Kind of unfortunate, that even here on lemmy most comments immediately flip to “but as a man I also feel scared”. True, but it’s not what this study is about. Maybe in 2026 we can try to just read something like this and take it as a prompt that, maybe, some things are not about us. Maybe we should do something about catcalling. We can talk about violence against men and loneliness at a different occasion.
Living in Japan, the country famous for being completely safe for everyone, this gap recently became clearer to me. As it turns out, when people talk about safety in Japan, they primarily mean that you won’t be beaten up and nobody steals your wallet. But there are so many weird creeps around here. I’m really quite happy I don’t live here as a woman.
My SO praises Sweden so much, nobody catcalls and people only bother you because you don’t have your bicycle helmet and that (only) annoys all genders.
The language of the post says something that cannot be (meaningfully) derived without a control group of people that didn’t experience a counterpoint:
“… the situation of being a young woman alone at night in a subway station being enough to generate the sense of fear.”
As I understand it, everyone in the study experienced all of that in combination, so any subset of those things may have been enough to generate a sense of fear: being alone, being at night, being a young woman, or being on a subway station.
The common objection I see is that everyone feels fear alone on a subway station at night, so the statement is misleading. That matches my personal experience, so I also see that statement as misleading, regardless of any work done by the study.
Kind of unfortunate, that even here on lemmy most comments immediately flip to “but as a man I also feel scared”. True, but it’s not what this study is about. Maybe in 2026 we can try to just read something like this and take it as a prompt that, maybe, some things are not about us. Maybe we should do something about catcalling. We can talk about violence against men and loneliness at a different occasion.
Living in Japan, the country famous for being completely safe for everyone, this gap recently became clearer to me. As it turns out, when people talk about safety in Japan, they primarily mean that you won’t be beaten up and nobody steals your wallet. But there are so many weird creeps around here. I’m really quite happy I don’t live here as a woman.
My SO praises Sweden so much, nobody catcalls and people only bother you because you don’t have your bicycle helmet and that (only) annoys all genders.
The language of the post says something that cannot be (meaningfully) derived without a control group of people that didn’t experience a counterpoint: “… the situation of being a young woman alone at night in a subway station being enough to generate the sense of fear.”
As I understand it, everyone in the study experienced all of that in combination, so any subset of those things may have been enough to generate a sense of fear: being alone, being at night, being a young woman, or being on a subway station.
The common objection I see is that everyone feels fear alone on a subway station at night, so the statement is misleading. That matches my personal experience, so I also see that statement as misleading, regardless of any work done by the study.