What is the forcefield defense? Well, it goes something like this. "Women need to put up a forcefield of coldness/bitchiness and treat all men like possible rapists to protect themselves." If a male advocate points out that not all men are rapists and that this "forcefield" causes considerable psychological harm to the vast majority of men who do not have ill intentions but are nonetheless treated as such, they are met with two responses. A) the "rape culture" argument claiming rape/female abuse committed by men is extremely common (often citing the false 1 in 5 rape statistic) and B) that its an acceptable loss because women do not have a way to know whether to use the forcefield or not, so they are forced to always use it.

I won't challenge response A) because that would be redundant: I'm sure we're all familiar with evidence refuting it. After all, its almost as ubiquitously refuted as something like the wage gap at this point. Instead I will address response B).

In order to do that, lets set up a quick thought experiment. Suppose rape is as common as 5% as opposed to the 20% as the 1 in 5 false statistic would claim. What we are left with is a security system that activates 100% of the time, but only needs to activate 5% of the time. This would mean it has an error rate of 95%.

Can you think of any responsible engineer or security company that would consider a security measure with a 95% error rate as 'effective'? Do you think the burglar alarm systems in houses have 95% error rates? To visualize what that would look like, it would mean the alarm goes off when no burglar is present approximately 361 days out of the year. Thankfully that doesn't happen. But if it did, there would be a lot of innocent people in the vicinity of your house that would feel worried about being mistaken as a burglar when the cops show up.

Anyway, supposing this alarm exists, would it not be preferable to lower its sensitivity to an exact value whereby false activations are no longer possible, but it can still activate legitimately when it needs to?

Women are obviously not machines and I wouldn't wish for them to be in the first place. It is not possible to "program" them to behave certain ways, and even if it were, it would be reprehensible to put into practice. But still, should society not be concerned with this gross error rate of 95%?

It would almost certainly not be possible to lower the false activations to a perfect 0%. Maybe a margin of error double the rate of good activations would be acceptable (10%). (Remember, I am just making up random numbers here).

Moreover, I also question the validity of the claim that the forcefield even does its job correctly in those 5% of cases to begin with. Clearly, rapes and other abuses still (tragically) happen despite the forcefield existing. And its easy to see why. A sociopathic asshole male is not going to care about the forcefield. He is going to go right through it. In fact, putting up a wall, acting cold, ghosting him, etc. is only likely to make him more angry. Maybe I would understand better if the forcefield was perfect, or nearly perfect, and it actually seemed to work. But the effectiveness can't even speak for itself.

Personally, I'm glad that society is thinking about what kinds of "forcefields" women could use to protect themselves. But I would also want those methods to be effective and not justify needless misandry. I don't have all the answers but I just thought I'd start a conversation on this sub about it because nowhere else would probably even entertain this idea without instantly labelling it as some kind of misogynist dogwhistle.

Reminds of a time I was younger, more naïve, and genuinely thought I was doing something wrong that made women feel uncomfortable. When I asked women how to avoid doing that (or conversely, what kinds of things they did feel ok with) I got accused of wanting the "cheat codes to women" or some such nonsense. Like I obviously must be an evil guy who wants to bypass female defenses for some nefarious reason or why else would I ask it? Gee, maybe because I'm not a masochist who enjoys the idea of being treated as a monster and making women uncomfortable?

So yeah, obviously I don't have all the answers, and I think we need genuine participation from women in order to solve this problem. Does any of this make sense to you, or do I seem like a suspicious "nice guy?"