“why would you be afraid of walking at night? Doesn’t seem like bad things happen to me”
“I basically believe the narrative that women have more to worry about here than men, that thing are legitimately dangerous for women walking alone at night”
“I believe that, actually, violent crime at night is just quite rare, and I’ve heard [but not checked] that men are actually more likely to be violently attacked than women. And the ‘women have something to be scared about here that male-privilege obviates’ feels a bit off. And it feels impolitic to say, but, actually, it maybe is better for women to become more calibrated about their safety.”
“Women get harassed a lot more than men, and with each harassment instance one of the issues is that they have to model whether the harassment is likely to escalate to a violent conflict, which they’d probably be at a physical disadvantage in (and regardless, having to escalate to ‘be ready to fight’ is really scary). But, I still think people are overestimating this danger – most harassment doesn’t escalate to conflict. In Berkeley I have homeless people come up and yell at me a lot, and I feel an initial jolt of fear, but then try to shrug and move on, and I think this would be correct for women to do too.”
“Hmm, actually, some of the harassment I’m seeing / hearing about actually sounds pretty bad, somewhere in between catcalling and violent conflict, and I’m now not sure what to think about the base rates here.”
(The last update came from hearing from a female friend who described herself living in “a bad neighborhood”, and having a bunch of late-night safety habits that seemed excessive to me. But it turned out they had multiple instances of people following them to their house, masturbating ‘at them’ through their fence, and coming up to their front door and banging on it loudly, which were all more extreme than I had encountered before and updated me more towards a more legit Different Worlds hypothesis)
I’ve gone through a few phases of beliefs here:
“why would you be afraid of walking at night? Doesn’t seem like bad things happen to me”
“I basically believe the narrative that women have more to worry about here than men, that thing are legitimately dangerous for women walking alone at night”
“I believe that, actually, violent crime at night is just quite rare, and I’ve heard [but not checked] that men are actually more likely to be violently attacked than women. And the ‘women have something to be scared about here that male-privilege obviates’ feels a bit off. And it feels impolitic to say, but, actually, it maybe is better for women to become more calibrated about their safety.”
“Women get harassed a lot more than men, and with each harassment instance one of the issues is that they have to model whether the harassment is likely to escalate to a violent conflict, which they’d probably be at a physical disadvantage in (and regardless, having to escalate to ‘be ready to fight’ is really scary). But, I still think people are overestimating this danger – most harassment doesn’t escalate to conflict. In Berkeley I have homeless people come up and yell at me a lot, and I feel an initial jolt of fear, but then try to shrug and move on, and I think this would be correct for women to do too.”
“Hmm, actually, some of the harassment I’m seeing / hearing about actually sounds pretty bad, somewhere in between catcalling and violent conflict, and I’m now not sure what to think about the base rates here.”
(The last update came from hearing from a female friend who described herself living in “a bad neighborhood”, and having a bunch of late-night safety habits that seemed excessive to me. But it turned out they had multiple instances of people following them to their house, masturbating ‘at them’ through their fence, and coming up to their front door and banging on it loudly, which were all more extreme than I had encountered before and updated me more towards a more legit Different Worlds hypothesis)