Egyptian feminist, journalist, author, and public speaker Mona Eltahawy has long campaigned against sexual harassment and empowered countless women to take action against their harassers.
So, when a man sexually assaulted her, she stopped at nothing to defend herself and fought back, pinning the perpetrator to the ground and beating him up repeatedly.
Eltahawy, 50, narrated the incident in a series of tweets with the hashtag #IBeatMyAssaulter, under which several women started sharing their own stories of defending themselves against assault.
According to Eltahawy and Robert Rutledge, her significant other who witnessed the incident, a man groped her on the dance floor at a nightclub.
Despite being much shorter than the assaulter, who was 6’2” (188 centimeters) tall and weighed around 210 pounds (95 kilograms), Eltahawy grabbed the latter by his shirt and proceeded to hit him.
"He went down hard and she got 10-15 blows on top of him before he fled," said Rutledge.
When someone tried to interfere and stop Eltahawy, Rutledge stopped him by saying, "No, no, no, don't you touch her. He assaulted her".
After a while, the attacker managed to get up and flee into the crowd.
Eltahawy noted that Rutledge intentionally refrained from intervening to help her out, as he trusted she could manage the situation.
"I was taking care of it and he knew it," she wrote, adding, "I am not his property to be defended".
"We're socialized to be nice and polite. Fuck being nice and polite."
"I am 5”4. I am sure most men would never consider me a physical threat. But I am not here to play," said Eltahawy.
"If anything about my appearance makes you think I will not punch you for sexually assaulting me, I will disabuse you of that delusion," she added.
In another tweet, she wrote that girls and women are not socialized to defend themselves against assault, but she is not constrained by this social norm.
"We're socialized to be nice and polite. Fuck being nice and polite. I am not nice and polite," she asserted.