You put into words thoughts that I've been unable to for a while.

Like, I read this and I see how someone makes this argument, but I feel fucking terrible afterwards. Sure you haven't said I'm a rapist, but you've said you'll treat me as though I am. You can't expect men as a demographic to agree to this argument if it requires society to assume they're shitty people, at which point, why is it even being made?

The worst part I feel is that there's a lot of incel types that conflate feminism with sexism, which we'd like to school them by pointing them at a dictionary. While incels are generally shitty, we can't ignore the fact that this argument is telling them their behavior doesn't actually matter because we're going to act like they're rapists based solely on their malehood anyways. (to be clear, this is an explanation, not a justification)

There is a distinction between a prejudice born of bigotry, and a prejudice born of a real fear and trauma. And while I understand your point, the difference between these two directly affects how we can effectively address them societally.

To start addressing it, we can't just keep admonishing traumatized women. We have to understand where the prejudice comes from. The reality is that women need to be on guard constantly, not because of all men, but still specifically because of men.

They are continuously exposed to stories like the Rape Academy website, see sexual violence normalized in media, encounter rape threats online, and virtually all of them have either experienced sexual assault themselves or know someone who has.

And while this is not all men, or even most, the statistics are clear: perpetrators of violence and sexual assault against women (and against men) are overwhelmingly male. Since there is no reliable way to identify which men pose a threat until it is too late, it's unsurprising that many women develop a prejudice as a safety mechanism.

It's unfortunate that this can harden into bigotry, but it's even more unfortunate that the threat giving rise to it exists at all.

Your analogy of being robbed by a black man "once" actually highlights how widely the pervasiveness of this threat is misunderstood. For women, this isn't a single incident. It's a lifelong threat most acute during their formative years.

So by way of a counter analogy: would you admonish a black person who grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights era with "not all white people" or "not all cops"? Or would you recognize that their wariness was, prejudiced or not, a rational response to a very real danger?

I agree that we should strive toward a society where no one is judged on anything but the content of their character. But it's worth noting that countless men rush to admonish frustrated and traumatized women with "not all men," while far fewer show up when stories like the Rape Academy actually break. This imbalance is itself part of the problem.

And if we as men, and as human beings, want to see less of this prejudice in the world, perhaps the more productive question isn't whether the prejudice is fair, but why so few of us are doing anything to make it less necessary, and why so many of us are more interested in pushing back against women's reactions than addressing the cause of them. And this, for me, calls to mind MLK's observations about the white moderate...

unfortunately yeah

do women statistically commit as many violent and/or sexual crimes? no. but some still do

I've been made fun of (lightly, but still) for letting friends know when I'm going home with a strange woman (which I shouldn't do at all but do anyway for various reasons). Strangers are strangers, you never fuckin know

Sharks are cool. Its sad to see, that they have the image of being bloodthirsty human killers, while statistically speaking you are more likely to get killed by a coconut falling down a palm tree then by a shark.

All Palestinians are terrorists

All gays are pedophiles

All men are dangerous

Obviously all this is stupid and dumb and inherently hateful, the following is what it should be

Any Palestinian could be a terrorist

Any gay could be a pedophile

Any man could be dangerous

There we are, perfectly non problematic statements that are objectively true. Its not my fault that I'm a terrible judge of character and have to treat any individual belonging to those groups as if they were the lowest common denominator. I'm just protecting myself and you need to respect that you fucking fascist.

There's a place a few towns over, it's like organized rape. The bar owner is in on it, bartenders and the bouncers. They all help drug women and help the rapists. Cops are called every week, they don't care and are possibly engaged in the same activity. It's been years. Known as a rape bar. I highly doubt this is the only one.

Shark attacks are also extremely rare. Dogs would be a better comparison, in that they can be extremely dangerous but most of them are not which is why we keep them around.

When you go through a safe driving class, they teach you to assume everyone else on the road is an idiot who can't drive. This isn't because they are, it's because it's safer to approach it that way.

In scouts you're taught that if you encounter a carrion animal, you should assume it has rabies. Not because rabies is common, but because you really don't want to be the rare case of rabies.

When you're learning how to handle firearms, you're taught to assume all guns are loaded until you've personally checked and cleared it. This isn't because guns magically manifest bullets as they're handed from one person to another, it's because it's safer to make sure than to hope someone else didn't make a mistake.

The only reason this is any different is because it makes weak men feel the same way they want to make everyone else feel.

I think the sentiment kicking off the husband explaining should have been "men are dangerous." Then the shark metaphor makes sense, because enough men are dangerous and a low-probability but nonzero outcome for choosing incorrectly is so severe (rape, death, kidnapping) that it makes sense to have a prejudicial heuristic to treat them all as dangerous until reasonably proven otherwise.

"All men are dangerous" is an absolute statement and just poor semantic logic, so yeah, this is confusing.

Racial profiling, but instead it's about gender expression.

Really, the critique is/should be about how there isn't enough societal pressure saying "Don't be a fucking rapist" to men in general. Unfortunately that's hard to change, it takes time and energy and there's a significant amount of pushback. So it's easier to be cautious with how you interact with strange (and rationally, familiar) men. There is a statistically significant non-zero chance they will seek to do women harm. So stating "Men are dangerous", while not especially helpful in combating that very idea, is technically true.