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I feel like we have to address the fact that a lot of people — including well-meaning feminists — feel perfectly fine pushing the narrative to women that every man is a threat. Combined with racial bias and fear of anything “other,” that is never going to end well.
There has been a good amount of evidence, ignored because it was politically inconvenient, that strict Title IX guidelines around campus sexual assault accusations disproportionately hurt black men. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-question-of-race-in-campus-sexual-assault-cases/539361/
My brother, who is a wonderful, kind young man who’s dedicated his career to teaching English to immigrants and refuses to let my cat roam in his backyard because heaven forbid she kill his beloved backyard rabbits and chipmunks (she would), has an interesting anecdote about this
He used to be a manager at an ice cream store that closed at midnight, and then he’d walk home. He’s a pretty big white guy, 6’2” and dresses like a slob (sorry kiddo). And he said that if he saw a woman walking toward him, he would *always* cross the street.
His rationale? He didn’t want to scare her. Because he knew a woman walking alone at night would see a big guy walking her way as a threat. This is a man who asked me how to accommodate a pregnant cat in his garage so that her kittens would be safe. Least threatening man ever.
Like me, he’s white to the point of being translucent. But he’s so conscious of how women have been taught to perceive all strange men as threats. How would this play out if he weren’t white? How much does bias and ideas of “the other” come into play here?
The idea of all men being a nonstop threat to women has been an asset both to feminism as well as to patriarchal sentiments that serve to keep women “protected” and guarded (sometimes at the same time, which nobody wants to admit).
Fellow white women (and TBH probably some other women too): We have to deal with this. We have to tackle the fact that our gender has been using “men are threatening” to our advantage and that it puts disadvantaged men at risk. There is an enormous legacy of this.
Would I be weirded out if a strange man approached me in a park? Yes. But that is 90% because I have been conditioned to think that way. It’s not OK. And it frequently comes from people who claim to have women’s best interests in mind.
As always, the very eloquent @katrinagulliver puts it incredibly well. https://spectator.us/why-is-it-always-white-women-calling-the-cops-on-non-criminals/
Want to get white women to stop being Karens? The first step is to stop raising your daughters who are growing up in some of the safest communities to ever exist to think that every man is a threat to them, especially men who are somehow “foreign” or “exotic” or “other.”
And now my thread concludes, and I apologize to my brother, who so probably reading this, for making him sound like a combination of Shrek and Baloo, but let’s be honest, he basically is.
Thanks for reading. Here’s a raccoon. Actually A LOT of raccoons.
Thanks for reading. Here’s a raccoon. Actually A LOT of raccoons.
*is not so. Damn autocorrect.
Wow, people are paying attention to this thread, and meanwhile I’m awake at 5AM because of the stray cat howling in the backyard. One thing that popped up in a couple of replies that I do want to address: Do women face threats from men? Absolutely. I’d be an idiot to deny that.
BUT, we have this cultural fixation on “stranger in an alley” threats to women to the point that it prevents them from living their lives freely, when the biggest risk to many (most?) women in the West comes from men who are immediate family members or intimate partners.
I cannot remember a time growing up when I was taught how to deal with the possibility that relationship might turn abusive, but I do remember plenty of “Warning to Women!!” chain emails about how you should never wear your hair in a ponytail in a parking garage or whatever.
Anyway, do women face threats from men? Yes. But we often teach them to look out for it in statistically unlikely places, in a way that insidiously serves to limit the scope of women’s lives AND can interplay in very ugly ways with racial bias and xenophobia.
This is a fascinating point, and meanwhile you see whole immigrant and ethnic communities get demonized https://twitter.com/thirtysixcups/status/1265572761805742081?s=21 https://twitter.com/thirtysixcups/status/1265572761805742081
One more point before I go back to sleep: Do I think the dog lady seemed intimidated or afraid? No. But I think the “stranger danger” trope — which she manipulated — earned her sympathy points she didn’t deserve and the dialogue around the incident only got uglier.
