Are Women Allowed to Be Afraid of Men?

In 1986, two different adolescent girls were kidnapped from two different parks within 3.5 miles of my house. Both girls were raped. Both were murdered. Both were discarded like trash in the woods.

Initially, police believed the girls shared a killer. Their cases went cold for more than four decades before authorities were able to utilize DNA technology to pin the murders on two separate monstrous men.

One of the girls was a 13-year-old named Jennifer Bastian who had been riding her bike through Point Defiance park. Her story hit a little closer to home because she was a member of the Castaways, the gymnastics team my mom coached at the local YMCA. When Jennifer disappeared, she was wearing her Castaways t-shirt.

I was young when this happened, but I still remember how the fear felt in my body when I heard her cautionary tale as a child. It was a sobering lesson that there were some really bad people in the world and that females, in particular, were vulnerable to them. I remember not wanting to ride my bike or play outside without a grown-up present.

These girls recently resurfaced in my memory bank when I read the story of a woman who was brutally attacked while walking the trails at the same Point Defiance Park where Jennifer was murdered. In this new story, a lunatic man jumped the victim, known only as “Jane,” from behind and told her he was going to kill her. He repeatedly stabbed her. He cut her throat, narrowly missing her carotid. It’s really quite remarkable she survived. The poor woman sustained some pretty gnarly injuries, requiring more than 120 staples in her skull, neck, and upper back.

Women encounter stories like this on the regular, and it’s not without consequence. We catalogue them in our subconscious, and they inform the way we navigate the public sphere. Accounts of stranger predation compound our collective experiences of the predation too many of us have experienced from men we already know.

By the time I heard the stories about Jennifer and Michelle, I had already been repeatedly sexually violated by a man close to my family. My situation is hardly unique. Though no one can ever agree on the numbers, and though the statistics are so routinely contested that they aren’t worth posting, the sobering reality is that high percentages of women and girls have personal experiences of being violated or harmed in some capacity by bad men in their immediate spheres of influence. They grow up in homes where domestic violence is present. They watch their moms be headbutted and threatened. They watch men they know get away with molesting them because no one wants to disrupt the apple cart. And they see stories on the news of women just like them who try to go out and do benign things like going for a run only to end up dead.

It seems like every week, we have to add another item to the list of the things we, as a sex, have to be super careful to remember in order to merely stay alive:

• Don’t go running or hiking alone.

• Bring a rape whistle

• Never accept a drink from a stranger

• Use the buddy system-there’s safety in numbers.

• Don’t park in unlit areas.

• Have your keys firmly in hand before you even step outside

• Scan the backseat of your car before you enter it.

• Lock your hotel door as soon as you enter

• Inspect bathroom stalls for hidden cameras

As women, we largely walk around with at least some degree of vigilance about our personal safety. It’s a perk of belonging to the sex with less physical power. This shouldn’t be groundbreaking information for anybody. It’s objectively true that the male sex commits like 90% of the world’s violent and sexual crimes, and it’s also demonstrably true that women are disproportionately on the receiving end of that sexual crime. Like the rest of the species in the animal kingdom, our senses are hardwired toward awareness of potential threat. It’s a basic survival instinct. We might not walk around with guns drawn, ready to strike, but as a general rule, women are keenly aware of when men who haven’t yet earned our trust are present.

And yes, I know I’m painting in broad strokes; I freely acknowledge this. My husband is a big burly beast of a man. No one looks at him and thinks, “There’s an ideal target for assault!” But even he still carries a gun and pays attention to his surroundings. I’m not saying men are inherently safe by virtue of their Y chromosomes. I know that men can be victims of sexual crime. I know that women can do bad things, too. This isn’t a “man bad, woman good” type of essay. But I’m a big picture thinker, and I’m talking norms and statistical probabilities, so bear with me. In the wide lens view of things, besides heart disease, the greatest threat to female safety is men. It’s just the truth. We do no one any favors by denying this.

But increasingly, it’s deemed hateful to say this on either the right or the left. The right calls it “man-bashing,” and the left calls it “transphobia.”

Let’s look at how this has played out in recent history.

Take the now-viral social experiment involving women and bears in the woods. If you happened to miss the kerfuffle, here’s the gist. Someone decided it would be a good idea to circulate a survey asking women the following question: “If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man?”

The responses set the internet on fire.

When high percentages of women chose the bear over the man, men everywhere erupted in rage, accusing the women of hysteria and human rights atrocities like “internalized feminism.” (Sarcasm here, in case you missed it.) I actually shared the survey with my own Twitter following, and, more than 8,000 votes later, the women who responded only chose the man 55% of the time.

Many men were greatly displeased by this. I was accused by more than one person of fostering enmity between the sexes by even asking the question. In my opinion, asking the question is only a problem to those who don’t want to wade through the nuances of the answers.

And listen, as much as I live for the thrill of seeing wildlife in its natural habitat, I would personally still choose the man. But I won’t lie and say the answer was easy for me. I’ve actually encountered a bear in the wild, and while it scared the living daylights out of me, when I turned to quietly leave, it minded its own business. My personal connotations of strange men in the woods, on the other hand, include real life stories of women and girls being raped, stabbed, and murdered. The answer wasn’t immediately obvious to me. Most women have never been attacked by a bear. But millions upon millions of us have been attacked by bad men. One woman broke my heart when she wrote, “I’d rather just be mauled to death than raped again.” Never underestimate the debilitating power of shame.

There’s useful information in these answers about what happens to women’s psyches when bad men assault them. There’s useful information about just how many women have been harmed. There’s useful information about how we navigate the world.

But we aren’t allowed to complain about this or identify it as a pretty friggin’ big problem. We’re accused of playing the victim, of demonizing men, of being brainwashed by a man-hating agenda. On the right, when women name our trauma, when we invite attention and call for change, more often than not, we are told to shut up, sit down, and stop whining.

We saw this loud and clear this past weekend when SBC Presidential contender David Allen categorized the 42 pending sexual abuse lawsuits against the denomination as “a distraction.” We saw it again when his buddy Pastor Mac Brunson chimed in to underscore the sentiment by offering up his wife’s personal sexual abuse story as a template for other survivors. In a tweet, he referred to these assault stories as “hangnails,” minor nuisances to be dealt with off the record and moved on from as quickly and quietly as possible.

It’s been my unfortunate experience on the right that most invitations to specifically center advocacy for women are dismissed as cultural Marxism or identity politics rather than being given room to breathe. There’s not much hint of a compassionate response. Our cries for justice are interpreted as a war on men, so they go largely unheard.

But conservatives are hardly the only people who forbid women from being afraid of men. Just look how the left responds when women say that we don’t want naked men in our locker rooms. How many women have been kicked out of gyms now for stepping up and saying, “Hey, there’s a man in the women’s locker room, and I’m afraid of his presence”?

The YMCA fired me for it. Multiple women from Planet Fitness have lost their membership status for it. Julie Jaman was banned for life from the Port Townsend YMCA for it. As long as I live, I’ll never forget being told that a man with an erection in the shower next to me would be no cause for alarm, as “sometimes the warm water can produce that kind of effect.”

The message was clear: Ignore your red flags, swallow your instincts, ignore your discomfort, and get over it. Men’s feelings matter more than your safety.”

This is a tough pill to swallow as as rape survivor who has spent years and thousands of dollars in therapy learning to speak up in defense of my personal boundaries. I thought I was supposed to trust my instincts. I thought I was supposed to speak up if I felt unsafe. But now that’s only true until a man in a dress decides otherwise? It’s rape culture by any other name. And gaslighting to boot.

But ask a progressive, and they’ll insist that women’s fear of men in our spaces is little more than manufactured outrage. Pearl clutching. Hysteria. Bigotry, even!

As I type this, a science channel documentary is playing in the background, detailing the porcupine’s instinctive defenses against predators. They’re innate, unbidden, and critically important for survival. No one faults a porcupine for spreading his quills when he feels threatened. No one accuses a porcupine of being hysterical. No one insists on telling a porcupine he’s a garbage creature for tending to his protective instincts.

But women continue to be denied this courtesy, and I’m not quite sure what to do about the problem except to name it.

If a woman says she would rather encounter a bear in the woods than a man she doesn’t know, there’s probably going to be a pretty reasonable explanation for this beyond “the man-bashing feminist agenda.” Furthermore, regardless of whether or not you think her reasons are valid, you sure aren’t going to change her mind by casting aspersions on her character or calling her stupid.

And listen, I know there are a great many amazing men in the world. We need more of them! I married one. I’m busy trying to raise two more. I’m sensitive to the way they’re regarded in society. I don’t want them to be unfairly painted with a brush that labels all men as monsters. No, it is absolutely NOT all men who are doing the damage. But it’s enough of them to merit a degree of empathy for the women who choose the bears. If you had been badly injured, you might be hesitant, too. The very best men I know are secure enough to prioritize the defense of the wounded above the defense of their own egos.

It seems to me that “Tell me why you chose the bear” will go a whole lot further in restoring gender relations than “What the heck is wrong with you, you psycho feminazi"?” ever will.

Can we start there?

I'm working to treat my writing like a job, so if you appreciate my writing, I would be so grateful if you would consider investing in a paid subscription. I try to keep my costs low, but my family thanks you for every dollar you invest in my writing. Thanks so much for your support!