler by creating small quarters of people in a similar family system (Abu Lughod 177).
Then there are ambiguous spaces that are seemingly public, because they are open to the gaze of strangers, but in which “private acts” are acceptable. The mosque, market, and government office are usually unrestricted, and thus thought of as private, and men allow their wives free access to these places. Other spaces can also be called semi-private, which are called the harah, in which clothing and acts which are “acceptable for a woman within the lodging is also acceptable in the harah” (Abu Lughod 178). The harah is an area that is in public, but that is governed by civil agreements. This can best be explained through the example of a balcony. Several times, I witnessed women in my neighborhood walking onto their balcony to do their laundry or talk on cellphones while clothed only in their nightgowns with their hair uncovered. Considering that the majority of women in Egypt dress very conservatively outside the house, this puzzled me until I was enlightened by an explanation from Middle East anthropologist, Carla Daughtry. Apparently, the balcony is an example of the harah; the balcony is a space that is considered (though open to the view of strangers), part of the private sphere because it is an extension of the house. Therefore, it is more of a shame for a male neighbor to gaze at the uncovered woman, than it is for the woman to be uncovered.
The borders of public and the private space blur in extraordinary circumstances including in religious festivals, and weddings. During these special times women dance provocatively, and behaviors like gender mixing, cross-dressing, flirting, and sexuality is often excused (Madeouf 480-481). Some marginal places also become ambiguous spaces. For example, the mosque square is a place for public and “private activities.” Mainly, unmarried people tend to “socialize, flirt, and exchange glances” in the mosque square, and it is a space in which women and men equally represented (Elshestawy 307). I see these spaces and special times as a way to release any tension associated with the rigidity of the system of public and private space. Although not so clearly understood by an outsider, this system of public and private space has worked for centuries to “order” society. Egypt is currently entering an era in which people, mainly women, are not staying in their assigned sphere or acting in a manner considered appropriate to their traditional gender role.
The Veil: Resistance or Accommodation?
As a way to reorder this system within the context of new societal changes, women are figuring out a way to carry the private sphere with them into the public sphere. For many women, veiling becomes a performance of honor that reasserts gender boundaries and reclaims modesty and respect that they feel they have lost (MacLeod 100). As of my visit in 2010, an unveiled woman is the exception on the street. Veils are not necessarily full-face veils, or long black cloaks, which are often referred to as a “grandmother’s veil.” The veils in Egypt are overwhelmingly a modern creation. Women wear American and European fashions that cover arms and legs with colorful headscarves, sunglasses, jewelry, and make-up. It is an emblem of religion for women, and of cultural pride, as a way to feel like they are abiding by the traditional values, but concurrently being fully modern.
The veil has many meanings for the women who wear it in Egypt, only one of which is to reclaim a sense of propriety and carry the private sphere with them. The modern veil began to surface in the 1970s after the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel as a politicized sign of religiosity adopted by university women (MacLeod 103-104). By the late 1980s, MacLeod had found that the majority of women had begun to don some variation of Muslim dress (105).
One woman explained, “When I put on the hijab, men must respect me. It says that I am a good woman, and if they are a good man, they will see that it is right that they treat me with dignity”(MacLeod 133). Another is quoted as saying,
This dress says to everybody, ‘I am a good Muslim woman. When I started to wear hijab, I felt that everyone looked at me with new eyes. I was not just any woman that they could come up to and bother, but a good wife and a good mother and they could respect me, because they would know who I was. (133).
In the workplace, veils can be a way to symbolically remove the signs of gender, so that a woman can feel as if her sexuality is not the only thing a man sees. Many women cite the veil as a great equalizer in interacting with men.Viewed in this light, the veil takes on an agentic quality. Mohanty, a theorist in the areas of colonial and postcolonial discourses would argue that the veil is a medium of power. Indeed, the veil acts as a religious symbol for many women, as a demonstration of political solidarity with Muslims around the Middle East and North Africa, and as a way to combat the loss of respect that they feel on the street. Mohanty posits that any attempts to invalidate this claim are based on Western feminist framework that seek to generalize “third world” or Muslim women as powerless, and that their wearing of the veil is “reactive,” and not a conscious choice to combat their oppressions (Mohanty 79).
Yet, while the veil can be empowering for women, and a conscious choice, there are also sources that suggest that for many women the veil is something that is an accommodation to oppression. Religious clerics perpetuate the argument that veiling is the only solution to avoid harassment, and they continue to urge women to veil in order to evade harassment. For example, one religiously motivated email campaign urges women to veil in Egypt. It warns, “A veil to protect or the eyes will molest” (Illahi 64). The campaign features a picture that compares women to sticky candy, which if left uncovered will attract the flies (men) and dirt (harassment). Illahi claims that “this message clearly links women to notions of sexual chaos, whereby because of their presumed sexual powers, held within notions of their femininity, men are unable to control themselves“ (64). Therefore, women must cover to prevent men from harassing. MacLeod even estimates that hijab is more of a trend rather than a religious revival, in that women feel they have to wear the veil to adapt to societal expectations (110).
Many women might adopt the veil because they think it is the only way to control the situation, even if it is not something that they would want to wear all the time. Emphasizing that women should wear the veil in public places the responsibility of harassment on women. Illahi found that this attitude was pervasive among men in Egypt, who did not believe that their conduct was inappropriate. Illahi reported one man’s justification for harassment, “They say no, but they mean yes. These women walk suggestively, wearing makeup and we men are supposed to just ignore it” (Illahi 64). Similarly, the majority of men in Egypt take very little responsibility for their actions.
Whether the veil is active resistance or accommodation for harassment, one thing is certain: street harassment is clearly perpetrated by men for the express purpose of intimidating women back into the private sphere, and as a way to feel agency in a society where they are oppressed economically, politically, and socially. Any resistance that does not directly confront the inappropriateness of this projection of male frustrations onto women in the public sphere is not effective resistance. By wearing the veil, women are internalizing the responsibility for their harassment instead of pointing fingers at the real responsible party. Nevertheless, convincing the public that women are not in control of their harassment would be somewhat of a feat. The Egyptian public views the veil as a source of control and a buffer against street harassment for women, yet it is primarily a disadvantage in light of street harassment. Women are subjectively liable for male abuse if they wear something too revealing, too tight to the body, or if a wisp of hair falls free from the veil. Women who choose not veil, usually Christians or foreign women, are often the targets of more intense harassment, because in the eyes of many Egyptian men, they deserve it for not covering themselves. The veil as a means of portable privacy may also be a disadvantage to women. Carrying the private sphere with herself through veiling is almost a woman’s apology for being in the public sphere, and an assertion that women in general should not be public figures. Of course, in practice many women who veil maintain very public roles, but in theory, the idea is that women should be in the private sphere, as sexual beings maintained and kept hidden away to avoid social chaos. The 21st century is leading women into more public roles in which their bodies and their voices are no longer hidden. Thus, in the changing and dynamic Egyptian society, street harassment will continue as a way for men to vent their frustrations whether a woman is covered from head to foot, or if she is uncovered. This is the sad and complicated reality.
Afterword
How I considered being a Western feminist while writing this paper:
I cannot divorce my identity as a Western feminist speaking with an American Western philosophical background and perspective from the subject at hand. However I tried to approach the subject using Egyptian frameworks (public vs. private space as well as the agency of the veil) in order to be more fair in my analysis.
That, I think, is the key: I attempted to demonstrate how Egyptian women have agency, although I’m not sure that agency is directed toward the most effective area (agency in dressing a certain way versus agency in confronting male behavior). The veil does not attack male behavior, but assumes responsibility for it. In this respect, I see the veil as inadequate resistance.
I also try to present Egyptian men as complex subjects of a postcolonial world and not caricatures of “Muslim oppressors.” To do this, I present the problem of street harassment in an Egyptian context grounded in realities that have engulfed Egypt, and not through theoretical imaginings of a monolithic “Muslim woman” as oppressed or a monolithic “Muslim man” as oppressed. That would be narrow-minded and limiting.
Egyptian men, both Muslim and Christian are oppressors in a way, but it is a way that is expressing agency against oppression (even if that agency is also misguided.) I am also not asserting that this is the case everywhere in the Middle East, through my example from Jordan. In this way, I believe I avoid some of the pitfalls of a lot of Western feminists who assert the Middle East is one entity, and that all women as “third world women” are oppressed by “third world men,” and idea that Mohanty vehemently despises.
My perspective is also one that is critical of colonialism in how it has destroyed local value systems that ordered Egyptian society, and I hope that came through in my analysis. If not, then it is a sentiment that I am now expressing. Under the right conditions of colonial and postcolonial oppression, I feel that street harassment of this magnitude is possible anywhere.
Thank you for reading.
Sincerely,
Arielle Steinberg
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