Gated communities—walled-off and access-controlled upscale residential enclaves—started to proliferate in the deserts surrounding Cairo under the auspices of the Mubarak regime in the mid-1990s. Increased perceptions of insecurity and the multiplication and intensification of incidents of public sexual violence in the aftermath of the January 25 Revolution have conditioned many Cairo inhabitants’ decision to move away from the city and to one of these compounds, exacerbating processes of spatial segregation and abandonment of public space already in place. Gated communities deploy a profusion of security technologies, including access control, personnel on the ground patrolling around the clock, and video surveillance. The “informal zoning” (Mitchell 2003) that results from the uneven securitization of these different urban spaces functions as a mechanism of “spatial governmentality” (Merry 2001) that “exclud[es] potential criminal acts from segregated spaces, leaving the rest of the city to watch out for itself” (Zukin 2003). While a minority of Egyptians can afford to enclose themselves in these enclaves, the lives of those who stay in the city core are made more precarious as a result of the state’s disinvestment and the failure of governance in the city. Fear—an affect with distinctive spatial dimensions—is at the center of these urban trends. Building upon affect theory, feminist geography and critical urban studies scholarship, this paper draws on interviews with women living in the suburban towns of New Cairo and Sixth of October City and with residents in gated communities to examine how fear operates at the level of the body to create the desire to maintain a physical distance from bodies and spaces perceived as fearsome and—when such a separation cannot be secured—the urge to leave the space before the object of fear materializes. In addition, it explores how the circulation of accounts of violence facilitates the socialization of fear, whereby episodes of public sexual violence are vicariously and affectively experienced at a distance, prompting the preemptive and anticipatory adoption of safety measures. The paper argues that upper- and upper-middle-class women’s increasing adoption of strategies of urban flight further marginalizes those women who continue to inhabit public space. As a result, women in the city are rendered simultaneously more vulnerable and more alienated, facilitating the articulation of discourses that figure women’s bodies in public space as "at risk" and "a risk."