I’m told that there are people who enjoy feeling that others think they are dangerous. 
But it’s really not a personal judgement about you, the human being you are.
I don’t approach strange dogs without checking with the owner (or someone who knows them) either. Even though i know that most dogs are friendly. I’m not implying it’s a bad dog, just that there’s a small risk something bad could come off it.
Okay, but that brings us back to where we started. If I crossed the street to avoid a Black person, would you tell them “it’s not about you as an individual, he does that for all Black people; don’t take it personally”?
I definitely might assure them that they shouldn’t take it personally, but I would also not hesitate to point out that such behavior is nonetheless racist as all fuck. As a Black person, they are totally justified in finding it offensive, even if it can’t justifiably be considered a personal insult directed at their individual self.
I think there are two separate issues here that you’re tending to conflate: 1. Is this behavior disparaging me personally as an individual? 2. Is this behavior exhibiting bigotry or discrimination towards a group to which I happen to belong? It’s perfectly possible, and reasonable, to object to behavior on the grounds of 2 even if it isn’t actually an instance of 1.
This is a bit of a dubious comparison, because it completely ignores very salient differences in behavior patterns among men and women which expose men to more danger.
For example, about 1 in 8 US homicides is linked to gang violence, and gang membership is overwhelmingly male. Homeless individuals are about 20 times more likely than the general population to be victims of violence, and unsheltered or “street homeless” people are mostly male. Violent victimization happens most often to people out alone at night, and most of the people going out alone at night are male. And so on.
So nah, I don’t think it’s plausible to say that women overreact to the possible threat of “stranger danger” when they do find themselves in potentially more vulnerable situations like being out alone at night. The comparative safety of women from stranger violence, relative to men, seems to be due much more to self-imposed restrictions on women’s behavior than to intrinsic lack of vulnerability.
Does anybody really think that if women’s levels of engagement in, e.g., gang membership, street homelessness, aggressive drunken bar arguments, nighttime solo traveling in unsafe areas, etc., were comparable to those of men, that women would still be much less likely than men to be victimized by strangers? I kind of doubt it.
ISTM that ultimately, women as a group are far less likely than men to be attacked by strangers because as a group women tolerate far more limitations on their physical autonomy than men do, and thus have a far level lower of exposure to various types of situations where they’re vulnerable to stranger violence.
That’s an interesting distinction to draw, but if you hold to it and apply it consistently to everyone, I won’t disagree with it.
Nah, men can go ahead and take it personally just as long as they don’t open their yaps to women about it, and accept that we deserve it.
Men commit violence. In Der_Trihs note about who is more likely the victim of violence, he doesn’t mention who is committing it. It’s men. It’s virtually always men. Men are attacked by men, women are attacked by men. Women are more likely to be attacked by men they know than men they don’t know. Gee, that’s great. As if “I get to relax in public because I’m safer here than at home with my man” isn’t a completely horrifying statement.
Most men don’t. Most men aren’t violent. Most men aren’t sexual predators. A significant minority of men are. Also, a tiny minority of women.
Also, I feel safe at home. And i feel safe with my male friends.
Sure. At the level of a “microaggression” maybe?
And I have learned to take the concept of microaggressions as a real thing including the idea that something that something that seems benign to me may be not so benign to the person, and to take perceptions seriously.
And a single microaggression? Against someone who otherwise may be intersectionally highly privileged? Cry me a river.
Yes, that’s exactly the kind of thing that “microaggression” was coined to describe.
And people who get a lot of microaggressions know that they need to understand that it’s not personal. The person who is misgendered by customers all day long? R Black woman who gets weird questions about her hair? They know most of those people have good intent, and don’t bear them any bad will. If they didn’t understand that, they’d crumple up and be unable to function.
I do. Bears, mountain lions, and coyotes are all threats to people, especially smaller people. And the behavior of a person greatly affects their risk of attack. If you’re in an area with these animals, you should be taking precautions.
Smaller people? Like 6 year old children?
Bears are so much larger than people that I’m dubious it matters. Mountain lions take prey much larger than people, too. Coyotes? Maybe your size matters? We have coyotes in my neighborhood. I’ve seen them on the streets and in my back yard. They are dangerous to cats and small dogs. They seem pretty respectful of humans. We had one bitch who was desperate to feed her litter, and stopped being respectful of humans, so animal control and the police killed her. (When she was just eating unaccompanied cats and small dogs, the authorities said, “that’s what coyotes do, keep your pets indoors”. But when she took a small dog that was standing quite close to its humans, they decided she was dangerous. She never actually threatened a human.)
Since I am a woman who gets around mostly by bicycle, I tend to think of the threat men can pose as being similar to the threat cars pose to me. Most drivers are fine. The majority of them can coexist with me on the street. Still, I assume there’s a chance that every single driver I encounter could harm me, and behave accordingly.
It doesn’t mean I have a problem with drivers, or I hate them. It’s not personal at all. Does that help clarify things for anyone?
Do you feel the same trepidation when a Subaru is rolling up as when a Ford F-150 is? I know I don’t. But I guess in recent years I’m more afraid of distracted than enraged drivers.
On the other hand, just today as I was walking down the sidewalk, a woman coming the other way suddenly blurted out, “Thanks, I love you.” I was a little bit startled until I realized that she had earphones on and was talking on her phone.
It’s hard to answer that in a way that applies to my real world experience, because driver behavior is a much bigger factor, and I don’t know how to separate that out. My experience (which is definitely biased toward what I notice) is that people drive big trucks more aggressively, and I don’t even think it’s intentional a lot of the time – people just don’t have a great sense of the space they take up.
And I guess some of that applies to men as well, but I don’t want to get too out on a limb with the metaphor.
Sorry that wasn’t a real question. I was attempting a joke.
Seriously though, the “man vs bear in the woods” question feels like a symptom of a society that has lost basic interpersonal skills. Which is not to say that women shouldn’t be cautious of creepy, rapey men. But the conversation feels more like some combination of women don’t know how to tell the difference and men don’t know how to approach a woman without coming across as creepy or rapey. So you end up with a bunch of anxious awkward people too scared to actually interact with each other.
Perhaps I should start here. A big part of the reason I asked the questions is that you came across as a genuine, honest woman who was trying to reach across the aisle and isn’t interested in the war of the sexes. Hopefully, I am giving off a similar vibe.
I had no clue that women do the elevator thing or duck into a building for a random man walking behind them. Don’t get me wrong. I understood it happened if a woman’s danger sense got activated for any reason, but I didn’t know this was a standard mode women operated in certain situations. If that makes me … I don’t know … naive or clueless, I guess I am guilty.
What I was trying to do with the different questions was to change the different variables in your hypothetical to see which ones mattered, and from that get an idea of how common this behavior was. ie Traveling, Strange location, Unknown man. And then change just one of those variables in each question. Admittedly, maybe some of the later ones were too obvious, but that was what I was attempting to do.
Would it be accurate to say that you only do this 2-3 times a year then? (At least if you don’t travel often for work.) Except that would ignore the building case… Let’s change it to this. How often do you do something to avoid a single unknown man that hasn’t yet done anything to activate a danger sense in a typical year?
So when I’m in an elevator with a strange man (e.g., when I’m in a hotel on travel) I don’t think I’ve ever ducked out of an elevator to avoid the man. However, I’m always aware that I’m in an elevator with a man I don’t know who almost certainly is stronger than I am, and alert in a way that I’m not when I’m in an elevator with e.g. another woman.
If that man got off on my same floor and was going in the same direction as I was and didn’t go off to his own room while ignoring me, then I would do something else, like pretend that I had got off on the wrong floor or was going the wrong way, or pretend like I was on my way to get ice or something, or have a loud phone call. I’ve only done this, I would say, a couple of times, and in those cases it just turned out that the guy’s room was just located awkwardly relative to mine – I’ve never had an incident in the particular context of hotels where the guy was legit creepy. (Also, I probably travel a couple of times a year by myself, so it’s not like I’m constantly in hotels by myself either.)