Forget “not all men”: even if it’s “almost zero men”, there are enough to make women feel threatened. And it’s probably not almost zero men; it’s probably some relatively small but non-trivial fraction of them. (Or, even worse, a larger fraction of men, but only some of the time, for instance when drunk.) How many incidents per decade would it take to make you anxious? One? Two?
There’s more than just this going on though. We’re also battling against human psychology.
In the US and UK, crime has been falling consistently for 30 years. In America, there are something like half as many violent crimes per person per year, and about half as many property crimes, as there were in the early 1990s. In the UK, the crime rate has fallen to something like a quarter of its 1996 peak.
But in both the USA and UK, most people believe that crime is increasing. The percentage who think so has dropped in the UK over the last 10 years, but still, nearly two-thirds of adults think that crime is more common now than it was a few years ago. Almost 80% of US adults think there is more crime now than a year ago. People’s perception of the risk of crime is only very loosely tied to the actual risk of crime in their country. Bringing it down — making people safer — will probably only have a relatively small effect on how safe people feel.
What’s more, while it is true that things like traffic accidents are much more common, humans are much more likely to be scared of dramatic, rare risks than common ones: “They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former,” wrote the security expert Bruce Schneier back in 2006.
Schneier also points out that personified danger, dangers with identifiable victims, is far scarier than anonymous, statistical risks. 10,000 faceless people dying of diabetes will never get to us in the way that a single named child ill with bone cancer will. If there’s a human agent behind the risk, that’s even worse. And risks that we don’t choose, risks that are beyond our control, are scarier than those we choose. High-profile murders by strangers meet all of these criteria. They are almost designed to scare us.
And we will always keep hearing about them, once again because of the law of large numbers. There are about 70 million people in the UK. If we get the risk of murder down to an unrealistically low one-in-70-million per year, we will still hear about them once a year, because they will make the news. The news will never dedicate 100 times as much coverage to diabetes deaths as they do to street murders, because that’s just not how the media works or, really, ever could work. A newspaper headline of “100,000 aircraft landed safely yesterday” would not sell many copies.
More than that, women tend to be more risk-averse than men. I want to be really clear about something: this is not “irrational”. There’s no optimal level of risk aversion, no correct amount to be worried. But it is an empirical fact that although men are more likely to be victims of crime and violence, they are less likely to be worried about it.
That makes sense. Even if I do get jumped in Finsbury Park as I walk home some night, there’s some deluded bit of me that thinks I could fight, or at least run. I would feel like I have some control, and risks we think (rightly or wrongly) that we can control are less scary. Most women do not have that feeling. It is hardly surprising that the world is scarier for women.
Plus, we’re diurnal animals. The night is frightening for us, and has been since before we evolved from our common ancestor with chimps. You don’t have to go all evolutionary psychology to think that being alone on a dark street is going to be scary for humans, whatever the real risks are.
Women also differ widely in their responses to things. There is a great essay by Scott Alexander, called “Different Worlds”, talking about how the same situation will be perceived entirely differently by different people. We all have different levels of threat-perception, and almost all signals we receive from the world are ambiguous. Some people will read some behaviour as dangerous, some as benign.
I read this story, about a woman’s reaction to unwanted attention on a train, and it felt threatening and unpleasant. But perhaps some other women might think it was harmless flirting. And the survey into sexual harassment I mentioned above included “being stared at” as sexual harassment, but I remember some female friends, when they were single, telling each other about that guy at the bar “checking you out”. The line between flirty “checking out” and harassment-level “being stared at” will be different for different women. Which is entirely normal and unavoidable. But it does mean that some women will be much more likely to feel threatened than others. Which will in turn mean that it will be harder to reach a point where all, or enough, women feel safe.
What can be done? Certainly men could be more aware of behaviour that might seem threatening. And doing whatever we can to reduce the level of crime, improving rape conviction rates, reducing workplace harassment and stigmatising the sort of creepy behaviour I talked about above — those things are good in their own right, and probably will have some effect on how safe women feel. I’ve seen women suggesting curfews for men — I’m not sure how seriously — and no doubt that would lower the incidence of attacks, although it’s not really proportional or realistic; it would involve punishing an awful lot of innocent men for the actions of a terrible minority. As would restricting alcohol sales, given that at least half of attackers in violent crime are under the influence.
Fundamentally, we are fighting too many things — especially the law of large numbers, a sensationalist media, and human psychology — for it to be realistic that women will ever feel safe enough. Men will never understand how women feel; but even worse, we may never be able to entirely change it.
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SubscribeGood read – let down by poor first line …
In fact, most men DO know “what it is like to feel unsafe on the streets”
Agreed. As a teenager growing up in inner city Leeds in the 90s I feared for my safety walking on the street, especially after dark. I regularly had my pockets ‘searched’ by groups of other young men intent on robbery, and had to make my escape from the top deck of the bus on numerous occasions after being threatened with robbery/violence. Sadly, I imagine the situation is the same now in UK towns and cities.
In London, the situation has improved substantially since the 80s and early 90s due to CCTV.
Quite so. There are parts of London close to me that I avoid after dark (quite early in the winter, of course) and I don’t travel on the tube when the drunks are going home later in the day. And, I object to this idea that I can’t understand how the various victim groups feel. I have my fair share of human empathy, as do most people. It is just a way of closing down discussion.
… and particularly the no go areas — avoided even in daylight and tolerated as no go …
You are right about empathy Mel but there are a small number of experiences that we can only understand if they have been our personal experience. Sometimes when people say, ‘I know how you feel,’ they are mistaken no matter how well meaning they are and no matter how generally they are good at putting themselves in the shoes of others.
But you don’t have to have exactly the same feeling to be able to respond appropriately and we can extrapolate from experiences we have had. I am sure we do it all the time.
I think there is a value to even partial understanding of another’s suffering and this is empathetic. The partner and carer to a stroke victim will have an increasing understanding of the difficulties and feelings of the partner as time goes by even though they may not actually ‘feel’ their partner’s feeling, if that makes sense.
Men are 11 times more likely to have an actual assault. This is the difference between feelings and reality. Perhaps more lines about actual harm and not fantasy??
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Very true.
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There are many times when I do not feel safe on the street and in public, and I have certainly modified my behaviour to avoid such situations.
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Noisy, often drunken, agressive men and youths in groups frighten and sometimes threaten me.
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But then, I have a d1ck, so that doesn’t matter.
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It’s a good, considered article, looking for answers, so we shouldn’t over-react and immediately start calling out the ‘woke left’ as some other commenters have done. Aren’t we here to listen and debate rationally?
But that first line got to me too, and I wonder at the differences (see Scott Alexander essay?) between my life and Mr. Chivers’. As for me, I grew up with the frequent threat of violence, actual violence against me, intimidation, and the witnessing of violence against and murder of other young men. How I miss the old Bermondsey (not!).
The east Midlands mining town I grew up in was like that, too.
It’s really not the same, in my experience. I’ve had a good few encounters on the streets of London where violence was on the cards (Although it’s years since it actually came to that). I came out of each feeling pretty good about myself — I had faced the enemy, and come out unscathed. My manhood was vindicated. The fact is, although objectively I don’t rate my capacity for effective violence very highly, I could deploy the threat of it, through body language, tone of voice, etc, effectively enough that no actual fight occurred. This dance isn’t open to women; the escalation to actual violence is entirely out of their hands; so even when they emerge unscathed, they will have (I imagine) suffered a humiliating, traumatic demonstration of their powerlessness in the face of brutality.
You are a braver man than I …
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. Women aren’t looking for a fight (I’m not say you were) but the powerlessness is a really big part of the fear.
I’ll wager that very few of the men who meet up with gangs of hooligan males out for trouble are looking for a fight either.
Very well put, added to the fact that most men, even in a fight situation, don’t have the fear of rape. I don’t actually think men can easily ‘feel it’. Obviously they can empathise.
But the bottom line really is that women have always been at risk, since the dawn of man. No matter what is discussed, or how many vigils, there will be people who break the law and do nasty things.
I agree, I regret to say though that the only person I have known personally who was raped was a man, by a gang.
Not all men are big and burly. Bullies pick on people, males as well as females that they instinctively sense can be overpowered with ease.
This dance isn’t open to women
Yes, of course it is worse for women, but why can’t you accept that it isn’t open to many men as well?
A considerable percentage of men have no chance of being able to project strength or physical self-assurance or do anything to persuade violent predators think twice.
Yes. This is my experience. The couple of times I have been assulted – the best i can describe this is as “a grab, grope and gone” before I could fully react, which left me enraged at my powerlessness to have stopped it and that the man felt free to do it. In fact years on, remembering these events brings back feelings of anger.
But I do not, as a result, live in fear of a possible future assault. I know, depending on circumstance I may or not be able to defend myself. And where I have not been surprised i.e the interaction lasted long enough for me to pull myself together (or more specifically focus my anger into action to defend myself), the result has been quite different. This is not to say a male of superior strength and determined aggression would not overwhelm me.
But Jonathon, not all men an escape the violence and intimidation you were able to do. Perhaps you are big. The absolute fact is that men are many times more likely to be injured and murdered than women are. Of course this is not to minimise in any way the tragic and needless death of the young women murdered last week. Horrible, but women are much safer than we are – and that is an absolute fact.
Depends what you’re up against. In my youth I had encounters with yobs on the streets and came out of them unscathed, but they weren’t out to rob me and didn’t carry knives. They were just looking for a fight. If I were confronted now by a knife-wielding group of robbers, as has become a reasonably likely scenario in recent decades, I don’t think being male rather than female would help me in the least.
The Law needs to define what level of force can be used in self protection, protecting someone else and making a citizens arrest. How is intimidation defined and at what point can the honest person strike, even if they have not been hit?
Until this is done many chivalrous tough fit men will not intervene because of the risk of being prosecuted for assault. I can think of scaffolders who box, members of the TAVR who are capable of subduing most yobs but are they risking prosecution for assault ? I suggest lawyers, academics, politicians and civil servants should base their decision by sparring with some unarmed combat instructors from the Armed Forces.
The Law must be based upon what an honest law abiding person must do in order to protect themselves in a streetfight or a home invasion and nothing else.
I totally agree. Men ask themselves the same question that women do: “If that person or group attacked me, would I be able to defend myself?” The difference is that men would normally be able to answer ‘Yes’, while women would usually think ‘No’,
Well done, Tom, brave attempt to understand.
Although getting long in the tooth now, I was once considered to be wolf-whistle-worthy – which in fact I rather liked. I have twice been stalked in my young days, once quickly dealt with by a policeman but the other time more seriously, involving a bedsit move.
I don’t though feel threatened by men. My generation was taught that we have to look after our own safety and not take risks, and I see nothing wrong with that.
Take heart, decent men everywhere – plenty of us still appreciate you!
This seems the key to it. Women’s sense of agency and of responsibility is systematically undermined in a culture that places all the blame for any ill with men or ‘the patriarchy’. Without agency women are disempowered and can only feel like victims.
Yes, the irony – still not appreciated by those who persist in making cases based on ‘patriarchal tyranny’ or ‘white male privilege’ etc… (which says something for the general intellect of those who argue in this way) is that in exploiting ‘victimhood’ for power you merely hand more power over to the allegedly responsible perpetrator. You don’t achieve agency by stripping someone else of theirs (unless what you really seek is revenge and satisfaction of resentment).
I read a short story recently where the protagonist behaved exactly in this way. I found it incredibly disconcerting but couldn’t articulate why. Thank you for forming the words so well.
A good point, and well put.
“Take heart, decent men everywhere – plenty of us still appreciate you!”
Sorry Jill. In statistical terms, you don’t exist.
Thank you, Jill.
And for many of us as long in the tooth as you, you may still be wolf-whistle-worthy – although we do it in our heads now 😉
I agree Jill – a good article, well reasoned.
It’s sad that these horrible situations get all too easily exploited by extremists. Sadly it doesn’t matter what those on the extreme shout about and blame, there will always be those monsters who commit horrific crimes. To say women should never take safety precautions because it’s a male problem and therefore victim blaming helps no-one.
My daughter has just headed away to college. I asked before she went it if could give to bits of ‘dad advice.’ She agreed, ‘when you’re walking home at night, don’t look at your phone.’ And the second she asked? ‘just have fun.’
I travel all over the world alone and never feel threatened. If we carry ourselves with dignity unless we unfortunately interact with someone who is essentially unhinged we have no more to fear than men. Overwhelming men respect woman who behave with dignity.
There are places I would avoid being where people are out of their heads on one thing or another but then so would the guys on here. If a waitress indicates the man across the room wants to buy me a drink I am flattered and certainly do not feel harassed I can always say I am flattered but I need an early night and the retort is no more than thats a shame. Woman essentially dress for themselves but if you turn a head when you have done well that day it should make you feel good rather than a victim. I actually find woman coming on to me far more confusing than men they are so damn complicated. Men seem to offer so much more clarity. Maybe we should start a group for woman harassed by other woman.
That’s not to make light of a death of a young woman but to try and keep persecutive. Odd that it fits with the other thing doing the rounds.
I’m not sure a curfew for men actually would reduce attacks on women – criminals don’t obey the law. It would reduce the attacks on men though with fewer of them about.
Besides, most of the comments I’ve seen on the matter have men saying they’ll just say they identify as women, non-binary, gender-fluid or somesuch and because this is clown-world, it would be transphobic not to accept the claim!
Oh god! And which toilets would they all use?
If drunk enough, probably a lamppost or a wall.
Maybe a study on what profile of male needs curfew. I rather doubt Middle class areas would have a need for it.
That might open several cans of worms. While it’s “men” everything is fine. Finer definition than that and things might get uncomfortable.
Fear is exploited for power. Certain politicians have seized on this latest murder to exaggerate the risk and magnify the fear women feel. This essay provides helpful information for understanding the problem but misses where to look for ‘What can be done?’
Our streets are safer than ever according to Chivers and unless the trend alters will become yet safer. Reassuring women of this so they may gain confidence is the most effective thing we can do. Instead we have the likes of Harriet Harman undermining the efforts of the Met Police Commissioner’s efforts to reassure women that such crimes are rare and seeking to sow division that she may exploit [see Sky news “Sarah Everard disappearance: ‘It’s men who are the problem,’ says Harriet Harman MP”].
This is the larger part of the problem. Street crime is a problem and no doubt more can be done. But it is a problem that lessening. Meanwhile, opportunistic politicians seeking a cause to advance themselves is an increasing problem. Dealing with that rather than focussing on one horrific murder by a man and generalising it to all men and all behaviour that may upset women, from unwanted attention to murder and rape, will be much more efficient and practical than aiming for a world of zero crime where people are afraid to talk to strangers.
Being a man can be very scary, I lived in precarious ways for a number of years, and early on, on my mother’s urging, began carrying a large knife. I never used the knife on anyone, but a few times having my hand on it allowed me to have sufficient confidence to prevent being attacked.
I believe very strongly every person without a criminal history has the right to armed self defense, which means the legal right to carry a weapon. I think guns are the best choice, as they are the equalizer, where an old, small, woman can defend her self against the biggest man.
Naturally the Brits would be appalled at this. In USA where I live now, in my state as in many of them, every adult citizen with no criminal past may carry a pistol concealed, or openly, with NO permit, and no training, and not even a registered gun. Few do, I have never carried a concealed gun, but I have not felt the need to other than those few years wile a young man. The amount of homicide by legal carry citizens is almost zero. Criminals kill people, good citizens do not kill wile committing a crime.
I am thankful that in the US, I have the option of being armed. If people broke into my house while I was home, I would have NO chance of doing anything to effectively defend myself without a firearm. I knew a woman who literally fled across the country–twice–to escape a violent stalker. She settled in a quiet semi-rural area, hoping this time he wouldn’t track her down, and eventually, reluctantly, got a handgun. One day the stalker found her and began breaking in the kitchen door to get to her. She got the gun and stood where he could see her, telling him to go away or she would shoot him. He broke in anyway and advanced on her, and she shot and killed him. Again, there was nothing she could have done to protect herself at the end without being armed with a weapon she could use at a distance.
But then rates of homicide in the US are about 4x what they are in the UK due to guns being available.
Look at then locations where violence occurs, in a few blocks in certain cities amongst criminals. Chicago has certain areas which are very violent but the university lecture theatres are safe.
2019 – 18 adults and children killed in total in schools and universities in the US.
2018 – Santa Fe High School, 10 killed, 13 wounded.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 17 killed, 17 wounded.
16 more killed in other schools and universities.
You have highlighted the large number of disturbed people in the USA, possibly due to drug taking. The UK had vast numbers of fire arms pre 1917, swords as well, but people did not go round on mass killing sprees. Since 1914, the UK has trained vast numbers of people to kill, who have done so in many conflicts and refrained from doing so when they leave the Armed Forces. Switzerland trains vast numbers of people to kill and lets them keep military rifles at home.
It is about emotional maturity, self- control, self -respect, discerning, thoughtful of others feelings, responsibility, a sense of duty to others, all the factors of chivalry which enable a person to kill in battle but be gracious, well mannered, elegant, refined and cheerful in peace time. If Britain and other members of the Commwealth had not achieved this, the vast numbers of men and few women who had undergone hand to hand combat training in the Commandos and Special Forces since 1940 would have killed and crippled vast numbers of people everytime felt a bit peevish with someone. My experience is that these highly trained people are the first spot potential violence and either avoid it or not to retaliate even if assaulted.
Most gun killings in the US are between people who know each other or rival gangs. The number of ‘random’ killings of any type is small, and getting smaller.
In fact, it is exactly their rarity that causes them to get broadcast all over – “if it bleeds, it leads” is the old saw. Same with racism; there are fewer and fewer incidents so the few that do happen are trumpeted to the world.
And, as a result, people are frightened and concerned about racism when they need not be.
White people have no business telling nonwhite people what level they need to feel concerned about racism.
Racism isn’t just about being killed. It’s being passed over for promotion and the opportunity to build intergenerational wealth that negatively impacts already vulnerable communities. It’s the psychological and physiological toll of continuously being told you’re less than.
Black women are three times more likely than white women to experience sexual harassment at work because sexual harassment is about asserting power over lower status people. Black women are on the bottom rung.
The workplace is where most nonwhite people experience racism. 40+ hours a week.
Is that a reason to be unarmed?
It might be, if there is a corrallation between allowing the general public to be armed and increased numbers of homicides.
From the evidence (UNODOC), in countries where firearms can be bought with relative ease, homicides are more prevalent.
I don’t think arming the female British public is the answer, in fact I think the idea is hysterical nonsense.
This anecdote makes an excellent point. Sometimes violence is the only valid response to an existential threat.
Excellent post. In the US an attacker is always taking a risk that the intended victim may be armed. In the UK, an attacker would be able to be sure that they did not have a firearm.
This is a discussion that crops up with a certain monotony over the years, and is replete with over-the-top opinion pieces, bad statistics and misleading opinion polling to sell a women-scared-man-bad narrative (akin to labelling all muslims as terrorists because of one incident involving ‘a’ muslim, it uses the same lazy childish stereotypical thinking).
In general, stranger on stranger violence is much more likely to have a male victim (and in the UK there is a strong societal taboo about violence against women). It is also a ‘lonely streets’ phenomena – the fewer people about the more opportunities for one-on-one encounters and fewer bystanders for assistance (see R.Philpot or M.Levine). Almost the worst thing you could do would be to take the 99% of law-abiding, anti-violence, men off the streets.
> bad statistics and misleading opinion polling to sell a women-scared-man-bad narrative akin to labelling all muslims as terrorists because of one incident involving ‘a’ muslim
That’s correct.
The use of data points at the extremes of a normal distribution to draw conclusions about the centre, unites the “all muslims are potential terrorists”, “all blacks are criminals” and “all men are potential rapists” narratives.
Absolutely -and it’s the same with diversity -the old, if 3% of the population is black then why aren’t 3% of politicians, astronauts, policemen etc… black too? Must be systemic racism etc… This is just a bad understanding of distribution norms.
Yes. All children capable of understanding these points should be taught them at school as part of the some kind of civic studies course.
as part of some kind of statistics course.
But of course, such statistically defined “justice” is somehow absent from people’s consideration of the male/female prison inmate ratios.
Thank you, self-appointed professor of sociological statistics.
If a woman is killed or sexually assaulted, it is most likely a current or former romantic partner.
Whether women are more afraid of randos jumping out of the bushes, unhinged boyfriends/husbands, or a Tinder date taking advantage of too many drinks – men are the primary source of violence experienced by women.
You cannot get around this fact.
Isn’t this “More men get murdered than women” stance monotonous and restrictive? No one is arguing that’s not the case, but to keep returning to it seems like that the viewpoint of a disempowered bystander. Jackson Katz is interesting on this – his work seeks to empower men by placing them firmly at the heart the violence against women debate. Here’s his Ted talk – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvSfeCRxe8
I think you misread. The authors I gave, show how bystanders are an important component in the prevention of violence. Men and women supporting each other reduces reduces threat. And in consequence, making women fearful of men, simply makes women more vulnerable because they start to avoid the very people who, through physical strength, can most help.
To follow this on, the old and very well embedded idea of a chivalrous gentlemen has been used as the epitome of good male behaviour for centuries. There are things a gentleman does not do, and takes a stand on to defend women and children. We’ve lost this role model due to the tendency for ‘blame-casting’ where one man, becomes all men, and a gentleman is cast as an oppressor, instead of an ally. Dividing people is less safe than uniting them.
Interesting point, but originally Medieval Chivalry was about elite male violence and how to behave effectively on the battleground, the more of the enemy you killed the more chivalrous you were considered to be.
It was the Victorians who misunderstood and introduced a fairytale version of it by mixing up chivalry with courtly love, which tends to be how people think of it today.
The difficulty for early feminists was that the Victorian version of chivalry felt like an excuse to prevent women from fully taking part in public life, ie, women need to be protected from the hurly burly male world of politics and business. How ironic that there appears to have been good reason for that male protective attitude, but for about 100 years women, some women, fought against it, and now here they are demanding protection again.
I think most decent men are instinctively protective of women but let’s not forget that for for a long time now some women have sneered at courteous men as if it is an outrage, because they insisted s e x was a social construct.
Perhaps what is happening in the 21st century is the realisation that s e x differences are in fact profound, and they matter.
I think you find you will find chivalry comes from the Beduin. Beduin women have to be free to tender te flocks and fetch water: tribal vengeance protects them.
I agree with you that the Victorians brought in a fairy tale version of chivalry but this was response to the squalor and vice of the slums. Places like Bradford went from 6,000 people in 1800 to 120,000 in 1850s.
Historically women ran the farms and estates when men were away, so during the Anarchy, War of Roses and Civil War women defended their homes and castles.Also women have often run pubs and breweries in the rough part of towns.
In warrior societies and where men worked away from home, Sparta, Vikings, Mongols, Beduin, Dutch and British woman had to be free to travel and run the farm/business . In Sparta women trained in gymslips which included wrestling and had far more freedom than those in Athens.
I suspect most of the feminists who sneer at courteous men come from families where there are not those who strong chivalrous and can fight: in short gentlemen.
In Buddhist societies, women are trained in martial arts: Wing Chung was started by a nun. The simple solution is to combine the rigours of Spartan athletics and a Buddhist martial Arts training for both sexes from the age of 5 years.
I expect that the medieval chivalric code may well be linked indirectly with Bedouin and all other horseback warrior cultures (the word chivalry comes from the Old French “chevallerie”, from the Latin “cabellarius” for horseman) where prowess in battle was highly valued, but the point I was making was that originally “chivalry” as we know it in Europe had nothing to do with protecting women.
As I said I think protecting women is a universal biologically driven tendency in men.
Strangely enough I think looking after their men is also a universal biologically driven tendency in women.
It did, it was how chivalry was defined. The constant struggle against heat, thirst and hunger caused the Beduin to adopt certain chivalric customs such as allowing women to freely travel to water wells (which were never poisoned) and not touching them during raids. Love songs developed in Arabic society from the 9th century onwards. There appears little chivalry amongst the barbarians who over ran the Western Roman Empire and also in Chinese culture. Binding feet is absurd amongst nomads.
During the Anarchy Stephen showed chivalry towards Matilda even though he was fighting her for the crown.
With respect Charles you are missing the point and muddling up the behaviour, which we might call “chivalry” today, but is essentially protective, life enforcing behaviour, with the historical definition of “Medieval Chivalry” which I have tried, and obviously failed in your case, to explain.
Claire D. The reality is that is countries and societies vary their attitude to protecting women over time and there is also massive variation between them. Just look at clothes in Britain. In Regency, say post 1800 Britain, women wore far more revealing clothes than in 1870. Well to do farmers daughters of 1800 had far more freedom, especially if she was shepherdess, than a well to do lawyers daughters in London in `1870 due to the growth of lawless slums, the rookeries.
Much of the way we look at social, economic and industrial history is through the post 1850 lense of urban life. Look at how Nell Gwynne thrived in Restoration England: impossible in 1860.
I suspect it’s probably a matter of convergent evolution. Women are more physically vulnerable to attack than men are, so if you want to keep women safe from attack, the two most obvious ways are (1) have norms against women going out and about on their own (so there’s always a male relative on hand to help defend them), or (2) have strong norms against men hurting women (so the need for defence will — hopefully — not arise). It’s not surprising that separate cultures should independently converge on one or the other of these options.
Indeed.
Thank you for one of the few nuanced articles I have read on this issue. I would only add a couple of things.
A lot of men do know what’s it’s like to feel unsafe on the streets at night. I’ve been violently attacked several times and, even though this was many years ago, I still assume I’m not entirely safe when I go out at night.
Also, men and women tend to respond to these things differently. I started doing martial arts and weightlifting so that I could prevent it from happening again. The fact is a lot of women just don’t want to do this and so never develop the self confidence to counteract their fears.
However, the elephant in the room is that men are generally much bigger and stronger than women so this will always be an issue, as will our different responses to it. Why do women worry about being attacked more than men? Well, if you are smaller and weaker than at least 50% of the population you will inevitably be less confident about your ability to physically defend yourself. Conversely, men will always struggle to understand women’s response and see it as irrational and overly emotional. As you say, neither response is ‘correct’ so we have an impasse.
Unfortunately, these debates become so toxic with loud mouthed idiots on both sides dominating the debate. A curfew for men is as ridiculous as a curfew for black people in order to stop knife crime. On the other hand saying to women ‘pull yourself together darling and take it as a compliment’ is not exactly helpful when a 13 year old has been propositioned buy a grown man.
Women are weaker than men and do need more protection. However, unless we invent a load of benevolent robots do to this work, their protection will always come from men. This creates a paradox that no one can solve.
I am over 70 and all my life have been told by firstly my mother to watch out for strange men when out on my own. And I have been terrified and ultra alert when walking home in the dark. Miss Everard was plain unlucky. Whatever happened, she was going to lose, caught by surprise on a busy road where even I would expect to feel safe, by a man who was far stronger than her. It is a very sorrowful one off but our justice system will deal with her murderer and other lessons will be learned. Last night on the news, the BBC reported from Mozambique where terrorists are invading communities, beheading men and enslaving young women and children. It doesn’t lessen the grief for the loss of one unique life but it does put things in perspective.
Exactly. I have been familiar with the situation in Mozambique for some time. Did the BBC dare to mention the religion practiced by the terrorists? Probably not…
That aside, and awful thought the murder of Sarah Everard is, it is my perception that there are fewer such murders than there were 30 or 40 years ago.
The Washington Post had a report on Boko Haram abductions in Nigeria. Of course, there was the wicked abduction of the 300 girls.
How many boys? 10000
You are right to point out the difference. I wish we could have an Unherd article on what is going on in Nigeria and why. I despair really. The murder in Clapham has been hijacked by hysterical women, police blamed for upholding the Covid law and the grieving Everard family cannot even mourn their daughter in peace, quiet and reverence. Meantime the real evil goes on all over the world including the UK.
It may not be realistic that women will ever feel safe enough – but there are actions that men can take which make women feel safer. Such as:- not walking behind a woman, not staring at her, speaking to her or calling out to her. This applies anywhere and anytime where the streets are relatively empty and there is nobody in close enough range for the woman to call on for help.
I’m now getting on in years and as such am invisible to men – except for those that offer me their seat on crowded public transport. But I can well remember the fear I felt as a young woman when an older man followed me home at night from the bus stop to the nearest housing estate – and became verbally aggressive when I wouldn’t answer his personal questions. I ended up knocking on the door of the nearest house and asking for help. All credit to the kind man who answered the door dressed in his pjamas, who then got dressed and accompanied me to my home. I still remember him 50 years after the event.
It’s probably true, Tom that “men will never understand how women feel” but neither will women ever understand how men feel, including how we feel about being lumped together with rapists and murderers.
“Of the 695 people murdered in England and Wales in the year to March 2020, 506 of them were men.”
So how about we just make the streets safer for everyone, without making a feminist psychodrama of it?
Women = good
Men – not good
That’s the narrative folks.
I remember a childhood rhyme:
What are little girls made of? sugar and spice and all things nice.
What are boys made of ?
Frogs and snails and puppy dogs tails.
Little did I know it would be scientifically undisputed.
That is simply not the narrative, and to say so is reductive. This is not about a hatred of men, far from it – it’s about the problem of gender based violence – figuring out from where this arises, and seeking to do something about it. Let’s not be passive bystanders here.
I’m afraid I think it is.
There is a marked tendency amongst some feminists to lay the blame for everything either at the door of men, masculinity or the patriarchy – from anorexia to global warming.
And for some, even when men put on dresses and want to be women, they can’t help putting the boot in.
They honestly don’t have a good word to say about men.
I’m afraid I think this is a blind alley. Not all men are bad. But women everywhere live in fear of sexism and harassment.
I have every possible advantage – I am white and well educated, I live in a good area, run a business and have financial independence. And yet my freedom, and that of my child, is curtailed because of the attitudes of some men to women. These attitudes manifest in numerous ways. When I was 11, a neighbour repeatedly stood wanking at his bedroom window, while his wife and children sat downstairs. I have been flashed at, repeatedly wanked at, groped, shouted at, bundled off dance floors by strangers, and chased through streets at night. These events could be considered relatively minor – I am fortunate enough never to have been sexually assaulted – but this is sexually driven behaviour. My daughter is now 13, and I cannot allow her to greet delivery men because they have made inappropriate comments to her on our doorstep. Men beep at her from cars, and everyday, I fear for her on her journey home from school. It is like living under siege. Do men have to put up with this? No they do not. And that is the issue here – it is not about extreme feminism, it is about equality of the sexes, and freedom.
“But women everywhere live in fear of sexism and harassment.”
I don’t. But it sounds like you have been repeatedly victimized. What did you do when your neighbor was w@nking? Call the police? Same with being chased through streets and “bundled off the dance floor” whatever that means. I have pretty daughters as well, what you do is you help them understand the world. One of mine was stared at on a bus in Berlin by two women until she asked them why they were staring at her. But you don’t instill fear in your own child. If a delivery person made an inappropriate comment to your teenager, did you report it to the service? Indicating to your daughter that she should be afraid to answer the door is doing her a disservice.
This is not about equality of the sexes. Men are not going to act like women and I doubt we would like it if they did. But don’t equate men with people who w@nk in public. They are not one and the same.
Spot on and saved me replying.
most women you talk to have faced a couple of incidents, usually minor, but never the litany of abuse described in the comment. Frankly if I viewed the world as that hostile I simply would not leave the house at night.
Most men, btw, will also have had some bad experiences: violence from men, but also low level sexual harassment from women – usually groping.
Do you think the women you know would necessarily tell you?. I have been groped at two social events. I didn’t tell my husband because I knew it might be the end of our social interaction with the perpetrators, and their families.
I suppose it would have been worse if I had told him and it hadn’t been the end!
I’m interested why you think being white is an advantage when it comes to sexism and harassment.
I’m a bit flummoxed why you think being well-educated is a plus in that regard as well.
Did being white and well-educated help you in those situations?
Please do explain, because I genuinely don’t understand your logic.
I believe she could expect to be listened to, at least, if she complained about it.
It’s all about the power attached to identity in dominance hierarchy. Simple In-group-outgroup dynamics.
As a white woman who is educated, she fits societal perceptions of respectability. Also such she is more likely to:
– live in a lower crime neighborhood. Therefore she is less likely to be the victim of crime in proportion to the general populace, as most criminals prey on their own communities (there’s less risk in being apprehended aka the police care less about poorer people preying on each than poor people/criminals violating socially higher people).
That being said, there’s quite a lot “white collar crime” in business and politics. But these people are seldom held accountable.
On that note, racism makes nonwhites more likely to experience economic disparity and struggle. Poorer conditions lead to scarcity which lead to more crime. Poorer women are more likely to experience domestic violence.
(Racist like to argue that nonwhites are just more criminally-minded because it’s convenient deflection from how white people, especially men, exist and sustain at the top of the social hierarchy, which is through reaping the gains of exploitation (hello, colonialism), assigning lower status to those who don’t ascribe to arbitrary cultural values and norms, and giving impunity to harm-doers within their ingroup, etc.)
– have a non-service job and thereby be less likely to experience sexual harassment than women in service jobs, who report much higher rates of sexual harassment. Even at her non-service job, she is still less likely to be targeted for sexual harassment than her nonwhite counterparts because sexual harassment is an act of dominance over less powered groups. White women are higher on the social hierarchy.
– be seen as innocent if accused of a crime or social harm, especially against nonwhite people. She is more likely to get away with sexual harassment toward men and other women. Btw sexual harassment can be creating a smear campaign against other women such as saying another woman colleague screwed her way to the top.
However, this privilege gets removed if she is accused of a crime against a white man because he’s higher in the social hierarchy
“Not all men are bad’?
Why – thank you.
I’d prefer it if you told it as it really is and said something along the lines of -‘Most men are perfectly decent and a very small proportion of them are bad. In fact a tiny proportion of them are utterly evil and very dangerous. These are aberrant monsters.
“Live in fear of sexism and harassment” Oh, come on. Fear of sexism? Sexism is annoying, but encountering the odd jerk who *like a middle-aged taxi driver back in my youth) talks only to one’s male companion and pretends to be surprised that a woman can read and write) never killed anyone. The world is full of stupid and annoying people. And even “fear of harassment”…do that many women really restrict their activities so they don’t get into any situation in which oafish men might wolf whistle them, or make unwelcome invitations or comments? I’ve always hated that sort of thing, but never once – even when it was at its peak, when I was in my late teens and early 20s – did is actually frighten me to the point of avoiding any particular activity or area; it just annoyed the hell out of me. Everyone knew that most men who did this sort of thing were just idiots, not predators.
Oh come on. Look at the narrative around domestic violence – men are the perpetrators and women are the victims yet women instigate violence against their partners 40% of the time.
Yes, women are also violent towards their partners, both in heterosexual and same sex relationships. Some studies have been reported to find that women are even more often violent towards their male partners than the other way around.
However, I do think that statistics would show that men who beat their female partners to death vastly outnumber women who beat (or poison or stab) their male partners to death (and when they do kill their male partners, it is not seldom after a period of abuse from that partner).
The frequency of violence is less relevant than the level of violence. After all, the absolute majority of violent behaviour probably comes from both male and female…TODDLERS.
I feel for anyone being scared and fearfull (though not their exact feelings of course) and will normally feel that way myself if out alone at night (I’m male) ….but as Tom pointed out, this is absolutely not about gender based violence…as that doesn’t stack up statistically. This is about a perceived power imbalance and the fear that generates (even if irrational). I don’t have answers but I feel both men and women need to work together to lessen this fear rather than against each other.
“figuring out from where this arises”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey
It arises from basic primate social behaviors, and both sexes have a role. I am a scientist who studies primates, so I would think that. But it’s clearly true and if it wasn’t a politicised matter it would be pretty uncontroversial.
Violence is innate, not only for aggressive purposes, but also for defensive.
(Sorry for this lengthy reply – and the questions, but I am curious.)
I wonder what your view, as a scientist working with primates, is on rape, especially gang rape.
I remember being shocked when I saw a doe being what I could only describe as gang raped by three bucks. It felt like rape (even gang rape, which I have recently read sometimes was used as a punishment for “disloyal” women within biker gang but now happens even to women who are not at all acquainted with the rapists, in “attack rapes” as opposed to “date rapes”) was more of a biological issue than a cultural one. Which was disheartening. Humans tend to use gang rape to humiliate the victim or assert superiority towards her. I doubt that was the intention of the bucks.
(Something one rarely talks about is how differently people can respond to attacks, and perhaps are not equally prone to being attacked. I know a two 19 and 21 years old sisters that are both well over 6 feet tall and very athletic. I will go on believing until somebody proves me wrong (but it will take a lot to convince me) that a random rapist (even a random date rapist) would be less likely to attack them than a smaller girl.
My sister, who is 5’3″ “tall”, would perhaps make a more probable victim. However, she is strong as an oxen and so…let us call it unwilling to take a beating, that if she was ever attacked, I have no doubt the attacker would regret it. (She would make sure he lived just long enough to regret it.) While I am taller but of a weaker constitution, and would most probably freeze from fear.
I am not at all saying this to put any of the blame on the victim. I just believe that, just as some are less and some are more susceptible to diseases, perhaps some are less or more less as susceptible to attacks.
Rape – in the sense of actually restraining an unwilling female in order to mate, or using physical violence to make her comply – is actually quite rare in the (non-human) animal kingdom. What you observed probably looked very disturbing, but may not have actually been “rap\’ from the doe’s point of view; why didn’t she run away from the bucks? In most species, if a female is not in season – i.e., ovulating and thus able to get pregnant – she will just avoid males of her species altogether. Generally mating is a complicated, hormone-driven dance that requires the cooperation of both parties to be successful. Even among our closest relatives, primates, actual rape is very rare. It’s been observed among wild orangutans, but not (as far as I know) other apes, or monkeys, not even among chimpanzees, whose society is very male-dominated and in which females often get physically bullied by males. Usually males of these species just aren’t interested in mating with a female that isn’t in season. In some species, females are highly selective, even when they are in season, so if they don’t have the protection of a single dominant male – eg. like gorillas do – they can be more vulnerable to rape. Dolphins definitely rape sometimes. I’ve seen squirrels mating in my backyard and it certainly looks like rape to me, i.e. the female doesn’t seem at all willing, it basically just involves the male chasing and tackling her and quickly doing the deed while she screams and struggles to get away. But it’s clear that in many species – including ours – relations between males and females are very complicated. A mother squirrel raises her brood alone, usually successfully as long as she can find enough food to produce enough milk for them, hide them well, and repel predators. She doesn’t need their father for anything, so doesn’t have to like him or even want him around. In our species, females have always known instinctively that having a strong bond with their children’s father – at least while those children are very young and vulnerable – maximizes their chances of survival, and males have always known that protecting and providing resources for the mothers of their children maximizes their survival chances. So that understanding has formed the basis of parental pair-bonding. Children born as a result of rape have a huge disadvantage, because their mother has no bond with their father. Random predatory rape. because while it may (perhaps a 10 percent chance, at most) result in a pregnancy, but the victim of that rape will not get the protection or support of her child’s father, has never been a good genetic survival strategy, for our species. Nor has casual sex, which is why neither has ever been the norm, and the sense of being widely tolerated and approved of. In nearly every human society that’s ever existed, men have been expected to support and protect their offspring.
It arises from the biology of the male. They are evolved to fight each other for access to females (among, of course, other things), and they simply WILL fight each other as part of their biology. They will organize in armies and fight each other in great numbers. Dealing with it in a society is simply a part of the challenge of being human, and Jordan Peterson has an excellent take on it.
That observation doesn’t paricularly explain why males would beat up females, and it’s also silent on what women do to secure their interests. It’s simplistic. Men are typically more overtly violent than women, but that’s only a small part of the human story. Anyway women do also use violence, at least in the home. You personally may not, and you may not relate to it. But then neither do I, and I’m a man. I almost certainly WON’T physicallly fight someone unless I’m desperate, which also is true of many women. I hear some women get a visceral thrill from violent men. As you say, that may have to do with men fighing each other over women. Sorry if I’m mansplaining this, but to be fair I work on the neurobiology of primates for a living.
You do not seem to be literate.
Men who behave like jerks AND make women (and other men) feel unsafe, while there is no good reason for doing that, ARE jerks.
THAT is the narrative.
Really insensitive and poor comment . No where , no one said ALL men are racists & murderers .
In THIS story a women has been murdered . A random man has killed her. It is sad that she was walking home and she was killed by a random man . NOT a gang member, NOT a dodgy character but.a policeman who probably was suffering from undetected mental issues .
Yes sometimes men die too . When there is a different shocking story , that death too will be mourned. This is NOT man vs woman . This is not feminism . Someone just lost their daughter!! There is anger against a senseless crime NOT men .
This article is just asking us ALL to think and assess oneself not attack one another.
Thank you Tom for some balance and common sense.
I hope this recent tragedy does’nt become another BLM-like eruption of hysteria with all the attendant political and social reactions. The fact that people have been confined in lockdown makes these commotions more likely, they would blow over soon enough except that politicians, like Harriet Harman in this instance, try and make political capital out of them and cause more trouble.
… it it termed The Rochdale Syndrome – child rape by ethnic gangs has been tolerated for some decades … the topic is largely verboten and charges let alone convictions have been scandalously few, in proportion to ongoing crime levels. How odd that the women of Rotherham have not risen up and demanded effective action.
Watch Maggie Oliver with Peter Whittle on The New Culture Forum, she is trying but not getting much help.
The closer you want to get to absolute zero risk the more authoritarian the state becomes to enforce it.
I would like to point out that when a Somali brutal gang rapist was on a plane to Istanbul being deported to Somali some of the Guardian reading passengers made such a fuss he wasn’t deported and in fact may well be walking the streets of London right now.
Also human rights lawyers recently prevented at least two rapists being deported to Jamaica. I would suggest deporting rapists and shooting Guardian readers would help matters considerably.
We’re all talking about this as the abduction and murder of a stranger. But given how quickly his colleagues knew just who to look for, I have to wonder what will emerge during the trial.
The article asks what can be done; the answer is nothing, and there’s no point in deluding ourselves. Some men are feral and we can’t always pick them out. Sheltered middle class people are unaware of the extent to which violence is natural to some men.
The murder of Sarah Everard was probably opportunistic; she met a killer who came across her by chance. I remember another case some years ago where a man who spotted a woman as he drove past in broad daylight, did a u-turn then raped and killed her. There have been similar, fortunately rare, cases and their rarity is what makes them memorable as we will remember Sarah. It is this atavistic animalism which is horrifying because it shows what some of us are capable of.
Killers like Sarah’s and, the Yorkshire Ripper are likely to be psychopaths. Most men who are violent to women are simply brutes. They’ll be around as long as sexual jealousy exists and women control their access to sex.
Women’s groups demand the government pass laws to stop male violence as if it were something that could be corrected by education, training or the kind of social restrictions which Chivers shows are unimposable and would be unfair to most men.
Remember also that hundreds of thousands of women are out after dark every day and come to no harm. They’re more at risk from a family member than a street predator. There’s a limit to how safe an urban environment can be made. In the end, our safety is our own responsibility.
A good comment. This is not a new issue and like many issues people always ask what can be done and when there is a suggestion it will be completely impractical. It is also relevant that reactions based on emotions and ignoring the facts, some of which you mention, will make matters worse.
Until the data became too embarrassing and had to be censored about 20 years ago, the British Crime Survey showed pretty conclusively that the problem of male violence generally, not just towards women, arose disproportionately from a particular demographic subset of “male”.
I’ll leave everyone to work out which demographic that is. If you’re struggling, ask yourself: Who am I not permitted to criticize? and that should get you there.
Many men fear crime too and not just on the streets. Fear of crime isn’t confined to women walking alone at night. Being robbed in your house is a great fear to millions, some people cannot even feel 100% safe at home. Whole towns live in fear of aggressive families or gangs/groups.
This is one of many good reasons to have strong law and order.
The author seems to attempt to dismiss the ‘typical’ male response of saying ‘men are at far more risk’, before offering a load of statistics to back it up. It felt a little bit like ‘I’m not a , but…”.
The author doesn’t explain why society cares more about the murder of women than men? Based on coverage womens lives are far more important by a massive factor?
Is it just that modern society hates men? I don’t think so, historically it was always this way. If a man attacked a far weaker innocent man and an equally weak innocent woman – some very ingrained part of me knows that attacking the woman is worse.
Now the rape/assault element is a crime women are far more likely to suffer – certainly with better policing the chance of this happening could reduce further. One idea is to have highly trained undercover single female officers walk the streets at night (with backup etc), if there are opportunistic rapists out there this could catch some of them, and a lot of muggers.
I’m sure that it is deeply embedded in humans (and other animals) that a female rendered no longer capable of gestating is a much bigger loss to the group (in survival terms) than a male.
I’d group it the other way, society (including men) thinks that men ~14 – 55 should be able to ‘look after themselves’. That attacking a ‘man’ isn’t as bad, attacking a male child or a very old man is about as ‘bad’ as attacking a young woman.
The risky behaviour of young men and societies view of men as more expendable (women and children first) is pretty strong.
I think we are probably both right.
Mine is “evolutionarily embedded” where yours is more “culturally embedded”
No one is debating whether more men or women get murdered. We know it’s men. Nor is this about a hatred of men, far from it – it’s about the problem of gender based violence – figuring out from where this arises, and seeking to do something about it. Jackson Katz is interesting on this – his work seeks to empower men by placing them firmly at the heart the debate. Here’s his Ted talk – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvSfeCRxe8
You are right, nobody is debating who gets killed more – that’s rather the problem.
The title of the article and gist of it is that women are relatively less likely to be attacked compared to men and by historic / international standards.
I didn’t say that it was ‘hatred’ of men, I dismissed it. I do point out that we (including me) see male on female violence as somehow worse that male attacking an innocent man – but struggle to explain why.
What does “gender based violence” mean?
There is a need for honest and fact-based discussion of violence in general, and such discussion is nearly always hampered by distracting and useless noise about “patriarchy” and “misogyny”.
A policeman has been charged with the murder of Sarah Everard. Perhaps all policemen should be subjected to a curfew given their astonishing propensity for crime. It seems that not a day goes by without a policeman or woman being found guilty of a serious crime.
Surely if you wanted to commit crime them becoming a police detective would be the best way to facilitate it? There is perhaps a good reason why there are countless TV and film dramas about such characters!
You mustn’t use the term policeman, it’s sexist.
The correct form of address is :
Ooooooorfficer!
Good article. And when reality hits home we know that there are men and there are women, and that some men behave in an aggressive or intimidating way towards women – not all, but enough to make the experience of intimidation a part of everyday life for many women. My daughters tell me this in a resigned, matter of fact way. These aggressive and intimidating men include those who pretend they’re women (or maybe really have convinced themselves that they are, with society’s connivance) and demand the right to use women’s changing rooms and lavatories. These men are more a threat – both perceived and actual – to women than any cat-caller on a building site. I’d like to think Harriet Harman will be making this point, but I won’t be holding my breath.
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And some men behave in an aggressive or intimidating way towards men as well, you know. It does happen!
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Probably the same men being generally horrid to all.
Horrid rather understates it. But I think you are right. The research shows that men who are violent to women tend to be generally violent.
Is this phenomenon a mix of social class, misandry and virtue-signalling? Woke people see themselves as both victim and secular priests, without any responsibility beyond asserting their absolute entitlement. In their roundabout way they are telling us that some women are more important than others.
Both. There can be no priesthood without a sacrificial victim to follow.
It is interesting that when a terrorist attack has happened the media have immediately said that we must not generalise and scapegoat a whole group from one incident. How odd that so many have now done exactly that in the light of this one tragic murder.
Very well said, Marie!
It always strikes me as bizarre how some people can’t see how ludicrously transparent their double standards are.
Come again? Does this just mean that there is no one-size-fits-all mathematical formula for risk aversion, that there us a range of behaviour that reasonable people would agree constitutes a reasonable level of risk aversion? I can agree with that. Otherwise this statement is completely wrong. There very much is an optimal range of risk aversion, and what we need to do is to teach people how to identify this range and then try to make their behaviour land in it. Neither cowardice nor rashness is conducive to a happy life lived well.
Part of this is due to childrearing. Most parents are more protective of their daughters than their sons. When bad things happen to boys, there generally is somebody there to teach them that these things will happen, and how to deal with them better when they arise in the future. When bad things happen to girls, there generally is somebody there telling them that it is all their fault for being in such a situation in the first place.
So, no wonder that men feel more capable of dealing with an unsafe world than women do. They have been practicing this more all through childhood and adolescence. And the very nice thing about identifying this dichotomy is that it very much points at a solution. Women have come up with all sorts of wavs to train for a less cowardly, fear-focused, oppressed existence — from martial arts and other self defence courses, outdoor experience and leadership courses such as done by Outward Bound, to joining the armed forces. And, no doubt, many others. But, naturally, these options can only be taken by women who have decided that they very much do not have an optimal level of risk aversion, and would like to do something to change that. Getting many of them to want this appears to be the difficult part, since going against one’s upbringing is hard.
We could probably educate people on how to accurately assess “outcome probability” which would help greatly.
However, even if that was achieved, many would be unable to overcome their seemingly excessive fear about the outcome itself – however vanishing unlikely it is to occur.
From a Darwinian perspective, it is highly advantageous for any group to have some people at both ends of the risk aversion scale.
Call me a hate-filled patriarch if you will, but it’s obviously more advantageous for the more fearful perspective to be held by “those who gestate”.
I seem to remember we used to have a name for them.
Beautifully put. I think that in general, our level of risk aversion as a society is increasing. This seems to be catalysed by a media desperate to sustain itself through sensationalism, and a political class that operate like a bunch of marketing executives.
Chivalry and good manners have been mocked by middle class Marxists since the 1930s. Until the 1970s American entertainment promoted good manners. Motown had a lady who taught deportment and if one looks at their stars they were graceful and well mannered. Something happens in the USA post early 1970s and far more characters in American entertainment become verbally aggressive. In the UK football hooliganism takes off and this is not due to poverty as there is no trouble at Rugby League matches. However, the young are treated as innocen, so if an adult intervenes to correct their behaviour they are the ones who can end being punished by the Law. If an adult grabbed a youth who was threatening a lady and took them to their parents, especially if it was a Mother, they would be the one punished for assault. A boy may be a pest but if by his late teens has not learnt gracefully to accept rejection by a lady, he can become a rapist.
If men were trained to be chivalrous, there is no reason why women cannot travel un-molested. In Beduin women were free to travel as interference with them brought tribal vengeance. It is highly likely chivalry comes from the Beduin.
Ladies it is simple, do you want a society which creates David Niven( an athletic chivalrous Commando Officer) or Weinstein ( fat slob and rappist ) ?
I hope people are starting to get wise to the cynical way activists and their allies in the media are using tragedies to advance not solutions but identity politics. Why are we discussing cat calling after a woman has been murdered? Why were we discussing statues in Bristol after George Floyd was killed in Minnesota? Because the activists are waiting for these incidents and co-ordinating campaigns at a time when people with clearer heads feel they can’t argue with women, or with black people. A similar thing was just attempted over the Oprah interview with the Sussexes but they vastly overestimated how much public sympathy there is for Meghan Markle and it fell flat. The BBC gave it their best though.
One other point: when we misogynist, right wing, white males used to run this country, the murderer of Sarah Everhart would have been visited in his cell at 6am by Albert Pierrepoint, led to a trapdoor and had a noose placed around his neck prior to being dropped through it. The party of Jess Phillips and most of the feminist left put an end to that. Today, due to liberal crime policies, the average murderer does about 15 to 20 years. Everhart’s killer will get more largely because of the press attention, however he didn’t know that. Maybe the conversation we should be having is about punishment and deterrence.
Disagree with you on the death penalty, but your analysis of how activism works is spot on. And people do wise up slowly, which is why activists tend to alienate people from their own causes.
The difference between BLM and the (real, historical) N-zis is that the N-zis would have killed George Floyd themselves and blamed it on their enemies. Perhaps we should commend modern activists for their patience.
Well said. We live in a highly feminised society where our male politicians and commentators are too scared to be men and answer the woke brigade with a clear cut NO
2 points come to mind immediately about the foundations of some of our discussions around crime and specifically girls and women’s perceptions of it directed towards them.
The first being the use of statistics and data captured by the highly politicised and biased body we know commonly as the police. The second is the presentation of special interest and pressure or lobby groups as unbiased authorities on a subject. Unsurprisingly the paid for commissioner of the stop voilence against women group, lady so and so, says how “terrible it all is” and “something must be done”. That isn’t a debate, or even necessarily a truthfull statement it is merely a spokesperson reading from a card.
The feelings of fear so heavily referenced is not the sole domain of women, as it used to be a routine headline about the elderly who also fear to leave their homes at night.
This fact is selectively ignored because it reveals that the true nature of the problem does not fit in to the present misandry agenda as it is related, as it always has been, to the age-old demon of the strong taking advantage of the weak.
However, in the 21st century strength is no longer the whole picture and it is probably better worded nowadays to be more inclusive. In doing so we end up with the much broader issue of the powerful taking advantage of the powerless.
With how modern society and its laws and mores are set up any protection at a street level for the powerless can only come from a suitably authorised, empowered, accountable and non-political police force.
Unfortunately, l believe, this is not what we have in the UK today.
Yes, I think that’s right. It doesn’t make it any less of a problem, but I think it’s true that the narrative is framed in such a way as to make it a feminist issue.
There must be a lot of people, particularly the elderly, who simply do not go out at night out of fear. But they never appear in the statistics.
Elderly people tend not to go out at night anyway, not just out of fear. The older people get the less they go out at night. For lots of reasons, eyesight among them.
A lot of people are arguing that men need to be educated to show more respect for women. One problem with this is that when you are a teenager you notice that quiet, sensitive lads get ignore by girls in favour of loud, lairy idiots. I’ve met countless women who’ve dismissed men for being too nice. Until that changes, many men will grow up learning that if you want to get female attention it doesn’t pay to be a gentleman.
This definitely resonates with me. The confident, loud, pushy guys are always the ones that get the most women. I guarantee it is those same men that are most like to be the ones that behave in the ways that women are scared of and intimidated by on a quiet dark street.
This smacks very much of fear-based victim blaming to me, which is a pity. Once again the finger of blame is being pointed at women for gender based violence.
I disagree. I saw it all the time when I was growing up. I am a woman btw.
I can only say that I am sorry to hear that.
“A lot of people are arguing that men need to be educated to show more respect for women.” I don’t respect anyone – respect is earned but just because I don’t respect a person doesn’t mean I wish them harm.
I think this is true of some girls but most grow out of it, probably by learning the hard way.
Some female friends have admitted to being turned on by male on male violence – again as they grow up they accept that fantasy and reality are best kept apart.
In adults it’s less common – but perhaps this is why some women are attracted (as spectators) to rugby and even boxing).
I was going to say that the solution is more police on the streets, instead of monitoring so-called hate crimes online or waddling around Tesco buying sandwiches and crisps, which seems to be their preferred method of crime prevention.
However, it is alleged that Sarah Everard’s killer is a member of the police ‘service’, and every day we read of a police person committing some or other serious crime. So, perhaps that is not the solution.
Thus we are left with the Drakeford Doctrine, under which all women move to Wales and any men still remaining in Wales are compelled to stay at home after 6pm.
There is not much relationship between the number of police officers and the level of crime. In general. This is how crime has plummeted even as the numbers of offciers went down.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that a special effort to tackle a specific crime can’t be useful. We could start with tackling sexual crimes against women – the rape conviction rate is pathetic, given that the factor most predictive of repeat rape offendig is not a conviction for rape, but an acquittal.
There is a close and direct relationship between reported crime and the number of police. More police = more reported crime; fewer police = fewer reported crimes.
A policeman in civilian clothing could be a GP, a street cleaner, a shopkeeper, a teacher. Any humanbeing is capable of any human activity upto and including any barbariry. The occupation of an offender dressed in civilian cloathing surly is of little primary importance, other than to sensationalists, politicians, and reporters. Police on the streets in uniforms, and not caged in offices, or you would in part have it in Tesco.
And how many women are committing those crimes? If a woman was to confront me in the open, I might weigh my chances/ risk against her . I might even win. If a man confronts me I have almost no chance. It’s our size & biology too. That is where the fear & helplessness is.
Also there are many other types of fears that women harbour Rape & sexual assault, dominance ( mental or physical) & the ability for it to change quickly from a verbal to physical . It’s less likely for women to be the perpetrators.
Mental health of men has scary implications on both men & women.
Being in an accident is equally distributed without prejudice, sex & size discrimination.
The logic of that last sentence should, by rights, make you a Thanos fan.
The crimes that women commit against men, such as theft or abortion of their children, are usually supported and enabled by the state, which is a much more ubiquitous and frightening adversary than the odd random nutter.
Unfortunately everyday sexism along with gender based violence is not just carried out by “the odd random nutter”.
200,000 aborted children a year is 550 a day, with the father’s consent not required. That is indeed pretty everyday.
Jon, God isn’t real, and therefore you don’t have to do what (other men say) God says. It took me a while to work out, but I’m much happier now, and I daresay, more moral too.
Hmm. Not cool.
“Almost 80% of US adults think there is more crime now than a year ago.”
And they’re right – there has been a big increase since 2015 and again since 2019. This is largely political – BLM, Defund the Police – but it’s still real.
It’s possible that this highlights (very sadly)
a very subtle but age old difference in the way the male/female brains assimilate fear.
The easy one is the fact that females do not have an overgrown ego system, for them,, talking about their fears and indeed their hopes and aspirations, is just part of the amazing communication skills females have and in essence ‘If it hurts, talk about it’
Men, as we all well known, firstly have to resolve the problem, not debate it! For a matcho male, telling his mates over a pint, that he is terrified of dark streets and attackers, generally would be taboo.
For female to female it would be simple communication.
I believe men look over their shoulder on dark nights in dark places as many times as women do, the difference being women would probably tell someone over coffee, men would fear being laughed at, or as my grandfather would have said ‘ Oh do grow up boy, stand up for yourself’!!.
Big boys don’t cry they say, girl’s cry to communicate, get rid of the steam and move on.
As to whether our streets are more dangerous now than in my grandfather’s day,
I really doubt it.
Victorian and war blackened streets were truly horrible places and certainly in the second world war, actual street crime was hourendous, simply because it was easy to hide your victims under the morning bomb rubble.
We have lost another young woman in circumstances that should scare us all, and my heart goes out to her and friends and family.
Let’s hope we learn something.
“The easy one is the fact that females do not have an overgrown ego system…”
Can you point to any medical books that provide any support for your theory? Thought not…
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Au contraire.
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There are many times when I do not feel safe on the street and in public, and I have certainly modified my behaviour to avoid such situations.
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Noisy, often drunken, agressive men and youths in groups frighten me.
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But then, I have a d1ck, so that doesn’t matter.
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No one is saying it doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. But it’s not women you are afraid of, is it? And you are much more unlikely to be raped than women.
Less likely to be raped, more likely to be murdered. Some choice.
And yet, for the most part, it is not women committing murder, is it?
That misses the point though. Dead is dead. Who is more likely to be out walking this streets at night? Men or women? And why does it matter who attacks you?
This is exactly what I am saying . No women alone or in gangs rapes or kills or assaults in the numbers that men do. I just don’t see how these comments have become men vs women when MEN are raping & killing MEN too!!! It’s about keeping women & women safe and how mental health can affect us.
I feel really sorry for the wife & children of that policeman too !!! It appears he tried to kill himself twice in custody. He must have realised the enormity of his actions and was clearly suffering from mental health issues. What a tragic outcome, not just for Sarah & her family but for the whole nation. Shame that the men see this as a divisive subject and cannot put an introspective lens on this subject
a “Freudian” slip?
What consolation is it to a man who’s being beaten to death that he’s being beaten to death by a member of his own sex?
Why even mention that, let alone present it as though it’s some kind of zinger?
Everybody knows: men are much more likely to be violent than women. Nobody needs telling that.
Wow. Talk about utterly missing the point.
Gretchen I’ve been attacked and hospitalised by a woman in a domestic violence incident. I could have been killed if I’d been less lucky. It works slightly differently than with male perpetrators; a woman is more likely to be surreptitious, deniable and opportunistic while a man is more likely to straight up punch you. But a shove down the stairs will kill you just as dead as being hit with a blunt object. It’s just easier to get away with.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve only experienced female led abuse and domestic violence. I have not reported it. If I’d died I’d have been blamed.
I looked at Jackson Katz briefly for you, just to get a sense. My impression is that there’s something slightly off about him. Like he’s trying very hard to please women for some reason.
Honestly I like being a man, and I’m not especially bitter at any women. I’m not especially thrilled to get the blame for their problems though. I think I absolutely don’t care.
I have been on the receiving end of domestic violence by two different women. In both cases, my concern for my own safety was exacerbated by my knowledge that if I was anything less than exquisitely careful in my self-defense, I would be seen as the aggressor.
Yeah that’s a situation to just leave behind you if at all possible. It seems really common and maybe one day we’ll all be adult enough to discuss it. But neither men nor women seem capable of that public discussion quite yet.
>But it’s not women you are afraid of, is it?
what’s that got to do with anything? A punch in the face is no less a punch in the face because it is delivered by someone of the same sex!
Yes, you will get less sympathy even though you may be just as concerned as a woman on the streets. Some are looking at this from the perpetrators view rather than the victims. To say but you’re not afraid of people who are less likely to be out after dark anyway stunningly misses the point.
I think you’re wrong about the curfew suggestion. It cannot be serious; it is, at bottom, clickbait. Deliberately outrageous and disproportionate, so as to provoke yet another culture war skirmish and get Baroness Whoever some attention. In the longer term, interventions like this make the other side more angry and more likely to say something outrageous and disproportionate in return, thus justifying further misandry (or whatever). This tedious dance. On and on it goes…
(It is interesting and creepy that the past year has moved the Overton window enough that such a curtailment of liberty can now be suggested — even as a cynical provocation — whereas in the past I think it would have been just too laughable. Makes me come over all Lord Sumption…)
It’s still a laughable suggestion, this year. But people have been spouting laughable nonsense forever – and I don’t think they are about to stop.
>I think you’re wrong about the curfew suggestion. It cannot be serious; it is, at bottom, clickbait.
I think you’re right. I think it’s a bit like Julie Whatsername’s suggestion of concentration camps for men. It’s counterproductive though, so you have to wonder why they do it. Personally I think it shows a deep rooted antipathy towards men. It’s a kind of venting.
Most women see right through it, which is why so many are put off feminism. Most women like men every bit as much as men like women
I think it is instructive to replace “men” with “black people” and “women” with white people.
If a woman says she is afraid of men, it is considered inapproprate to introduce evidence that the fear is unfounded. One must simply grant it legitmacy. If a white person says they are afraid of black people, it is considered highly inappropriate to permit them to justiy their fears with evidence. One must simply dismiss their fears, and with hostility to boot.
The only difference is that one group is favored by manichean wokeness and one is disfavored.
Good point. Would it ever be suggested that there be a curfew for black people if statistically they commit more physical crime?
Just to push the mental experiment a step further – if implicit bias testing showed that women had negative associations with men, this would not be interpreted as meaning that women were sexist! The negative associations would be taken as justified.
Not to even mention the role of female fear of black men in southern lynchings. Indeed, I believe there was a white feminist author who justified these lynchings because they made white women feel safer!
In Britain chivalry has been mocked by the left wing middle class since the 1930s- read Orwell. Pre 1939 all boys had boxing lessons in PT. Those whom boxed, played rugby and rowed and or entered manual were very tough by the age of eighteen years and as those who entered manual labour. Boxing was stopped in schools by a middle class Labour women MP in the mid 1960s. Many men who undertook manual labour were quite capable of lifting a 112Lb sack on to their shoulders with one hand. Many generations had been through the Armed Forces. Historically station masters on the railways were ex sergeants from the Armed Forces which was why women were not hassled and there was little vandalism.
Some of the most chivalrous men used to be Irish foremen in the construction industry. Men who worked on construction sites may have wolf whistled women but they would have been the first to come running if she cried rape. Many pubs in rough areas were owned by women and the barmaids were protected by the male customers. Also women would order their menfolk to protect a lady being hassled. However, within a decade many of these factors had gone.
Men tend to reach peak strength at about twenty six years of age and the punch is the last skill a fighter loses. A manual worker who boxed in their teens and twenties can still punch hard in their 60s, especially if they have been trained in un-armed combat in the Armed Forces. However, we have allowed the young to go un-disciplined. Cnsequently if a group of young men over the age of say sixteen are hassling a lady and a gentlemean in his late twenties, who has undertaken manual labour, boxed/Martial arts , , rowed, played rugby and /or been in the Armed Forces intervenes, he could severely injure them. A street fight last three to five seconds and if there if is risk of knife being drawn, the gentleman has to hit fast and hard. The street fight is not a video game. Many youths are verbally aggressive, physically threatening but cannot fight which means they end up injured if they attack a man who can. However, those gentlemen have families support cannot afford to lose a job due to a criminal record. Too often, The Police since the early 1970s believe the injured party or that which is least threatening.
In summary, for the last several decades gentlemen have walked on by because to intervene risks a criminal record and/or losing a job.
Why was it that only Mr Brad Pitt warned off Weinstein?
Paul Joseph Watson did a good response video on this, and didn’t shy away from talking about the politically incorrect fact that a very high percentage of rapes and murders of women and girls in the UK in recent years were not at the hands of toxically masculine English louts out to take out a white girl. No, he references the Cologne situation, and the grooming gangs that have reeked havoc on the lives of girls and women in the UK. Not a white English lout amongst them.
Some great lead comments pointing out the blatant sexism and gynocentrism of Mr. Chivers take on this event.
I followed the link to the twitter story. You have to read the replies to get the context. Scrolling a bit down, some replies mentioned the nose. Which made me curious about the nose, so i clicked on the woman’s profile picture and indeed there it is. It’s a crash course in the convoluted world of female insecurity (i’m sure there’s a corresponding world of male insecurity too, i guess). To cut it short – if you have a funny nose (but still look good) and three merrily drunk blokes on the tube are giggling about you, chances are that a “Nice hat!” remark is the polite way of saying “What a nose!”. (Or just saying “nice hat”, nothing else.) The faulty thought process which translated it to “nice t¡ts!” in the woman’s head is too ingrained for her to be aware of it, nevertheless she should get it looked at professionally before she unwittingly lands someone in court for ‘harassment’.
Another link in that piece was to the report Prevalence and reporting of sexual harassment in UK public spaces, in which we learn that TfL regards sexual harassment as “anything that makes you feel uncomfortable”. No mens rea required, merely the actus reus of making a woman feel uncomfortable. You could be looking down the tunnel for the lights of your approaching Tube train, blissfully unaware that a woman in standing at that end of the platform, (wrongly) interpreting your gaze as meaning that she is, to borrow from the article, “being stared at”. In the eyes of TfL, you are guilty of sexual harassment.
I would be hard put to find a woman in my network who hasn’t been propositioned without encouragement nor invitation on a tube or bus. I’ve had men wanking in front of me on trains at night. TFL have fortunately had the wisdom to receive training and guidance from Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism Project.
Good idea, keeping all the law abiding men off the streets so no one is there to keep the criminal element in check. That’ll make them safer.
But I know the woman advocating that is just a click bait hunter, and I ran for the bait and she got me.
My answer is to allow all women with no serious criminal history to carry concealed weapons.
It’s ridiculous that, in the UK, even carrying pepper spray is illegal. It shouldn’t be.
It is’nt ridiculous, if it were legal it could be used as a weapon to incapacitate people for criminal purposes.
A personal alarm is a better idea.
A well funded police force focusing on street crimes, violent crime – with a cps and legal system willing to convict people. And to lock them up properly. Is possibly a better idea too.
Plenty of writers have this week spoken of the low sentences given to men who kill or assault women. That is if the crime is ever reported, and the police get enough evidence and if the cps proceed and so on. However they miss the point that this is the case for most crimes.
The reality is the difference between the frailest women and strongest man is massive as is the case in many mammals.
Where men have takem steroids, there are cases of ” Roid rage ” so alarms or sprays may be of little use where one blow can knock someone out.
How to prevent the strongest men or most violent from misusng their power is vital to all societies but since the influence of Frankfurt School and Gramsci these issues have been ignored or gentility belittled.
Why not allow women to own guns to defend themselves in their own home? Prior to 1917 one could buy a gun from any hardware shop in the UK. The law was changed because of fear of communist revolution and the IRA.
And leaving aside the fact that bad news sells, or attracts clicks, some have an ideological interest in exaggerating and distorting the risks. Primary amongst them the kind of people who call for curfews on men.
More generally, I’m not sure we can allocate policing on the basis of perceived, rather than actual risk. Resources are short and must be allocated carefully. It’s an interesting question though: is the aim of policing to reduce crime, or to reduce the fear of crime?
“I have walked the streets of London and Liverpool on my own for the past 20 years, at all times of night, rarely giving it a second thought.”
I’m a man, and that just seems crazy to me.
A very good article (and by it’s own reasoning un newsworthy ). I do take issue with the idea that men do walk around will a feeling of complete invulnerability, as the author claims he does. I dont know of anyone who doesn’t take “precautions” when out at night and who hasn’t found themselves in situations of feeling fearful or anxious. I do see sense in trying to address the apparently greater levels of female anxiety through guidance on helpful behaviours. Those currently in the media were precisely the ones I “learned” in a session st College during the Yorkhire Ripper” panic. And it has to be said, though I have been assaulted by a drunk woman, in general I perceive threats as most likely to come from young men too.
It’s a shame such things always descend into “all men are rapists” type rhetoric when in fact much of the “solution” would be encouraging men to behave with more chivalry. I cant help thinking that deciding to trumpet ideas that there’s some “systemic” plot to do violence to women, and men are irredeemably monsters in waiting. Just doesnt help promote the actual things that help such ac “mind you language” and treat women with care and not be “loud”.
I suppose the problem is what is required in fact looks a lot like chivalry, and supposedly such things are “benign sexism”.
“It’s a shame such things always descend into “all men are rapists” type rhetoric when in fact much of the “solution” would be encouraging men to behave with more chivalry” – chivalry is dead and feminism killed it.
Due to the existence of gender based violence, it is clear that women do need the support of men – for how else can we ever seek to eradicate it – if not by inclusion? However chivalry as a concept is often considered sexist because the implication is that it props up women who are weak – and therefore lacking the ability or resources to cope.
Why do you need the help of men to eradicate the 40% of domestic violence instigated by women – surely you women can sort out those women without needing us men to get involved?
I suppose there’s the problem. Because, as the article points out, this is a more about perception yhan reality. The truth is that the “inclusion” you are asking for, all men to treat women differently than men because women are generally likely to be more anxious. In the same way that the heightened anxiety of the elderly to crime is responded to by additional support and concern. Feminists are wanting women to be treated with additional helps and supports. But the way of doing so by effectively telling all males they are horrible and part of an evil plot, is hardly likely to engage people. Perhaps it would be better to simply admit women are smaller and more anxiety prone and play upon men’s chivalry. That in the end is what is being asked for. As the author points out the anxiety is rooted in psychology not reality.
Spot on. And there need be no implication from that that women are less good at medicine, say. It’s not suggesting some sort of general inferiority.
I hate to point it out Gretchen, but the whole thrust of your argument is to point out that, in the situations under discussion, women are weaker. Indeed both weaker and more fearful.
Chivalry takes that into account. If you are strong, and don’t need the help, why all the complaining?
What is “gender-based violence”?
… perhaps something effective will now be done to curb the clannish rape gangs of Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford etcetera… or perhaps not …
You really do need to brush up on your knowledge of victim hierarchies.
If we hadn’t flooded the country with gangs of men who walk around the Cities, women would not be feeling unsafe. As a young woman living in London in the 1970s I knew to keep to the main streets and use buses rather than tubes due to the ling and often lonely walk between platforms. This has been sensible for everyone forever. However, I never had reason to feel unsafe walking around well lit streets.
Statistically there are more men murdered in cities than women. In towns and villages it is extremely rare for anyone to be attacked.
The answer is not more fear mongering and keeping decent men off the streets. The answer is for women to be sensible about where they walk, who they see and indeed what time of night they walk alone. The next issue is immigration. Why are there so many hooded gangs of young men from cultures at odds with ours. These people should not be in the UK. We need a decent government to say no to the traffickers, no to Open Society and no to those very silly people who create even more division by declaring curfews for men. Many men work at night to keep our streets clean and our food delivered. Are they going to be ostracised
The risk of something bad happening to a woman on the street is generally lower, except in the case of sexual assault. Society tends to give more protection to women, in fact they are valued more from a biological point of view, however much feminism denies it, and that is why more importance is given to their perceived greater fear than to the empirical reality.
Women are afraid because on average they are much weaker than men. On the other hand, it is not true that men do not also feel fear. I’m a naturally big and strong guy and I’m not usually afraid, but talking to a man with a more average body he told me, it must be nice to go on the subway at night and not be afraid. I looked at him quizzically, and asked “Fear?”, he said “You don’t realize, do you?” The experience of many men who are not particularly large or strong is similar to that of women, and rightly so, as they are more likely to suffer an attack than women.
ALL men should be concerned about Sarah Everard. As she and all women are somebody’s sister, daughter, wife. I personally join women in seeking Stronger measures against those CONVICTED of sexually motivated offences.
I would however point out to all the women campaigners at this time, – Where were they to protest about the vulnerable teenagers Groomed and raped by Muslim Pakistani’s in Rochdale and other towns ?
Seems our society is Racist in Reverse !
If there were a curfew for men after 6pm,it would certainly impact GDP. We’d all be be grindingly poor within months.
“… predominantly young white women ( and I suspect even more behind the veil)”
I think you’ll find that it was predominantly white girls because they’re all sluts, asking for it, what with their (underage) drinking, and just look at how they dress.
Of course, a good Muslim girl equally deserves it if she dishonours her family by falling in love with the wrong boy, but that’s a different phenomenon.
If you’ve walked the streets of London and Liverpool without feeling even slightly apprehensive there’s either something wrong with your biological alarm system – possibly rationalised to a condition of dysfunction – or you’ve never ventured out of the better postcodes.
“I’m a bit sceptical of surveys like the recent one which found that 97% of young women have been sexually harassed…”
You’re right to be so. The specific recent “97%” survey actually includes “being stared at” as harassment. It is obviously foolish to deny the occurrence if harassment, but the definition must be clear and objective,
Well we now learn that Mark Drakeford’s son is in jail for the rape of a minor. It’s a fact, you can google it. Said son has an IQ of 68, which is probably twice that of his father.
In what world is having a severely emotionally, ethically and intellectually retarded son an occasion for anything other than sympathy? Very ill-judged comment.
Mark was adopted from a troubled background so that he could be given better opportunities than he might otherwise have had.
Do you blame all parents for the mistakes of their adult children?
What possessed you to mention that??
Tom Chivers is usually interesting and almost invariably (is that an oxymoron) rational. However, there are some experiences, for example that of Sarah Everard’s family, where it doesn’t matter whether the odds are 1 in 10; 1 in 100; 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10,000, if you or your family are that one. It is irrelevant how many people are not sharing your worst experiences.
“streets feel safe for women”. Legislating on the feelings of anyone is a nonsense. As you stated the risk of being hit by a car is far greater that actual attack on a Western nations street. The only variation to this is when Germany let in more than a million immigrants. Then this ratio changes in the other direction. All of this rhetoric is an extension of that fake pandemic. People are not dying more proportionately. This is what the beginning of a Stasi state looks like. Hiltler, Musilini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung…. it is the usual formula.
We must as a community dismantle identity politics. Feminism is the 1st identity in identity politics. We must return to presumption of innocence, judging each individual by their actions and not the feelings another has about their actions. The hurt feelings police must be disbanded and banned from public office at all levels. Administrators, police, lawyers, Judges who have violated the civil rights of the public. Similar to the post WWII de-Nazifying of Germany. Go through the ranks to seize all proceeds of crime and prosecute the leaders in public, while ejecting all the acolytes and sycophants of this cult.
Would setting a punishing curfew on men keep soldiers from fearing losing their lives during combat, or civilian men while doing dangerous work? Or, from that matter, walking down a dark street?
The entire premise of the article, that women have some sort of ‘right’ not to be afraid, is sketchy. Also, I simply don’t believe the author has never experienced fear while walking down the street, or through a park at night.
Total safety can only be brought about by total control.
I’d always assumed that the only reason people were irrationally and childishly afraid of crime was because of the mass media, and articles like this.
If blogs and papers were running hundreds of pages of thoughtful essays every time somebody was involved in a bicycle accident, most people would be terrified of bicycles.
Is it possible that the real terror-inducers are the “profoundly decent people” writing posts like the one above?
If the UK were any safer, it would have to become a full-on totalitarian state (which would appeal to a lot of people, I know). Huge cities don’t get much safer than London—not in this part of the multiverse.
When considering crime in the Uk one needs to consider time and place. The UK was incredibly safe from the late 19th century to 1939 if one avoided rough areas such as the docks, certain industrial areas and certain pubs at chucking out time. There is indication that the mass destruction of property and the Black Market led to an increase in crime, largely amongst criminals. When assessing safety one needs to define whether violence is between men arguing in a pub, amongst criminals or random attacks on innocent people. In the 1970s, football hooliganism increased violent crime, largely amongst themselves.
I think unless one includes place and time data, statistics on violence is misleading. A pub, taxi stand, take away can be peaceful until 10pm and then violence errupts at chucking out time on a Friday and Saturday night, whereas on Sunday it is quiet. What increase crime is drug dealing and especially crack houses.
Historically heavy industrial areas which employed tough men who kept crime away from where they lived, especially The Non- Conformists. The NC was critical of drinking and gambling which caused much violence and distress. Violence was greatest in the dock( read Sherlock Holmes ) and shipbuilding areas where there was much day labour/ short term work. Until 1900 perhaps 1914, men often used to carry a walking stick which concealed a sword or was made of very heavy wood for self defence.
In general innocent people who avoided rough areas were free of violent crime from about 1890s to 1939 and this is still the case in many parts of the UK. I would suggest what has changed is that the violent areas are not so well defined and people are staying out later. Historically most people were in bed by 10pm because they had to be in work for 8 am and were married by their mid to late 20s and so were not out of their home.
Sarah : last seen at 9.pm
There are few unarmed men that cannot be effectively attacked by someone bigger or with better fighting skills or by an armed assailant.
Men like the author who feel completely comfortable walking the streets at night are more likely to be attacked and are clueless.
Worked the ER during Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the guy with no wallet snd bashed in the head always just started with, “ I was just a little drunk walking down Bourbon St at 2 AM…”
Unless a self defense expert or armed, women should be nervous walking the streets at night and only they can fix that. Like gun control, a nighttime man curfew will take law abiding men off the street not the criminals. Is that what you want?
I think that, if we want men to do more to make women feel safe, we need to model such behaviour much more in wider culture. As it is, films and TV shows are full of spunky, kick-ass women who don’t need no man to help them, can easily handle themselves in a fight, and would probably be downright offended if a man ever offered to walk her home. No doubt women naturally recognise that these are just fantasies and that it would be nice to have a big burly man intervene to defend them if it looks like they might get into trouble, but we men don’t know what it’s like to be a woman or what women want unless we’re told, and what society “tells” us is that women are quite capable of looking after themselves and don’t want our help, thank you very much. This isn’t (as it’s often straw-manned) a complaint about women not falling over themselves to thank us for being minimally decent people — quite the reverse; if you think your help isn’t needed or wanted, the minimally-decent thing to do is not to offer help.
Basically, if we want men to do things like intervene to stop cat-calling, or offer to walk female friends home at night, or cross the street to make women feel safe, then let’s actually start praising these behaviours in our general culture. Old books and films have plenty of male characters who act chivalrously and are shown as praiseworthy for doing so; there’s no reason why new productions can’t do the same. At the very least it would be a saner situation than what we have at present, where we spend half our time sneering at chivalry and the other time getting angry that men don’t act more chivalrously.
Indeed. If you watch any films/TV, it’s common still to see old men being hooked up with much, much younger females (never vice versa) si it appears normal that 50 year old men should be married to 25 year old women. It’s not. Yet we will be told it has to be that way or people won’t watch.
This article is very sensitive, very caring, and fundamentally wrong. The message that the actual danger to women is minuscule needs to be repeated and repeated and repeated. You can’t deal with irrationality by giving into it.
Great article. I agree with a number of people here who have stated the fear felt by men. Having been hospitalised once and held at knife point as a student in Liverpool – its real. If I’d reacted by being fearful of black men every time I came across a group of them – exactly as previously, I’d have been accused of irrational racism. And quite rightly. I don’t like the way men are being portrayed as the problem. Obviously some men are the problem. But that wont be addressed by blaming all men as Jess Phillips alluded to on the radio last week.
I like the balanced explanation of numbers in this piece. Not so that I can say – yeah, its more dangerous for me! But because we can only make rational decisions about risk if we are informed. This might help with appropriate reactions and then proportionate actions to improve things.
I’m an interloper from the US. (Don’t hold that against me ☺️.)
As I read and scan through the comments, I am looking for the one word that is the hallmark for such a discussion in the States:
GUN.
I don’t have time to read through each response right now, but said word is strikingly absent.
I suspect no one would be surprised by this observation.
Do I believe that had Sarah been packing a gun that she would still be alive?
Can’t answer that. And it’s probably illegal to do so anyway – carry, that is.
However, I will say that even today, young girls are not taught it is alright to fight back and are by and large not trained to do so.
Granted, that attitude has greatly lessened since my childhood, but it still remains.
I remember reading a book in my twenties written by a former police detective:
“When Women Learn How to Kill Rapists, Rape Will Stop”.
Guns were not mentioned in the equation.
However, gouging a man’s eyes out and smashing his testicles were on the agenda.
The detective admitted that many women would have trouble on an emotional level doing these things.
Interesting perspective.
Good article
Nice piece.
Aren’t human neuroses, both male and female, in fact what make humans, urmm, human? The failure to understand the nature of scale, and map simple dry statistics onto personal risk is, I contend, wilful in humans. You can show the mechanics of a magic trick to people, but it still won’t prevent them from believing something else similar they see is real. You can show the mechanics of making a horror movie to people, and people will watch it knowing it is a contrivance, but it will not prevent them from being frightened witless. This includes me as much as anyone else of course. Knowledge that a piece of music only has meaning in the context of the projection of human emotions doesn’t prevent people from welling up in response.
What are actually being triggered of course are innate biological responses built into human genetics over hundreds of millions of years. So, as to the question Tom Chivers asks, “What can be done?”, I have a solution in the long term, but it’s not one you’re gonna like.
The solution, clearly, is to use the fast emerging gene-splicing technologies, like Crispr and Prime, to edit out bits of our genetic makeup that cause unwelcome mental reactions. And more root-and-branch, also perhaps silence those genes that drive the original need to be frightened out of scale and context in the first place.
Solipsist Nation, here we come!
Hold yet another Referendum on the Restoration of Capital Punishment.
I sat on the Jury of one of last Capital trials in England, and when the dread sentence was passed it had the most salutary affect on all present.
Failing that, equip every fretful in women with a .357 Magnum as suggested by Sanford Artzen Esq above..
Feminists argue that a woman should be free to behave as she wishes and that it is up to everyone to educate men to respect that and where they do not to provide deterrents to protect women from them. This is a reasonable aim, but it is absurd to think that the changes this demands can be accomplished overnight. So, what do we do right now? We might all wish that there were not sexual predators, but our wishes are not reality. Sexual predators are a fact of life. It is at this juncture in the debate that one comes up against the rigid orthodoxy of many feminists: an orthodoxy that brooks no suggestion that young women especially, should take any precautions or alter their behaviour in any way in order to avoid the sort of outcome apparently experienced many of them. Those that do argue otherwise are quickly submerged in at best, angry denunciation and at worse a storm of Twitter led personal abuse. Senior female judge Lindsay Kushner QC knows all about that. When retiring from the bench three years ago she said: “… a woman can do with her body what she wants and a man will have to adjust his behaviour accordingly, but I do not think it’s wrong for a judge to beg women to take actions to protect themselves”. All too predictably her comments were condemned by feminists as victim shaming. There is no disputing that the risk to women is increased in certain situations, but the howls of outrage which now greet any attempt by public figures or others to emphasise the need for care in those situations, is producing the most tragic and absurd of outcomes; one in which in order to create an atmosphere in which victims of sexual crime are happy to come forward, feminist intransigence fosters a situation which is more or less certain to produce more victims in future.
In the main, agree w/some of your thinking and proposals that you’ve just expressed. But not at all w/your first 2 sentences, which completely contradict everything sensible that follows.
Very good article, strangely although written by a man, I think I gained a better insight of the problems to many women face, to much of the time.
Disappointing that you fall into the feminist trap of sexual/gender stereotyping and sexual/gender profiling.
The reality is that women have been internalising sexual/gender stereotyping and sexual/gender profiling for decades which has significantly increased due to online platforms. In other words, women are grooming themselves to be fearful of men due to the internalisation of sexual/gender stereotyping and profiling.
As a result, they have tuned their senses, instincts and intuition to perceive men as a threat when women should be tuning their senses, instincts and intuition to the threat of sexual Intimidators and sexual predators.
Over time, this will reduce their internalised threat levels and therefore make their social environment feel safer.
Overall, the irrationality of your article is that you and women imagine that by ‘decent men’ changing their behaviour, sexual Intimidators and sexual predators will change theirs when in reality they are doing what they are doing knowing it is wrong. In other words, your sexual/gender stereotyping and profiling strategy is completely illogical.
Women need to discard their sexual/gender stereotyping and profiling and tune their senses, instincts and intuition to identity sexual Intimidators and sexual predators, not men generally.
Stereotyping and profiling whether on the basis of race, ethnicity, colour,sex, gender or beliefs is wrong and deploying these dysfunctional mental states does not protect women but endangers them.
Interesting that there was absolutely no mention of self defense in the article. In the US an attacker on a dark street can never be sure that their intended victim doesn’t have a firearm. And many women do. In the case of an armed woman, an attacker may either be shot or decide to select another victim.
Same with breaking into peoples homes, that’s a risk because the homeowner is often armed. There was a case not long ago of an 86 year old woman who shot a man attempting to break into her house. She likely saved her own life.
Curfews for one sex, adults no less, would not pass US constitutional muster of course, so they could not be instituted in the US. I would be surprised if they would be legal in the UK but perhaps so.
Does this deter crime overall though? Is the US a safer place to live than the U.K.?
It certainly deters crime if you’re the woman carrying.
A curfew against all men violates the Geneva Convention, article 33, section 1.
Yes, but my question was its legality in the U.K. specifically. Is there a constitutional prohibition on curfews based on gender and or race in the U.K.?
It seems unlikely the UK would indulge in group punishment and you couldn’t do that in the US, but a consideration not mentioned in the article is the punishment for attacking and killing someone in the UK, male or female. Will Sarah Everhard’s murderer, once convicted, be given a few years and then released? Or will he be given a life sentence that actually means life? Like as in until he dies in prison. Of course, murderers have been known to murder in prison, so that would not totally prevent another such crime.
In the US, of course, murderers can be subject to the death penalty in some states. After which, amazingly, they commit no more such crimes.
In this case, I think that if found guilty he’ll be locked up and they’ll throw away the key.
Or of course, he will discover that he has been a woman all along. So his, sorry, her human rights will get him/ her to a woman’s prison.
I am dismayed to see such poor math skills and logic exhibited by Unherd’s Science Editor. Tom suggests a hypothetical woman who walks past 200 men in a given day. He then posits that would equate to 73,000 male passerby per annum, and 730,000 in a decade. He suggests that even if a small percentage of men are dangerous or threatening, a woman is bound to encounter some when the number of men is so vast.
The obvious flaw here is assuming that our hypothetical woman will encounter 200 unique male passerby consistently and without fail, day after day in perpetuity. Even in large, cosmopolitan locales, it is far more likely that a pedestrian will begin to encounter the same people each day. While there may be tourists, visitors, and changes in residency and personnel, neighborhoods and communities tend to have a fixed core group of local characters. As someone who worked in lower Manhattan for several years, I often saw the same individuals each day in the same locations going about their daily chores and routines. The idea that there is an inexhaustible supply of new strangers is simply false.
A further point is that Tom’s essay highlights the fact that the media exaggerates and distorts perceived risks. As of late, those exaggerated risks include risks of dying of COVID and the risks posed to minorities of being murdered by police. Media narratives skew public perception and create irrational fears. As Morrissey says: “The news contrives to frighten you.” These trends correspond with a time in history when perceived issues, “personal truths,” and “lived experiences” are granted equal consideration as objective facts and statistical realities. Thus, the media creates unreasonable fears that we are demanded to respect and accommodate as being “valid.” We have wandered far from the Enlightenment principles that have allowed modern society to exist and improved circumstances for individuals the world over. It’s a sorry state of affairs.
Women should feel safe on the streets, but the Woke Left are not really interested in that, or they would be out campaigning against the Muslim Grooming Gangs, and against the predominantly black gangs that intimidate people on the streets of London and other big cities. – when a lady did a video about sexual harassment on the streets, walking through a city while being filmed by a hidden camera, the biggest problem was sexual harassment from blacks and other ethnic minorities. (It was even implied that she was racist in some way because the result of her video wasn’t pc enough.)
The Woke are using this issue as an opportunity to attack their prime target, White Straight Males. That’s what it’s all about.
Every woman should feel safe.
But the woke are very focussed on targeting and blaming the straight white male for this.
But they are silent on muslim rape/grooming gangs, and the high levels of sexual assault and sexual harassment from the black street gangs.
Very specific and targeted outrage as usual.
The woke care about women’s safety, when it can be used to target their enemies, and further their cause.
Good article. We all need to take care and not expose ourselves to excessive risk. Women should be able to feel generally safe but also expect to take sensible precautions to reflect their increased vulnerability and the riskiness of any situation. Special interest groups such as trans have high-jacked protection for women, and unfortunately the feminist groups have an unrealistic demand for women in society be it health, earnings or job roles. Maybe we could get back to the basics of people being treated respectfully and eliminate the special interest noise and demands for preferential treatment.
When you add up the accounts of all the “Charities”, “not for profits” and other feminist industry outfits, it’s a £200 million a year business. Hundreds of thousands of women’s jobs depend on the encyclopaedia of grievances it deploys to sustain the claim that women are the targeted victims of everything from hatred to inconveniently set air-conditioning systems.
It would be a disaster for this industry if a magic wand was waved and their grievances were solved: “Good news! We’ve solved [insert grievance]. Pack up your things, we’re dissolving the charity” is something you’ll never hear one of its £300,000 a year CEOs declare.
So of course women don’t feel safe, and never will.
The desire to make sure people feel perfectly safe will mean we will have to sacrifice liberties and many joys that make life worth living. However, this exchange will put more power in the state, and I can’t fully trust the state. Instead of feeling unsafe from an individual who is out on the street late at night, I’ll feel unsafe all the time, even in my home, because who knows what the state will be up to? P.S. Some might argue that the the state wouldn’t have to get involved in order for people to feel safer. There could be loads of ways to encourage change. In theory, I fully agree. In practice, I fear any concerted effort to reduce people’s feelings of insecurity would end up involving the government, which is never very good at keeping its nose out of things.
It’s just that the drive and dominance that many women find attractive is not a drive to beat up and dominate other people. It is the drive to achieve and being dominant through excellence that is attractive.
(And yes, there are women who are attracted to scum bags and criminals, but there is also men who are attracted to raving mad females.)
People have fear because they are too stupid to examine a narrative being fed to them and because they are too stupid to understand statistics. Take a look at how the general public has reponsed to the Covid scenario if you don’t think this assessment is valid.
You are right to draw this parallel. We do make a mistake when we pander to the feelings of fear, rather than base policy on the real risks. We start living in a fantasy.
Statistics stop being any comfort after you are the 1 in however, many 0s.
Yeah, but if we start making laws based on inaccurate assessment of feelings rather than facts and statistics then we’re well and truly screwed aren’t we?
Its a good article and whilst many men are afraid on the streets it mostly about drug or violent crime around muggings am on man not the sexual intimidation or abuse women fear. That said in these woke MSM times there are plenty of young men/boys vulnerable to exploitation where young women send very explicit photos and texts ahead of a date and then cry foul on the night
Such actions can never excuse rape ( lets not assume its 100% one way) they certainly blur the boundaries unless there is a clear NO at the time – in my youth you might hear the phrase ” she’s a bit of tease” which normally meant you had been led along but turned down. A tactic to exposure your character and intentions, yes and perhaps one that developed in the 50/60s as courting and chaperons. gradually disappeared – like a lot of things in the past they were there for a reason. Arranged marriages are wrong but perhaps we should encourage a return to courtship and less promiscuity and sex in the media? Many young immigrants have only media images of western women which are heavily biased towards promiscuous, overtly sexual behaviours – NO respect
We cant ignore the fact that there is a game element to attraction and dating whilst there is a very clear line between being confident (as opposed to shy) and over confident to the point of unwanted physical contact.
To the point of menace, intimidation and violence towards women I am sure the psychologists have a lot to say on the source; whether this springs from a poor relationship with mum, no Dad, or a bad role model Dad
Upbringing including, absent fathers, has a lot to answer for
The Victims in this latest case include. to lesser degree obviously but still relevant, the accused’s two children
Respect starts with your family , your mother, your sister your cousin.
Why didn’t this level of debate occur when Nicole Smallman, and Bibaa Henry, we’re murdered almost a year ago?
Because people were afraid of being called islamphobic , since these women were murdered as part of the Muslim code of behaviour and family ‘honour’. And being islamophobic can get you a visit from plod, chucked out of your job…..
A victim of lockdown perhaps! Eh Tom?
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, giving all your love to just one man. You have bad times, and he’ll have good times, doing things that you don’t understand. But if you love him, you’ll forgive him, even tho he’s hard to understand. And if you love him, I’ll be proud of him, cos after-all he’s just a man.
All offenders must be subject to the same law, what ever their occupation or ethnicity.
Tom Chivers need to make up his mind if he wants public policy to be led by evidence or feelings. The evidence is that women are not at a higher than average risk of being murdered. Like elderly, they perceived a higher risk because they are less physically capable of defending themselves from attack but the facts don’t support their fear. Perhaps reassuring women might be a better approach than scaring them witless.
I’ve been harassed and frightened by pointed male attention in the past, although not for several years as I am well into middle-age. It’s important to note that along with this particular type of unwanted male harassment, there are plenty of other kinds of negative attention from the general public that can really hurt. I remember having my day completely ruined, and/or having a favorite outfit forever tainted, by snide comments and snickers from others. Usually delivered by groups of younger females; very similar to the “nice hat” comment given to the linked article. Before my nose-job, I remember the occasional unkind remarks made by both young men and young women. The men will say these things alone, or in groups. The women only say them when in groups.
We have a truly lovely daughter. Since she was about 15,, when I am out in public with her, I’ve been made starkly aware of the reaction she gets from random passers-by. Most of the attention is from men, most of it is complimentary and brief, but some of it is creepy, and some is downright scary.
But what really shocked me was the hostility directed at her by women. Glares that could kill. Twice I heard women call her a b***h as she walked by—just from daughter walking by, not looking at them—and with me, the Mom, standing right there! Daughter told us that she felt at least as bad from the women’s comments as she did about the typical cat-calls. And of course she felt way worse, and more frightened, by the creepy and lewd male attention.
Any attractive woman you talk to will tell you this.
I’ll risk it and say – that if there is one thing worse than getting male attention it is getting none – and seeing it all going to someone prettier than you are.
The accusation levelled by feminists that attractive women simply pander to male ideas of female attractiveness is clearly born out of this resentment.
I heard that the main demands yesterday involved turning misogyny into a Hate Crime. I thought it already was.
I have no truck with unpleasant or worse, threatening men. They are an abhorrent disgrace and I have no time for them at all. However, the question of how people can be made to feel safer is impossible to solve, because it is about subjective perception and is subject to the variable and indeed half mad misperception of some people. As Chivers ably points out men are vastly at greater risk of being murdered than are women, but most do not confess to quaking in their boots as they walk about. Young men especially are in danger and are very frequently subjected to violence, often of an extreme kind. Horrible and unforgivable as this most recent outrage is, it is a very rare thing in contrast to the daily violent assault and murder of men.
Even if (as I wish were the case) the vast majority of men – say 99.9% behaved with old fashioned politeness and respect towards women in the streets, there would still be unpleasant episodes from aberrant individuals. If some women were then to over generalise from these as they do now and go about feeling afraid, we would be no better off.
Any attempt to blame men as a group for the behaviour of a few, including a curfew, is actually forbidden by article 33, section 1, of the Geneva Convention, which specifically prohibits collective guilt as an infringement of basic human rights.
Not that the violation of the collective rights of men have ever been a concern for feminists.
It’s not a problem that can be solved. For example, in the winter it’s dark by 4.30pm. I get home from work and walk the dog around my local park. It’s not very well lit and it’s a regular pedestrian route to and from the city centre and railway station. I will often pass by a sole female on the path and many times I sense they feel apprehensive. I’m just an everyday middle aged chap walking my dog and I’m making women feel ill at ease. Millions of these type of interactions take place in the UK each day. The suggestion of a curfew is ridiculous; it would make matters worse. Someone intent on harm would be delighted with a 6pm curfew that they would not observe but would ensure that all the law abiding husbands, brothers, sons who simply by their presence keep the environment safer would be in and not out. Perhaps the answer is that all the chaps take it in turns to walk out for an hour with a friend, not as a patrol but simply as a deterrent.
Does it matter that a curfew based on gender would violate the Geneva Convention, article 33, subsection 1, which forbids punishment for the crimes of other people based on group identification?
The provision defines guilt as being individual. No penalties can be imposed based soley on shared group characteristics..
The irony is apparent: feminism began as a defense of civil rights based on gender. Now it has morphed into being the opposite– the removal of civil rights based on gender.
MLK 1963 “I have a dream…that my children will be judged on the content of their character, not the colour of their skin”
BLM 2020: we judge everything on the colour of your skin and not the content of your character
If women’s feeling of risk is determined by their perceptions rather than the actual risk as revealed in statistics – then it’s not clear that reducing the number of attacks will have any effect.
It will change the statistics, of course, and make them objectively safer. But will it actually make them feel safer. And this seems to be the issue for many women – they just don’t feel safe.
But who’s going to tell them they are just wired that way.
Here in the US, especially in the city of New Orleans we all know what its like to walk the streets and not feel safe. But the point I want to make is that the statement that men don’t understand what it is like to be a woman is inaccurate. In the context of the author’s point, we can and have all experienced various levels of fear because we are human. Emotions like fear are not unique to me or women or even humans for that matter. All men may not know exactly what its like to walk the streets as a woman but all men know what fear is. So instead of asserting that men can’t understand women and the fear they may feel when walking the streets, which is inaccurate, wouldn’t it be better to relate to an experience that elicits fear in men. That is the way humans attempt to understand others.
There are certain places where no-one should walk alone, male or female. Walking alone in a big city late at night is a risk but generally walking alone in a town or village is not. Although that is an assumption and probably an irrational one.
Many women, in my experience, do not feel unsafe although many do. One wonders how much of the fear lies in what females are taught as opposed to any realities. Males still experience far more violence than females when we crunch the numbers but we do not raise sons to fear walking alone at night.
I certainly raised all my children to take care and be aware.
Like others commenting here, there are areas of my local,city where I would definitely not feel safe walking around at night and one or two where I would hesitate to walk during the day – muggings are a real possibility and local ‘gang culture’ can be very threatening. If you look at someone in the wrong way etc, walk too close to them and don’t step aside etc. However, I take the authors point and in consideration of how someone might feel, often find myself crossing road if I happen to end up walking down a pavement with just a single woman in front of me or towards me.
I do, however, find myself a little annoyed and insulted by the comment made by the woman in ‘this story’ above that when a man said he liked her hat she knew that what he really meant was ‘nice tits’. A rather nasty comment which to me says more about the woman than anything else. Groups of women on nights out can and do make similar comments to men – it doesn’t mean anything other than drunken / tipsy cheekiness and totally meaningless flirting.
Looking at some of the comments below I think there is a bit of a game being played : it’s worse for women etc, men can’t understand. Have to say I totally disagree and I could equally say it worse for men – men do get raped and men do get beaten up with life threatening injuries and similarly, women can’t understand the fear experienced by men. Let’s stop this totally pointless competition to claim the title of most threatened , most scared
Its a big city thing . And within that , its an anonymity thing. If some man in a big city shouts at a woman no one knows him . He gets away with it.
In a small market town it doesnt happen. People know each other and people therefore behave better.
Big cities are bad places for humans . The air is dirty, there is no space, they are relatively dangerous and the anonymity encourages bad behaviour.
If we want a better safer life in the UK we need lower population density
Men do not understand what it is like to be a woman — to feel unsafe on the streets.
Their lack of understanding must be why men are far more frequently homicide victims than women. Can we stop with the relentless pursuit of identity politics on every single issue that exists.
I’d say that the difference between being checked out and creepily stared at lies in two things: 1 How attractive the starer at first glance is to the stared-at and 2 how elegantly the staring is performed, so to speak. I have never been an attractive woman, but am sadly well endowed in the bust area, and for me (I would say even for me, who since my husband died am starved of male attention) to find it agreeable having men talk to my bust instead of me (the intellectual part of me is to be found roughly behind my eyes), these men have to be beyond George Clooney-agreeable.
And if most men stopped being jerks – the not so small fraction of men who do it occasionally – and stopped expressing behaviour such as those described by Mr Chivers above (some of whiche even I as a decidedly unattractive woman has had to endure (I would also include snubbing ugly women as a jerkish behaviour, and I refer to the “very interesting woman” Dustin Hoffman on this matter)), there is actually a good chance that the women would be a lot less unnerved.
It is a bit like eczema.
If you treat it well, perhaps with some ointment, it will calm down.
If you scratch it day in and day out, it will not.
Is there a contradiction here, if men make women feel unsafe why would you put a man who claims to be a women in a women’s prison?
Bottom line, people are indulging in fear and conflating feelings with facts. As such they believe we should accommodated everyone’s feelings to the lowest denominator and make policy on that. Putting aside how that can infringe on everyone’s democratic civil rights and liberties.
My (first) wife sometimes introduced into her conversation, with apparently self-mocking whimsicality, a character called the Mad Axeman. He personified her feelings of physical vulnerability when left alone in the house or walking down an empty street at night – darkness was an essential element to this creature. My guess is everybody has such a character in their repertoire but women speak about it differently, as being part of their inner world. Perhaps that’s why they organise marches against – what? Max the Axe? Perhaps it’s a healthy psychological group defiance against their relative defenceless. Marching for better street lighting or public transport would make sense, but not marching against men per se.
The UK murder rate had been dropping since the 90s, but did go up in recent years before levelling off.
Don Quixote could not have written a more foolish article. We cannot build a world around women’s feelings. Such a world would be petty, irrational, and subtly malicious. For all our efforts to corral and tame their lower instincts, women prevail at becoming upset about matters which they can never control and demand that we fix them for their satisfaction.
What century are you posting this from – the one that Don Quixote fictionally inhabited? Perhaps you also believe women’s wombs should still be forcibly removed to “tame their lower instincts”? Off to Bedlam with the lot of us, forsooth our feelings are so “petty, irrational, and subtly malicious”.
That’s more than a bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it? If your feelings are such that you feel unsafe walking around at night, maybe you should not walk around at night.
What is being ignored is if a women cries rape how many will come to their assistance? I have been attacked on a street in broad daylight and passers by pretended not to notice. Here is a question for the ladies ” Of all the men you know, what percentage would have the skills and spirit to help a women crying rape to fight off multiple attackers?”. Those who undertake assaults in public do so because they have experience which shows most people will not help those being attacked.
In The Middle Ages a parish constable was elected annually. If the PC raised the hue and cry to catch a criminal, any man between the ages of 15 and 60 years of age who did not assist was fined. Should we make it illegal not to assist those being attacked in the street. This way an assault on one person becomes an assault on society.
What a great argument for being armed, eh?
QED
This is an excellent article on how women feel and perceive danger and personal threat. In addition I believe that women are also more security conscious when it comes to protecting themselves and their families at home. They are much more likely to want security measures put in place than men. Possibly it goes back to the notion that men were once the hunter-gatherers and women were the nesters looking after the homestead.
A recent piece by Julie Blindell (https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-are-so-many-women-being-killed/) argues that the authorities are far too tolerant of domestic violence. It comes up from time to time but nothing is done, perhaps because of the psychology that Tom Chivers talks about.
Are we not allowed to balance the fears of women against the overwhelming increase in the freedom of their lives since WW2? Is it surprising that men are somewhat disorientated by this and in some cases react in the worst way? Until very recently in the million years of human existence, no woman was considered safe unless she was under the personal protection of the men of her family.That role of protection now falls on ‘society’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) or more specifically on the police who have many other fish to fry. I somehow don’t think the police are going to provide individual security for women wanting to walk the streets at night any time soon.
In Britain the countryside women were safe to work, women worked in the mills and as barmaids in pubs in docks. Shepherdess looks after sheep and she could not do her job if she was at risk of being murdered.
The Met’ was created because the massive growth of London and other cities produced slums, amongst a large transient population amongst, criminals flourished. In The 1880s, Hampstead was was safe, Limehouse was not.
The reduction in crime in London and other cities between the 1840s, when slums were at their worst to say 1939 was massive but it required a combined forceful approach to to stop the 10% of the population who are criminals, from damaging the lives of the 90% of the law abiding population.
“At risk of being murdered”
Lets unpack this. I am at risk of being murdered right now. I’m posting this from the break room at work. Somehow I am able to do my job. That is because the risk is statistically negligible.
We are all at risk of being murdered all the time. The question is how at risk.
For a science writer, that’s an appallingly illogical opening. Most men don’t know what it’s like to feel unsafe on the streets most of the time, is perhaps what you should have written. And the murder of a woman does not affect whether a man feels safe or not.
Weak or non-violent men who have a history of being picked on and victimised can certainly know what it’s like to feel unsafe on the streets.
So, two of our very sane and professionally accomplished women friends say my wife needs to learn how to use and carry a small concealed weapon. Their argument? It makes them feel safer.
Perhaps this “equalizer” is necessary for women to feel safe? If so, then in spite of my general abhorrence of weapons, I can live with it.
“But it does mean that some women will be much more likely to feel threatened than others. Which will in turn mean that it will be harder to reach a point where all, or enough, women feel safe.”
This is difficult to parse. Is the underlying theory of perception and cognition that feelings determine objective reality? Feelings are part and parcel of objective reality but are they the arbiters of what is actually real? It seems to me that what is being assumed here is the notion ‘I feel it–>I think it–>it is true’. ‘I feel you are threatening me–>you are threatening me’ or, ‘I feel this is a threatening situation–>It is a threatening situation’. So is there is no internal linguistic cognition being performed to ascertain whether there is a threat?
Perhaps this is a form of representative heuristic.
Might the reason we think crime is increasing is that over the course of a year every one of us has hundreds of people trying to scam us out of money?
Excellent article and comments on here.
Which goes a very little way to gainsaying the ‘patriarchy’
Have to admit, I’m 6’3″ 16st man but I never feel ‘safe’ late at night anywhere. Especially not Liverpool or London
What crime has been over in the world if not getting only different appearances? What about the fact that the predator was a.. policeman.. ?.. that is the worrying side for me. And then the Police upsets those gathered to grieve and makes arrests… and this is how the Police is being perceived as the bully and some might even start asking to defund the Police similarly to the Usa fashion, I will not be surprised… Alike incidents, where the Police makes itself the incompetent protagonist, are taking place all over the world, sooner or later. Are those incidents happening by chance?
“Men will never understand how women feel”. What load of bs. Psychology and physiologically we all experience fear in basically the same way. Their are different people who will experience the same situation differently but due to various different circumstances and variables but to say humans do not or cannot have shared of experiences emotions is ridiculous. All of us have experienced all levels of fear and apprehension in our lives. To suggest a man cannot understand the fear a woman feels in just wrong.
I think the point is that women feel fearful doing things where a man would not. I’m a bloke and I walk my dog around the local park in the evening without a second thought, my sons do also, my wife does not, my daughters wouldn’t. Chaps seem to enjoy more dominance in our environment than women – but I don’t think there’s much we can do about it – it gets dark at night and our differing responses seem to be a consequence of our nature.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?? As highlighted below, of course all men feel fear some times in their life, BUT not every night when they are out.
The way for women to feel safe:
1) Carry a personal alarm
2) Do not walk in remote-from-people places, like parks
3) Take a cab if worried
4) make sure the cab isn’t driven by Warboys
Many men make a big effort to make sure they do not appear threatening to women. Crossing streets, passing them quickly, falling back, avoiding eye contact . The call for more laws may be proportionate , but it will also move the goalposts for all men, much as the race debate moves the goalposts for cross cultural relations. The future is looking less and less free in the erroneous search for a risk free world. Technology will no doubt be used to ensure compliance and those in charge will control our everything.
Robbery is unpleasant but rational. The casual irrational stabbing isnt.
I have walked at night in Pakistan and Africa and felt safer than in parts of London. Why ? Because there if I was being robbed it would be with a purpose. The Knife attacker in London is likely drugged up and illogical.
Most women are in fact abused and/or killed by a male they know. Most likely, a current or former romantic partner; fathers and uncles or other family males, or a male friend too but less likely.
Your husband is more likely to be your murder one day than some rando jumping out of bushes. But it’s natural to project perceived fear into unknown men.
Moreover, are not only afraid of perceived likelihood of assault or worse, they also fear the victim-blaming that will entail if they speak up about it.
You can see this reflected in UnHerd’s comment section. These archaic misogynistic #notallmen attitudes exist in the justice system too.
Pointing out that all men are not violent, lustful cretins is not misogyny; it is a refutation of misandry.
Feminists find themselves in a hypocritical bind. Wanting to be treated equally but preferably when it comes to murder and violence, despite the fact that about 30 per cent of annual homicides are female victims. There women in combat units in the army now, how is that going to work?
I expect I’ll be howled down for this, but here goes: any woman who walks anywhere after dark is at increased risk of attack, especially if they are walking across a common. (Ditto men, but for the purposes of this comment, I’m focusing on women.) What on earth was she thinking? Why didn’t she get a taxi? Why the surprise at the outcome? That isn’t to say I think she deserved it, but honestly, it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. Understandably, women wish the world to be a different place, but guess what, it isn’t, and neither will it ever be devoid of the dangers particular to them. The idea that men who pose a threat to women can be ‘educated’ is laughable. Fortunately, such men are few, but they will always be ‘out there’, and women will always have to take precautions against encountering them.
It now appears she was not abducted on the common. So that’s a bit of victim blaming wasted
Excellent article. I feel heard and not denigrated. Fear is a hard-wired instinct. It can be rationalised away to some extent but not eradicated. In fact would it be healthy to do so?
To even try and address this issue without a mention of the horrific numbers of rapes and sexual assaults
How do you edit in this platform ?… to continue from my last post… against women is quite frankly ridiculous. It’s not about being murdered to scares women its the fear of being sexually assaulted and raped. This fear never enters the m8nd of men when walking
Well reasoned – and of course the same discussion about risk applies to COVID hysteria.
I come to this thread after it was mailed out today in a boxset about women in danger. I’ve read many comments again recently about women living in fear to walk the streets and found it very confusing. Particularly since I lived and worked in the area where Sarah Everard was kidnapped for thirty years. I regularly met people (women) who said they were afraid to go out at night even when the worst situation always seemed to be the attacks on gay men around the area nicknamed Cottage Corner. I never feared walking across Clapham Common and I never will. At any time of the day. To do so is to give my own power away. This does not mean I have not encountered what I might describe as sleazy behaviour from men and one case of a very mentally challenged man following and harassing me. It just doesn’t translate into fear of going outside and/or fear of strange men.
What I wanted to say however, having read a lot of the comments, is that there was a lot of discussion six months ago about the biological differences between men and women and that women would always be likely to feel fear because of being biologically weaker – with some debate about the nature of violent women thrown in. What this all seemed to miss, in my opinion, is that fear is not a natural state. It is taught. Or maybe you could push to learned. By one generation from the next. Probably mainly in childhood. So I have fears. I learned them and was also actively taught them. They just didn’t happen to be about going outside and/or of strange men. Consequently I do think we can do something about how women feel about men. We can explore why they fear them or why they fear going outside and work on minimising that fear – not by removing men or changing the outside world but by recognising what the trigger is, where the learned behaviour came from and why.
To clarify, this is a whole different subject to ensuring that men are less violent or intimidating towards women. I also think the debate here focused too much on the innate qualities of maleness and didn’t address the things men learn or are taught about male identity etc although the discussion about nice guys not getting the girl certainly touched on it. Objectification of women via spaces such as online porn, when experienced in a vacuum by sexually immature boys could definitely be debated as having a link to how they might behave as adults. I do love a nature versus nurture conversation and I’m happy to consider both as relevant but the difference is that we can change the nurture stuff – either as it happens or later when we realise what it might have done to skew our view of life.
One line I disagreed with: “women tend to be more risk-averse than men.”
If that were true, the human race would have died out centuries ago. Until recently, childbirth had an extremely high fatality rate. It’s also very scary and painful.
What could be riskier than pregnancy and childbirth?
Sky diving? Hang gliding?
Men have no idea what “risk” truly means.
This is a great article – and I think you make the point that much of the fear women feel is inflicted as much by ourselves as it is by men.
We are at far more endangered by choosing the wrong man to marry or by being born into the wrong family.
Strangers and the streets are not the biggest threat to women (or children): family members and male intimate partners are the biggest threat to women and children.
My advice to young women – go out, live alone,travel alone, do what you want – but listen very carefully to your intuition when you choose which man to date or to marry.
Failing to trust your gut is the most dangerous thing a woman could do.
Just a few observations: we cannot address this issue in isolation from how men relate to women (and to some extent how women allow that to happen and behave in response). We cannot address this issue without realigning the power imbalance between the sexes. We possibly have to change how we think about sex and gender as well. Women generally just do not trust men – they do not trust them to respect women, to treat us with dignity, not to harm us. We don’t trust any men because we have all experienced so much disregard, patronising, aggressive, angry, abusive and violent behaviour all our conscious lives. EVERY. SINGLE. WOMAN. So until men change their entire relationship to women – and until women stop forgiving, supporting or accepting the current behaviours – we are not going to fix it. And I will carry on carrying my keys in my hand when I walk the streets of any city.
“Women generally just do not trust men” – for many men the feeling is mutual. Difference is when a woman makes a claim of ‘he did something that made me feel uncomfortable’ the guys gets arrested or loses his job as social media piles in without the need for anything old fashioned like an arrest, trail and conviction.
Why are you discussing this as if there is a lumpen ‘men’ category with a single mind and single objective, acting to only benefit ‘men’ above all others? Men, like women, come in all shapes and outlooks, and most would see caring for the women in their lives as a primary life mission.
Remember, people are individuals. Most of us are just muddling through making mistakes along the way but hopefully learning from the process. Seek out some mutuality and humanity, instead of caging people by category. Yes, some individuals – men and women – are bad and we all need protection from them. But turning this into a cartoonish stereotype of ‘all men’ goes nowhere to improving things for everyone.
Your lazy, egotistical approach to the matter – and disregard for your own duty of responsible, fair and balanced judgement of individuals instead of groups – is making the world a miserable place to live.
Put on your big girl’s pants and wake up to the abuse you are delivering to the immense majority of men who are far more decent than you care to admit.
The problem is in my experience, women don’t respect a man they don’t look up to. For many men, it’s a balancing act between knowing when to be assertive and when to step back. Every woman is different too, so there is no simple solution. Unfortunately, from personal experience, I have learned that the crueler I am to a woman the more she respects me.
This has to be one of the saddest comments on here this evening.
Thank you, Catherine. It’s not meant sadly – I think it’s just the eternal battle between the Masculine and the Feminine. We’ll probably still be having these kinds of discussions a thousand years from now.
Not really. There are both men and women who expect to be and accept being mistreated. What’s sad is choosing one of them.
You might want to re-think the women you are attracted to. Or those who are attracted to you. It isn’t about an eternal battle, it’s about choosing women who like or at least accept being mistreated. Btw, there are men who like being mistreated as well and I would suggest to any woman that selecting such men should be re-thought as well.
Gee, maybe because…get out your calculator:
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf
Any chance of converting this to a clear and polite sentence which negates the need for people to find a separate document ?
You don’t need to “find” a separate document, dimwit I found it and posted it. And I don’t need to be “polite” to anyone for them to click on the link and perform basic reading and arithmetic to learn something they did not know. The onus is on the individual to learn things they do not know instead of whining about whether or not someone is “polite”.
Since apparently you desire someone to explain the document to you, it is the compilation of violent crime statistics from the US. 2018’s to be precise. There are hundreds of thousands of male and female victims and the majority of perpetrators by a LARGE (orders of magnitude) margin a MEN. So they violently assault males and females in very large numbers but some people seek to “dispute” that FACT. I therefore, quite nicely I might add, provided numerical facts rather than engage in an argument about anyone’s opining about those facts. That’s a waste of time since facts are not subject to debate/argumentation.
Have a nice day! (That’s me being “nice”!)
That rather depends on whether it is something you would like them to learn. Bringing people round to your way of thinking is something you have to work at. If you won’t, why should they.
“woke cathedral” eh? Giving the game away a bit there, aren’t we? Can you start frothing about “cultural marxism”, then I’ll have a row on my bingo card. Go on, you know you want to.
Again, wrong website, /pol/ is over there —>
In the past, women used to be chaperoned when they went out and about town. Perhaps we should return to that.
Wrong site: /r/incels is over there ->
If you substitute “some” for “many”, he’s probably not that far wrong, and for reasons of evolutionary biology. You don’t have to be some social inadequate playing at politics and completely missing the point to see that.
But I suspect that you do not seriously think the previous poster is an incel, but merely wished to “big yourself up” by insulting him.
Weak men often mistake rudeness for strength.
I don’t think making this point necessarily makes someone an Incel. I might suggest to Hopp that he’s made his description a bit too cartoonishly – I would use the word “leadership and assertiveness (dominance)” over the blunter “power and aggression” words in terms of quite what turns women on.
But I think there is a fair bit of truth to what he says.
Sorry, but thinking that women only fancy bad guys (so it’s their fault when they get assaulted by them) is absolutely classic Incel stuff. Along with the implied or explicit “why don’t they like Nice Guys like me?”, of course.
I’ve been the Nice Guy complaining about that sort of thing in my geeky youth (though I never suggested that the women concerned deserved assault). My mistake was to assume that merely being a decent human being creates some obligation on the part of women to get into a relationship with you. Lacking social skills, I also couldn’t distinguish having confidence from being a bad guy. (To anyone like the younger me reading this, I recommend taking up partner dancing once it’s allowed again 🙂
Finally, we should acknowledge that the complaint is sometimes true: there are bad (rather than merely confident) guys who never seem short of offers from women. Some women write to convicts seeking a relationship with them, for example. Having been reading the Stoics (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca), I think they would give short shift to Nice Guy complaining about the success of the bad guys, though: to Stoics, the only good is a virtuous character, and romantic success a “preferred indifferent” (see The Stoic spectrum and the thorny issue of preferred indifferents). So what if the bad guys got some foolish women to sleep with them, they’d say, is that worth spoiling your own character by becoming like them?
It isn’t the woke idiotic left, any more than the complacent, idiotic right. It’s women.
But the suggestion has been made mainly in a tongue in cheek fashion, to encourage men to see what it feels like to have restrictions placed on you for being a victim. Do try to keep up!
Robert i suggest you turn the page and read the next chapter….you’re still playing catch up.
But we all know full well that behind all of this is a group of politically motivated (bitterly resentful) women, and their woke male allies, seeking to ‘disempower’ ‘men’ as part of their assault on an imaginary tyrannical patriarchy. The MSM is infested with them. That’s why such non-empirical data is accepted as good as fact, personified perceptions of reality never get tested, just accepted. It’s really, really boring now and utterly contrary to the truth of things, but those women with an axe to grind won’t stop. The fact that such a suggestion was even voiced in the House of Lords – and it was made in earnest mind, and then gradually ‘tongue in cheeked’ once the sheer abhorrent, lazy and casual sexism of the idea was exposed for what it is – just shows the desperate lengths certain women will go to to achieve power over men. Add into this Jess Phillips’ blatant lie in Parilaiement that the murders of women are considered ‘acceptable’ -it’s just ugly, barefaced, divisive lies -usually put forward by a patronising, out of touch, liberal elite who have found no way of making a more normal useful contribution to society.
“We all know full well that behind all this is a group of politically motivated (bitterly resentful) women and their work male allies, seeking to disempower men…”? I find this extremely offensive. Speaking as simply a regular white middle class woman, I am not the slightest bit woke, bitter, nor particularly politically motivated, nor do I have any axe to grind. Despite the many advantages I enjoy, I know exactly the fear that this article talks about – both for myself and my teenage daughter – on a daily basis. That fear is real. Your elegantly cloaked comment is ugly, patronising, sexist, and entirely misses the point. Just like the comments – albeit not so eruditely phrased – of so many oafs online. You make no useful contribution whatsoever to society here.
go on gretchen. What is wrong with this putrid publication’s comments section. The literal dregs of humanity swim around in this sewer of simpletons. Odd.
Considering the statistics (see the article) which show how rare ‘stranger’ murder of women is, perhaps it is worth considering whether your “fear” is neurotic rather than rational. If it is neurotic, then it might be worth exploring further to find out what lies behind this fear.
Personally I don’t, or ever have shared your fear, I lived in London for the first 25 years of my life. I have female relatives in London, as far as I know they do not share your level of fear. That does’nt mean we have not had our fair share of wolf whistles, shouting from cars, staring, even rudeness (from drunks usually) but I for one accepted that some unwanted male attention was probably inevitable. If women dress in a way that signals sexual attractiveness you are going to get unwanted as well as wanted male attention.
That does’nt mean there’s any excuse for uncouth male behaviour but it does mean I can discriminate between men worthy of my attention and men who are at best pitiful, at worst dangerous. That is a life lesson which needs to be learnt.
I think you are lying to yourself when you say “I have no axe to grind”, the fact that you are so offended by a commenter saying “there is a group of politically motivated women etc” suggests that you do.
100% agree. Ditto live in south London. Ditto not afraid. Ditto receive unwelcome attention and welcome attention, and can tell the difference between the two. Have been on the receiving end of more than one assault (minor and not so minor), and absolutely do not live in fear of men or fear of being attacked. I do choose to not walk down some streets, sensible for any women/ man. I will be reading the link to essay “Different Worlds” on why people perceive the same events so differently.
Well said. We all abhor the horrible events which sparked this off, but I for one get VERY angry when such aberrant behaviour is dumped at the feet of men in general. I have never behaved lewdly and offensively with women in the manner discussed above and I doubt very much that any of my three sons did either. Yet very frequently we hear women (rightly angry about events like this) who go too far and blame men in general and even suggest extreme and oppressive ‘solutions’ such as curfew for men. While some are just being hyperbolic, others really mean it. Lewd ignorant shouting is certainly a minority pursuit among men and is confined to those of low intellect. Sexual violence is even more unusual and inclination to stranger murder of women is the predilection of a vanishingly small group of individuals.
Sadly you are behind the political times. The argument has shifted to an idealogical one which this article is trying to shed some factual light on. Anyone who doesn’t feel apprehensive walking down the Caledonian Road at 2am on their own would be an exception. A pity Chivers has never felt so, must live in Chelsea.
I got held up by a knife weilding man near Caledonian road, racially motivated too. It was by a West Indian who hated Irish people (as he told me) – my shock and confusion was heightened by the fact I’m not Irish. Didn’t want to enrage the nutter with a knife though by debating with him.
Gretchen – Odd as it may seem, much of this hinges on the difference between man and men.
If a man goes out and kills a woman, he did it. It was not in some way perpetrated by men in general, or toxic masculinity, or the patriarchy. It was committed by the man who did it.
All of us want to stop that happening. No one has an interest in violent men being out on the street.
What gets men’s hackles up is the idea of collective male guilt peddled by people like Harriet Hartman and worse. If directed at black people, say, this collectivisation of guilt would be utterly unacceptable and named for what it is.
Well said.
I wonder whether there is another interpretation for the phrase “…behind all this”. I went back and read the comment you are replying to and that comment was a reply to the initial comment “But the suggestion has been made mainly in a tongue in cheek fashion, to encourage men to see what it feels like to have restrictions placed on you for being a victim..”.
That comment was about the suggestion made in the House of Lords of placing all men under a curfew. Hence “all this” may pertain to all the motivations behind that suggestion.
In my view that is a more reasonable interpretation.
If you experience this type of fear on a daily basis, then maybe its you personally. Not trying to be rude but to live in fear on daily basis from anything is not living nor living in reality. If you wish to live in fear their are much more dangerous things threatening you then this issue as the author’s points out.
Ah yes, Jess Phillips, the woman whose response to the sexual assaults on women in Cologne a few years ago was to say that it was similar to what happened on Broad St in Birmingham every week.
What most shines through in your words, rather like that of the common online troll, is a hatred of women. Only you know why that is, and I would not seek to meet your fear and hatred with the same. But I would really like it if you would listen to Jackson Katz’ Ted talk, who’s work seeks to empower rather than disempower men – by putting them at the heart of this debate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvSfeCRxe8
Generally, people who detect “hatred” in others merely demonstrate their own idiocy. What shines through in your words is a refusal to engage in the substance of what Julian said, and a choice instead to resort to labelling and name calling.
Why is that?
He’s expressed criticism of and a dislike of certain women (and their male allies).
I would always caution everyone about making that “hatred of women” kind of generalisation, because it makes them look a bit unhinged or dishonest.
“…personified perceptions of reality never get tested, just accepted. It’s really, really boring now and utterly contrary to the truth of things…”
Juilan, that’s really really funny, the best piece of ironical writing…hang on…it was meant ironically, wasn’t it? I mean, you did start with, “But we all know full well…”, which would be a personified perception – so it must have been irony, surely. Yeah, irony, I’m sure of it – and really really funny, too.
Oh, just for clarity, what with me being a man and all, if anyone called me ‘woke’ to my face just because I don’t believe women should live in fear – they’d find my response more iron than irony.
All the best
Hate crime is exactly like this. You assert that it happened and it did even when nothing of the sort occurred.
None of the above indicates any sort of approval or casual acceptance of what happened to that poor young woman. Monstrous, but it is nothing to do with 99.9% of men who would never do anything of the sort.
I suspect that suspect in custody has gone nuts and has a brain tumour or something. The indecent exposure allegation from last week suggests an individual out of his mind all of a sudden.
That’s huge speculation, it’s completely unknown why whoever killed the poor lady did it. If we presume that the suspect is guilty we do not know I believe yet if he was life long evil (but concealed it), if he knew the victim or/and had become obssesed with her, if he had fallen for the Incel woman hating idiotic narrative or as you suggest (and I find highly unlikely) that some medical condition drove him to do it.
My money is on the lone wolf born evil person (culture can only do so much) . It’s the least best theory, if it was purely cultural or medical then there is a cure, the lone wolf evil scheming man is really difficult to detect.
The very same Jess phillips who described the sexual assaults on young women by gangs of muslim men in German cities on new years eve a couple of years ago as just like any saturday night out in Birmingham city centre ,just lads having a laugh.
What restrictions are placed on women?