Indeed. And if women do out they are told they need to be constantly vigilant - never go out without a friend, always watch your drink, always be on your guard when someone comes up to you, have your head on a swivel when walking to your car, have your keys in your hand in case you have to get in your car quickly, etc. Things as a man I’ve never had to consider.
This brings up a related issue: namely, that although the percentage of men in most societies who will actually kidnap, rape and murder a strange woman is quite small, the percentage of men who will harass or low-level assault women, making them feel unsafe, is much larger. And that kind of milder misogynistic behavior is much more broadly tolerated or even condoned in many instances, which contributes to the expectations on women to restrict their behavior.
Because there’s no guaranteed way to tell whether any given harasser or groper is a potential rapist or murderer. And when the milder type of misogynistic behavior is socially accepted, that means women have to limit their own behavior even more to reduce their risk of serious harm.
This is something I’ve never understood either. Virtually every argument used in “men are dangerous” debates is something that would be considered inappropriate if used in a race context.
Obama once spoke about how, as a black man, people would lock car doors when he approached, or women would clutch their purses and hold their breath while in an elevator with him (this was before he became famous.) And society’s reaction was, “Yes, Obama, that was racist and wrong. They shouldn’t have taken precautions like that; doing so belied their racist assumptions about you.”
But the same people who decried that racism would praise a woman for locking her car doors if a man approaches (leaving race out of it, focusing only on gender) and also for clutching her purse tightly and holding her breath while in an elevator with a man.
You’ve managed to come up with one I never heard of.
This Twitter thread illustrates this is all too well. https://twitter.com/julie_cohen/status/1370013467500044289?s=19
(It feels like sharing something already public is a good way to talk about what it’s like without asking people to revisit unpleasant memories. CW for men making a woman feel unsafe. No harm comes to her.)
Across from me on the Tube carriage, were three men. Middle aged, white, middle class. They looked like dads at my son’s school. They’d been at a party, or a sporting event; they were drunk and very merry. They kept on looking at me and sniggering. Finally one said ‘Nice hat.’ 4/
I’m a grown-up. I’m a successful, confident woman. I’ve been taught to be pleasant to people. I’ve been taught to be pleasant to men. I said ‘Thank you,’ and smiled. Then I looked away. But they kept trying to talk to me. They kept sniggering. Trying to flirt. 5/
But I didn’t say anything. I was successful, pretty, professional, grown-up. A mother, a teacher, a writer. A bestseller. I’d been all of these things before I stepped into that carriage and they spoke to me and laughed. Now, I was a pair of tits in a hat. 7/
Now these were really normal-seeming guys. They weren’t scary looking. They were having fun. I wasn’t having fun any more, but they were. In a normal way. Three of them, one of me. No one on the carriage said anything. 9/
I got off the train at my stop. I walked away, not looking back. Until I heard them behind me. They’d got off too. They were following me. Laughing and yelling, ‘Hey, Jemima! Where are you going, Jemima? Can we try on your hat, Jemima?’
I told myself that this is okay. 11/
Here’s what these normal men probably did. They laughed some more. Traded some bants. They went home to their wives and kids. Next day they remembered that they had a great time, saw a pretty woman on the train and flirted with her. Had a laugh.
Here’s what I did. 13/
I walked quickly out of sight. Took off my hat. Pulled on a scarf. Tucked up my hair. Walked to the next platform, took a train in the opposite direction. Rode it one stop, got out. Took another train back to my destination. Looked around for the men in case they hadn’t left. 14/
We can’t tell which men are safe because even the ones who are supposedly safe feel enabled to humiliate us for fun. No men are safe. Normal men aren’t safe. We are never safe because our society believes that the safety of women is not as important as the entitlement of men. 18/
I was fine, in the end. I was safe. They didn’t mean any harm.
I have never worn that dress again. I will never forget how they stripped everything from me: my enjoyment, my feeling of safety, my professional achievement, my self-esteem. Even my name. 16/
This is an unhappy story. There’s nothing Julie, who went to a party and got the Tube home, could or should have done to avoid this. It’s equally obvious what the three perpetrators could and should have done to avoid it. But what is anyone, anywhere proposing that would make them do the right thing?
There’s no part of this conversation that is about women’s worries over having their purse stolen. This is about harrassment, sexual assault, rape and murder. The bug question is not, “Hey guys, are we being completely fair to men here?”
Well, to be grimly cynical about it, society’s expectation that women are responsible for taking the “precaution” of constantly mistrusting men in all circumstances provides another handy excuse for constantly judging and policing women’s behavior.
Didn’t manage to successfully elude a rapist? Oh you stupid heedless woman, not taking the reasonable precaution of distrusting and avoiding a man who might turn out to be a rapist.
Made a non-rapist man feel uncomfortable by your avoidance of him? Oh you bigoted paranoid woman, unjustifiably projecting your fear and distrust onto men as a group just because a comparatively small percentage of men turn out to be rapists.
Because we accept violence against men as the norm. That isn’t to say we’re happy about it just that we’re comfortable with it. No doubt some of this has to do with the attitude many men have towards violence and their perceived risk of running into it. I don’t typically give a second thought to walking at night or through a “bad” neighborhood. (Though after a series of muggings I stopped wearing my iPods to make it more difficult for someone to sneak up on me from behind.) A lot of men don’t want to express any form of vulnerability by admitting they might be worried about violence against their person.
It’s rather odd to agree with the one guy when every other poster explains why they are incorrect.
No one ever tells women who are worried about being raped that they are wrong, no matter who it is. The only problem is when you use that fear to discriminate.
One in twenty men have committed rape or sexual assault. One in twenty. How many men does the average woman come across? More than twenty. In fact, one in five women have been raped or sexually assaulted.
This is exactly the problem the suggestion in the OP is designed to show. You have women being raped, but still it’s all about the men and how bad they feel. The idea of putting restrictions on women, telling them where it’s safe to be, is common, but putting restrictions on the men to where women feel safe? Not a thing.
As is my wont these days, here’s a video from Beau of the Fifth Column. The video is about workplace sexual harassment, but the general principle is sound. Instead of putting the onus on women to not put themselves in potentially dangerous situations, the new hotness is telling men not to create those potentially dangerous situations in the first place.
Yes, and I think perceptions are also influenced by relative perpetrator/victim rates. For example, men are statistically more likely to commit murder than to be murdered, and more likely to commit rape (about 1 in every 20-30 men) than to be raped (about 1 in every 70 men). Women, on the contrary, are much more likely to be victims than perpetrators of almost every type of violent crime.
So even though the violent crime perpetrator rates for men are quite low overall, and the victimization rates for men often exceed those for women, men are on average more likely to be predator than prey. That reinforces the popular perception of men being primarily the cause of the violent-crime problem rather than sufferers from it.
This is the problem, its partly about perceptions and response to risk.
Men are at greater risk and yet largely percieve themselves to be safer than they are, women are at lower risk and percieve themselves to be in more danger than they are.
All this says that men are pretty poor at evaluating risk - no great surprise there then, and women may be overestimating risk
Given the information in the previous post, its pretty clear that the violent men are more likely to victimise others disproportianally than the average man, and violent men need to be locked up for far far longer so that everyone is safe.
Its not about getting men off the streets - even in a so called ‘thought experiment’, its about getting violent men off the streets - we should concentrate on those individuals - its not about collective punishments.
Violent men do not start off at maximum levels, they tend to build up and we are all being failed by the criminal justice system - filling prisons up with non-violent offenders instead of dealing with the problems that kill and injure us.
In the UK this does not appear to be clearly the case.
See section 7, some exerpts
Men were more likely to be victims of CSEW violent crime than women (2% of men compared with 1.3% of women1, Appendix Table 1). This was true for all types of violence, with the exception of domestic violence, where women were more likely to be victims (0.3% of women and 0.1% of men,
- stranger violence showed the largest difference in victimisation between men and women (1.2% compared with 0.4% respectively)
- 0.7% of men and 0.5% of women experienced acquaintance violence
The CSEW estimated that 60% of victims of violence were male, with 40% being female in the year ending March 2020
Figures from the Home Office Homicide Index for the year ending March 2020 show that 73% of homicide victims were male and 27% were female
I am sure that women do live in greater fear of violence, that seems to be borne out by my own real life experiences but I don’t think there is any harm in recognising the fact that men and women have an equal stake in tackling violent crime.
Painting all women as victims and all men as potential perpetrators won’t get us anywhere.
I would be just as angry about this murder if the victim had been male.
And there ARE situations where a person really should not have been there or doing that. Here are two examples.
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A while back, a young man was murdered in a fight at a strip club, which has since been shut down (due to - you guessed it - delinquent taxes.) I know I was not the only person who said that this man should not have been partying in that strip club at 3:30am, or any other time; he should have been at home with his wife and baby. While that is true, he still didn’t deserve to die.
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Talk about the most devastating way to find out your fiance’ is cheating on you: this story airs quite frequently on Oxygen or Investigation Discovery, with varying levels of explicitness depending on what time it aired (I’ve seen it more than once, and the episodes were not the same). You’d think a police officer would know better than to go looking for strange on Craigslist, but he did, and this wasn’t the first time, and he finally paid the ultimate price.
The fiancee’ said their sex life was normal, whatever that is, and was completely unaware that he had this secret side of him, which did include a chamber in their crawl space full of S&M gear and other sex toys.
? Your cite doesn’t seem to be disagreeing with my claim. Your cite seems to be talking about differences in crime victimization rates between men and women. My point was about the relative size of crime perpetration rates versus victimization rates for each gender.
Example: Men are more likely to be victims of homicide than women are. I.e., men’s victimization rate for homicide is greater than women’s.
At the same time, men are more likely to be perpetrators than victims of homicide. I.e., men’s perpetration rate is greater than men’s victimization rate in the case of homicide.
Women, on the other hand, are much more likely to be victims than perpetrators of homicide: i.e., their victimization rate is greater than their perpetration rate.
And that’s one of the reasons that in the case of homicide, men are popularly perceived as “the problem” while women are perceived as “the victims”, even though men’s homicide victimization rate is actually greater than that of women.
I agree, but I’m just pointing out some of the ways in which the data encourage simplistic perceptions of painting men in general with the “perpetrator” brush and women in general with the “victim” brush.
Fair enough, I apologise as I missed out a rather important couple of words when reading your post.
I don’t think we disagree.
I’m not being deceptive, nor am I conflating things. I don’t see women being told to treat “everywhere all the time” as a potential for victimization. You are really afraid of being assaulted during you’re kid’s parent teacher interview or birthday party at grandma’s? My female supervisor is not afraid that I’ll rape her either… honestly I guess if one goes out looking for paranoia they can find it but what I see being described as common advice to all women simply isn’t so anywhere I’ve lived. Also not true that women usually get blamed and abandoned by the system if they failed to take precautions. I’m sure you can find some jerk who’ll make comments as such, but in the situations I’m familiar with the legal system takes violence against women more seriously than even the female victims in some cases.
I have 4 daughters and been married to a woman who has been raped and assaulted multiple times prior to meeting me for 11 years. We’ve had many interesting discussions over the years. Rest assured I “receive” far more information on the subject than I “transmit”. .
Simple: Because society doesn’t see it as a big enough problem. In many if not most societies men (and even boys) are expected to be good at handling violence. Men who get beat up will usually spin the story around and brag about how they managed to fight off 3 other guys or held their own despite getting sucker punched and laugh about the experience afterwards. Women certainly don’t treat their assaults the same.
This is common and understandable; most men, especially those who’ve led a peaceful life, are notoriously poor judges of both danger and their own abilities to deal with it. I used to be the same way. Mark MacYoung has done a lot of writing on this subject and does so better than I would. Most men just assume they are tougher & stronger than average, and that they know how to fight even if they’ve never done it. This is partly what leads to the large number of ignorant guys walking into bad situations and getting beaten down. You can entertain yourself for hours watching youtube videos of street fights; it’s almost all younger men who don’t know what they’re doing.
And again, I simply don’t see most women being afraid of assault everywhere they go on a daily basis. It’s certainly not the experience my wife tells me about, nor how we teach our daughters. Are there actually people here who think it would be good to NOT tell women how to stay safe?
I have observed that a lot of liberals just don’t understand the concept of multiple lines of defense.
Sure, the ideal is that no man would ever do something to harm a woman. But guess what? IT HAPPENS.
So liberals take a look at the situation, and decide that they want to fight the battle in a fake, idealized world that doesn’t actually exist. That’s why they get so upset about things like suggestions that women should not go out alone.
Conservatives, on the other hand, fight the battle in the real world. Sure, it’s well and good and nice to try to get men to shape up, and start behaving better. But what happens when that line of defense breaks down? And living in this imperfect world, filled with imperfect people, with humans being what they are, it will break down, whether deliberately or by accident.
Thus the need for at least one other line of defense. That can take several different forms–advising women to go out in pairs, or to carry a weapon, or to refrain from getting drunk, or any other number of things.
Liberals put all their eggs into one basket, and then get outraged when all their eggs get broken. Conservatives diversify.
I don’t think most women are actively “afraid of assault” in most of their everyday lives. But the reality is, of course, that a woman can be assaulted in almost any situation, and there are women getting assaulted in broad daylight, in supposedly safe everyday situations, literally every day.
Again, what’s bothering people here is the cynical double standard for women’s behavior. On the one hand, women are constantly told “Don’t be paranoid, don’t be so fearful, don’t be suspicious of your co-workers, don’t penalize all men for the actions of a few”, etc. And on the other hand, when a woman does get assaulted (which, again, happens in many situations besides the typical “sleazy bar in bad neighborhood”), women get the barrage of “advice” about how to “protect themselves” and “take sensible precautions” (which are usually retroactively defined as whatever the assaulted woman didn’t do) because so many men can’t be trusted.
Um, the reason for getting upset about “things like suggestions that women should not go out alone” is because it’s a very burdensome restriction on one’s life not to be able to go out alone. If you had to put up with that as part of your everyday existence in order to feel that you were being appropriately responsible about taking precautions for your own safety, you’d be upset too.
It’s a pretty feeble excuse for a “line of defense”, though, given that women get assaulted all the time even when they are following that “advice”. (And there are also lots of times that women don’t get assaulted even when they’re not following that "advice.)
What liberals are after here is not a “fake, idealized world”, but rather approaches to the problem that actually contribute to solving it. Which your allegedly conservative approach of lazily offering women routine “advice” about how they need to restrict their own behavior doesn’t really accomplish.
So, you are saying that there SHOULD be a curfew on men, so they don’t assault women?
I mean, it would make the world safer, but it seems like a serious imposition on the innocent ones.
I strongly disagree although I can be swayed with stats if you have them. My feeling (possibly wrong) is that most man-on-man violent crime is due in part to both parties: they got into a fight, they belong to opposing crime organizations, or someone started waving their dick around. Since I’m not part of any of that I generally feel safe.
For a woman, though, keeping your nose clean doesn’t help all that much. While we can complain that not every man should be considered a rapist a woman needs to be in the mindset that any man can attack her. Or, like the twitter story linked above, any man can ruin an evening.