Before reading this I'd assumed my twitchiness around men who might beat me up was just due to me being a pussy. No doubt this is still part of it, but good to know that every man suffers the same
Interesting piece and (as often from you) one of the more thoughtful treatments of a particular gendered phenomenon I’ve seen. Reading about this topic always reinforces my sense that in some ways I am a very weird or anomalous guy because I feel like I almost almost totally lack the “public threat sense” you’re describing. I virtually never think about my safety or possible confrontation scenarios in public and to the extent the knot of teens outside the mall would have registered to me it would have been in terms of “that looks annoying and inconvenient to deal with.” I’m not sure why my brain is different this way and I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing. It’s probably NOT a good thing to have a large blind spot around the possibility of stranger violence!
Also to be clear I don’t mean that this is some sort of principled anti-confrontation or “leave him alone” stance on my part but rather I just really minimally register the possibility of physical stranger threat most of the time.
Totally recognise the shuffling the girlfriend across the street. Almost always leads to an argument as she used to never see the danger herself
Before reading this I'd assumed my twitchiness around men who might beat me up was just due to me being a pussy. No doubt this is still part of it, but good to know that every man suffers the same
Has same! That’s why I wanted to write it, to reassure that it’s only 50% us both being a pussy
Interesting piece and (as often from you) one of the more thoughtful treatments of a particular gendered phenomenon I’ve seen. Reading about this topic always reinforces my sense that in some ways I am a very weird or anomalous guy because I feel like I almost almost totally lack the “public threat sense” you’re describing. I virtually never think about my safety or possible confrontation scenarios in public and to the extent the knot of teens outside the mall would have registered to me it would have been in terms of “that looks annoying and inconvenient to deal with.” I’m not sure why my brain is different this way and I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing. It’s probably NOT a good thing to have a large blind spot around the possibility of stranger violence!
Also to be clear I don’t mean that this is some sort of principled anti-confrontation or “leave him alone” stance on my part but rather I just really minimally register the possibility of physical stranger threat most of the time.