Egyptian women were on the frontline of the 2011 revolution. Images of Egyptian women participating actively in revolutionary change across all boundaries of generation, ideology and religious identity help to define Egypt’s revolution as a romance of national unity victorious against tyranny and Tahrir Sq. as symbol of republican virtue. However in the post-revolutionary period, much publicized incidents of the sexual assault of female protestors have underlined the extent to which Egyptian women as a whole have became targets of worsening sexual assault and violence since 2011. Commentators, mostly (but not exclusively) outside of Egypt, have pointed to epidemic levels of sexual harassment of Egyptian women as a symbol of the failures of the Arab Spring writ large. However, such pronouncements may miss important shifts, as the post-revolutionary period has also seen new forms of organizing around sexual harassment (a term which in Egypt can encompass anything from cat calls to violent sexual assault) since the revolution, particularly around the assault of female protesters in Tahrir Square. This paper examines changing discourses around sexual assault over the last five years and grassroots political responses to it to answer a number of crucial questions: What lessons does the activism around sexual harassment in Egypt have for thinking about the practice of democracy? What can it tell us about the indicators of revolutionary change, and its limits? How do post-revolutionary gender politics serve to constitute the alliances and fissures between the state and ordinary Egyptian citizens? By looking at the emergence of groups like Tahrir Body Guard, the Girls of Egypt are a Red Line and Operation Stop Sexual Harassment I trace the ways in which activism around sexual assault and need to protect female protesters (and, by extension Tahrir as a revolutionary space), have transformed discourses around sexual harassment as a whole, making it not only a topic of political import for the first time but also prompting the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to make combatting sexual harassment a focus of state legal action and concern. I argue that such grassroots and state interventions both hold out promise for Egyptian women and reveal limits of such interventions in the context of authoritarian rule.