Dangers of misogyny are real
Women must calculate many times each day whether our desire to do something is worth the safety risks
I was walking down a forest trail with my dog recently when I ran into another woman, alone with hers. She warned me that she had just had a verbal altercation with a man on the trail.
He said he wasn’t comfortable with dogs on the trail because he never knew what they would do. She replied, now you know how women feel when we pass men on trails.
We then discussed how women must calculate many times each day whether our desire to do something is worth the safety risks.
Can I walk down a forest trail alone, or take a walk at night after dinner — or walk down a busy metropolitan street in broad daylight?
That’s right. Recently, the New York Times published a story about a woman who was standing at an intersection waiting for the light to change when a man came up and punched her in the head.
She is not alone. Fourteen women have reported being punched “out of nowhere,” since mid-March the newspaper reported.
And what about the BBC News report this week that said “Women in the northwest of England say they feel unsafe after videos taken of them on nights out without their knowledge have gained millions of views on social media and attracted a slew of misogynistic comments.”
Said one women who was victimized, “I have no words really other then it just made me feel a bit sick.”
This is reminiscent of the misogyny directed at female news announcers when they were doing live reports on the streets. It became a thing to walk behind the reporter and yell a vulgar statement.
And what does it do to women when men think intimidating and degrading women is funny. Or when they think they can approach us for sex whenever they please, and even assault us if we don’t come across?
“Grab ’em by the p---y. You can do anything,” Donald Trump famously advised TV personality, Billy Bush, of “Access Hollywood,” fame. Bush got fired, Trump was elected president of the United States.
It’s not like we don’t know the dangers of ignoring misogyny.
In mid-April, a man fatally stabbed six people in a shopping mall in Australia. Police said he was hunting down women.
“The videos speak for themselves, don’t they,” said New South Wales state Police Commissioner Karen Webb. “The offender focused on women and avoided the men.”
As did Alek Minassian when he drove his van down Yonge Street in North York in 2018, killing 11 and injuring 15, and as did Marc Lepine when he separated the women from the men in 1989 at the École Polytechnique and murdered 14.
But still there is resistance to addressing misogyny. Case in point?
Last week on the fourth anniversary of the Nova Scotia mass shooting of 22 people, an event that began with the perpetrator assaulting his common-law wife as he had many times before, Nova Scotia’s justice minister, Brad Johns, said he doesn’t believe domestic violence is an epidemic.
Really? According to Statistics Canada, 44 per cent of women aged 15 and older have reported some kind of abuse in their intimate partner relationships.
And according to another study: every six days a woman in Canada is murdered by her intimate partner.
Johns stepped down the day after he made the remarks.
But the damage is done.
He gave back up to men who think making disparaging or threatening remarks to women on forest trails, or assaulting them on city streets, or grabbing them by the genitalia is a joke. He might as well have said: “Nothing to look at here.”
So, women will continue to feel unsafe, because we don’t know what men will do.