Granted that something like 80 to 90% of sexual assaults on women are by someone known to them.
Still that leaves 10 to 20% that are by an unknown male. Use the low figure. Given that roughly 20% of women report rape or attempted rape over their lifetime that is still one in 50 who have experienced such by a stranger.
Fraction of their time around unknown men in a location that a rape attempt could occur? Probably much less than a fiftieth of their time. For many very infrequent indeed.
It isn’t highly paranoid to be concerned enough about that to walk with awareness of potential risks. It would be OTOH very silly of me as a man to take a woman’s caution about being alone in a stairwell with me right behind her and no one else around as a huge personal affront or any harm to me in any way.
Your experience matches mine…well…except for the square dancing. I don’t think young men and women are meeting up the same way they did when we were younger. We usually had to leave the house to meet and talk to the opposite sex. When a guy asked you out, you had to look him straight in the eyes and break his heart or at least hear your voice over the phone. These days, texts and apps mean fewer people have to risk a face-to-face rejection.
There are still places to meet other people. Bars are still meeting places. I am at a square dance event now, and i just left the after party, where two dozen dancers sat around a table and drank beer and are chocolate and talked. I didn’t know most of these people there years ago. I worked on my temple’s meals-on-wheels program, cooking food, and met a dozen or more people. Some i know well enough that i text them to ask for advise on local politics, one gave me a sour dough starter. This was mostly after the pandemic, so recent.
I am not looking for a partner, because I’m old and have a husband. And many of those people were old. But there were young adults there, too. New members to the temple who wanted to meet people, adult children of some older members,
It probably is harder to meet young people in person than it used to be. But there are still in person events that attract young people. My son is running a LARP this weekend. It’s all young adults. There’s a local contra dance that attracts many young adults, and also a local west coast swing dance event. Most jobs still require some time in the office, working with other human beings. And people still throw parties. And these are all places where women don’t avoid men out of caution.
I think Der_Trihs’s post is overstated, but I do see ways in which men’s problems are minimized or dismissed. The Economist doesn’t seem to think anyone will read about better education for boys, unless it will benefit girls as well; then it’s news.
One of the reasons sexual assault is more commonly perpetrated by an acquaintance is that a woman’s guard is down around someone she knows.
It’s incomprehensible that some people would argue the solution is therefore to let their guard down around people she doesn’t know. I guess if your only goal is to bring those numbers more in line then sure, that’s one way to address it.
This is an official Warning for yet again violating our rules against personal attacks against other posters. I encourage you to take it to heart. You’re walking a pretty fine line with the staff here now.
I guess maybe I’m not connecting the dots on the sexual assault thing. I understand it’s a problem that women face far more frequently than men. I’m not looking to minimize that. It’s just not clear to me how it is related to “male inequality”, other than maybe men feel unjustly characterized as rapey douchebags?
Shrug, I had hoped you would understand that my goal was to better understand a woman’s point of view and what they go through. How often they need to resort to these measures would be part of that. I wasn’t looking for an example number but a rough guideline of how common this was.
Regardless, it appears that Raspberry_Hunter answered my question that this only happened to her a couple of times. (However, if I am reading her post correctly, she is only talking about the elevator case directly and not a general case of doing something to avoid an unknown man.)
I think i get that, but you are asking from the wrong perspective. How often do i take a specific action to avoid being alone with a strange man? Not very often. How often is it something i consider? Pretty often. I know lots of women who never walk alone after dark. Like, never. That’s very restrictive. I usually don’t worry about it.
But, getting back to male inequality – sorry for veering off track. I think both sexes have certain challenges to a greater degree than the other sex. But fwiw, the young men i know seem to be doing okay. Maybe that’s a biased sample, though, they are mostly young men who succeeded at a competitive college, one if the things that’s arguable eager for women to do.
You missed the point there. The reason that attacks on women, or threats to women, provoke more indignation in patriarchal society than attacks/threats against men isn’t that people actually “care” more about the security and freedom of women as people. It’s because, in the baked-in sexist worldview of patriarchal society, men are autonomous individuals while women are a resource.
Ever seen or read one of the many classic whodunits where the investigator views the corpse of the lovely young female murder victim and sadly remarks “What a waste”? That’s where the societal outrage is coming from, especially in the case of beautiful young white women.
Men are fully realized people who are expected to be competent to make choices about risk and freedom, and sometimes pay a heavy price for running risks. Women, as you note, are literally put in the same category as children when it comes to stirring up popular sympathy: fragile beings not competent to handle autonomy and danger. Destroying a man’s woman or children is both depriving him of happiness and insulting his manhood as a failed protector (see: every grim widowed-hero revenge thriller ever made). That, at bottom, is why it bothers society so much more to contemplate attacks on women than attacks on men.
No; it’s because women and children are regarded as something deserving compassion or at worst a valuable resource to be protected, while men are a consumable. Fuel to be burned up in the engine of society. Society doesn’t care about men dying because that’s what they are for, to be used up and discarded - or killed if they don’t get with the program or stick out.
You’re only treated as an “autonomous individual” if you are rich, whatever your gender.
Poor men, and poor women too, certainly are consumable in society’s perception, as you note. But the “damsel in distress” trope in films with male protagonists, for example, isn’t there to signal that the male protagonist is consumable or that his fate is comparatively unimportant. It’s there to raise the stakes for the one character who’s an autonomous individual, namely, the male protagonist.
Once again: it cannot be emphasized too strongly that traditional patriarchal attitudes of protectiveness towards women are in no way an expression of actual respect or concern for women as people. Complaining that female-victim-focused “tragedy porn”, and society’s general high anxiety level about threats to (mostly well-to-do young white) women. are indicative of lesser social value for men is really missing the forest for the trees. Patriarchy doesn’t want the female victims to be free and safe, it wants them to be controlled and safe, so that threats to them don’t end up depriving or traumatizing men.
No, it’s there because people would care less or not at all if it was a man. Same reason why there’s no many films where some dog gets put in danger and escapes or is rescued; it’s to up the emotional stakes by including something the viewers care about, and most viewers will care more about the life of a dog or cat than that of a man.
This is something done out of a calculated attempt to appeal to the audience for profit, not part of some patriarchal indoctrination effort. It’s the same reason humanitarian relief organizations put women and children on their advertisements; if they used men, nobody would care.
And as I said, this thread is itself good example; expressing sympathy for men is simply regarded as unthinkable, even in conversation. Nearly everyone feels obligated to show up and carefully proclaim that men deserve no sympathy and they are just bad people. Rapists, murderers and “patriarchs”.
A dog. Or a cat. Or a woman or a child. You know, all those lesser beings.
Your arguments are just reinforcing my point. We’re encouraged to feel outrage about harm toward those perceived as non-autonomous, the ones who are assumed to require protection from danger because they’re not competent to choose danger.
Nonsense. Are you mistaking my remarks about “patriarchal society” for criticisms of men specifically being “patriarchs”? That’s ridiculous. Patriarchal society is just one of many forms of baked-in traditional discrimination and bigotry, and its norms are upheld and enforced just as much by women as by men.
Nobody here except you is conflating patriarchal society, rape culture, male-supremacist prejudice, etc., with the collective worth or character of the human individuals who happen to be men. Saying that criticism of the sexist norms of patriarchal society is equivalent to derogating men in general for being “patriarchs” who “deserve no sympathy” is just plain clueless.