Could I ask for a clarification here, I want to better understand this. Do you do this every time you are in an elevator with a strange man when traveling or only if they aren’t acting normal?
Also would you consider yourself more cautious, about the same, or less cautious than a typical western adult women?
Do i always do what? Wait for the guy to exit first when I’m traveling and it’s just me and a strange guy in an elevator?
A little while ago, when I lived in a relatively urban area, I was walking home at night. There were 2 women who were also walking in the same direction as I was. I noticed that they were looking over their shoulders at me as I came up behind them, and then they suddenly crossed the street to walk on the other side.
I understand that they were exercising due caution on a dark night, but I still felt bad about it. I didn’t mean to scare them, I was just heading home, and walking in the same direction they were. I’m not sure what I could have done or said. I really didn’t mean to make them nervous, but I apparently did.
I’m still not sure how to handle a situation like that.
Just keep walking, and don’t take it personally. (And exit the elevator first. 
)
Things like “feminine hairstyles and clothing” are a human universal; not a specific hairstyle or outfit being feminine, but them existing. Same goes with language; men and women tend to speak differently worldwide, although the exact differences vary from culture to culture. Humans are naturally wired to go out of our way to create identifiable distinctions between the genders; the exact distinctions being less important than that they exist at all. Gender matters to most people, which is why there’s so much arguing over it in the first place.
And in many cultures gender roles and gender have been conflated to the point that, say, a biological female that identified as a male would simply dress like a man and go out hunting and that would be enough for most to consider them officially a man.
Absolutely. Many cultures were and are exactly like that. My only quibble is that in other cultures, people who are AFB and identify as women would dress in hunting clothing and go out hunting, and it wouldn’t be considered unusual, and that in most cases, we lack sufficient archeological data about specific prehistoric societies to know which of the two types of culture mentioned above more closely describes it. If we find a female skeleton buried with hunting implements and clothing, they only thing we can know with any reasonable level of assurance is that she or he hunted.
What @puzzlegal said. Also, if you happen to notice you’re approaching a woman from behind on a lonely street at night, consider crossing the street yourself before you overtake her.
Discreetly avoiding and ignoring a woman in a potentially theeatening situation is the most reassuring thing you can do for her. She doesn’t want to know whether you’re personally trustworthy, or to have to make a high-stakes judgement about your character; she just wants to know that you’re going about your own business at a safe distance and paying no attention to her.
I like to take long walks by myself and will often run into single women running or walking. I try to avoid coming up behind them. I will either slow down or take another route (I’m usually not going anywhere in particular, just logging steps).
I have a college age daughter who walks between classes and to shop/dine and I have had this discussion with her and some of her close friends. They are unnerved by men “following” them even though they know that 99.9%+ of the time they just happen to be going the same way. They have unnecessarily ducked into a store, restaurant or classroom building dozens of times in their first two years of college.
There’s just no easy solution.
But it’s important to remember that that woman may be ducking into a store “just to be on the safe side”. She isn’t judging you as bad. She just doesn’t know, and doesn’t need to (or want to) find out either way, she just wants to enjoy her jog.
Really, don’t take it personally.
Reaching way back into half-forgotten anthropological notes…there were several major Native American cultures where trans women were an accepted fact. I don’t have the time or inclination to dig up the notes, but I remember that from some classes on cross-cultural child-rearing.
Yes. Or more specifically I was trying to tease out if there was a difference between your first and your 2nd post as the first part implied you always do this when traveling and the 2nd implied it was only if the unknown man did something to trigger a danger sense.
I will be honest when the man\bear thing first came out I was highly offended. (Maybe because I found out about it when my teenage daughter came to me laughing that women are more afraid of men than a bear and then explained the situation. I was really bothered by the idea that my daughter should fear me if she didn’t know me.)
Of course she is; she says “man”, she thinks “monster”. If she was dodging into stores or crossing the street to avoid someone who was black or “looked Muslim” everyone would acknowledge that. But demonizing men as monsters is acceptable. If men were anywhere near as dangerous as women like to think I doubt there’d be a woman left alive anywhere.
I will also point out that men are more likely to be attacked by strangers than women, yet we somehow survive without fleeing from every random person we see. Women are much more likely to be attacked by men they do know, not strangers. Their threat assessment is almost exactly the opposite of reality, which if nothing else is bad for the women themselves. It’s exactly the sort of “stranger danger” nonsense taught to children.
It’s not that women think that men are dangerous, it’s that they don’t know which variety of man (eg dangerous or otherwise) a strange or unknown man is. So I (a 6’ 3", 220 lb guy), assume that every encounter a woman has with a strange man has an inherent risk with potentially very high stakes, stakes that I will almost never have to deal with.
It’s not a difficult concept to understand.
Except that no; you are more likely to have to deal with it than she is. Women are more likely to be attacked by partners, men by strangers.
Are you really mansplaining “being afraid of men”?
No, I’m saying they are wrong.
dude!
Interestingly enough, we’re also MEN who are physically larger and more able to deal with an attack than a woman. Like when I got punched in the face by an asshole who was following a young woman home in the dead of night. I stood my ground and he ran away.
What do you think would have happened if he assaulted the young lady, who I outweighed by 2/3rds? Think he would’ve taken one swing at her and ran away?
BTW, maybe their caution is, I dunno, WHY they get attacked less than men?
Quit this line before you post anything more ridiculous.
Which will help you a lot if you get stabbed or shot.
And, it still doesn’t change the fact that they are both being bigoted by any other standard, and worried about the wrong threats to boot.
Bingo.
And no, i don’t think men are monsters. I think there’s a very small minority of men who are monsters.
I’m less cautious than most women, and i think that’s partly because I’m relatively strong for a woman, and partly because i had younger brothers, and routinely won when i fought with them as a kid. And partly just because of how I’m wired.
It’s not about you. It’s about that small percent of men who are predators. And we all (well, almost all) know that that strange-to-us guy is probably a normal, decent guy.
I’m absolutely serious when i say the number one thing men should do about women fearing them in public is to not take it personally.
Fwiw, when that question came out, it was right after I’d spent a day hiking up to a ruin in Italy. I came upon several lone men as i was walking, and i just smiled and said, “ciao” to each of them. None was following me, each was heading in some other direction. It was normal for people to be walking around there. The only thing i worried about was getting lost, when i accidentally started off my return trip on the wrong side of the mountain and realized my phone was running down and had poor connectivity. (And i would have been pretty alarmed if I’d run into a bear.)
But on reflection, men are much scarier. No one blames the victim of a bear attack for walking alone, or for not taking adequate precautions. And the percent of bears who actually want to prey on women is smaller than than the percent of men who do, even though that’s a small number.