Conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh is hardly the first man to shout “Slut! Prostitute!” at an uppity woman. I've been called these words repeatedly in Egypt. Facing relentless sexual insults on the streets of Cairo, I've felt lucky to be from America where men in public today are generally better behaved. So it was with surprise that stung like a slap to hear Limbaugh use those exact words. Silly me. Sexual humiliation is the first weapon men seize to make women shut up—letting them know their claim to equal rights and dignity are made at their peril. The sexual violence used by men to control women is age-old, crosses class, race, and national boundaries. It varies only by degree. And sometimes, extreme degrees clarify. I was in Cairo's Tahrir Square January 25 interviewing celebrants at the one-year anniversary of Egypt's revolution when a young woman was being mobbed on the other side of the square. Like Lara Logan, her clothes were torn off and she was beaten and raped—vaginally and anally—by the fingers of multiple men before other male bystanders managed to intervene. She left the square in an ambulance. Her crime? I could say it was because she happened to be foreign, or had on a short-sleeved top, or was unveiled and blonde, or had an independent, athletic walk, or was alone. The problem with these explanations is that none are true. By the end of that day and evening, this same thing had happened to three other women. One was with a group of friends, another with her husband and another was Muslim and veiled. Looking for explanations, of course, is an interesting exercise in victim-blaming that others, especially women sometimes explore in the hope of gaining control by explaining why it couldn't happen to them. These women in Tahrir Square, however, were assaulted because they happened to be celebrating their empowerment in a public arena, a space that in Egypt is always owned by men. The problem of the increasingly rampant sexual harassment on Egyptian streets was recently raised in Egypt's new Parliament, where after a bit of consideration, the people's representatives declared the charges “overblown.” No matter that the chamber of 500-plus men includes less than 10 women, or that 98 percent of Egyptian women say they have been sexually harassed and assaulted, and an equal number admit to being battered at home. The irony of a room of middle-aged Egyptian men pondering over and then deciding whether or not their fellow countrywomen are being sexually harassed seems ridiculous, even a bit barbaric. Noting this, I again rejoice I am from the West, until I remember that, oh wait a minute, didn't our own US House of Representatives decline to include Limbaugh's Georgetown law student, or “slut,” as he dubbed her, in their all-male testimony considering insurance coverage for female contraception due to her “lack of expertise.” ** The author blogs at Egypt Unplugged. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/KI1i3 Tags: featured, Harassment, Rush Limbaugh, Slut, Women's rights Section: Egypt, Op-ed, Women
