I read a great exchange which inspired me to write this post. I took the twitter exchange that makes up this post as a launching pad, and added in quite a bit. I pulled from the comment section, as well as other articles and theories. There are links to other sources and concepts throughout this piece.

This post includes a back and forth in twitter format between two people. @CathyYoung63's tweets provide the arguments, and @barrydeutsch's tweets provide the response. Anyone quoted outside of the main exchange (which is nicely packaged as a Storify in the source post) has a reference written in. Because large parts of this are quoted from twitter, I've made minor edits to quoted text for clarity and consolidation. I added paragraph formatting, commas, emphasis and the like. I've made a few edits to the text itself, but I've used ellipses and brackets properly. Block quotes and headings should make obvious who is speaking, Any text not quoted is my commentary. If you see any problems or have something to add, please let me know.

Initial statement: #YesAllWomen

YesAllWomen because the odds of being attacked by a shark are 1 in 3,748,067, while a woman's odds of being raped are 1 in 6... yet fear of sharks is seen as rational while being cautious of men is seen as misandry. ¹

Argument 1: But wouldn't it be racism if...?

Here's a simple question though--would this tweet be offensive if it referred to blacks/racism, not men/misandry?

Answer: No

Yes, it would be - . . . because of the false and harmful stereotyping of black people.

. . . It's not irrational for women to feel more cautious about men than women, in common contexts. If a woman is walking and someone starts following saying "Hi! Hey, hi!" and escalating to "don't ignore me bitch!," It's VERY safe to assume the person following is a man. And this happens VERY commonly, to many (not all) women.²

Perhaps you'd say that a woman in such a situation is irrational to fear violence, but I disagree. Few street harassers escalate to violence, but it's hard-wired into humans to find openly aggressive hostile behavior from strangers threatening.

Also the initial attention lets the woman know that this man is targeting her, specifically. If he escalates from attention to harassment or from harassment to violence, she's the target.

So in this very common situation - walking down the street - women could very rationally be more cautious of men than women. (Note I'm just saying "be more cautious." I'm not saying mace every man you see, I'm not advocating any anti-male act at all.) Not every man is a harasser, of course - most of us aren't - but enough are so, [that] threatening, public harassment is commonplace.

And that harassment is socially acceptable enough that women who are being publicly harassed can't count on public support. Often women trying to avoid a man harassing them will be further harassed by onlookers (men who sympathise with the man doing the harassing). They often can't count on support from positions of authority either: most cops are male, and the justice system is notoriously bad at handling gendered harassment and violence. While police should and often do take street harassment seriously, far too often they don't. Or worse, they join in.

The frozen calm of normalcy bias is also at work here. People, in general (70%!) are not likely to intervene. There's a reason that someone can be pummelled to death in public while people just walk past. In cases of gendered harassment, this is worse. You have both normalcy bias working to keep people from intervening and you have a too high population of people who see nothing wrong with harassment in the first place.

In contrast, someone who is more cautious about blacks because they feel blacks are likely to be muggers is being irrational. Statistically, there are a greater proportion of muggers among blacks than whites - "but the number of such muggers is so vanishingly small that a black's chance of being one is only slightly higher than a white's."³ For practical, walking-the-streets purposes, the odds of a stranger being a mugger are effectively identical regardless of skin color.⁴ There are things that matter - youth, acting suspicious, etc - but those merit caution regardless of skin color.

This power differential is also vastly different. If a white person actually is in danger from a black person and needs the justice system, the power is balanced in their favour, every step of the way. From cops, to prosecutors, to judges, to juries, to the law itself: white people are in the best position possible to receive protection and/or justice.

Argument 2: But what about the men?

. . . but that doesn't mean negative stereotypes of men are harmless (even if they are less harmful than those of blacks).

Answer: They're hurt the least

I agree, they're not harmless. But the solution is to change how some men behave so women no longer feel the need to be cautious - not to criticize women for saying that they are sometimes cautious of men."

This is different from negative stereotypes of blacks. It is not the way black people act that are the problem, and even so, they already have changed their behaviour to make white people more comfortable. They've had to, because when they don't, they die. (And sadly, even when they do.) Fear of a black person walking the streets is irrational, and the only way to solve that is by tackling the root cause of that fear (racism), not by further oppressing black people.

[It's also important to have an] awareness of [just] who gets harmed by the decision (or tendency) to avoid a potential street interaction, and how that differs between women avoiding street interactions with men and white people avoiding street interactions with black people.

Our society is substantially segregated by race, but not by gender, and the desire of white people to avoid interacting with black people is a major driver of that segregation. Meanwhile, women avoiding street interactions with men mostly plays out by limiting the mobility of women, so women’s pattern of avoidance harms women, and white people’s pattern of avoidance harms black people.⁵

Yes, men can be harmed by women having to be cautious. A man could miss out on meeting his soulmate because a woman was being cautious. A man could have his feelings hurt by a woman who is terse with him in public. But this is a far smaller harm then the alternative (socialising women to ignore reasonable fears). And it's not just a smaller harm than the alternative, it's a smaller harm than the one that women themselves pay for being appropriately cautious.

Additionally, because women and men are highly integrated in our society (most women grew up with men in their family, work with men, have male friends, etc), street interactions with strangers do not represent the overwhelming majority of women’s interactions with men. This means that the psychological effects of having an aversion to interacting with strange men on the street [are] heavily moderated by positive interactions with men in other contexts.

Meanwhile, most white people in the US have very limited interactions with black people, so the psychological effects of viewing black people on the street as threats has very little moderating counter-balance, and plays a much larger role in setting white people’s psychological biases when they interact with black people in other contexts.⁵

Conclusion / Shorter copy pasta

While men may have their feelings hurt by women avoiding street interactions with them, women pay a much higher price: their mobility is limited and their energy, time and money consumed. Women’s pattern of avoidance harms mostly women. Meanwhile, white people’s pattern of avoidance harms black people (segregation). Men are the people least harmed by women avoiding them, the same way that white people are least harmed by avoiding blacks. Who does the avoiding is not the analogous part. The power differential and the harm differential are analogous here:

The example is exactly backwards. It should be “is it racist for black people to be wary of white people? . . . The implication [of this analogy] is that women are in a powerful and privileged position relative to men, just as whites are in a powerful and privileged position relative to blacks. In real life it is of course the other way around.⁶

1. Mirnahh tweeted
   
2. Data on the prevalence of street harassment can be found here
3. Here @BarryDeutsch is paraphrasing something Cathy herself wrote, hence the quote marks.
4. Ampersand used the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics to do some quick, back of the envelope calculations. Using data on “robbery” (the category closest to muggings), 136,445 Americans are robbed by white offenders in a year (2008, most recent year with data up), while 246326 were robbed by black offenders. Assuming (wrongly because this ignores multiple-offender robberies and serial robbers) that the number of offenders equals the number of robberies, these stats mean that 99.40% of blacks are not robbers, while 99.94% of whites are not robbers. The odds get more identical for white people when you consider that 1.6 per thousand white Americans are robbed in a year, versus 5.5 per thousand Black Americans.
5. Charles commented
6. Mythago commented