Of course there is a risk but it is far smaller than the risk of being in a car accident and yet we all still get in cars.
Actually, you are far more likely to be raped or sexuallt assaulted than you are to be in an injurious car accident.
However, I think if it's a common problem it's most likely due to the women affected being raised without a strong male role model in their household.
Do you have any journal papers or similar evidence for that? How is not having a father around supposed to make a woman scared? And how do you explain women like myself, whose parents even after divorce had joint parental responsibility and I spent 50% of my time with my dad, yet still I am scared of male violence? Perhaps my experiences at the hands of unrelated men and boys might be the cause of my fear?
the chances of being attacked while just innocently walking along
That's not the threat model women face TBH. The issues are things like sexual assault in mixed changing rooms, date rape, and spousal abuse, not "stranger leaps out of the bushes".
would definitely be wise to seek professional help
- The fear I have now is after professional help. It's also after a rape, a vulval sexual assault at age eight, and more non-vulval sexual assaults than I can count. I was cat-called in school uniform. I insisted on going to an all-girl secondary because by the end of primary school (before my parents' divorce, so don't blame my parents splitting for my fear) I was already traumatised by boys committing physical and sexual assaults against me.
- Telling women that their structural fear of male violence is all in their heads is gaslighting and misogynist.
This being frightened is a problem that you have to deal with rationally.
The rational thing to do, when men are the principal murderers of women and children and the sole rapists, is to keep the sexes separate under circumstances where women and children are especially vulnerable. The rational thing to do, for woman individually, is to stay away from the sex class that can force them to become pregnant. The rational thing to do is to get men to all stop raping and battering and murdering.
It's not for anyone else to change the way they act unless they're being inappropriate.
If men stopped being inappropriate, that would be a great start. For example, a stranger of either sex talking to me on the train is an unjustified invasion of my time, before you even consider the fear caused by a man chatting me up with obvious sexual intent in an enclosed space that I cannot leave.
I don't think any 'structures'suppirt aggressions.
Yes they do. Examples:
- A new building at work has transparent balustrades on the staircases and balconies, permitting upskirting of women using the stairs and balconies by men standing below them. The workplace women's network have called this issue out. My employer won't fix it because it will "spoil the architectural feel of the building".
- Lifts are installed without CCTV, putting women at risk of sexual assault if traveling alone with a man in these confined spaces.
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Evidence shows that women are a much greater risk of sexual assault in mixed changing rooms than single-sex ones, yet councils continue to install mixed changing rooms.
The original Universal Credit payment method was to pay the entirety of a joint claim into one account. In abusive relationships, guess whose account the money was paid into? And most abusers are male. It took a lot* of pressure from feminists to have that changed.
People in power making decisions that put women at risk of male violence is pretty much the definition of structural support of aggressions.
women should manage their anxieties better
This is a silencing tactic, intended to shame victims of male violence into silence. Men who rape and grope and cat-call and batter get off the hook. If men managed their behaviour, I'd have no anxiety to manage. Tell men to stop raping.
I was sexually assaulted on holidays when I was 20.
It's obviously not helpful to anyone to view men just as potential rapists.
I don't view them as "just" potential rapists. It would be very helpful to me if I could do that. But no, I also have to view men as colleagues, plumbers, electricians. I have to invite a potential rapist into my house to service the gas boiler. I have to work alongside potential rapists, sometimes in confined spaces because of the nature of my job. I was working on a building site a few years back and the protective boarding in the lifts was covered in pornographic graffiti about what the men would like to do to the female site staff, and I had to work in the vicinity of those men who talk about their female colleagues as sex objects. I have to manage my anxiety every day until such time as I've repaid my mortgage and don't have to work any more. So don't lecture me about managing anxiety.
To say our fear is especially bad or so much worse than men’s fear is to paint women as the weaker sex according to the old damsel in distress gender stereotype.
Women are raped six times more often than men. And no man was ever left pregnant by his rapist. Damn right women should be more scared. The gang that put Robert Maltby in a coma killed Sophie Lancaster in the same attack, because she was weaker than him and her bones were thinner. Damn right women should be more scared.
You're talking about a small minority of badly behaved men who rape women.
A third of men don't think it's rape to carry on having sex after the woman has told him to stop. The law says it is. Around 6% of men are rapists and I don't know who they are. When I enter a confined space with a man, or start dating one, I am playing russian roulette with my safety. 6% are rapists. If I gave you a bowl of M&Ms and told you that 6% would give you food poisoning, would you dare to eat even just one?
There's nothing cwrong with aggressive or masculine behaviour
There's everything wrong with aggressive behaviour. When my ex punched the wall, I thought I would be next. I wasn't, but I feared it and that was part of how he controlled me.
Men do not view laughter as violence.
They fear the rejection and humiliation that accompanies the laughter. They imagine and dread asking a woman out and her saying "You? Date me? Not if hell froze. [laughs and walks away]" Even though no sane woman would react like that, she'd play along and give a fake number for fear of him hitting her. You might look up a guy called Eliot Rodgers, who really didn't like female rejection, for an indication of how badly men can take rejection. And any man could be him for all I know...
Women have a defence mechanism in that they can prevent anything from penetrating them if there's a strong will to do so.
It's called vaginismus, and it doesn't keep a rapist out. He tore me because I involuntarily clamped shut and he rammed it in anyway. I recommend that you don't take biology lessons from Republican party politicians. And frankly, we shouldn't have to develop vagina dentata or kegels of iron to "prevent anything from penetrating" us: the word "no" should enough to stop any man.
Women are at greater risk of rape, assault or murder in their own home from an intimate partner or male relative than any random strange man out in public.
50% of victims are raped by a current or former partner. That's what happened to me.
30% by someone else you know.
11% by unlicensed minicab drivers.
9% by strangers who are not unlicensed minicab drivers. My sexual assailants at school were strangers, they weren't in my year. We had a poster on here over the summer, she'd been sexually assaulted on a train by a stranger. I can reduce my risk of another rape by 50% by refusing to date nor live with men. I can't eliminate the other 50%, and I still fear them.
No. I have not. Do you have a problem believing what a woman says?
You are extraordinarily lucky to have never been subjected to cat-calls, groping, or rape. So lucky, in fact, that your luck is unprecedented amongst every woman I've met. I would love to know how your life circumstances have differed from mine so that I can try to reproduce your safe environment for myself.
It demonstrates that men are most likely to harm the person they profess to love the most
It also demonstrates that men will spend months or years premeditating a woman's murder, by identifying her, gaining her trust, isolating her away from witnesses, and manipulating her to the point that she perceives both resistance and summoning aid to be futile.