Benefit of the doubt goes to the woman, and women in general, in my opinion. Sexual assault is not a particularly unusual occurrence, unfortunately. There’s no way to know if her reaction had anything to do with race, but I think it’s far more likely due to gender (and perhaps body size). It is reasonable for a woman to be cautious, and even extremely cautious, if she thinks a man might be following her.
This is just about exactly what I’d have written.
Yeah, I’ve done that when I’m behind a nervous person now and then, too. I don’t mind a tiny bit of personal inconvenience if it makes someone else more comfortable and at ease.
Huh. And here I always pegged Skald as an ambidextrous lesbian Eskimo…
That’s an absurd complaint. Unless you never refer to anyone as anything but “the person” or by name, you have to use some form of identifier.
Probably not. It doesn’t bother me or the other red heads in my family, it’s just descriptive. Do blonds get sick of being referred to as blonds?
I wouldn’t have screamed, but definitely would have done 1 and 2, and possibly 3, if you were a white guy, too. I’m small, even for a woman, and the thought of having a big guy of any race seeming to follow me around when I’m by myself? That’s scary stuff.
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Probably not. It doesn’t bother me or the other red heads in my family, it’s just descriptive. Do blonds get sick of being referred to as blonds?
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Ok. Good to know because I say it all the time. I don’t know if blondes get sick of that. I do notice that people don’t refer to brunettes by their hair color as frequently.
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That’s an absurd complaint.
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It wasn’t a complaint. But no worries, a redhead answered my question. Yes, I often use descriptors to identify others.
I think she was being cautious. And what WhyNot said.
It sounds like she was the one who stood out in the area and many times, that will draw unwanted attention (black person in a predominately white neighborhood, white person in a black or Latino neighborhood, Asian in a small town in the midwest). Anytime the coincedental appearance not once, not twice but three times when alone (especially after dark) of anyone who appears to be able to do harm to me (large woman, but with physical limitations) occurs, you bet your bottom dollar I’m going to book.
While race and gender may have come into play on this one, the fact that you were larger and kept showing up behind her was enough to spook her. With the exception of the elevator incident, I would have likely reacted the same way.
It would have made a lot more sense for you to speed up how fast you were walking and overtake her so that none of that seemingly stalker behavior had a chance to happen.
I don’t think either party was racist. I think the circumstances, innocent as they were, made them both hyper aware that she was a woman and he was a man capable of overpowering her. And that awareness made them both act a little peculiarly.
C’est la vie.
I’m going to have to be that person. I don’t really have a problem with this woman’s reaction per se, but I do have a problem with the lessons people try to use with it, like in that book “The Gift of Fear”
I just hate this whole idea that you should allow your feelings of fear to make risk assessments. I think it’s created a culture of fear among women. Women seem constantly praised for being afraid of things, whether their fear was reasonable or not.
Fear is not a gift. It is a part of your primitive brain. It is usually wrong. It’s only usefulness is in situations when you don’t have time to think rationally. Most of the time, it fires when you have plenty of time to think rationally, and thus only serves to make it harder to do that thinking.
Through training, you might be able to make your fear work for you. But it doesn’t by default, and it is foolish to trust it. For the mostcommonly used example: most rapists are people you already know and trust. The very people you are NOT afraid of are the most dangerous. Most likely, whoever you are actually afraid of is just awkward or, like in this case, the whole thing is a coincidence.
What following your fear actually does accomplish is to give you an illusion of safety while allowing you to ignore real threats. And it is self-reinforcing. You never learn what stuff is right to be afraid of and what isn’t.
What you need to do is actually learn what stuff is dangerous and what isn’t, and actually train yourself to be on the lookout for those things. Don’t trust your instincts. Instincts lie.
All encouraging people to listen to their fear does is teach already timid people to be more and more afraid. I think this is why anxiety disorders are more common in women than in men.
And because I know it’s a popular refrain these days to say that I just talk about things I have no experience with (something I only did in my very early posting career and stopped when I was told it was annoying), I will point out that I probably have more experience in this area than most of you. I know what listening to your fears does to you. You are a fool to trust it save when it lines up with a rational evaluation of events. Better safe than sorry is a horrible, horrible way to live.
You should control your instincts. Don’t let your instincts control you.
No way to tell if there was any element of racism in her reaction, and I’m surprised that there are people in this thread who conclude otherwise. Is it impossible to speculate the same woman might have reacted similarly with a different guy, large-ish but this time a white dude? Who knows?
I think it sucks that there are enough scumbags in the world that woman have to worry about things–and I think it’s rational anxiety–that I don’t think twice about. I am a large-ish white guy, 6’ 2", about 215, 220 these days. I run early in the morning, usually out the door by 5:00. It’s usually before the sun is completely up, very little traffic, car or foot. I roll out the door, it’s dark and “lonesome,” and I don’t give it a thought.
In my old neighborhood, I’d feel bad when I was approaching and passing a female runner (I almost never see anyone that early, male or female, in my new development). It’s dark, she hears footsteps. I would try very hard to be nonthreatening. “Just another runner, coming up behind!” I might call out, hopefully cheerfully but definitely so as not to startle her if she hadn’t heard me yet. I’d wave and move past, deliberately not changing my pace. As a rule, I wouldn’t see the same woman out multiple times that early. I really hoped the “big dope jogging behind them” wasn’t a factor. Again, I think it absolutely sucks that women need to be on guard because of a minority of vile assholes. I wish there was some surefire, magical way that a woman could immediately know someone wasn’t dangerous. But there isn’t.
So, anyway, given the facts, I have no idea if any racism was a factor. I think “an unknown guy following me, and I can’t seem to shake him” is explanation enough.
I live in the same town as Meredith Emerson, and hike on the same trails she enjoyed, including one with her memorial at its trailhead. I resemble her killer: thin old white guy, shaved head, a bit creepy looking. For weeks after her murder, when her killer was safely in custody, I was met with stark apprehension by the hiking women I encountered. It really wasn’t difficult to understand their reaction, so I don’t blame them. I don’t think they considered if my feelings were being hurt. So long as nobody said anything or sicced the cops on me, I had no right to be offended. Still, it sucked.
I decided two things: as a fellow human being I felt genuinely bad for the women who were afraid I’d rape and kill them. And I decided that all I ultimately owed them was to not rape and kill them.
Hmm. I disagree with this in a qualified manner. The problem with trying to think through sudden scary events is that they are generally wide outside of your usual experiences, so you’ve got little reference material, and fewer properly-trained reflexes. If a possible assault situation comes up, you may not be able to get anything useful out of the rational side of your brain.
That’s not to say that the fear response isn’t leaky and prone to both false-positives and false-negatives that you need to learn about and systemically correct for. The point of the book, I think, was that if you’re afraid, you should pay attention to the fear in the moment, and then give some long hard thought to what specifically was causing you to be afraid once you’ve sorted things out.
Have you actually read The Gift of Fear?
I quite like this post. I’m not sure I agree with it entirely, but I still like it. It’s true (I think) that we tend to weigh things we fear according to how often we’ve heard about them or how “sensational” they seem. Hence why it’s easier to be afraid of a plane crash than a car crash.
It might be a bit of an impractical way to look at it, at least in this case, though. Presumably you don’t advocate being more afraid of people you trust. You’d end up in some weird paranoid loop anyway.
There are dangers we can do something about, and dangers we can’t. It might be true that we’re more likely to die while driving than to get murdered in a dark alley. But that doesn’t mean it’s more logical to give up driving in favour of hanging around in dark alleys. There’s little to be lost by at least being wary. Maybe not going so far as to be afraid.
Flinching and screaming is a bit too far, although I might well have left the elevator. Because it seemed very clear, because of a series of coincidences, that this big dude was following her and even followed her into a well lit populated store. So if I saw you again I’d leave the elevator and speak to security. Screaming is over the “a little freaked out” line.
Leaving her shopping was just counterproductive - when you’re in a populated place stay there, call somebody to come get you, speak to the manager, whatever. That was an unreasoning fear there.
Oh, I forgot that it was the elevator of your building - yeah, then I’d probably just slap myself in the head. Unless you’d REALLY freaked me out and then I’d be afraid you’d gotten in somehow, but I don’t think, as I said, that I’d be crazy freaked out by events as you reported them.
Does he need to? The title kind of gives it away.
I would have to disagree with most of this post. While it’s detrimental to be afraid of everything, I don’t have to have been bitten by a snake in the woods to be cautious enough to give one a wide berth when I spot it, even though it isn’t one of the poisonious ones. In a more controlled enviornment (at the zoo, the herp shop, a school or the home of a friend who has snakes), I wouldn’t react that way and might even get to “know” the snake. Out in the wild, however, there are too many variables that could wind up with me being injured or dead. Same with someone who appears to have the ability to do harm to me physically when out alone at night. Not at all unreasonable.
I’ve stopped to let men pass me, one time in particular it was midnight and a young black man was about 50 feet behind me. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was black- it was night, he was too close. I didn’t even really get a scary vibe from him, it was just really disconcerting to have someone that close behind me in the dark. I’m pretty sure he thought I was being racist, and I feel bad for that.
Actually he does. The book is not about walking around being fearful all the time; it is about paying attention to your fears when they occur. It is also about not letting one particular fear, that of not being thought of as a “nice” person, cloud your judgment in a bad situation.