The author apparently has the privilege of living in a bubble where everyone she knows fundamentally approves of all her opinions, but occasionally has one person out of 20 show up at a gathering who disagrees, and just may throw a fit if that person dare voice their opinions.
Me—atheist, egoist, libertarian—I’m lucky if one person out of 20 won’t think I’m the devil if I’m open about my opinions. I weep for the discomfort she feels when my existence impinges on her awareness.
I note that a Christian or Muslim describing how they are hurt by those who dare openly(!) question their sacred values wouldn’t receive such polite consideration, and certainly not by this blogger.
Me—atheist, egoist, libertarian—I’m lucky if one person out of 20 won’t think I’m the devil if I’m open about my opinions. I weep for the discomfort she feels when my existence impinges on her awareness.
Are you ever in physical danger because of your opinions?
Not really a valid question; I feel similarly, but you quickly learn to suppress it when the situation becomes questionable. Anyone who reacts strongly to my more mainstream opinions, is almost certainly going to be a lost cause when it comes to my extremist opinions. I can’t say I’ve been in physical danger because I’ve never pushed it to that point. However, I can think of instances where physical danger was on the table of options (the KKK in minnesota is a good example.)
However, I can think of instances where physical danger was on the table of options (the KKK in minnesota is a good example.)
My point was: experience of a male white atheist, egoist, libertarian is very different from the experience of a female (of any persuasion). The former does not experience a constant physical danger (and the associated stress of being aware of said danger) whenever he leaves the house.
You need to be a very special person to be able to have a calm detached discussion about things that threaten you every day of your life. Not in a specific place in Minnesota, but everywhere.
a male [...] does not experience a constant physical danger (and the associated stress of being aware of said danger) whenever he leaves the house.
With the exception of rape, which tends to be a special case in most senses, men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of every other type of violent crime including homicide. In addition, men make up 92% of workplace deaths (and presumably a correspondingly high proportion of the injuries) and are also significantly more likely to die in an accident off the job (again, presumably a similar distribution of injuries).
The idea that men are somehow protected from physical danger by “male privilege” is simply a preposterous notion.
There’s a very big difference between men being part of violent crime and dangerous jobs and needing to worry for your physical safety as you walk down the street. No one is claiming men are protected from “physical danger” as if they have some sort of DND “Immunity to nonmagical weapons”. The fact that men are involved to a much greater extent in violence and prison and whatnot IS a big deal but it’s not actually opposed to the problem of women being on average smaller than men and a target for rape.
There’s a very big difference between men being part of violent crime and dangerous jobs and needing to worry for your physical safety as you walk down the street.
No, no there isn’t.
Most crimes, including most violent crimes, are not rape. Aside from rape, men are much more likely to be the victim of a crime, especially a violent crime. So if you’re talking about how much someone should be worried about being the victim of a violent crime… how exactly is maleness supposed to protect someone when it predicts a much higher likelihood of being targeted by criminals?
And even beyond that, even mundane stuff like being hit by a car while on the shoulder of the road is more than twice as likely to kill a man as a woman. With no malice at all, a man is still in significantly more danger of dying or being injured just going about his everyday life, whether driving to work or walking down a flight of stairs. Again, no “dangerous job” needed; men are in greater physical danger even in commonplace situations.
Women have every reason to fear for their safety, and rape is a very serious problem, but it boggles the mind to see attitudes that men couldn’t possibly understand how dangerous it is to be a woman when those very same men are the ones much much more likely to be hurt or killed “whenever he leaves the house”.
I think you’re being disingenuous when you talk about men being targeted by criminals. Men make up more than 90 percent of gang members (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demographics) and something like 90 percent of violent criminals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime) in the first place. Something like half of violent crimes are gang-related (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/gang-related-offenses). This means that with no “targeting” needed, men are already WAY more likely to be injured or killed through violence if you look at sheer demographics, and yet the average man doesn’t need to worry about being shot by an opposing gang member when he walks down the street at night. This is exactly why you immediately abandoned your point about workplace violence, since workplace is self chosen. You can’t simply look at an inequality of outcome and totally discount the nature of the populations concerned.
Similarly, you can look at the ratio of male to female prostitutes (http://sex-crimes.laws.com/prostitution/prostitution-statistics) and see that a prostitute is far more likely to be female than male. We can talk about what this means for both women and men, but I think it would be terrible to simply list it as “Obviously women are very badly off, way more have to become prostitutes than men!” and ignore the fact that men are by far more likely to be customers of prostitutes. Reality is complex.
I think it’s important to recognize that men are channeled by society into more violent and dangerous careers in crime and coal mining etc. I don’t think those are nonissues. But I also think the average man walking down the average street at night is significantly safer than the average woman doing the same
You seem to ascribe a fair amount of bad faith to me and I’m not sure why. Maybe because this line of argument pattern-matches to MRA thought?
Anyway I didn’t “abandon” the jobs point so much as point out that men are universally, even ignoring job choice, more likely to get into and be hurt in accidents. Accidental death and injury being far far more common than homicide and assault, that alone blows the “physical danger” argument out of the water. Not quite as dramatic as an industrial accident or a robbery-gone-wrong sure, but then again shark attacks are more dramatic than dying of heart disease.
And with regards to crime, your statistics do not say what you think they say. The national gang center says half of law enforcement agencies reported an increase in gang crime, not that ~50% of violent crimes were committed by gang members. Looking at the FBI unified crime reports, I can only find clear breakdowns of victims / circumstances in homicide, but it looks like even subtracting the entire number of gang-related deaths from the male death total still leaves them with more than three times the number of homicide victims that women have (9,917 male victims − 884 gang/institutional murder victims / 2,834 female victims = 3.19). And remember, the homicide rate today has been masked by medical advances for decades; male victimization rates are actually much higher than crime statistics indicate, and again most of these guys are ‘civilians’ rather than career criminals.
The whole point of my original post was this; it doesn’t matter if you look at crime victimization or workplace injury or accidents or all of them or something else entirely, because by any and all reasonable measures a man is in more “physical danger” in his everyday life than a woman is (yes, even the mythical Average Man/Woman). There are a handful of crimes which women are at special risk from and need to be cautious of, but men will disproportionately die or be injured in pretty much any other way you could imagine.
(BTW, I’m not the one downvoting you. One of those times when an anonymous karma system is more of a pain than a positive.)
But I also think the average man walking down the average street at night is significantly safer than the average woman doing the same
Most sexual assaults are not committed by random strangers on the average street at night. IIUC, if we exclude sexual assault, gang-related violence, and random fights/brawls, victimization rates for men and women are similar, and probably still higher for men.
In 2010, males experienced violent victimizations by strangers at nearly twice the rate of females (figure 2). The rate of violence against males by strangers was 9.5 victimizations per 1,000 males in 2010 compared to 4.7 victimizations per 1,000 females.
It goes on to say that the disparity seems to be shrinking, with crime against men falling more rapidly than crime against women.
Sexual assault by random strangers? Then is not a significant risk, at least in most parts of developed countries. Assault for other purposes? Then AFAIK women don’t have a higher victimization rate than men.
One wonders if some of the difference in outcomes (as in the being hit by a car on the shoulder example) isn’t partly a product of women generally taking less risks than men because of the fear of sexual assault.
The situation is made more complicated because women are encouraged to take risk seriously while men are encouraged to downplay risk, so you get different results depending on whether you’re looking at risk or fear.
One might say that this sexist bias is the problem, and one that the original blogger seeks to exacerbate.
One might, but I certainly wouldn’t. I believe that violence against men is a very serious problem, and one which has barely begun to get addressed.
I would like to see a serious attempt to oppose violence against people, but no one seems to have figured out that it’s worth doing and/or found a way to organize it.
Once you’ve decided that both goals are worth pursuing, an important question is whether violence against women might be reduced by different means than violence against men.
Well, people are far less likely to die (per mile travelled) in car crashes than in plane crashes, and yet ISTM more people are scared of flying than of driving. Which means… Okay, taken literally Locaha’s claim is incorrect, but it’s not that hard to steelman it into a valid point.
I’ve seen it asserted in many places that most women are constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped. Now obviously women in general aren’t always visibly on edge whenever they’re out in public, but some proportion clearly do feel that way, or at least claim to. Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it’s rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on. Does anyone know of any studies or surveys or anything which might shed some light on the issue?
Edit: The most helpful thing turned up by a quick google scholar search was this. Table 2 on page 4 gives us a good rough estimate that ~38% of people worry “very/pretty frequently” about rape (this makes the rate for women possibly as high as ~76%, if we assume that men never worry about themselves or others being raped).
This paper seems to suggest that levels of fear of crime are about equal in males and females, although women are more likely to worry about rape specifically. It’s based only on 64 qualitative interviews in Britain, but it also points to this conclusion being predominant in the literature.
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it’s rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on.
You can start by asking your mother or your sister or your girlfriend. If none of them obsesses about being raped every time they venture out onto city streets...
Of course, this assumes a reasonably benign environment. If you live in inner-city Detroit, you should be aware of the dangers of going out of your front door, but that applies to both men and women. On the other hand if you live is a sleepy village with zero cases of rape during the last hundred years and you still are “constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped”, a psychiatrist might be a good idea.
You can start by asking your mother or your sister or your girlfriend. If none of them obsesses about being raped every time they venture out onto city streets...
“Obsesses” already implies excessive concern.
I’m not sure what a good survey would include, but questions about what precautions one takes, or how one feels about going out versus being home might be a start.
The problem is how to get the data without contributing to the atmosphere of fear. Because that atmosphere really does harm quality of life for a lot of women, and is not in any real way helpful at mitigating the danger, because it hardly ever comes with usable advice or strategies attached.
I suspect the most common and useful strategy is the “Girls come in pairs and groups” thing. Which has the advantage of not being a stressor in the way turning yourself into Nicola Griffiths Aud would be, and also likely pretty darn effective—Hard to get raped if your bestie is kicking your assailant in the kidneys.
On a much better tangent: Aud is awesome, and I am really confused noone has made her into a series of blockbuster movies yet.
The true ratio is probably somewhere between 0.76 and 0.38
Before starting to speak of the true ratio, you really should examine your data source a bit more carefully.
Your link leads to a non-academic article which quotes numbers from opinion surveys and there’s little information on those. In particular, the question of how representative their data sample was is kinda important. To make an obvious observation, people living in big cities probably (correctly) fear crime more than people living in rural communities. Therefore the reported average fear of crime will be greatly affected by how urbanized your sample is.
Another point is that your Table 2 does not give numbers about people who worry about rape. It gives numbers about people who worry about “yourself or someone in your family getting sexually assaulted or raped” (emphasis mine). And “sexual assault” is a fuzzy term which might, depending on who and how you ask, include things like catcalls and leery glances. And boyfriends. Plus, to continue my example, probably every parent with a teenage daughter answered “pretty frequently” to this question.
P.S. Also the numbers are from 1993. The overall crime rate in the US has dropped hugely since then.
Yes, I’m aware that these sources are far from perfect. I just did a quick google search and threw out the the first numbers I could easily get my hands on, as a quick sanity-check. Obviously it’s far from a definitive answer.
You’re free to look for better data; I’ll probably do a little more poking around myself.
However I’ll give you my data-less biased priors :-)
I expect you to find some data. Much of it will be bad because it tends to be produced by Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and these people are not known for their statistical acumen or precision of analysis. Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published. Whatever remains (if anything) will show high variance and inconsistency.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
Do you really believe that the quality of most studies on this topic is so poor that this extremely flawed research strategy you recommend is more likely to be reliable? That seems like an unjustifiably dim view of the relevant research community.
I don’t disagree that asking women you know is one easy way to get evidence on this question, but I would think that even a pretty poorly conducted scientific study would constitute superior evidence.
Well querying it in sample sizes that are much smaller and less random than even the shoddiest academic study is, by comparison, indeed “extremely flawed”.
I said this below as well, but it’s fairly well buried now so I’ll repeat it here for others’ benefit:
Your hypothesis that any research on fear of rape will be systematically biased towards the claim that the vast majority of women are frequently, distressingly afraid of rape is strongly contraindicated by the fact that the arbitrarily-chosen (i.e., they were open access) research sources I cited at the top of this thread support the opposite conclusion.
(To clarify: I really don’t care very much about this question and as such I’m content to just go along with the rough approximations that a couple of old surveys provided. If someone was actually trying to get a really good answer I would suggest they look further and deeper. Published research would probably be a good start; given what I’ve seen so far, your hypothesis that it’s systematically and hopelessly biased to the point of uselessness is not persuasive)
Um… the particular method you suggested is an extremely flawed research strategy. Especially considering that one of your complaints about the research linked by Vulture was that the sample may not be representative. I don’t know about you, but the women I know well do not constitute a particularly representative sample of women in general.
Describing your experiment as “directly querying the reality surrounding you” makes it sound pretty dandy, but if you actually look at the specifics of the experiment, it’s subject to a host of biases.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
More than that, a poll about fears is likely to have a pretty high false positive rate—just considering the question is likely to bring up a significant number of instances of anything you fear at all, and if it is phrased as generically as “often” with no definition?
Getting at the true numbers would require.. Uhm. No, asking people to monitor their fears would be Nigh-certain to make them much more fearful (“log thoughts of sex” has been tried. The results that came back were blatantly a case of “dont think of a pink elephant” coloring everything) and thus would be deeply unethical. I think the cleanest lift would be a large collection of extensive daily journals, or outright annotated lifelogs. That would probably make your subject pool more introspective than the general population, but it should not skew these specific numbers much. Expensive, however.
Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
At first glance that fear seems to be a result of the availability heuristic. Women are much more likely to be assaulted by someone they know, not by a random stranger that they meet when they go out in public. But the random stranger in public assault is the one that’s more well known in the popular consciousness.
I think “constantly” was a bit of obvious hyperbole on Vulture’s part, permissible in an informal comment but not in a survey question that is meant to produce useful results. I have heard from some women that they are frequently concerned about the possibility of being raped, but I doubt there is anyone who is literally in constant fear of rape.
Unless the intent of this poll is just to mock Vulture’s original phrasing, I’d suggest changing the wording of the question.
Unless the intent of this poll is just to mock Vulture’s original phrasing, I’d suggest changing the wording of the question.
The intent was to illustrate how easy it is to create a poll. I would like people to create polls more often when they wonder about something that could be instead estimated using a poll.
I apologize for the wording, but it seems unfair to change the words when some people have already voted. Anyway, the whole poll is hidden deep in the comment tree. It would be better to do it again, in a top-level comment, in the Open Thread (to reduce selection bias). And it would be better done by someone who treats this hypothesis more seriously; they will find a better wording.
The former does not experience a constant physical danger (and the associated stress of being aware of said danger) whenever he leaves the house.
Oh, he surely would if he lived in a vibrant enough neighborhood. Unfortunately, most white male atheist libertarians are horribly bigoted and segregate into “safe”, de-facto gated communities. Privilege can be quite unfair, y’know!
That’s how I’ve arranged my life. I live in a civilized neighborhood in a civilized city.
I actually grew up in Hawaii, where the thing for young men to do was find the nearest young male “haole” (white) to harass, threaten, or beat.
That’s one bit of violence that the blogger likely missed out on. Young men looking to prove their manhood often look to find other young men from some unpopular subgroup to victimize. But that’s people with penises being victimized, so what the hell does that matter?
One of the unfortunate things about SJ as it currently exists is that they don’t want to hear that privilege is local. Intersectionality is a step in the right direction, and I hope things will keep getting more fine-grained until it gets to what happens in individual lives.
It’s something I’ve been thinking for a while, but I believe this is the first time I’ve posted it.
All hail LW for being a place where I felt safe saying that privilege is local—it took being a place where SJ language is understood without SJ being the dominant ideology.
I don’t believe the blogger was in any danger because of her opinions at a dinner party either.
My guess is that she travels in a terribly civilized circle where watching a boxing match would induce fainting spells. I travel in fairly pansified circles myself, and that’s the way I like it. I like civilization.
As for actual violent crime, all the crime statistics I’ve seen show that men are at least as likely to be victimized as women.
Even in terms of partner violence, all of it of which I’m aware in my circles are of females acting out against their partners in rather dangerous ways. We’ve been laughing for years about how a female friend gave her boyfriend a shove down a staircase right in front of me in college. He managed to catch himself on the sloping ceiling above and avoid crashing to his death. The look he gave her in return was priceless.
Because you see, it’s funny when women try to hurt men. When it’s the other way around, it’s a crime against humanity. And we all have to be thrown into a tizzy at the thought of violence used against a woman. The mere thought of the possibility of it entitles the blogger to have all opinions that give her a twinge of worry shut down. No matter that the statistics show that the evil enpenised person she shuts down faces the same or more risk of actual violence.
We have no idea how much violence the blogger has actually experienced, but it might have something to do why they’re so concerned about it. I’m more than a bit surprised that they find SJ (?) circles so emotionally safe, but maybe they haven’t run into the nastier emotional attacks is a way that affects them personally.
I agree that violence by women against men is all too frequently treated as funny—in popular art as well privately. Is there anyone here who follows popular art enough to have an opinion about whether this has changed and in what direction?
I think violence against men by women not being taken seriously is partly sexism against women—an idea that women aren’t strong enough to do real damage. The other half of the problem (this is probably obvious to you) is a highly mistaken belief about how tough men ought to be.
It seems to me that a certain sort of violence by women against men was a common trope some decades ago—perhaps other people can tell me whether it’s still popular.
He says something obnoxious. She hits him, and not with a slap—with a solid punch coming up from the ground. Big laugh from the audience. Rather implausibly, he isn’t injured and he doesn’t retaliate.
Though on second examination, that to be looks more about the sight gag than the violence dynamic. Armor-Piercing Slap (warning: TV Tropes) can include violence, but all it requires is humiliation, contra NancyLebovitz’s description.
On what basis do you complain that your fellow neighbors don’t like egoistic people? It seems to me very useful for a community to disapprove of egoists.
In case it wasn’t clear, I was using the term in the philosophical sense, and in my case it refers to Stirnerite egoism.
I’m not complaining that my neighbors don’t like egoists. They’re not required to. I don’t feel entitled to have them believe as I would have them believe, unlike the privileged blogger under consideration.
The author apparently has the privilege of living in a bubble where everyone she knows fundamentally approves of all her opinions, but occasionally has one person out of 20 show up at a gathering who disagrees, and just may throw a fit if that person dare voice their opinions.
Me—atheist, egoist, libertarian—I’m lucky if one person out of 20 won’t think I’m the devil if I’m open about my opinions. I weep for the discomfort she feels when my existence impinges on her awareness.
I note that a Christian or Muslim describing how they are hurt by those who dare openly(!) question their sacred values wouldn’t receive such polite consideration, and certainly not by this blogger.
Are you ever in physical danger because of your opinions?
Not really a valid question; I feel similarly, but you quickly learn to suppress it when the situation becomes questionable. Anyone who reacts strongly to my more mainstream opinions, is almost certainly going to be a lost cause when it comes to my extremist opinions. I can’t say I’ve been in physical danger because I’ve never pushed it to that point. However, I can think of instances where physical danger was on the table of options (the KKK in minnesota is a good example.)
My point was: experience of a male white atheist, egoist, libertarian is very different from the experience of a female (of any persuasion). The former does not experience a constant physical danger (and the associated stress of being aware of said danger) whenever he leaves the house.
You need to be a very special person to be able to have a calm detached discussion about things that threaten you every day of your life. Not in a specific place in Minnesota, but everywhere.
With the exception of rape, which tends to be a special case in most senses, men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of every other type of violent crime including homicide. In addition, men make up 92% of workplace deaths (and presumably a correspondingly high proportion of the injuries) and are also significantly more likely to die in an accident off the job (again, presumably a similar distribution of injuries).
The idea that men are somehow protected from physical danger by “male privilege” is simply a preposterous notion.
There’s a very big difference between men being part of violent crime and dangerous jobs and needing to worry for your physical safety as you walk down the street. No one is claiming men are protected from “physical danger” as if they have some sort of DND “Immunity to nonmagical weapons”. The fact that men are involved to a much greater extent in violence and prison and whatnot IS a big deal but it’s not actually opposed to the problem of women being on average smaller than men and a target for rape.
No, no there isn’t.
Most crimes, including most violent crimes, are not rape. Aside from rape, men are much more likely to be the victim of a crime, especially a violent crime. So if you’re talking about how much someone should be worried about being the victim of a violent crime… how exactly is maleness supposed to protect someone when it predicts a much higher likelihood of being targeted by criminals?
And even beyond that, even mundane stuff like being hit by a car while on the shoulder of the road is more than twice as likely to kill a man as a woman. With no malice at all, a man is still in significantly more danger of dying or being injured just going about his everyday life, whether driving to work or walking down a flight of stairs. Again, no “dangerous job” needed; men are in greater physical danger even in commonplace situations.
Women have every reason to fear for their safety, and rape is a very serious problem, but it boggles the mind to see attitudes that men couldn’t possibly understand how dangerous it is to be a woman when those very same men are the ones much much more likely to be hurt or killed “whenever he leaves the house”.
I think you’re being disingenuous when you talk about men being targeted by criminals. Men make up more than 90 percent of gang members (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demographics) and something like 90 percent of violent criminals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime) in the first place. Something like half of violent crimes are gang-related (http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/gang-related-offenses). This means that with no “targeting” needed, men are already WAY more likely to be injured or killed through violence if you look at sheer demographics, and yet the average man doesn’t need to worry about being shot by an opposing gang member when he walks down the street at night. This is exactly why you immediately abandoned your point about workplace violence, since workplace is self chosen. You can’t simply look at an inequality of outcome and totally discount the nature of the populations concerned.
Similarly, you can look at the ratio of male to female prostitutes (http://sex-crimes.laws.com/prostitution/prostitution-statistics) and see that a prostitute is far more likely to be female than male. We can talk about what this means for both women and men, but I think it would be terrible to simply list it as “Obviously women are very badly off, way more have to become prostitutes than men!” and ignore the fact that men are by far more likely to be customers of prostitutes. Reality is complex.
I think it’s important to recognize that men are channeled by society into more violent and dangerous careers in crime and coal mining etc. I don’t think those are nonissues. But I also think the average man walking down the average street at night is significantly safer than the average woman doing the same
You seem to ascribe a fair amount of bad faith to me and I’m not sure why. Maybe because this line of argument pattern-matches to MRA thought?
Anyway I didn’t “abandon” the jobs point so much as point out that men are universally, even ignoring job choice, more likely to get into and be hurt in accidents. Accidental death and injury being far far more common than homicide and assault, that alone blows the “physical danger” argument out of the water. Not quite as dramatic as an industrial accident or a robbery-gone-wrong sure, but then again shark attacks are more dramatic than dying of heart disease.
And with regards to crime, your statistics do not say what you think they say. The national gang center says half of law enforcement agencies reported an increase in gang crime, not that ~50% of violent crimes were committed by gang members. Looking at the FBI unified crime reports, I can only find clear breakdowns of victims / circumstances in homicide, but it looks like even subtracting the entire number of gang-related deaths from the male death total still leaves them with more than three times the number of homicide victims that women have (9,917 male victims − 884 gang/institutional murder victims / 2,834 female victims = 3.19). And remember, the homicide rate today has been masked by medical advances for decades; male victimization rates are actually much higher than crime statistics indicate, and again most of these guys are ‘civilians’ rather than career criminals.
The whole point of my original post was this; it doesn’t matter if you look at crime victimization or workplace injury or accidents or all of them or something else entirely, because by any and all reasonable measures a man is in more “physical danger” in his everyday life than a woman is (yes, even the mythical Average Man/Woman). There are a handful of crimes which women are at special risk from and need to be cautious of, but men will disproportionately die or be injured in pretty much any other way you could imagine.
(BTW, I’m not the one downvoting you. One of those times when an anonymous karma system is more of a pain than a positive.)
Most sexual assaults are not committed by random strangers on the average street at night.
IIUC, if we exclude sexual assault, gang-related violence, and random fights/brawls, victimization rates for men and women are similar, and probably still higher for men.
The U.S. Department of Justice has a special report, Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010:
It goes on to say that the disparity seems to be shrinking, with crime against men falling more rapidly than crime against women.
we are talking about assaults by random strangers though.
Sexual assault by random strangers? Then is not a significant risk, at least in most parts of developed countries.
Assault for other purposes? Then AFAIK women don’t have a higher victimization rate than men.
One wonders if some of the difference in outcomes (as in the being hit by a car on the shoulder example) isn’t partly a product of women generally taking less risks than men because of the fear of sexual assault.
I think that likely explains some of the discrepancy.
I routinely walk across a park late at night that women I know avoid.
The situation is made more complicated because women are encouraged to take risk seriously while men are encouraged to downplay risk, so you get different results depending on whether you’re looking at risk or fear.
Yes, everyone is encouraged to take violence against women much more seriously than violence against men.
One might say that this sexist bias is the problem, and one that the original blogger seeks to exacerbate.
One might, but I certainly wouldn’t. I believe that violence against men is a very serious problem, and one which has barely begun to get addressed.
I would like to see a serious attempt to oppose violence against people, but no one seems to have figured out that it’s worth doing and/or found a way to organize it.
Once you’ve decided that both goals are worth pursuing, an important question is whether violence against women might be reduced by different means than violence against men.
Well, people are far less likely to die (per mile travelled) in car crashes than in plane crashes, and yet ISTM more people are scared of flying than of driving. Which means… Okay, taken literally Locaha’s claim is incorrect, but it’s not that hard to steelman it into a valid point.
None of the women I know in real life “experience a constant physical danger” whenever they leave the house.
Presumably we’re not talking about being hit by a bus.
I’ve seen it asserted in many places that most women are constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped. Now obviously women in general aren’t always visibly on edge whenever they’re out in public, but some proportion clearly do feel that way, or at least claim to. Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it’s rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on. Does anyone know of any studies or surveys or anything which might shed some light on the issue?
Edit: The most helpful thing turned up by a quick google scholar search was this. Table 2 on page 4 gives us a good rough estimate that ~38% of people worry “very/pretty frequently” about rape (this makes the rate for women possibly as high as ~76%, if we assume that men never worry about themselves or others being raped).
This paper seems to suggest that levels of fear of crime are about equal in males and females, although women are more likely to worry about rape specifically. It’s based only on 64 qualitative interviews in Britain, but it also points to this conclusion being predominant in the literature.
You can start by asking your mother or your sister or your girlfriend. If none of them obsesses about being raped every time they venture out onto city streets...
Of course, this assumes a reasonably benign environment. If you live in inner-city Detroit, you should be aware of the dangers of going out of your front door, but that applies to both men and women. On the other hand if you live is a sleepy village with zero cases of rape during the last hundred years and you still are “constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped”, a psychiatrist might be a good idea.
“Obsesses” already implies excessive concern.
I’m not sure what a good survey would include, but questions about what precautions one takes, or how one feels about going out versus being home might be a start.
The problem is how to get the data without contributing to the atmosphere of fear. Because that atmosphere really does harm quality of life for a lot of women, and is not in any real way helpful at mitigating the danger, because it hardly ever comes with usable advice or strategies attached.
I suspect the most common and useful strategy is the “Girls come in pairs and groups” thing. Which has the advantage of not being a stressor in the way turning yourself into Nicola Griffiths Aud would be, and also likely pretty darn effective—Hard to get raped if your bestie is kicking your assailant in the kidneys.
On a much better tangent: Aud is awesome, and I am really confused noone has made her into a series of blockbuster movies yet.
(emphasis mine)
This is known to be false (e.g. ask any father of a teenage daughter).
Right. It’s a deliberately excessive assumption that I used to obtain a ceiling. The true ratio is probably somewhere between 0.76 and 0.38
Before starting to speak of the true ratio, you really should examine your data source a bit more carefully.
Your link leads to a non-academic article which quotes numbers from opinion surveys and there’s little information on those. In particular, the question of how representative their data sample was is kinda important. To make an obvious observation, people living in big cities probably (correctly) fear crime more than people living in rural communities. Therefore the reported average fear of crime will be greatly affected by how urbanized your sample is.
Another point is that your Table 2 does not give numbers about people who worry about rape. It gives numbers about people who worry about “yourself or someone in your family getting sexually assaulted or raped” (emphasis mine). And “sexual assault” is a fuzzy term which might, depending on who and how you ask, include things like catcalls and leery glances. And boyfriends. Plus, to continue my example, probably every parent with a teenage daughter answered “pretty frequently” to this question.
P.S. Also the numbers are from 1993. The overall crime rate in the US has dropped hugely since then.
Yes, I’m aware that these sources are far from perfect. I just did a quick google search and threw out the the first numbers I could easily get my hands on, as a quick sanity-check. Obviously it’s far from a definitive answer.
You’re free to look for better data; I’ll probably do a little more poking around myself.
I’m lazy :-P and not interested enough.
However I’ll give you my data-less biased priors :-)
I expect you to find some data. Much of it will be bad because it tends to be produced by Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and these people are not known for their statistical acumen or precision of analysis. Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published. Whatever remains (if anything) will show high variance and inconsistency.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
Do you really believe that the quality of most studies on this topic is so poor that this extremely flawed research strategy you recommend is more likely to be reliable? That seems like an unjustifiably dim view of the relevant research community.
I don’t disagree that asking women you know is one easy way to get evidence on this question, but I would think that even a pretty poorly conducted scientific study would constitute superior evidence.
Yes.
P.S. I do love how directly querying the reality surrounding you is described as an “extremely flawed research strategy” X-D
Well querying it in sample sizes that are much smaller and less random than even the shoddiest academic study is, by comparison, indeed “extremely flawed”.
Well their not systematically biased, unlike the samples that someone with an agenda is likely to use.
I said this below as well, but it’s fairly well buried now so I’ll repeat it here for others’ benefit:
Your hypothesis that any research on fear of rape will be systematically biased towards the claim that the vast majority of women are frequently, distressingly afraid of rape is strongly contraindicated by the fact that the arbitrarily-chosen (i.e., they were open access) research sources I cited at the top of this thread support the opposite conclusion.
(To clarify: I really don’t care very much about this question and as such I’m content to just go along with the rough approximations that a couple of old surveys provided. If someone was actually trying to get a really good answer I would suggest they look further and deeper. Published research would probably be a good start; given what I’ve seen so far, your hypothesis that it’s systematically and hopelessly biased to the point of uselessness is not persuasive)
Um… the particular method you suggested is an extremely flawed research strategy. Especially considering that one of your complaints about the research linked by Vulture was that the sample may not be representative. I don’t know about you, but the women I know well do not constitute a particularly representative sample of women in general.
Describing your experiment as “directly querying the reality surrounding you” makes it sound pretty dandy, but if you actually look at the specifics of the experiment, it’s subject to a host of biases.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
More than that, a poll about fears is likely to have a pretty high false positive rate—just considering the question is likely to bring up a significant number of instances of anything you fear at all, and if it is phrased as generically as “often” with no definition? Getting at the true numbers would require.. Uhm. No, asking people to monitor their fears would be Nigh-certain to make them much more fearful (“log thoughts of sex” has been tried. The results that came back were blatantly a case of “dont think of a pink elephant” coloring everything) and thus would be deeply unethical. I think the cleanest lift would be a large collection of extensive daily journals, or outright annotated lifelogs. That would probably make your subject pool more introspective than the general population, but it should not skew these specific numbers much. Expensive, however.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
At first glance that fear seems to be a result of the availability heuristic. Women are much more likely to be assaulted by someone they know, not by a random stranger that they meet when they go out in public. But the random stranger in public assault is the one that’s more well known in the popular consciousness.
A poll: Are you constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped? Also, are you a man or a woman (however you define it)?
[pollid:579]
I think “constantly” was a bit of obvious hyperbole on Vulture’s part, permissible in an informal comment but not in a survey question that is meant to produce useful results. I have heard from some women that they are frequently concerned about the possibility of being raped, but I doubt there is anyone who is literally in constant fear of rape.
Unless the intent of this poll is just to mock Vulture’s original phrasing, I’d suggest changing the wording of the question.
The intent was to illustrate how easy it is to create a poll. I would like people to create polls more often when they wonder about something that could be instead estimated using a poll.
I apologize for the wording, but it seems unfair to change the words when some people have already voted. Anyway, the whole poll is hidden deep in the comment tree. It would be better to do it again, in a top-level comment, in the Open Thread (to reduce selection bias). And it would be better done by someone who treats this hypothesis more seriously; they will find a better wording.
We’re talking about being a second-class citizen in a society.
The statistics I’ve seen show that men in the US face more risk of violent crime than women.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
Oh, he surely would if he lived in a vibrant enough neighborhood. Unfortunately, most white male atheist libertarians are horribly bigoted and segregate into “safe”, de-facto gated communities. Privilege can be quite unfair, y’know!
That’s how I’ve arranged my life. I live in a civilized neighborhood in a civilized city.
I actually grew up in Hawaii, where the thing for young men to do was find the nearest young male “haole” (white) to harass, threaten, or beat.
That’s one bit of violence that the blogger likely missed out on. Young men looking to prove their manhood often look to find other young men from some unpopular subgroup to victimize. But that’s people with penises being victimized, so what the hell does that matter?
One of the unfortunate things about SJ as it currently exists is that they don’t want to hear that privilege is local. Intersectionality is a step in the right direction, and I hope things will keep getting more fine-grained until it gets to what happens in individual lives.
Nice. That’s catchy.
I’m glad you liked it.
It’s something I’ve been thinking for a while, but I believe this is the first time I’ve posted it.
All hail LW for being a place where I felt safe saying that privilege is local—it took being a place where SJ language is understood without SJ being the dominant ideology.
I don’t believe the blogger was in any danger because of her opinions at a dinner party either.
My guess is that she travels in a terribly civilized circle where watching a boxing match would induce fainting spells. I travel in fairly pansified circles myself, and that’s the way I like it. I like civilization.
As for actual violent crime, all the crime statistics I’ve seen show that men are at least as likely to be victimized as women.
Even in terms of partner violence, all of it of which I’m aware in my circles are of females acting out against their partners in rather dangerous ways. We’ve been laughing for years about how a female friend gave her boyfriend a shove down a staircase right in front of me in college. He managed to catch himself on the sloping ceiling above and avoid crashing to his death. The look he gave her in return was priceless.
Because you see, it’s funny when women try to hurt men. When it’s the other way around, it’s a crime against humanity. And we all have to be thrown into a tizzy at the thought of violence used against a woman. The mere thought of the possibility of it entitles the blogger to have all opinions that give her a twinge of worry shut down. No matter that the statistics show that the evil enpenised person she shuts down faces the same or more risk of actual violence.
We have no idea how much violence the blogger has actually experienced, but it might have something to do why they’re so concerned about it. I’m more than a bit surprised that they find SJ (?) circles so emotionally safe, but maybe they haven’t run into the nastier emotional attacks is a way that affects them personally.
I agree that violence by women against men is all too frequently treated as funny—in popular art as well privately. Is there anyone here who follows popular art enough to have an opinion about whether this has changed and in what direction?
I think violence against men by women not being taken seriously is partly sexism against women—an idea that women aren’t strong enough to do real damage. The other half of the problem (this is probably obvious to you) is a highly mistaken belief about how tough men ought to be.
Sometimes violence by men against men is portrayed as funny, too.
Violence by men against women portrayed as funny isn’t as common but there are still some classic examples.
Violence by women against women is another trope entirely.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail: 1975
Airplane: 1980
It seems to me that a certain sort of violence by women against men was a common trope some decades ago—perhaps other people can tell me whether it’s still popular.
He says something obnoxious. She hits him, and not with a slap—with a solid punch coming up from the ground. Big laugh from the audience. Rather implausibly, he isn’t injured and he doesn’t retaliate.
Monty Python was the example of men vs men. The examples of women against men were Airplane (1980) and Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008).
Those were examples of men against women being funny.
Oops...but now I don’t know why Nancy was giving dates.
Maybe to show that things have changed somewhat? Repo the Genetic Opera is something of an unusual movie, but it’s more recent than Airplane! is.
As you might expect, there’s a trope for this. (caution: TVTropes link)
Judging from the examples, the answer is “yes”, although I don’t know comedy well enough to say whether these are truly representative.
This trope might be closer.
I knew there was something I was forgetting.
Though on second examination, that to be looks more about the sight gag than the violence dynamic. Armor-Piercing Slap (warning: TV Tropes) can include violence, but all it requires is humiliation, contra NancyLebovitz’s description.
On what basis do you complain that your fellow neighbors don’t like egoistic people? It seems to me very useful for a community to disapprove of egoists.
In case it wasn’t clear, I was using the term in the philosophical sense, and in my case it refers to Stirnerite egoism.
I’m not complaining that my neighbors don’t like egoists. They’re not required to. I don’t feel entitled to have them believe as I would have them believe, unlike the privileged blogger under consideration.