If most women who claim to be afraid of the potential threat men pose to their lives were sincere, they wouldn’t feel emboldened to mock, berate, or taunt men online, especially men who express sentiment from a socially/romantically unsuccessful perspective

The level of disrespect that most women demonstrate toward men online, directly and in general, is not commensurate with the fear that these women cite as the primary reason for their caution around men.

To be clear, I don’t believe that anyone is owed overt respect. The baseline expectation for human interaction is neutrality. I’m mentioning disrespect specifically to reflect this distinction.

While it’s understandable that people are more likely to placate someone they fear who is in their presence than when interacting online, my statement above is still true.

Many women who claim to fear men emphasize how some men’s online activity, individually and en masse, poses a threat to women by potentially motivating physical harm to women in person.

If this is true, then why wouldn’t these women do more to win men over online, or at least not add fuel to the fire by disrespecting the men who don’t seem to be persuadable?

Why do we instead find countless women, self-identified with their real identity, mocking, berating, and taunting men online?

Do these women not understand that their behavior toward men online influences men’s behavior in person? It’s the same dynamic by which they complain about women-critical content online influencing in person behavior.

Keep in mind, even if women don’t believe that the individuals interacting with her or viewing her interactions online pose a threat to her, specifically, women’s collective behavior toward men online influences men’s thoughts, and therefore their behavior, in person.

So any given man who harms a woman in person may have been influenced in part by how they perceive women’s online behavior toward men.

It seems as though the social and online clout to be gained from engaging in this behavior toward men outweighs many women’s fear of men harming or killing them. Women know they will be viewed more positively by most women, and even many men, for behaving this way.

I can accept this, but it would be nice if women, especially those who live in some of the safest circumstances in history, dropped the hyperbolic expression of fear for their lives at any given waking moment existing as women.

If a woman is afraid of men, then it’s in her best interest not to draw the ire of men they interact with online, as well as the ire of men who witness or read those interactions online.

Women’s hysteria around this subject has a disparate negative impact on the life outcomes of lesser desirable men by increasing the threshold at which these men can overcome women’s prejudice.

None of this is to say that men don’t pose a threat to women’s safety and lives, that much is obvious to anyone who can interpret statistics.

However, it seems as though the potential threat men pose to women is opportunistically emphasized depending on the situation.

Helpless potential victims don’t have the privilege of taunting their “oppressors”. Either you’re afraid and you behave accordingly, or you aren’t.