Mona Eltahawy is the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution.
In the past week alone, I can tell you how many explosions armed militants carried out across Cairo, how many people are believed to have died from torture at a police station which has become synonymous with the regime crackdown against Islamists, and I can tell you who was in and who was out in the latest cabinet reshuffle.
I can tell you, in other words, myriad men's stories: men jostling for power, men killing other men over power, and men negotiating over the spoils of that power.
I cannot, however, tell you how many girls were subjected to genital mutilation during the past week, how many women were beaten or raped by their husbands, nor how many girls and women were subjected to street sexual harassment, or worse, in the cities of my country.
I can't tell you any of that despite the fact that statistics make clear the horrific regularity at which those horrors visited upon girls and women occur. According to Unicef, 74 per cent of girls aged 15-17 have been subjected to a form or another of genital cutting in Egypt. Among those aged 15-49, it is 91 per cent.
According to a 2013 UN survey, 99.3 per cent of girls and women in Cairo experience some form of sexual harassment on the streets.
Clearly, the daily terrorism of girls and women is akin to the air we breathe – we take it for granted and we rarely think about it.
If feminism is the F word some hesitate to use, I rarely use the T (for terrorism) word because I recognize the ways in which it is used to describe the violence of enemies versus the violence committed by allies. But if terrorism means violence meant to scare us into changing the way we behave, then surely cutting off healthy parts of a girls' genitals to ensure her chastity and sexually harassing girls and women on the street to maintain male primacy over public spaces is terrorism.
And those startlingly high statistics? Add social acceptance on top of the terrorism subjected on girls and women and ask yourself again why the stories of women rarely make headlines.
Why don't those violations committed against girls and women disturb us as much as explosions and torture? I am not making light of armed militancy nor of the horrors of torture or police brutality. But by ignoring the hideous violations of women's rights, the daily drip-drip of misogyny, we make light of the crimes committed against girls and women.
The Egyptian regime consistently uses that stale George W. Bush leftover "War on Terror" to justify its security crackdown. But a look at Egyptian jails full of thousands of political prisoners and the number of activists and soccer fans killed by the regime's security forces in recent months is a reminder that those security crackdowns are effective at silencing dissent but are abject failures at stemming armed militancy.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi's solution was to replace the interior minister. We have been playing political musical chairs in Egypt since we began our revolution in 2011. We replace one man with another, but unless we confront the root causes of the rot in Egyptian politics – the lack of alternatives to military rule and political Islam as ways to rule – we will never be free.
Who do we sack for our abject failure at stemming the terrorism that girls and women are subjected to?
Put in those terms, at a time of armed militancy and horrific human rights violations, any complaints about the violations of the rights of girls and women – half of our society – are always told to wait.
Wait until elections are held, wait until political prisoners are released, wait until we end torture, wait until stability returns, wait, wait, wait. The letimotif of women's stories and our lives is waiting.
It is essential to remember the prescience of Martin Luther King with regards to the notion of waiting.
"This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied," he wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
The stories of girls and women in Egypt must be elevated and given as much prominence and priority as those about explosions, torture and ministerial reshuffles. The world marked International Women's Day on March 8. But I avoid "Days" – be they Valentine's or International Women's – because – tenacious optimist that I am, I believe that equality and justice for girls and women, just like love, should be marked and celebrated and fought for every day.
My tenacious optimism aside, unless the political revolution we began in Egypt is accompanied by a parallel social and sexual revolution – essentially a feminist revolution – our political musical chairs will be never ending and we will never be free.
The reason we must pay more attention to the female experience is because the most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it matters. Because it does.