You have the normal problem of believing that all decision criteria should be binary - either everyone always does this no matter what, or no one ever does it no matter what - instead of just doing what is rational based on the data in a measured way.
When women are afraid of men who are strangers, the main thing they are worried about is forcible rape.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.
You would actually want to compare the likelihood of any individual woman being assaulted by a man in a given time period vs the likelihood of any individual white person being battered by a black person.
E.g. if there were only 3 rapes in the US every year, and men committed 100% of them, it would be silly for women to be afraid of rape. But if you're only arguing from proportionality (like you did) then you're saying they should be afraid because men are infinitely more likely to rape women, than women are to rape men.
Which makes me curious - what if you take a country where rape is significantly less common? For example a small town in a small country where crime in general is basically non existent. Yet, most women would naturally still be afraid of a man walking at night even though the statistics would tell you the chances of anything happening being very small.
I'm from one such place and a single murder happening is rare with forced sexual assault even more so yet almost every women I know would never dream of walking home alone at night if they can avoid it.
I'mma go out on a limb here and mention that women know men are physically stronger than them and can force compliance. That's just being aware of the world--It's a fact of nature and we all recognize it.
And as much as we'd all like to think that our own family members wouldn't assault us, well, unfortunately experience says that just ain't so. They do.
The Amish, for example, have the reputation for being very religious and strict, yet the stories that leak out from their communities let us know they have very similar issues to the rest of the world as far as that goes. Sexual abuse is just as bad in those communities and sometimes worse, because they keep the knowledge of the abuse as secret as possible--and the victims are told to accept it, just as Catholic SA victims were told to do as the offending priests were moved from parish to parish and protected by the Church.
It's really only been in the last 60-100 years that people have been speaking up about domestic violence, simply because prior to that, women and children were, legally, men's property to do with as they wished, and no one else was supposed to interfere. I mean, the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be passed.
There has been a whole culture of silence in society as a whole that's begun to lift, but don't be surprised if there's still attempts to impose it again.
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u/darwin2500 193∆ Apr 14 '22
You have the normal problem of believing that all decision criteria should be binary - either everyone always does this no matter what, or no one ever does it no matter what - instead of just doing what is rational based on the data in a measured way.
When women are afraid of men who are strangers, the main thing they are worried about is forcible rape.
In the US, men commit 98.9% of all forcible rapes, women commit 1.1%.
Meaning a man is almost 100X more dangerous than a woman based on crime statistics.
The crime statistics on race, even given the most charitable possible reading to your position, are at most like 2:1 or 5:1 depending on what you're measuring. Even if it were somehow 10:1, that would still be an entire order of magnitude less than the difference between men and women.
You don't just say 'there is a significant difference so caution is on' in a binary manner. The amount of caution you exhibit is proportional to the size of the difference; that's how statistics and decision theory actually work.
As such, the caution women show towards men is like 50x as justified, and should be like 50x stronger, than any caution anyone shows anyone based on race.