Well, I’m not completely wrong, I’m only partly wrong (and I can say that with authority because I didn’t stop Googling cites after I found one that supported my one-trick pony): homicide is the leading cause of workplace death for women. They don’t fall off girders and get impaled on rebar as much as men, they don’t get engulfed in grain silos as much as men, but strangers and co-workers, usually male, will kill them.
However, it may feed into your MRA victimization to know this: the government is White-Knighting women’s workplace safety all out of proportion. In 2013 I sat in a conference room where the SE regional director of OSHA made it very clear that workplace violence against women would be given more emphasis at the Federal level, above and beyond what local law enforcement was doing. And this was during the sequestration, when the Federal government was holding back wherever it could.
I don’t believe women are safer with woman cabbies. I’ll have to agree to disagree with some poster on that, with or without a handshake on the deal. But women cabbies are safer with women fares.
So employees can die at work from (a) misadventure or (b) homicide, and we have two groups, X and Y, and group Y is largely protected from (a), and you throw up your hands in horror and cry “Criminy! Look at the proportionate danger Group Y are in from homicide!” ?
Or to put it another way, “Yes, men are at greater absolute risk of dying from homicide, but since they have so many other ways to die as well, we should be concerned about women’s risk”?
I see your point, but here’s the thing: if I have an employee who is likely to fall off a girder and be impaled on rebar, I put him or her in a safety harness*.
If I have an employee who, as a woman, is seen as low-hanging fruit for a creepster, like bengangmo I keep her on the day shift, or only let her serve other women.
*which are only rated for up to 300 pounds, including tools. So I also discriminate against heavy people.
Enduring sexual propositions a dozen times a week isn’t a tax woman have to pay for the right to walk down the street, have a job, or RIDE IN A CAB. If I am a paying customer of that cab or livery service, I have a right to a polite, safe driver.
As much as I support people owning guns for hunting purposes, I strongly dislike both concealed-carry and open-carry laws, and this comment is exactly the reason why.
Sure as hell is one that will get your CCW pulled, you barred from using the cab service and might well be jailable. I have no doubt it violates the terms of your CCW.
Get yourself a fucking car.
If I am alone and he acts in a threatening manner, hell yes. I consider it fair warning. I also take down his name and number and report everything that occurred to the cab company immediately after being able to exit the cab. They usually plead with me not to call the police at that point. But I always do, and you know what, I’ve never been arrested. I have had detectives inform me, they would tell their own wives to say and do the same thing.
This is not really that nutty. And neither is making a veiled threat to an inappropriately sexually suggestive man. When a man says or does something that makes a woman fearful, which I understand happens to many women extremely frequently, I have no problem if she responds by saying something that makes him fearful.
Okay. I think, in some circumstances, “do you like to party?” could cause reasonable fear.
But I think there’s a broader point – it’s entirely normal today, and was accepted by society for most of our history, for a man to say or do something that might inspire fear in a woman. It’s, unfortunately, a very long-lived problem that’s still very common (according to women I’ve discussed this with). Some women, to make themselves more comfortable, might go to the lengths described by ZPG Zealot and carry a means to defend themselves, and say so to a man they’re uncomfortable around. It’s possible that, occasionally, she might make a decent guy who did nothing wrong feel a bit of nervous fear. This is a tiny shame, but women making men fearful is not a problem and has never been a problem in our society. The reverse is a significant problem, and has always been a problem in our society.
I’ll note that nothing you said contradicts this, but I wanted to make this point against any who might conflate the two situations. So I absolutely support woman for taking actions up to and including veiled threats of violence towards men who made them feel fearful, even understanding that occasionally this response may not be calibrated perfectly, and once or twice some decent guy who just wanted to talk about the weather might feel a twinge of fear.
I don’t understand your first and third sentences and how they relate to each other.
I have a rare perspective on the issue of being propositioned - I presented to the public as a somewhat nerdy, mousy man for most of the life, and got a good feel for what it’s like to, as someone else put it, blend into the background very quickly. Cab drivers used to grunt at me “where to?”, then turn on the radio and ignore me the rest of the trip. People in elevators averted their eyes. At bars and nightclubs no one looked at me twice, and even when I danced the most I would receive was a polite smile.
Having lived full time as a woman for a few years now, and having been told I have a pretty nice body…the difference in how I’m treated by the other sex is still stunning. I won’t hijack the thread with stories, but there’s simply no comparison.
I suppose that all hinges on what you perceive to be ‘a threatening manner’
What she described isn’t a vieled threat, its a very specific threat, and men have also the right to go about their day to day lives without being threatened with violence or the fear of violence. What you are doing is maximising the problems and issues women face and minimising or dismissing entirely the problems men face, which is all to common these days.
Getting back to the original subject of the thread, a livery service being started that will employ women drivers and whose target market is women, the New York Times today has an article that said that the start of the service is being delayed so that the operator can recruit more drivers. The article mentions, “In the city, women make up only 1 percent of yellow-cab drivers, and only 5 percent of for-hire drivers of livery cars, green cabs, limousines and luxury sedans, according to city data.”
Given that the vast majority of livery drivers are men, I don’t see how this company’s service limits opportunity for men.
[QUOTE=Disposable Hero]
I don’t think anyone addressing someone else by the word ‘boy’ really deserves a reply.
[/QUOTE]
Sure thing.
It clearly does, though, technically speaking. There’s a service that by design a woman can call and receive an accommodation, and by design a man can’t. It is, on its face, as obvious as discrimination can get. I think it’s important to acknowledge because there are a lot of people who refuse to go any further in the analysis than that. I’m not one of them, and I think as soon as you take into consideration the context it becomes totally non-controversial, but you have to admit that if the context doesn’t matter to you at all, this is every bit as bad as the separate but equal traincars.
But there are many other livery companies that hire and are aimed at men. So men are not denied the opportunity to work at or use the services of a livery company.
I think I’m being pretty realistic about the problems and issues women and men face with regards to being inspired to fear by the words or actions of strangers of the opposite gender.
