Let us ask you one simple question. Do you think women now are fully free and, you know, being treated like actual human beings? Do you think we’re finally at the point where women are just A-Okay and untroubled?
You’ll have two answers to this question. You’ll either go with the popular “no, how are you even asking that?”. Or you’ll go with Yasmine Sabry’s answer, which went something like this:
Yeah. So, here’s the thing. Yasmine Sabry saying, with full optimistic confidence, that women don’t really “have an issue” to “fight against” is problematic on more than one level. Most importantly because that’s not real.
If you’ve had the privilege of being alive for any period of time on earth, you may have noticed that women consistently get the short end of the stick in literally everything. This past year alone is enough testament for that!
But you know what? We really cannot put the full blame on Yasmine Sabry for this untrue answer.
See, a great part of society has been telling women, ever since the new millennium, that they’ve “gotten all the rights and freedoms they could want” because they’ve only scratched the surface of freedom that most men take for granted.
And what’s worse is that these people and more have also been saying that feminism, you know the whole movement about equality, has ran its course and that “feminists are just out for blood now“.
Reading this, you probably want to scream and roll your eyes because, well, the fact that we’ve got the ABCs of women’s rights doesn’t mean the movement is over.
In fact, it’s far from over. As much as we want to be optimistic and idealistic like other people (aka men and women who have been conditioned to accept these crimes), we really can’t be.
Open up any Egyptian newspaper or news channel and there’s a big chance you’ll find someone discussing crimes like: female genital mutilation (FGM), domestic violence and abuse against women, honor-killings, child marriages, harassment, and gender-based discrimination.
Actually, you might not even have to do that. Just scroll down Facebook. We did and we discovered that recently, the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood barely stopped two underage children from being married.
Our own platform has recently covered myriad stories about sexual harassment in Egypt and other crimes against women that lead to death.
We don’t even go a day without hearing about one crime or another being committed against a woman simply because she’s a woman. And most times, these crimes happen because society has been conditioned and set up in a way that’s inherently against women.
It’s a race where the hurdles get tougher the faster you go! And we need to learn that misogyny and sexism and the crimes that result from them haven’t really gone anywhere.
