To the men who tell women what we’re allowed to be afraid of

First of all, thank you. I know you must have better things to do than wade in, yet again, to correct our perceptions of reality. The trouble is, we’re always getting it wrong.

To be fair, it is not our fault. We are not authoritative; we are not you. We are taught from an early age to doubt ourselves, to see our own versions of reality as suspect, requiring external confirmation from the experts, the men. When you are not considered a reliable witness to your own experiences, things become very confusing. This, I guess, is where you step in.

Not all of us are afraid of the same things at the same time. Or there are some things we convince ourselves are safe which we later understand were anything but. We are inconsistent. That’s the thing about fear. The impact impedes the articulation. What do we fear most of all? Hard to say. That is, the answer is obvious, but it’s very hard to say it without having one’s sanity or one’s morality — one’s capacity for kindness — questioned. It’s easier to defer to you. We can do this for years. We can even start to believe it.

Years ago, I was attacked by a stranger. A car pulled up in front of me and I couldn’t decide whether or not to be scared. I dithered, berating myself for my paranoia, reminding myself that stranger danger is more cliché than reality, that “you’re more likely to be attacked in the home than outside it”, even thinking — possibly, I was having a lot of thoughts — “it’s not as if any man would want to assault someone like you”. If only you’d been there to assess the situation. It wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome, but at least I’d have known whether my — in this case, well-founded — fears meant I was mentally ill, a bigot or a bitch.

Then there’s attacks inside the home. These are an actual thing, not just a line you trot out to downplay attacks outside the home. Do you know how many abusive men are considered lovely men, gentle men, kind men, by those who don’t witness what happens behind closed doors? To be fair, you probably have heard this; that’s another cliché. But also, how many abused women defend these men, doubt their own perceptions, have been beaten down so many times they’re not sure if it isn’t their fault? Do you know it’s possible to be ashamed of your own fears? To think, well, maybe this does mean I’m a bad person? You reinforce that shame each time you lecture women on fears you deem to be misplaced. Still, you’re the expert.

Here is a depressing reality, which I learned from the stranger in the car, and others. The strength differential between male and female people is ridiculously significant when male people want it to be. Unfit men, small men, old men, young men — they can do anything, you realise. It is not very easy to forget, nor easy to dismiss with bullshit sophistry about identities, averages and exceptions. Female fear of male strangers is not irrational from a safety perspective. It is, however, politically inconvenient, socially embarrassing, definitionally troubling etc. etc. Lots of things that bother you more than they bother us, but then those are the more important things.

That you — male people — are complicit in the creation of our fear, that you benefit from it, that it’s your dominance that enables you to breeze in, puffed up with pride at your own magnanimity, to tell us we’re allowed to feel threatened by this, but not that … I imagine you don’t really think about this. Or about the effort it takes traumatised women to qualify, reframe, deny, bargain with their fears, all the time, background music playing in their heads. The active suppression of fear of male violence is like housework; you only notice when women aren’t doing it. The rest of the time it’s invisible to you. You don’t appreciate it at all, all the half-lives, all the silences.

You think it an act of generosity to allow us to be fearful of some male people, but not others. As though fear itself is a luxury. We mustn’t be greedy; mustn’t take too much. That you should be offering safety — that a kind, empathetic response to female fear would be to look at the violence from which you benefit, question the class to which you belong — does not cross your mind. You think you float above the worst things men do.

The violent men, patriarchy’s foot soldiers, are not you. It’s hardly your fault if they’ve presented you with the spoils, one of which is the entitlement to define the reality of half the human race. And what better way to clean your hands than with the ritual shaming of the woman who fears too much?