Quote from: Asche on January 27, 2016, 09:40:44 AMBut I'm not sure that being female instead of male makes all that much difference in those situations.
Domestic violence situations excluded, I think it does. In general, I don't know any females personally who've been the unwilling participants of a bar fight or street brawl. Having met a lot of people in the club circuit I've seen quite a few of those involving dudes. The only incident I heard of where a woman was being beat up by a drunk man in the street was a story my ex told me, in which he saw this happening and stepped in to help her (and accidentally fell on his ass while doing so because he also was drunk. But apparently he "saved" her anyway). Maybe he'd have stepped in to help a random dude being beat up, I dunno; but you know... there's that pervasive idea women are weaker and harmless so one should step in and protect them immediately if you see someone beating the crap out of them. Not saying that's necessarily true but a lot of people believe it is; and that beating a woman up is somehow way more despicable than beating up a man. (I mean, beating up anybody or anything without a good reason is despicable.) I'm sure it happens out there plenty to women, but I'm also sure it happens at least twice as plenty to men because of this idea that beating women is bad but men beating men is ok. They pretty much prove it in that documentary where they stage a domestic with actors in public - man yelling aggressively and threateningly at woman 'partner'? Members of the public look concerned, people begin to step in. Woman yelling aggressively and threateningly at her male 'partner' and lays hands on, pushing him against a railing? People laugh.
I've been in situations where there's been an incident or some kind of danger, and any guys present were pretty much expected to go sort it out while the females in the room waited. In my own home and with my own family, the two out of four of us who would always get up with bats in hand to investigate someone breaking in during the middle of the night were myself and my dad (we did live in a poor area in a city with a bad reputation so ...yeah, you're certainly right about the random violence and crime in such places. We got broken into probably an average of 2-3 times a year for 10 years). My mother and my sister didn't want to get in harm's way. Me, I wanted to get those [insert whatever colorful expletive you want] breaking into our house, no way could I stand waiting around upstairs listening to whatever was going on downstairs. I've seen dozens of movies where if there's something creepy or scary going on the women immediately jump behind a male who's supposed to defend her, or at least get eaten by the monster or shot by the burglar first. At first I thought this was pretty cliche and unrealistic... till I noticed it happening a lot in real life too. If you're expected to be upfront there's a fair possibility of being more hurt more often than a woman who isn't. As my mom said: "go see what that noise was. I'm staying here."
Of course my personal experience is a small window of the world and I'm not saying mine are the b-all. But I think in general people's stories and experiences I know of, or have read of on the wider net, reflect that if you're woman you're more likely to be sexually harassed or sexually attacked... but less likely to be totally beaten up or killed (again exclusive of the domestic violence thing. After all, you're statistically far more likely to be killed by someone you
know than someone you don't... which is pretty damn awful too). The girls I knew in school had their own form of bullying each other but those girls were rarely if ever picked on violently by boys. Some of the men in my family have
very violent wives but they won't ever hit back, even when in my opinion those wives are downright dangerous in their moments and need to be stopped. There's some kind of unwritten rule among humans that you don't treat women as violently as men or you're just a class-A dirtbag, even if the woman is potentially freaking deadly violent herself. The rule doesn't stop every incident against females but it does seem to stop quite a lot of it, even when it passes into the realm of irrationality/absurdity.
Biologically I think human society just cares more about women's safety than men's. On the whole women care more about women's safety, and men care more about women's safety... than men's. Men are expendable, women aren't, etc. I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon - it's biologically driven I guess.
