It’s a memory from many years ago, of me running late at night on a dark suburban street.
Two women were walking ahead in the same direction. As I stomped past them on the sidewalk, one muttered, “Oh my God” in deflated horror.
It dawned on me that the two didn’t know what to expect from a man vectoring toward them in a place free of streetlights.
Not what you’d call a deep insight on my part. But it was a major clue how different things are for men and women.
For a large part of their lives, females have to navigate a sliding scale of gender-specific bother, which can extend from degrading remarks to sexual harassment and beyond.
This is the reality that most males don’t viscerally get: the gut sense for women that there can be serious consequences for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because they can be physically overpowered by the opposite sex, women learn to move through the world with the alertness of gazelles on an open plain.
Only a small fraction of men present a physical threat to women, but here is the crucial thing: it doesn’t work the other way.
Violence from women is and has been much rarer than violence from men, no matter which culture you choose in whatever historical period.
Personally, I think I won the genetic lottery a long time ago just by being a born a straight white male. I have walked city streets around the world, often at night, with caution but little fear. And in the work world, I have never been subject to humiliating remarks or unprofessional conduct — at least not the way many women have experienced.
Put it this way: during my pre-freelance years, even if I skipped into the office or factory floor wearing a skimpy outfit and a com-hither look, it’s unlikely I would have increased my chances of being groped by any sane human.
It’s instructive for a man to ask any woman and her friends about their negative experiences with men. Because seriously dude, unless you are Perseus battling a snake-haired Gorgon or James Caan’s character in Misery, you don’t have a clue.
It’s not all port and cigars for us guys, of course. Seismic cultural shifts began for men long before feminist Susan Faludi penned her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. Females graduate from university and college in higher numbers than males across the western world, accounting for 58 per cent of graduates within OECD member states in 2009. And we all know how the “girl power” meme leaves boys in the cold. But the latter is a symptom, not the disease.
The disease is a dominator culture in which women have won the questionable right to fight in combat. Some figures from the U.S. armed services, as noted by Guardian writer Alexandra Topping in a review of the 2012 film The Invisible War: “a female soldier in combat zones is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire; over 20 per cent of female veterans have been sexually assaulted while serving in the US army; of 3,192 sexual-assault reports in 2011 only 191 members of the military were convicted at courts martial.”
The risk to women is not limited to battlefields and barracks. A recent Rolling Stone article paints one particular frat house at the University of Virginia as a cross-generational epicentre of sexual assaults. The words to the frosh song “Rugby Road” — unprintable here — are certainly enough to get outsiders wondering about the institutional mindset of UVA.
The debate about informed consent aside, women are at an anatomical and hormonal disadvantage when they play the male games of sex and war. There are better self-esteem boosters than exploring polyamory or baiting ISIS, considering such adventurism is more likely to benefit those with XY chromosomes.
Thinking back to my oblivious sprint past two frightened women on a dark suburban street, an observation by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood comes to mind.
“Why do men feel threatened by women?” she asked a male friend. “They are afraid women will laugh at them,” he replied. She then asked a group of women why they feel threatened by men. “We’re afraid of being killed,” they responded.
geoffolson.com
