A fun probability fact I like is around the question "what is the likelihood of consuming any given water molecule twice?", so like, consuming that water molecule, then excreting it somehow (sweating, urine etc.), and then consuming that same molecule again. The probability of that happening for a given molecule is so ridiculously small that it's basically zero.

However, the probability of that having happened at least once in an adult's life is effectively 1, — i.e. it's almost certainly happened. This is because one cup of water contains around 144,531,378,240,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water, so we get a lot of chances to consume a water molecule twice.

The chances of being kidnapped or otherwise assaulted or harassed is quite low for any given interaction, but despite this, it's something that a concerningly high proportion of women have experienced. I think for most women, it's not a case of literally being terrified, but more than we take a wide variety of steps to reduce our risk, given that it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate oneself from every man who could possibly assault them. It's no different to how people of all genders will often do things like taking a slighter longer, well lit route, or refraining from listening to music through headphones when walking through a city at night.

If I had a husband or partner who was available to go pick up something on my behalf, then that's a straightforward and trivially easy thing I can do to reduce the amount of unnecessary risk I'd be exposing myself to. If that wasn't something that was available, it wouldn't necessarily mean I wouldn't pick up the item myself, but I would be a bit more cautious.

The culture of fear you describe does feed into how individual women perceive and manage risk associated with unknown men, but it's also important to realise that that culture of fear exists in large part because of the direct lived experience of women who have learned that these kinds of precautions are necessary. For my part, whilst I've never been assaulted when picking up items from online sales, I have had a few instances of men being extremely creepy in a way that made me regret not being more careful. I had to change my phone number once because an Uber driver kept sending me dick pics, and a friend once had to get a restraining order against a delivery driver who kept coming back to her home and lurking outside her window. It's only a small minority of men who do these things, but because our daily lives expose us to so many people, then it ends up being a very rational choice to take precautions to protect ourselves.

Edit: my comment cast a wider net than just "risk of being kidnapped", because that felt to me like a hyperbolic euphemism designed to avoid saying the much more likely forms of harm that women face from predatory men. However, I want to add that the number of traffic accidents I've been involved in is non-zero, and equal to the number of times that an unknown man has attempted to kidnap me.

Yeah, the US got a lot of hubris talking about how other countries are dangerous, and then I see posts like this every month.

Going to disagree with the responses you have so far. You need to consider both the cost and benefit of taking precautions. The cost of sending someone else in your place is low. The benefit is that you negate that small chance of getting assaulted. The cost of not driving in a car-centric society? It's way higher. It could mean not being able to go to the store to buy groceries, or not being able to get a job. For most people, that cost is much higher compared to the chance of dying in a car crash.

it's harder to unionize if you're afraid of your neighbours

It hits different after your tits get groped in a crowd and the guy just looks at you like he had the right to.

Get treated like a piece of meat* by a couple of men, see that there's no policing by the other men around, and those hungry looks suddenly are less flattering and more frightening.

• (without going through a proper consent and safety process, no shaming free-use here)

Men also get sexually assaulted by women, ofc, and that sucks for them because the default reaction is to laugh at the guy it happened to and to say sth like "I wish that would happen to me".

I had had some really unpleasant experiences with extremely selfish guys in the sack and had pretty much decided to go full Lesbian Escape Hatch, but one of my friends sent her absolute sweetheart of a boyfriend over to show me what a gentle guy is like and I am giving dating men another try.

If you're a dude and you wish more women trusted men, when you see your boy grope someone, police his ass right there.

Lots of comments here are "you're not gonna get kidnapped/raped at the stadium what are you worried about?"

SA can be damaging without it being "legitimate rape" or whatever the fuck people are calling the thing that they feel entitled to go right up to.

Thing is ill take a risk of being in a fender bender because I will most likely live and not get raped

That being said I combat it by picking things up in a public place or bringing my husband with me

It's more than the probability, it's the level of harm. It's similar to how we protect our kids from paedos with a high degree of safety even though the risk is really low. It's because the harm from a paedo is fucking huge. The harm a man can do to a woman is fucking huge, life shattering, soul destroying. Women go to lengths to avoid that because it does happen and it's impossible to know when, where, who. The only truth we have is that it is a possibility now, here, with this stranger.

know this stuff does happen - but the chances of being kidnapped are far lower than, say, being in a road traffic accident,

And the chances of getting raped are far higher than an adult being kidnapped by a fucking stranger. What a weird metric to use.

The chances are low, yes, but the potential consequences could make life not worth living.

The classic analogy is the jar of 100 sweets. If I offered you a sweet from a jar of 100, and warned you that one of the sweets in the jar was laced with strychnine, would you take one?