The tragedy here is that so many women are terrified of unknown men. A real culture of fear we’ve got going, which serves to isolate almost everybody.
I’m not completely naive - I know this stuff does happen - but the chances of being kidnapped are far lower than, say, being in a road traffic accident, and yet billions of people drive daily without a second thought, without fear, just assuming everything will be fine.
I do wonder if the proliferation of True Crime podcasts is, possibly, down to shadowy funding of some sort.
I don’t listen to them anymore myself, not because they’re not gripping, because a lot of them really are, but because it effectively turns victims of horrible crimes into profitable entertainment, and I don’t want to be a party to that.
(I wish I was smart enough I’d come to that conclusion myself, but no - it was other podcasts and an episode of Black Mirror that pointed that out to me)
A fun probability fact I like is around the question “what is the likelihood of consuming any given water molecule twice?”, so like, consuming that water molecule, then excreting it somehow (sweating, urine etc.), and then consuming that same molecule again. The probability of that happening for a given molecule is so ridiculously small that it’s basically zero.
However, the probability of that having happened at least once in an adult’s life is effectively 1, — i.e. it’s almost certainly happened. This is because one cup of water contains around 144,531,378,240,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water, so we get a lot of chances to consume a water molecule twice.
The chances of being kidnapped or otherwise assaulted or harassed is quite low for any given interaction, but despite this, it’s something that a concerningly high proportion of women have experienced. I think for most women, it’s not a case of literally being terrified, but more than we take a wide variety of steps to reduce our risk, given that it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate oneself from every man who could possibly assault them. It’s no different to how people of all genders will often do things like taking a slighter longer, well lit route, or refraining from listening to music through headphones when walking through a city at night.
If I had a husband or partner who was available to go pick up something on my behalf, then that’s a straightforward and trivially easy thing I can do to reduce the amount of unnecessary risk I’d be exposing myself to. If that wasn’t something that was available, it wouldn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t pick up the item myself, but I would be a bit more cautious.
The culture of fear you describe does feed into how individual women perceive and manage risk associated with unknown men, but it’s also important to realise that that culture of fear exists in large part because of the direct lived experience of women who have learned that these kinds of precautions are necessary. For my part, whilst I’ve never been assaulted when picking up items from online sales, I have had a few instances of men being extremely creepy in a way that made me regret not being more careful. I had to change my phone number once because an Uber driver kept sending me dick pics, and a friend once had to get a restraining order against a delivery driver who kept coming back to her home and lurking outside her window. It’s only a small minority of men who do these things, but because our daily lives expose us to so many people, then it ends up being a very rational choice to take precautions to protect ourselves.
Edit: my comment cast a wider net than just “risk of being kidnapped”, because that felt to me like a hyperbolic euphemism designed to avoid saying the much more likely forms of harm that women face from predatory men. However, I want to add that the number of traffic accidents I’ve been involved in is non-zero, and equal to the number of times that an unknown man has attempted to kidnap me.
I was going to type something but it would never be so elaborate and accurate as yours! Its not just about the worst case, but high probabilities for a lot of potential problems.
Also, Bear Grylls consumed the same water molecule twice.
Going to disagree with the responses you have so far. You need to consider both the cost and benefit of taking precautions. The cost of sending someone else in your place is low. The benefit is that you negate that small chance of getting assaulted. The cost of not driving in a car-centric society? It’s way higher. It could mean not being able to go to the store to buy groceries, or not being able to get a job. For most people, that cost is much higher compared to the chance of dying in a car crash.
According to OurWorldInData, a person is almost three times more likely to be killed in a car accident than in a homicide by another person. (5.8 homicides per 100k people vs. 16.7 car deaths per 100k per year)
In comparison, non-homicide rapes are… 37.5 per 100k people (oof, much worse that I expected). However, most sources I can find seem to indicate a fairly small percentage of rapes are committed by strangers not known to the victim (A Better Way states it’s 28%). If we take that into account and apply it to the OurWorldInData numbers, it comes out to 10.5 people per 100k are victims of rape by total strangers.
That doesn’t account for the fact that many rapes are not reported, and the risk of rape can vary wildly between different states (holy shit is Alaska rape-y) so the real risk is probably a bit higher than my numbers in most areas, and lower in others.
That wasn’t the result I was expecting when I started writing this comment. I guess in conclusion, people are way more likely to be killed in a car accident than some rando murdering them, but depending on where they live, death by driving may be more or less likely than being raped by a stranger. So uh… Yeah. Not great.
I think that’s a good way to put it. You can’t do much about someone else crashing into you (Unless your husband is Mr Incredible), but you can do a whole lot more when selling/buying something to/from a stranger to avoid that turning nasty.
Genuine question here, am not trying to be edgy or controversial: Which would you least like to happen - be raped, or lose the use of a limb in a road accident?
As a cishet man, I’d take the former (assuming no HIV etc)
A more comparable question is would you rather lose the use of a limb from an accident or have to go under vaginal reconstruction to restore use of urinary function after rape.
I know which is more traumatic. People act like being raped comes with no consequences.
It’s more than the probability, it’s the level of harm. It’s similar to how we protect our kids from paedos with a high degree of safety even though the risk is really low. It’s because the harm from a paedo is fucking huge. The harm a man can do to a woman is fucking huge, life shattering, soul destroying. Women go to lengths to avoid that because it does happen and it’s impossible to know when, where, who. The only truth we have is that it is a possibility now, here, with this stranger.
Do you you think death… Isn’t all of that? People die or are paralyzed in car accidents.
I’m with op, the risk analysis and responses of society are so batshit insane to me. Absolutely petrified of shit that never/rarely happens, completely ignoring the things actively and currently killing them.
You’re right that car accidents happen pretty frequently, and carry a high risk of lasting harm to those involved. This is why people have to pass a test in order to be allowed to drive, are legally required to have insurance, why speed limits and other road safety features exist, and why one of the roles of the police is to monitor and respond to dangerous drivers. Despite all these measures, road traffic accidents happen all the time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do these things to try to reduce the likelihood and severity of car accidents. None of these precautions are airtight, but they do reduce the risk that road users face. We don’t ignore the risks of car accidents, we just do what we can to mitigate those risks and get on with our lives as best we can.
That’s how things are for the majority of women. Most of us are far from petrified of unknown men, we have just learned that there are things we can do to reduce the risk of us being harassed or assaulted — many of which don’t take much additional effort and are entirely reasonable precautions to take. Having to do these things is just a background annoyance for most women, because it sure would be nice if we didn’t have to spend time or energy of these things, but most of us have enough lived experience with having to interact with predatory men that it would be irrational not to take precautions.
There certainly are some women who do feel a much higher level of fear, but this is often associated with specific trauma, and is no different to how someone who had been in a bad car accident may feel uneasy driving at first. Risk exists everywhere, and learning what precautions you can easily take to reduce risk, and incorporating them into our lives isn’t us being controlled by fear, but quite the opposite. It can become harmful if it dominates too much of our thinking, but dynamically responding to mitigate risks is something that we all do, every day, to keep ourselves safe and well.
How many of those were by a random stranger though? I am not saying to be careless or that shit never happens to women. I’m just saying that people fixate on the rare things while not being careful around the common things.
The chances are low, yes, but the potential consequences could make life not worth living.
The classic analogy is the jar of 100 sweets. If I offered you a sweet from a jar of 100, and warned you that one of the sweets in the jar was laced with strychnine, would you take one?
This is literally the same way white supremacists ‘justify’ being distrustful/suspicious of black people in general.
The mental stress that this level of paranoia inflicts on you is likely going to be more harmful on average.
You’re best off overall if you take reasonable precautions (having a small weapon/pepper spray), and just go about your day without stressing about it all the time.
One in a hundred? No, of course not. One in five million? Actually, still no, because I don’t like sweets very much. But lets replace the sweets with 20oz wagyu steaks… and yes, I think I would!
Lol, well I probably would because I don’t know what that is. And it sounds like an artificial sweetener.
But I get your point. Humans aren’t good at feeling out chronic ‘mundane risk’ and significantly deemphasise it in favour if acute, ‘dramatic risk’.
Much as how 9/11s death toll permanently transformed America politically and culturally on multiple levels, whereas the severity of far greater numbers of vehicular (or firearm) deaths are accepted as unavoidable facts of life.
The tragedy here is that so many women are terrified of unknown men. A real culture of fear we’ve got going, which serves to isolate almost everybody.
I’m not completely naive - I know this stuff does happen - but the chances of being kidnapped are far lower than, say, being in a road traffic accident, and yet billions of people drive daily without a second thought, without fear, just assuming everything will be fine.
it’s harder to unionize if you’re afraid of your neighbours
I do wonder if the proliferation of True Crime podcasts is, possibly, down to shadowy funding of some sort.
I don’t listen to them anymore myself, not because they’re not gripping, because a lot of them really are, but because it effectively turns victims of horrible crimes into profitable entertainment, and I don’t want to be a party to that.
(I wish I was smart enough I’d come to that conclusion myself, but no - it was other podcasts and an episode of Black Mirror that pointed that out to me)
A fun probability fact I like is around the question “what is the likelihood of consuming any given water molecule twice?”, so like, consuming that water molecule, then excreting it somehow (sweating, urine etc.), and then consuming that same molecule again. The probability of that happening for a given molecule is so ridiculously small that it’s basically zero.
However, the probability of that having happened at least once in an adult’s life is effectively 1, — i.e. it’s almost certainly happened. This is because one cup of water contains around 144,531,378,240,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water, so we get a lot of chances to consume a water molecule twice.
The chances of being kidnapped or otherwise assaulted or harassed is quite low for any given interaction, but despite this, it’s something that a concerningly high proportion of women have experienced. I think for most women, it’s not a case of literally being terrified, but more than we take a wide variety of steps to reduce our risk, given that it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate oneself from every man who could possibly assault them. It’s no different to how people of all genders will often do things like taking a slighter longer, well lit route, or refraining from listening to music through headphones when walking through a city at night.
If I had a husband or partner who was available to go pick up something on my behalf, then that’s a straightforward and trivially easy thing I can do to reduce the amount of unnecessary risk I’d be exposing myself to. If that wasn’t something that was available, it wouldn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t pick up the item myself, but I would be a bit more cautious.
The culture of fear you describe does feed into how individual women perceive and manage risk associated with unknown men, but it’s also important to realise that that culture of fear exists in large part because of the direct lived experience of women who have learned that these kinds of precautions are necessary. For my part, whilst I’ve never been assaulted when picking up items from online sales, I have had a few instances of men being extremely creepy in a way that made me regret not being more careful. I had to change my phone number once because an Uber driver kept sending me dick pics, and a friend once had to get a restraining order against a delivery driver who kept coming back to her home and lurking outside her window. It’s only a small minority of men who do these things, but because our daily lives expose us to so many people, then it ends up being a very rational choice to take precautions to protect ourselves.
Edit: my comment cast a wider net than just “risk of being kidnapped”, because that felt to me like a hyperbolic euphemism designed to avoid saying the much more likely forms of harm that women face from predatory men. However, I want to add that the number of traffic accidents I’ve been involved in is non-zero, and equal to the number of times that an unknown man has attempted to kidnap me.
I was going to type something but it would never be so elaborate and accurate as yours! Its not just about the worst case, but high probabilities for a lot of potential problems.
Also, Bear Grylls consumed the same water molecule twice.
Going to disagree with the responses you have so far. You need to consider both the cost and benefit of taking precautions. The cost of sending someone else in your place is low. The benefit is that you negate that small chance of getting assaulted. The cost of not driving in a car-centric society? It’s way higher. It could mean not being able to go to the store to buy groceries, or not being able to get a job. For most people, that cost is much higher compared to the chance of dying in a car crash.
Very good point
Thing is ill take a risk of being in a fender bender because I will most likely live and not get raped
That being said I combat it by picking things up in a public place or bringing my husband with me
According to OurWorldInData, a person is almost three times more likely to be killed in a car accident than in a homicide by another person. (5.8 homicides per 100k people vs. 16.7 car deaths per 100k per year)
In comparison, non-homicide rapes are… 37.5 per 100k people (oof, much worse that I expected). However, most sources I can find seem to indicate a fairly small percentage of rapes are committed by strangers not known to the victim (A Better Way states it’s 28%). If we take that into account and apply it to the OurWorldInData numbers, it comes out to 10.5 people per 100k are victims of rape by total strangers.
That doesn’t account for the fact that many rapes are not reported, and the risk of rape can vary wildly between different states (holy shit is Alaska rape-y) so the real risk is probably a bit higher than my numbers in most areas, and lower in others.
That wasn’t the result I was expecting when I started writing this comment. I guess in conclusion, people are way more likely to be killed in a car accident than some rando murdering them, but depending on where they live, death by driving may be more or less likely than being raped by a stranger. So uh… Yeah. Not great.
I think that’s a good way to put it. You can’t do much about someone else crashing into you (Unless your husband is Mr Incredible), but you can do a whole lot more when selling/buying something to/from a stranger to avoid that turning nasty.
Genuine question here, am not trying to be edgy or controversial: Which would you least like to happen - be raped, or lose the use of a limb in a road accident?
As a cishet man, I’d take the former (assuming no HIV etc)
A more comparable question is would you rather lose the use of a limb from an accident or have to go under vaginal reconstruction to restore use of urinary function after rape.
I know which is more traumatic. People act like being raped comes with no consequences.
Yeah, the US got a lot of hubris talking about how other countries are dangerous, and then I see posts like this every month.
It’s more than the probability, it’s the level of harm. It’s similar to how we protect our kids from paedos with a high degree of safety even though the risk is really low. It’s because the harm from a paedo is fucking huge. The harm a man can do to a woman is fucking huge, life shattering, soul destroying. Women go to lengths to avoid that because it does happen and it’s impossible to know when, where, who. The only truth we have is that it is a possibility now, here, with this stranger.
Do you you think death… Isn’t all of that? People die or are paralyzed in car accidents.
I’m with op, the risk analysis and responses of society are so batshit insane to me. Absolutely petrified of shit that never/rarely happens, completely ignoring the things actively and currently killing them.
What makes you think we don’t take as many reasonable precautions on the road too?
You’re right that car accidents happen pretty frequently, and carry a high risk of lasting harm to those involved. This is why people have to pass a test in order to be allowed to drive, are legally required to have insurance, why speed limits and other road safety features exist, and why one of the roles of the police is to monitor and respond to dangerous drivers. Despite all these measures, road traffic accidents happen all the time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do these things to try to reduce the likelihood and severity of car accidents. None of these precautions are airtight, but they do reduce the risk that road users face. We don’t ignore the risks of car accidents, we just do what we can to mitigate those risks and get on with our lives as best we can.
That’s how things are for the majority of women. Most of us are far from petrified of unknown men, we have just learned that there are things we can do to reduce the risk of us being harassed or assaulted — many of which don’t take much additional effort and are entirely reasonable precautions to take. Having to do these things is just a background annoyance for most women, because it sure would be nice if we didn’t have to spend time or energy of these things, but most of us have enough lived experience with having to interact with predatory men that it would be irrational not to take precautions.
There certainly are some women who do feel a much higher level of fear, but this is often associated with specific trauma, and is no different to how someone who had been in a bad car accident may feel uneasy driving at first. Risk exists everywhere, and learning what precautions you can easily take to reduce risk, and incorporating them into our lives isn’t us being controlled by fear, but quite the opposite. It can become harmful if it dominates too much of our thinking, but dynamically responding to mitigate risks is something that we all do, every day, to keep ourselves safe and well.
Not to mention that rape by a stranger is literally the rarest type of rape, re relationship to the victim.
Women get raped all the fucking time, dude
I didn’t intend to say they don’t. Just that random strangers don’t usually do it.
Never/rarely happens? 1 in 5 women have been raped and we think those numbers are conservative due to self reporting issues.
How is that rare?
How many of those were by a random stranger though? I am not saying to be careless or that shit never happens to women. I’m just saying that people fixate on the rare things while not being careful around the common things.
And the chances of getting raped are far higher than an adult being kidnapped by a fucking stranger. What a weird metric to use.
Kidnap was what the meme said
The chances are low, yes, but the potential consequences could make life not worth living.
The classic analogy is the jar of 100 sweets. If I offered you a sweet from a jar of 100, and warned you that one of the sweets in the jar was laced with strychnine, would you take one?Classic, but deeply flawed.
This is literally the same way white supremacists ‘justify’ being distrustful/suspicious of black people in general.
The mental stress that this level of paranoia inflicts on you is likely going to be more harmful on average.
You’re best off overall if you take reasonable precautions (having a small weapon/pepper spray), and just go about your day without stressing about it all the time.
One in a hundred? No, of course not. One in five million? Actually, still no, because I don’t like sweets very much. But lets replace the sweets with 20oz wagyu steaks… and yes, I think I would!
Same with traffic incident tho.
Good point. There are some risks we just accept as a society.
Lol, well I probably would because I don’t know what that is. And it sounds like an artificial sweetener.
But I get your point. Humans aren’t good at feeling out chronic ‘mundane risk’ and significantly deemphasise it in favour if acute, ‘dramatic risk’.
Much as how 9/11s death toll permanently transformed America politically and culturally on multiple levels, whereas the severity of far greater numbers of vehicular (or firearm) deaths are accepted as unavoidable facts of life.