I really have zero patience with the whole "man vs. bear" / "you're alone in an elevator with three adult men BUT you feel completely safe. Who are they" / "male night joggers are the natural predator of female night joggers" thing. Like, it's jokes, but it's also sincere, and it reinforces the idea that it's normal and good for women to be afraid all the time, especially of men.

It is not good for women to be afraid all the time, and we should not encourage it! When you consume a media diet of mostly true crime, buy a surveillance device for your house, and commiserate with the girlies online about how scary it is to see a man in a public place, you are basically cultivating an anxiety disorder. This will make your life more unpleasant, because you have trained yourself to be scared all the time, and it will not benefit you, because your fears are based on memes, not reality. You're not protecting yourself from anything; you're just giving yourself an extra flinch response.

And it plays right into the hands of conservatives! The right wing would love it if all women, especially all white and/or wealthy women, were terrified to leave their houses alone because they might see a strange man. They want you to be on a quest for One Good Man who will protect you from all other men and to be too scared to go anywhere without him. They want you to be on a hair trigger, ready to call the cops on anyone who makes you uncomfortable, because that is your function within their hierarchy.

If you are a woman, especially a white woman, then your fear is used to justify violence against poor people and people of color, especially men. From the perspective of conservatives, this is what your fear is for. And your fear is, in large part, what you are for.

Don't let them use you. Don't cultivate your fear.

Also you can equally cultivate NOT being afraid.

As a kid, I used to get so anxious when me and my grandmother would have to walk home from her job at the pub, back to our house on the other side of the estate. It would be dark, the streets would be mostly empty, and the other people we saw would loom up out of the dark and be terrifying to a small child - What if this was Stranger Danger! What if they wanted to attack us, rob us, kill us? At this point the Yorkshire Ripper was either still active or only recently caught, and the news was full of how dangerous it was for women to walk alone at night.

So, my grandmother invented the game of "Who's that?" Where, when we saw someone, we had to make up a story of who they were. Oh, he has a newspaper and a big coat, he must be off to do a night shift at the shipyard. That guy is in a suit, and he looks exhausted, maybe his work kept him behind and now he's five hours late for his tea. Those kids in a little huddle on the street corner - they're smoking weed or drinking a bottle of stolen cider, they are just hoping we ignore them. Etc. The stories usually started out very normal, and gradually got sillier as I calmed down ("Maybe she's a soviet spy trying to discover the secret of HP sauce...") but the whole point was to teach that we weren't the centre of the world, and that it was ridiculous to imagine that total strangers' plans would revolve around us.

addendum to this: I was recently pushing back (mildly) on basically this, on the occasion of splitting up from my coworkers after an Xmas do, and one of them said, well, it's not just that you're a woman, I'd tell anyone to be careful - it is a city.

And like damn having done both a fair few times this year, I'd be way more worried about someone walking home by themselves in the countryside. It isn't lit there! There's nowhere to duck inside if you're too cold! If you lost signal or ran out of phone battery you could genuinely get lost out there and not find a person to ask for directions until morning. Plus there could be a bull.

People are safety more than they are danger, is the point.

You were close, you were so close to noticing something, that you had to force your gaze away so you wouldn't notice it.

You are describing feminism. You are describing actual real-world feminism. You are describing Real True Feminism. It is not a malign plot by conservatives (who are synonymous with evil). It is feminists doing this. It is Yes All Feminists doing this. You have to stop making excuses for feminism and you have to stop shifting blame away from feminism.

Actually, the person you are quoting never once said (or even wholly implied) that these overblown fears actually originate in conservatism or are a "malign plot by conservatives" rather than an aspect of some flavors of progressivism. The OP laments that such overblown-fear-or-men mentalities play into the hands of some conservative ideas and so conservatives will take advantage of them and that this is one major reason why they are lamentable. (I'm surprised actually that the OP didn't also bring up the notion -- both appearing in certain conservative and certain progressive ideology -- that women are in considerable danger from trans women in women's spaces actually, because that applies as well.)

Had in my draft folder to reblog loki-zen's reblog without comment outside of tags anyway, because so much of the thread is extremely well said, guess now I don't have to.

It's too bad the OP already responded and clarified they meant "this thing I am describing is not feminism and does not come from feminism and it is conservativism."

They would not have needed to go into detail about how it benefitted conservatives if they were not operating under the belief that it arose from and was synonymous with conservativism. The majority of the post was about how it was bad because it was what conservatives wanted and would be used by conservatives and aided conservatives. It's very clear to me that this person believes that bad things and bad beliefs originate in conservativism and that things which are not conservative are not bad, and they clarified this position in a later response.

Okay, fair enough, I hadn't seen the OP's response but have now and it seems like they do contend that somehow stoking extreme fear of strange men has nothing to do with feminism or any major part of the feminist movement and that conservatives are pure evil. Fine, I rescind my previous full endorsement of their viewpoint as I do think overblown fear of men is one aspect of some strains of feminist and progressive ideology rather than having its origins entirely in conservatism, nor do I think every feeling or idea within conservatism is evil.

I sure don't see that your alternate viewpoint of how overblown fear of men (but not that women should be encouraged to fully participate in all parts of society) lies at the heart of Real True Feminism, which (instead of conservatism) is the embodiment of pure evil, is any better.

How about, feminism, like most really widespread, multifaceted, decades-spanning social/political movements, has given rise to some bad memes (in this case, the notion that men by existing in public create constant around-the-clock terror for women) without realizing that they fly in the face of some of its good ideas (in this case, that women should be enabled and strongly encouraged to participate in all parts of society -- see also the very related contrast between what I've called "Women Can" and "Women Can't" feminism, two major strains of ideas arising within feminism which seem in tension with each other), and so the feminist movement, like so many other major movements, should be more aware of and try to reconcile its internal contradictory elements.

Or this might be even better: stoking overblown fear of men may not actually contradict the "women should be enabled and strongly encouraged to participate in all parts of society" feminist idea, because part of enabling women to participate is treating the issue of women feeling unsafe to participate, and in order to remove what (to at least some degree in reality truly) is unsafe for women, we have to raise awareness of how dangerous men can be sometimes. But we should be aware of the general phenomenon that over-zealously trying to spread awareness of a danger stokes overblown fears of that danger and actually harms the people that we're trying to protect from that danger by making them ridiculously afraid and effectively "experience" more unsafeness (this is apart from the obvious problem of fomenting prejudice against the group considered dangerous, of course).

The movement that is named feminism DOES reconcile its contradictory elements. The elements that despise men and fully embrace all of the biases of sexism including but not limited to "women should be in constant terror of victimization by men" win every single time and it isn't even close.

There is no war happening for the heart of the movement that is named feminism. Sexism and hating men have always, always, one hundred percent of the time, won. Any time there is any conflict where something might trade off against hating and demonizing men, the movement that is named feminism will pick to hate and demonize men. If you tell feminists they should hate men less than they do, you are excommunicated from the movement that is named feminism.

There are not "many feminisms." There is the movement that is named feminism, which has social and political power due to the fact that it is the movement that is named feminism. Every action that is taken with that social and political power -- power that is accessible only to feminists and only with the approval of the movement that is named feminism -- works to enforce sexism, terrify women, and hate men. The movement that is named feminism might claim to only care about gender equality, but we can notice what it does and what its members say. We can notice that "call out sexism more, find people saying sexist things and publicly bring attention to how bad they are," is a constant demand made by feminists, and we can notice what this means about the approved group consensus of the movement that is named feminism. We can notice that the "real feminists" are very interested in telling people "those aren't real feminists you can't notice them you have to think the movement that is named feminism is good and you have to give more power to the movement that is named feminism," and not even the slightest bit interested in stopping the "not real" feminists from using the power of the movement that is named feminism to enforce sexism, terrify women, and hate men.

I've seen enough of your feminism-related posts to know that there is probably no point in ever arguing with your absolutist beliefs about feminism and what it is and what feminists think and so on, but let me try this one response and then I guess I'll quit and let you have the last word. (There is potentially some talking past each other here because of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism? Although I don't think so -- it seems to me we're both being descriptive right now in characterizing feminism by how the feminist movement and its people actually behave.)

First of all, I never claimed anything about a "war for the heart of feminism". I spoke of how every large-scale movement has distinct elements within it whose particular beliefs, when taking closer to their logical conclusion, are rather at odds with each other, and how the movement as a whole is often not very aware of the tensions between the implications of some of its factions' rhetoric. I'm not sure I believe in a large-scale movement having a single "heart"; I guess the closest thing I see to that is some sort of unifying defining belief, but I would say feminism is so huge and disparate that, descriptively speaking, about the best I can come up with for a unifying defining belief is (vaguely) a belief in looking out for the interests of women. If you think that "looking out for the interests of X people" is simply equivalent to "fomenting hatred of non-X people" absolutely positively end of story, then I suppose there won't be much I can say to convince you otherwise, and then if you are an anti-hate person, then I suppose you'll be bound to never support any movement that looks out for the interests of a group who is oppressed in certain ways.

But anyway. I find your contention that feminism (the "heart" of feminism, or the One True Feminism) has always chosen the "promoting hatred and terror of men" option to be absurd (descriptively that is; if you're being prescriptive instead then your claim is just tautological and you have to defend "promoting hatred and terror of men" as somehow being the best definition for feminism).

I can think right off the bat of a couple of pretty major parts of the feminist movement over the decades that seem to contradict your claim. Around the '60's and '70's, one of the focal points of feminism was to liberate women sexually and throw off the societal expectation of female chastity. In short, women were told it was okay to have sex with men outside of marriage. (No, not all branches of feminism thought this -- the "all male-female sex is rape" idea became popular in certain circles -- but my understanding is this was quite marginalized within feminism and a misconstrual of Dworkin in the first place.) Now, was encouragement of women to go ahead and sleep with men who wanted to sleep with them falling on the side of "men are evil and terrifying", or on another side?

(Of course, at various times -- I think most particularly in the past couple of decades -- condemning and broadening the definition of rape has been a feminist cause as well. And I suspect the "free love" movement of 50-60 years ago made things, well, a good bit rapey-er for women in certain ways, and so the "free love" and anti-rape parts of feminism are examples of two sub-movements whose implications I would say are in tension with each other, although to be fair they each peaked at very different times.)

Is an example from back more than half a century ago too dated? Fine, let's take an issue currently tearing apart our culture and actually sort of coming close to being a "war for the heart of feminism": trans women in women's spaces. One side, which includes some feminists of a certain sort, at every turn emphasizes how terrifying men are and what a threat they are to women in women's spaces, and how overpowering men are in athletics, as part of their justification for keeping anyone with a penis out of women's spaces. The other side argues back with... well, mainly that trans women aren't men (and the frequency of cis men pretending to be trans women to go into women's restrooms or locker rooms is negligible and better not to be considered at all), and trans rights, and something something there isn't actually that much of a male advantage in sports something about "there's a lot more to the concept of 'unfairness'" etc. -- okay, most of the time they'll avoid arguing point-blank that fears of the physical danger of men in women's spaces are exaggerated, because in our present culture there's a pretty strong taboo against ever telling anyone their fear is exaggerated, but, it's pretty undeniable which side of this debate is less devoted to "all men and their physique and their penises and their voices are hateful and terrifying" beliefs.

Now, which side of this has been taken by the bulk of the feminist movement at least in the US (the biggest Western country and biggest that's home to non-oppressed social progressivism)? The side that's all about how terrifying and overpowering men are? Or the side that waves its hands over the idea that a woman might be justified in feeling threatened when someone who appears male enters a woman's space or that a woman athlete might feel unfairly treated if she has to compete with big strong dominating males? Which side can currently most easily claim victory for "the heart of the feminist movement"?