Egypt: protests were safe space for women until they turned violent today

Sarah Topol in Slate: "Egypt has a sexual harassment problem. In a 2008 study, 86 percent of women said they had been harassed on Egypt's streets–any woman walking through a crowd of men in Egypt braces to get groped. But in the square, crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, men apologized if they so much as bumped into you. After wandering around the protests for days, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't been groped, a constant annoyance when I'm faced with large crowds in Cairo. When I pointed this out to other women in the square, we all took a moment to reflect. 'I hadn't even thought of that,' one woman in Tahrir told me. 'But it's because we're all so focused on one goal, we're a family here."