The Safety Trap

Fear

And that fear of men affects one’s entire perspective. I’m willing to bet you that male anarchists outnumber female ones at least two to one (and probably much more), because the first question a woman will ask about changes in government is, “How can I be safe?” Right now women at least have the reassurance of law, police, etc. for their safety–but, speaking as a woman who knows self-defense backwards and forwards, the idea of not having a monopoly justice system with courts of appeal and so on, applicable to everyone, scares the willies out of me. One of the basic things I want out of any governing system is some structure to guarantee that a horde of big hairy things will not try to revert me to sexual slavery, and anarchy as a system probably hits that button REAL hard for most women. Until you can address that, you probably won’t find many female supporters.

It runs deeper than that, of course. Women have essentially been raised in a bunker system where they’re supposed to be afraid of half the population. (Virtually every woman at least considers the possibility of date rape at some point in their lives.) Surprisingly, women consequently tend not to be as daring as men;as Emily Dickinson complained,

Women have no wilderness in them;
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cells of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

I think one of the reasons you see relatively few female entrepreneurs, and few women in high-risk professions, is precisely because women are generally raised to think of safety first–before you go out on a date, before you go anywhere, you ask yourself if predators are lurking. That can’t help but impact the way you do business, the way you choose professions, your entire worldview. (Heck, before I learned women’s self-defense, I felt acutely uncomfortable just being alone with a tall man–never mind getting into heated arguments!)

I feel like I’ve mostly gotten past this, primarily through a combination of early social outcasting (I never learned to conform) and having learned to fight through fear, but there are some visceral reactions that just can’t be eradicated. That’s one of the reasons I consider teaching women’s self-defense a radical feminist act; until women get out of their bunkers, they will always be at a disadvantage, always less bold and more conservative, than men.

There’s a converse, of course: men are taught that they have to be risk-takers or they’re wimps, geeks, etc.; this is one of the reasons, I suspect, that men tend both to perpetrate violence, and be victimized by it, significantly more than women. (Men are murdered four times more often than women and are more often victimized by every violent crime, except rape.) Society notices and magnifies danger to women, and discounts/minimizes danger to men.

But that’s a whole ‘nother conversation…