Dalrock’s Law of Feminism: Feminism is the assertion that men are evil and naturally want to harm women, followed by pleas to men to solve all of women’s problems.
Reader The Question found an example of Dalrock’s Law of Feminism at The Age:
Groups of men harassed me to tears in the street – and no one acted
Intrepid feminist Jill Stark went to an event where she had been uncomfortable for her safety before, and found that it happened again. Surely the good men in the area should have learned from the last time this happened to her!
We’ve been conditioned since childhood to believe it’s our responsibility to change our behaviour and minimise our risk in public spaces but it’s not our actions that need to be policed.
If you are a bystander to the mistreatment of women, you are part of the problem.
What made my experience last week particularly deflating was that exactly the same thing happened to me a few years ago after exactly the same AFL opening round fixture.
What Stark doesn’t understand is that this is a case of tragedy of the commons. The men around her knew she wasn’t their woman. This is true in both the specific sense, and in the more general/societal sense. In the specific sense, Stark tells us a male friend offered to walk with her, and she declined.
At first I was annoyed at myself for not being tougher, and for not taking my friend up on his offer to walk with me.
Oddly she doesn’t say why she declined his help, especially given that she had a bad experience the last time she was alone with the same crowd. But in general feminists resent men’s offers to help in these kinds of situations because accepting help implies not only that they aren’t as strong as men, but it also risks creating a situation where gratitude is appropriate. Since surely women are as strong as men, and since ugly feminists live in fear of feeling gratitude, the offer can’t be accepted. Besides, she should be just fine, since all of the men she doesn’t know, the men who didn’t offer to help, owe her protection on demand.
But her expectation that unknown men owe her protection from even feeling uncomfortable is a poor assumption. For starters in most of the West good samaritans are seen as dangerous threats to good order, and frequently derided as “playing hero”. As the most respected comment to the piece explained:
I can tell you why no-one (read: good men) helped: Being a good samaritan is not worth it. There was a similar situation where when a woman was harassed on the train and the men in the same carriage stood up and changed carriages. Looking at the motives, the journalist who was told about the incident did some investigating as to the lack of help.
Turns out men who tried to help women in distress recently were either killed or badly injured assisting, went to jail for assault or murder themselves because they used excessive force in defending the woman, or hurt the assailant enough that he successfully sued the good samaritan.
In all three cases the (good) man and his family suffered greatly.
So most people don’t want to risk their own families security and livelihood for some stranger. That’s why. They would prefer to protect their own.
There is another problem with her expectation, and it comes from social dynamics of groups of rowdy strange men. If her friend were walking her to a car or another safe place the catcallers would have shown less interest. It is highly unlikely that her friend is strong enough to overcome a group of rowdy football fans, but his presence would cause her not to stand out as (for lack of a better term) an unclaimed woman. In her gut she surely understands this, and this reality will have any feminist reading mad enough to tear out her leg hair. On the other hand, once she placed herself standing alone in the vicinity of rowdy fans, she was in their minds unclaimed. Moreover, if a random stranger challenges a group of men who are catcalling her he will be seen as challenging them personally. A man protecting a woman or women he is with will be (generally speaking) respected, unless he acts to challenge the group and/or unless the group is especially unruly. But a white knight who steps forward will be seen as challenging the men to a fight, and there is a good chance they are looking for such a volunteer.
The feminist response to this reality is that no one owns them, and they are of course right.
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