Instincts guide women. We hide car keys between knuckles and fast-walk when strangers make suspicious eye contact — we’ve learned that a healthy fear of the world is good, if not necessary, for survival. Now, women are being told to deny instinct and embrace social contagion, comedian Bridget Phetasy writes today in UnHerd:
We live in a radically different world. A world in which a generation of young women is being taught to disregard the fear they might feel in a threatening situation. They are told not to trust their intuition. And they are called bigots and sent death threats if they suggest that they feel uncomfortable in their bathrooms and changing rooms — or even in shelters for survivors of sexual abuse.
After the “Me Too” movement, it was generally assumed that women would stand up for women against sexual threat. Much of the movement was politically motivated, but it at least validated that our fear of sexual harm or trauma was rational and universal. Phetasy evokes a Margaret Atwood quote: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”
I understood this. I was taught to get out of any threatening situation as soon as possible. If you’re alone in a room and a man enters and you don’t feel safe? Leave. If you’re walking at night and feel the instinct to escape? Just run. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, because what if you’re right? I was told to ignore that little voice at my peril. My mother raised me and my sisters to scream and run like hell if a stranger asked us to get in their car. “Because if you end up in a trunk, you’re dead.”
We’ve all heard that, right? Don’t end up in the trunk but if you do, punch out the car’s taillights, don’t let an attacker tie you up because your chance of survival dramatically decreases if he does, don’t engage with unknown men on the internet, don’t stay alone with a male boss after hours. These rules are widely known, but for women, they’re more than rules. They’re instinctual.
Womanly instinct applies when a man exposes himself in a women’s locker room, when a man who says he is a woman enters a woman-only prison, and when a man walks into a domestic-abuse shelter, claiming he knows what it’s like to fear male predators. Nonetheless, women are shunned for protecting themselves against transgender ideology. Look at the female athletes who dared to protest against men in their locker rooms, or the female inmates who suffered brutal sexual assaults from biological males masquerading as women. These women face court battles, death threats, and social suicide — worse yet, the same sisterhood that once cried loudly “Me too” now tells them “Not you.”
The elimination of sex-segregated facilities is cause to heed instincts, not ignore them.