Kristen Page-Kirby is scared she’s going to be killed by a stranger:
Gentlemen! Let’s play a little game. I call it “Creep or Normal Guy?”
The way you play is you have less than a second to decide whether a man you don’t know is a threat or not. If you identify a normal guy as a threat you could get called a bitch; if you identify a creep as a normal guy you could end up dead. This is fun, isn’t it? Now play it every day, with nearly every man you see, in nearly every situation you’re in, from the time puberty hits to … well, I turned 38 this week. Can someone tell me when I can stop playing?
[...]
Being a woman in this world means paying a certain price.
Page-Kirby’s thesis is the “murderer” variant of the Schroedinger’s rapist argument, so named and most famously articulated, (though doubtless not originated) by a writer calling herself Phaedra Starling.
What Page-Kirby – like Starling before her – fails to mention is that being a man in this world means paying a price, in the form of being actually violently victimised far more often than women, particularly so in cases of violence by strangers. In Scotland, where I live, men and boys are more than seven times more likely to be murdered by strangers than are women and girls. In England and Wales men are five times more likely than women to be murdered by strangers In the United States, Males over the age of 15 were five times as likely as their female cohort to have been murdered during the seventies and eighties All these figures, both for men and for women, are dwarfed by the death rate from traffic accidents, yet nobody lives their lives in fear of Schroedinger’s Motor Car.
Instead of trying to persuade those many times more likely than they are to be violently victimised, how terribly oppressed they are by violence. Page-Kirby and Starling would do better to examine the mismatch between the fear they and other women feel, which I don’t doubt is real, and the freedom-from-violence privileged reality of most women’s lives.