"Schrödinger’s Rapist"

I just read an excellent post with that title by Phaedra Starling (via). The post's subtitle is, "a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced." An excerpt:

Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.

“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”

Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is.

I am continually shocked and horrified by what women go through on a daily, and more often, nightly basis simply to navigate the world without being raped, abducted, or otherwise assaulted simply because they're women. Most of my friends are female, and I've had countless phone conversations during which, as a friend walked down some street at night, was sitting at a bus stop, or was just sitting in a cafe reading a book, she was approached either on foot or by a man in a car and asked if she wants a ride, where she lives (seriously, do they expect someone, male or female, to just tell a strange man where they live?), what her name is, if she lives alone(!), if she wants to go out on a date (usually meaning right then), or if she wants to have sex. Then there are the times when I get calls late at night because a friend is being followed by a strange man, or a strange man won't leave her alone as she walks by herself. One time, I was on the phone with a friend as she walked through a grocery store parking lot when a man walked up to her and asked, "Do you like to get freaky?" I mean, what the hell? Does this ever work for guys? Does a woman ever say to them, "Yes, I would like to have freaky, funky sex with you right now. I live right over here, by myself. Let's go there and get it on?" I can't imagine that ever happens. Or that women ever say yes when a man in a van pulls up to them on a dark street and asks them if they want a ride.

But then, I don't think these men are really looking for women to say yes to any of those queries. More often than not, I suspect, they're scoping out the woman and the situation, looking for vulnerabilities and opportunities for sexual assault and rape. The "yes" is irrelevant.

We will not live in a truly free society until women feel as safe walking down the street alone at night as I do. This would require men learning not only to respect women as human beings, but also understanding the unique difficulties and dangers that women face because so many men are likely to treat them as mere objects. And honestly, I don't have a lot of hope that this will happen anytime soon.

UPDATE: From the comments to the original ""Schrödinger’s Rapist" post:

Interestingly, I’ve been getting more and more comments from men about how these threads prove that if women just talked back and were confident more, instead of being “polite”, the problem would go away.

While I'm not a woman, and therefore can't speak for them, my second hand experience is consistent with this. One of my friends always responds to men who approach her in the ways I described above with a very forceful, "Get out of my fucking face!" or something to that effect. And the men seem to respond to this, usually leaving her space post haste. Sure, they'll occasionally mutter "bitch" under their breath, but better to be called a bitch than to be physically assaulted, right? She does the same thing with men who follow her. She will stop, look at them so that they know that she knows they're there, and if they continue to follow her, she will say something like, "What's your fucking problem?" or "What the hell do you want?" In almost every case they stop following her after that.

My theory is, this wakes the men up to the fact that she is a person, and not simply a moving object, and while I don't think this causes them to respect her in any meaningful sense of the word, it does cause them to respect the fact that she's capable of doing them harm too, with either a swift kick or by letting everyone in the general vicinity know what they're up to. In fact, I've seen her do this in person, and she does it so loudly that everyone within ear shot turns around to see what all the fuss is about. The men often become visibly embarrassed, which seems to disarm them.