I was watching Last Comic Standard last week and heard this joke… I don’t remember the guy’s name but it was about online dating and a study that showed men’s top fear is the woman looks different than her pics (fat) and a woman’s top fear is being killed.
You know what, my last post was needlessly nitpicky. I apologize and retract it.
Bottom line, men worry about realistic threats, while women worry about horrific but unlikely ones.
And men are apparently childish and/or insecure enough to consider the trivial embarrassment of “looking like a fool” or “being laughed at” to be a “threat” worth actually “worrying about”. 
Rita Rudner used to say, “Men are like bears with furniture.”
Ah yes. Oh to be female and hence immune to emotional and social insecurity. backatcha
I’ve read something similar as to the reason why straight men are as a whole more homophobic towards gay men than straight women are towards lesbians. Gay men introduce to straight men a set of people who might be able to force unwanted sex on them – something they don’t have to worry about if the only people who might want to have sex with them are straight women, who generally aren’t strong enough to force the issue.
Straight women might have the same concern about lesbians, but since they are already constantly surrounded by people with the physical capability of forcing unwanted sex on them, it’s a fear they’ve gotten used to already.
This theory strikes me as very unlikely, given the stereotypes that are typically associated with homosexuality by homophobes and homophobic society. The prevailing theme is contempt for gay men as “unmanly”, not fear of their prowess.
Yup. We only get sexually assaulted frequently, not full-on murdered. How silly to mix that up.
A comedian told that joke on the last (or a very recent) episode of Last Comic Standing. I could have sworn it was slightly plagiarizing a Louis CK bit, but I can’t swear to it.
Here’s the Louis CK bit I was thinking of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4LkrQCyIz8
Well, yes, why isn’t the quote about sexual assault then? It wasn’t me that introduced it.
Maybe that is what the OP’s lost quote is talking about, in fact:
It’s not actually all that “unrealistic” for women to fear physical harm from men. Mind you, I still think everybody needs to keep in mind that the risk of that for most women is rather low compared to other dangers.
But it’s certainly much more statistically realistic than for men to fear physical harm from women. Which perhaps is why men describe their “biggest fear” in such a situation as the superficial discomfort of being laughed at, instead of being seriously harmed.
A while back Imgur had this variation on the front page:
http://imgur.com/gallery/T8iFEfN
It’s Donald Glover, and I think it drifted to the front page on a wave of “overly attached girlfriend” gifs.
“Why don’t women have crazy men stories? I don’t really hear 'em. And then I realised, I was like ‘Oh, it’s because if you’ve got a crazy boyfriend, you gonna die.’”
No. Statistically, it is significantly more reasonable for a woman to fear she will be killed by a man than for a man to fear he will be killed by a woman.
It’s more reasonable for a man to fear being killed in general; but in terms of cross-sex violence, women have much more reason to be afraid.
Certainly, it is more likely for men to seriously harm women, than vice versa.
The point, though, is as you note, the actual risk of either is low, while the risk of more quotidian concerns - being rejected, being humiliated, having one’s heart broken - is reasonably high, for both men and women.
The notion that a crazy boyfriend = death (as in the joke in the post above) is hyperbole to the point that the joke isn’t really hilarious. It does not have the ring of truth to it that makes for a really good joke.
That bit had a lot more to do with hygiene and housekeeping, IIRC.
I generally preface my opinons with “it seems to me” or some such, because I’m smart enough to realise that they’re opinions. The stereotype of the terrifyingly violent boyfriend is alive and well, and powerfully appealing; and there are a lot of terrifyingly violent men. My first thought on hearing that joke was of this chap:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2564611/One-eyed-police-killer-Dale-Cregan-leaves-high-security-psychiatric-ward-placed-mainstream-jail-smoke.html
He killed two policewomen in a deranged gun/grenade attack - deranged, because there was no chance he was going to get away with it, he just wanted to kill somebody. Admittedly he didn’t kill his girlfriend, but I wouldn’t want to be her. His mother was later arrested for trying to intimidate witnesses. Yes, there is one of him and twenty-nine million British men who haven’t killed anyway, but he is in the newspapers and he shapes public opinon, which is what makes the joke work.
Or this chap:
http://www.bbc.com/news/10583120
Who shot his former girlfriend, killed her new boyfriend, and shot a policeman in the face (and then eventually shot himself despite the intervention of former England footballer Paul Gascoigne). The idea that crazy boyfriend = murderous gun rampage is common.
The arguments in this thread are generally coming from an idealistic viewpoint that seems completely detached from reality, as if the posters don’t interact with society or are adopting a persona for the message board. It smacks of the “what’s the problem in digging up and dismembering corpses - they’re dead!” kind of argument that young people enjoy. In the real world - the mundane, boring, but nonetheless real world of old, unsexy people who outnumber you - the perception is that women are at worst harridans, men are at worst strangling knife-wielding murdering rapists. The two examples above are of course a tiny minority of men, but they are a highly visible minority, and they shape public opinon.
In the real world, of middle aged boring farts (like me! 
), people in their 30s to 60s have generally seen or indeed experienced all sorts of bad relationships, either themselves or among friends and family - and know damn well that a boyfriend can be a crazy shit without being a murderous nutter, and that murderous nutters are quite rare.
I was reminded of this thread when I spent this afternoon with a woman I’d struck up a platonic e-mail correspondence with a few months ago at a meet-up, then had coffee and talked in a restaurant a couple of weeks later; then, this week she e-mailed how she missed being by water (she has cancer and can’t get around as much as she’d like). So I took her to Lake Lanier (which was beautiful today) and after talking for a couple of hours she admitted she’d brought a gun, just in case I tried to kill her.
So I guess it was OK that I laughed at her.