In other countries, men of all races and social categories harass women when and if they can get away with it. It’s not systematized and constant the way it is in Egypt. When I’m there I get hissed at or propositioned literally every 50 feet. Women complain about men masturbating next to them on the subway. We’re not talking about occasional catcalling here, we’re talking about an institution. VERY different from casual harassment in the rest of the world. We can’t just blame it on patriarchy because it is much, much more complicated than that.

The parallel I drew between the pressures faced by African American men here and Egyptian men in Egypt is largely psychological–obviously their histories and unique situations are very different. But the level of disenfranchisement and the immense pressure that places on them has, I think, emotional similarities. They seem to complain about similar stresses and feelings of being rejected and pushed out by the mainstream establishment. But in Egypt there’s the added pressure of sexual oppression and religious expectation. (No matter what your gender, I think being forced into celibacy until you’re 35–not just celibacy, but strict social separation from the opposite sex–is oppressive.)

But I don’t think your comparison of Egyptian men to African-American men is apt; Egyptian men are not a minority group in Egypt. They are mainstream society, and they shape their own media/culture/religions. In the U.S., black men are not the majority and are placed outside of mainstream culture/media/etc. by the majority.

Your point about poverty is a good one, but again the comparison between Egyptians and African-Americans doesn’t work. Plenty of rich American men (of any race) harass women. And men of all ethnicities harass women despite their income level.

Ironically I think men in Egypt struggle with problems similar to the ones African American men face here. Jobs are scarce, the government is demeaning and oppressive, and the conservative Islamic establishment has told single men that they are rapacious and untrustworthy so often that they have begun to believe it. They have no impetus to behave respectfully–they have no prospects, no respect, and, in their own eyes, no future. Their only path into respectable adult society (and into healthy sexual relationships) is marriage, which is an astronomically expensive affair in Egypt. Many of them live with their parents–unemployed, single, and in a state of enforced chastity–until well into their thirties. They are *miserable*.

Egyptian women are screwed because Egyptian men are screwed. The solution to this problem will have to be sweeping, because it is rooted in poverty, oppression and a religious establishment that curtails and stigmatizes male sexuality just as ferociously as it does female sexuality.

I think Faith’s point about the story’s point: “to reinforce ideas about the superiority of Western gender as compared to gender norms in the Arab world” is a great one. Without context, the story just ends up fueling the “culture-clash” argument by constructing Egyptian (or, in a larger sense, Muslim) men as inherently bad boogeymen.

There is a good article by an Egyptian man i.e.Khaled Diab about this issue:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/03/egypt.gender