Women aren’t always safe, even in gyms. But fear is a good way of reining them in
Iwas utterly transfixed last week by a moment captured on CCTV in a Florida gym. A woman – an Instagram fitness model called Nashali Alma – sees a man waiting outside the door and interrupts her workout to buzz him in. It is evening. The two are now alone, sealed inside the empty room.
After a few minutes the man approaches her and then, shockingly, starts to chase her around the machines. Then he catches her. You think: that’s it, she’s done for. But like one of those dramatic sequences in the very best David Attenborough films – a hatchling iguana evading a nest of snapping snakes, perhaps, or an impala struggling clear of a crocodile death-roll – it is not over. She fights and, eventually – unbelievably – she wins. The exhausted predator has been outdone by his wily prey.
“I was confident I had the strength and mentality to fight back,” Alma later said, for all the world like a victorious footballer at a press conference. “I would tell every woman always to keep fighting, never give up.”
Inspiring stuff, I thought, but many would disagree. In fact the video has sparked something of a row online.
After a Florida sheriff told reporters the story would be “an inspiration to other women”, many reacted in fury. There was nothing inspiring about a woman being attacked, they felt – in fact that message was deeply irresponsible. The real and only message was that women are not safe in gyms – not safe anywhere at all.
How should we talk about this video? Which message is the right one? The question captures an unease I have long felt in the way we talk about female safety.
We hear a great deal of the second message: that women are not safe walking home at night, not safe on public transport, not safe in gyms. It is drummed home at every opportunity (even a video of a woman successfully fending off an attack, it seems, is a chance to tell us just how unsafe we are). Yes, it is important to push for greater protections against violence. But is it possible that this narrative – that women are perpetually at great risk in public spaces – does harm as well as good?
I should say that there is of course some truth to the message. Horrific things do happen to women in public places. But perhaps not as often as we might think.
In England and Wales, women are far less likely to be killed than men: in the year ending March 2022, 72% of homicide victims were male. And as for safety on the streets, the stats suggest the greater danger for women lurks in the home, at the hands of a current or former partner. In that same year, stranger attacks accounted for just 7% of female victims and 15% of male ones.
Just 15% of rapes are committed by strangers.
These are the facts. Yet they remain at odds with public perception, perhaps because of an outsize cultural reaction when that rare terrible thing does happen to a woman walking home alone at night.
A year after the murder of Sarah Everard, a YouGov poll of British women found 66% of women either “always”, “often” or “sometimes” felt unsafe walking alone at night. Some 25% felt similarly afraid walking alone in the daytime. Anecdotal evidence suggests much the same effect has been produced by the coverage of Nicola Bulley’s death. Women are scared to go out alone.
Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? Does it matter if daily risks to women are exaggerated, if it helps keep them safe? Well, here’s an argument that it does matter. In patriarchies, theorists might say, violence against women in public places is not only a social evil – it serves a political purpose. It is used to police. It tells women where they are supposed to go and where they are not. When women are attacked on the streets, or at universities, or in the workplace, they understand these places are not for them.
Informing women of real risks is one thing, but exaggerating the danger only helps deliver that original message: keep off the streets, leave the city to the men, this space is not for you. In fact, if the message is frightening enough, and spread widely enough, actual risk no longer matters. The work of the patriarchy is done. Women police themselves.
In the world’s strongest patriarchies there is not only vicious violence against women, but also a tradition of drumming up the threat. Women are told they are weak creatures in need of male protection at all times.
That is why they must stay in their houses, cultivate good relations with the family patriarch, wear veils and even consent to mutilation practices. It is, after all, for their own safety. (Studies in India suggest it is cultural fear of crime, rather than the actual statistics, that are most strongly linked to women’s decisions not to take up offers at prestigious universities or join certain workplaces.)
Nation states have for time immemorial used fear – foreign invaders, terrorist threat, even pandemics – as a shortcut to curtailing the freedom of their citizens. It is perhaps unsurprising if the world’s oldest power system uses much the same methods. A minister in the Indian government recently proposed any woman leaving the house register herself at the local police station so she can be tracked. For her protection, of course.
Yes, Alma’s video is an inspiration – it counters a disempowering message that women are supremely vulnerable to men. It tells us it might just be worth investing in a few self-defence lessons. And it contains another message too, perhaps no less important. Attacking women is not always as easy as it looks. Try it and you might just tangle with the wrong person.
• Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobby correspondent
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Is it possible that this narrative – that women are perpetually at risk in public spaces – does harm as well as good?
came out thinking: I never want to do this again.
You end up with your arm up an elephant’s backside. How was that?That was sprung on me. First they asked if I’d assist a vet taking blood from an elephant. Then they asked if I’d like to take a stool sample. I said: “No thank you. I honestly don’t think I can.” At which point I hear my coproducer David Brindley shouting from off-camera: “Oh, I think you can!” So I did it for the show. I felt sorry for the animal. It was a horrible feeling.
Has making the show changed you?It has. The idea that you can’t really form an opinion about something unless you try it, that’s been an eyeopener. I never wanted to go on safari. I know what all these animals look like. Do I need to get up at 5am and go on a long trip to see them running around a field? Actually, it turns out I do. After only a few days in South Africa, I grew an affinity for these wild animals and the landscape they inhabit. The danger posed by poachers and hunters hit me in a very real way. I’m not a big talker and lean on the shy side but I learned how to chit-chat to strangers. Travel makes you a better person, or at least a slightly more interesting one.
Your son Dan co-created and costarred in Schitt’s Creek. Your daughter Sarah played Twyla Sands and your brother Fred produced the show. How was it, working so closely with your family?It’s one of the true joys of my life that I got the chance to work on a day-to-day basis with my children. I always used to envy friends in different professions – a lawyer whose son went to law school or a doctor whose children became doctors – with family businesses. It was a thrilling experience for me.
It must have been a proud moment when you and Dan both won Emmys in 2020?Oh, absolutely. We’re recordbreakers – the first ever father and son to win an Emmy in the same year and the first to win for the same show. I’m glad we didn’t get all those awards in our first or second season. That’s a dangerous way to go. Much more satisfying to do it all in our final year, when people had seen all the seasons and got what we were trying to do.
You’re known for co-writing and appearing in Christopher Guest’s films… Funnily enough, a lot of the cast just got together in San Francisco for a reunion event, marking the 20th anniversary of A Mighty Wind. There was music, laughter, a lot of fun.
Are there any more collaborations in the pipeline?No, I don’t think it will happen. Our last one was For Your Consideration back in 2006. Our fake documentaries – Chris always hated the term “mockumentary” because we’re not mocking, it’s more affectionate than that – but they were getting a little cookie-cutter in terms of story. Everything was kind of the same, except we just changed the subject. At a certain point, that becomes predictable. In the interim, so many television shows have picked up that form and just destroyed it.
What do you get recognised most for nowadays? Is it still American Pie?
Now it’s Schitt’s Creek. All over the world. People came up and talked about the show in pretty much any location we visited. The American Pie thing got a bit tedious. People would bring me apple pie every time I went into a restaurant or to a wedding. Which is kind of funny, but it did happen a lot.
What part have your trademark eyebrows played in your career?Well, listen, here they are [removes his baseball cap and waggles eyebrows]. I try to keep them as trim as I can. They didn’t hinder or help my career, I don’t think. Nobody has ever asked me to hire a landscaper and take them down for any job.
You had a hit TV show in your 70s. You must be pleased that your friend Jennifer Coolidge is becoming an icon in her 60s?Totally, yes! It’s so well deserved. She truly is a very funny, quirky, beautiful person. In The White Lotus, Jennifer finally got a role that reflected who she is. I love that she’s getting all these plaudits, partly because it gives her the opportunity to make thank you speeches that turn out to be the highlight of the entire awards show.
You have Scottish roots, right? Perhaps you could explore those if there’s a second series…Yeah, my mum was born in Glasgow in the early 20th century and came over to Canada aged 12. She’s no longer with us, of course, but I still have relatives in Glasgow. I could go over there. Scotland was on the initial list of possible locations but I tend to think of Scotland as cold, cloudy and windy. I didn’t know if I wanted to spend a week in a place with no sun. But hey, that was the old me. I’m getting it now, so who knows?
The Reluctant Traveleris available now on Apple TV+
I’m not a big talker and lean on the shy side but I learned how to chit-chat to strangers
try to hike some of the availableroutes myself. Starting at Griffith Observatory, known for its appearances in Rebel without a Cause and La La Land, I walked for miles along a battered asphalt road, with only the distant grumble of an LAPD helicopter for company. Wild coyotes trotted alongside me, eyeing me with resentment for being not quite small enough to eat.
Following my Google Maps directions, rather than the posted signs, I found myself on a narrow dirt trail that took me along a precipitous drop. I thought I must have taken a wrong turn, but some other hikers told me that I had not. “This is the easiest way,” a man in a Dodgers cap reassured me, as I shimmied down some rocks.
An Irish tourist I met near the sign’s summit told me she and her friends had started their journey to the sign by hiking through a field, then gotten yelled at, before eventually finding a path to the top.
There’s a shorter route to the sign, if you don’t mind risking the wrath of wealthy homeowners. Up the twists and turns of Deronda Drive in Beachwood Canyon, a pedestrian gate into the park is typically surrounded by a scrum of double-parked cars and drivers reaching a dead end and desperately trying to turn around.
I walked down that way, dodging Teslas through the verdant, sidewalkfree streets of Beachwood Canyon, and thinking of Bertolt Brecht’s journal entry from 1941, in which he compared Los Angeles to “Tahiti in the form of a big city” and complained that “an incessant, brilliantly illuminated stream of cars thunders through nature”. (Los Angeles’s lush nature was itself an illusion, he added: “Stop paying the water bills and everything stops blooming.”)
Recognizing the continuing travails of sign tourism, the Hollywood Sign Trust, which manages the monument, announced that it would use the sign’s centenary to raise funds for an official visitors’ center, complete with lecture halls, a movie theater, museum, gift shop, and, presumably, bathrooms, something sign visitors have lacked for years.
“The people have asked for it, tourists have asked for it, the community at large has asked for it, so we’re doing it,” Jeff Zarrinnam, the chairman of the trust, announced in January as he stood below the letters, wearing a miniature version of the sign on his lapel.
This sounds like a great solution, until you learn that the current location options for the visitors’ center may not get tourists much closer. Proposed sites include the old pony stables in Griffith Park, about five miles away, “down on Hollywood Boulevard”, about two miles away, or even “behind the Hollywood sign, on the other side of the mountain”.
The current inaccessibility of the sign does have an upside. The area around the giant letters has remained a little patch of wild earth, a sanctuary for deer, foxes, coyotes, even the city’s celebrity mountain lions. On the steep dirt slope around the sign, it’s so quiet that it’s almost possible to hear the sun beating, or the flick of shadows from birds overhead.
“For some reason, the crows and hawks are always circling by the letters,” Holcomb, the PR rep, told me. “The gusts of wind must be fun to ride.”
Holcomb let me walk a few feet inside the giant fence around the sign, but said we had not been cleared by security to get any closer. Crouching on the dirt, between clumps of wildflowers, was as close to the sign as I was going to get.
And yes, I asked: they wouldn’t let me touch it.