In a world where knowledge about the body is restricted and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are deemed “taboo”, those who attempt to break the silence often become targets of harassment, abuse, and defamation. This pattern is not accidental. It reflects a deeper patriarchal entitlement that treats women’s bodies as publicly accessible and punishes those who claim authority over sexual knowledge.
In Egypt, the issue is intensified as sexuality is tightly interwoven with honour, family reputation, and state-endorsed moral discourse. Accordingly, women SRHR activists challenge a multi-layered patriarchal social construction, including both public and private patriarchal control at the same time. As a result, the challenges they are exposed to extend far beyond scarce resources or social stigma to also include various forms of sexual harassment, abuse, and every tactic to intimidate women who dare to open a serious and scientific discussion about SRHR and push them into silence.
“It’s very common for someone to send me a picture of his penis, asking, ‘Is this normal?’ Sending me something like that is a form of harassment,” says Mai El-Husseiny, a marital relations counsellor and psychosexual therapist. Mai produces educational content on sexual and reproductive health from a gendered perspective and regularly receives explicit messages and images in response. Harassment, according to her, has become an inseparable part of the work of many women activists in this field.
“DM”
Sending unsolicited explicit images without consent is known as Cyber-flashing, where the digital medium is used to replicate the power dynamics of physical indecent exposure. Cyber-flashing, or commonly known as (dick-pic) functions as a primary tool to intimidate women and make the digital environment so hostile that they feel compelled to withdraw from it. According to Durham University, nearly half of young women have been exposed to this form of abuse online. For SRHR activists, these images serve to “remind” them of their perceived status as sexual objects that they should not forget.
Additionally, sexual Harassment is not limited to Mai’s inbox on social media. It also targets Women who engage with her posts who are subjected to sexualised comments such as, “Come to my DM” or “I’m looking for someone with certain qualities, a close friend, someone who wants intimacy.”
Direct messaging (DMs), Mai points out, is often the main channel of interaction with such content due to societal restrictions around discussing sexuality. Thus, many prefer to ask questions privately. Yet these private channels are just as often flooded with unsolicited sexual images and explicit harassment, transforming a supposed educational space into a site of abuse.
This could also be a form of reclaiming power over women “who know” because they pose a threat to men who consider that their ultimate power primarily comes from their knowledge and experience of sex and sexuality. Thus, they resort to Cyber-flashing or other forms of sexual harassment to shock women by violating their privacy to force them to silence.
Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence
Such a form of abuse is widely recognised as digital sexual harassment, defined by scholars Anastasia Powell and Nicola Henry (2019) as “unwanted or unwelcome sexual behaviour conducted by electronic means such as email, voice and/or video calls, text and/or picture messages, and posts in online contexts”. In their study, Powell and Nicola refer to this harassment as a part of technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV). This concept denies the separation of sexual violence in the “real” world from its digital manifestations. Instead, it situates contemporary forms of violence as deeply entangled with online platforms and communication technologies. Hence, this type of violence is not limited to digital assaults of a sexual nature but rather includes broader patterns of gender-based violence.
Knowledge as a Crime
Mai’s case, thus, is not isolated. It is a recurrent scene for nearly every woman activist or initiative attempting to speak up and raise awareness of SRHR. Mayar Mekky, founder of the Bar Aman initiative, also recalls a wave of abuse she faced after she posted the phrase, “Sex is for pleasure, not just reproduction” on her page. The backlash included insults, mockery, and explicit sexual harassment in her DMs.
Society, she says, does not merely reject SRHR knowledge, but also stigmatises women for possessing it, labelling them “experienced” as a slur rather than as an acknowledgment of expertise.
As sexuality is socially regulated in Egypt, sexual knowledge is something women should access only within marriage. Thus, unmarried women are expected to remain sexually uninformed as a marker of “respectability”. This leaves many young girls and women navigating their own bodies in silence, often discouraged from seeking accurate information or medical care. In some communities, even visiting a gynaecologist before marriage can provoke suspicion. In the “Gynecology Clinic… For married women only” episode of the Salmon podcast, several young women described being denied access to gynaecological examinations because they were unmarried. Consequently, women who publicly share SRHR knowledge are confronting a system that equates ignorance with virtue and knowledge with impropriety.
In April 2024, The Sex Talk Arabic, a feminist intersectional platform that publishes content on SRHR in Arabic in relevance to the context of the SWANA region, asked this rhetorical question: “Since when is experience judged? In this Instagram post, the platform highlights that this stigma is merely a reflection of society’s rejection to allow women to have knowledge of their bodily rights and sexuality, which could allow them to escape patriarchal control, the deepest social panic.
Mai emphasises this sense of entitlement towards women who possess sexual knowledge through the messages she receives: “They flirt with me, asking personal questions like, ‘What do you like? What turns you on?’”. The ability to speak openly about sexuality, thus, becomes an excuse for violating her privacy and sexually harassing. Although these topics are directly tied to the right to knowledge and a dignified life, simply raising them, especially when voiced by women, opens the door to a torrent of online sexual violence, merely because they “dared” to speak.
In the same sense, a recent study by the Edraak Foundation for Development and Equality (2025), “Social Challenges and Social Media Restrictions Facing SRHR Content Creators”, confirms that women in this field are routinely stigmatised because of their knowledge. They are accused of “promoting immorality” or “spreading vice”, which is further confirmed by Mayar Mekky who also emphasises the importance of opening up discussions on these topics without being called “shameful” or accused of “opening girls’ eyes.” Such criticism, she argues, stands in direct opposition to women’s right to knowledge and awareness of their bodily rights.
The same study, which anchored nine in-depth interviews with SRHR content creators, whether independent or organisation-affiliated, found that stigma extends beyond the women themselves to include their families and partners. which multiplies their restrictions and undermines their ability to continue their work. According to the study, although many participants received direct support from their partners or friends, they were simultaneously attacked by members of their extended families or their in-laws. In some cases, even their husbands were used as a tool to target and shame them.
In Egypt, reputation is collective. That is why targeting husbands and extended family members operates strategically, leveraging kinship structures, especially outside Cairo and the central cities, to pressure women into withdrawal.
El-Husseiny confirmed experiencing this type of targeting when she shared a video on International Women’s Day about sexual and reproductive health awareness. As a result, she was inundated with hostile comments such as: “If your husband allows you to do this, then what can we say?” For Mai, this is the most painful kind of attack: “I’m aware of my work and its pros and cons, but my people, even if they support me, are hurt by this, especially because it is not their field, and because it’s not considered a ‘normal’ field for women”.
Beyond the Central
This violation is not only confined to the capital and large cities. Far in the south, the Ya’a Al-Melkiya initiative, a grassroots organisation working on SRHR in Aswan city, faces the same challenges. In local communities such as Upper Egypt, working on these issues comes with additional layers of repression and stigma, shaped by closed tribal structures and the belief that such topics are “shameful to discuss” according to Iman, one of the co-founders, who often receives sexually explicit messages framed as harassment, such as: “I want to try pleasure,” or “I’m married but I don’t feel any satisfaction.”
“Sometimes I can’t even tell if the sender is really harassing me or genuinely seeking help from the initiative,” Iman says.
Yet, this type of attack has not deterred the initiative’s members from continuing their work because, as Iman puts it “They understand how society views these issues. We are still afraid to talk about them, and anyone who does deserves mockery and sexual harassment”. She also emphasises that the initiative intends to carry on “breaking all socially imposed taboos” and spreading accurate scientific knowledge to raise women’s awareness in the south about their sexual and reproductive health and rights, and changing the prevailing social attitudes towards these topics.Despite such hostility, Iman and her team persist: “We know these topics are still taboo, that anyone who talks about them is seen as available or open to harassment. But we continue breaking taboos and spreading scientific knowledge to help women in the south understand their rights.”
Psychological Distress and Burnout
Inevitably, these challenges that SRHR women content creators are subjected to take a toll on their mental and psychological health. For instance, despite her robust support network, Mai El-Husseiny flags up that exposure to this kind of violence sometimes discourages her and directly affects her ability to proceed, especially during hard times when she is more vulnerable and less resilient. “Sometimes I reach a stage of disgust, wondering why I have to deal with so much hate speech”, she says, adding, “when I’m feeling down, I think I shouldn’t have to waste my energy confronting and responding to this”.
According to Edraak’s study, the constant pressures exerted on women activists in this field compromise their well-being and expose them to risks of exhaustion and burnout. Furthermore, some organisations, as the study indicates, adopt collective psychological support strategies, such as creating a supportive work environment, using participatory management to reduce the sense of individual burden, and organising group debriefing sessions to ease tension and share emotions across the team. However, these mechanisms require adequate resources to be implemented effectively. This creates a stark gap between larger or formally registered organisations, which can provide mental health support and well-being measures for their staff, and grassroots who often operate with very limited resources. Such a structural disparity leaves frontline activists more vulnerable to burnout and complications, even though they are the ones most directly affected by violence.
