Z. Nith

Here, I'll make this make sense. Ever see one of those fight videos where a woman keeps slapping some long-suffering dude until he finally loses patience and sits her down on the pavement with a single right cross? Go find one. Look at her face. Before all the crying. See that? Utter shock. She's completely and utterly flabbergasted that someone dude finally laid one on her. She never expects it, no matter what she was doing five seconds before, or for fifteen years before. She never even considers the possibility. No matter what, she always reacts to that ass-kicking as if it just fell out of the sky. Understand why, and a great deal of women's behavior won't seem so bizarre. Women never participated in tribal warfare. They were prizes, not contestants. They may have sometimes had a vested interest in the outcome. Or, judging by the books they read, they may have sometimes simply preferred whoever was better at violence. Neither of these ideas is the point. The point is that the violence was not directed at them. This is how women's hardwiring evolved. To most women, violence is something that happens to other people. They walk around in an invisible bubble labelled "non-combatant", believing this will keep them safe. Often, it will. Women are targeted for violence far less often than men. They are far safer walking around at night, sketchy area or not. We know this. We have the numbers. This means that women are seldom afraid of actual violence even when they should be (because far less is not zero). Because to a great number of them, violence simply isn't real. What they fear is loss of status within the tribe. Social threats, unlike physical threats, are immediately, viscerally real to them, always. So is quite possible for a woman to be more afraid of an icky guy hitting on her, which reduces her social status, a threat she believes in, than a man pointing a gun at her, a threat which she doesn't. This may sound unbelievable. It may sound incredible. You may be asking yourself what kind of retard looks down the barrel of a handgun and never considers the possibility that a guy willing to point it at you might be willing to press the trigger. But retardation has nothing to do with it. Most of how we think about risk is hardwired in, and it takes a great deal of training to actually think about that risk in a mathematical or abstract way instead of using the feelings you have in your tum-tum. Thinking about risk using data rather than feels is so difficult for humans that there is an entire career path (actuary) for doing just that one thing. The vast majority of Western women have never been punched in the face. Not never in their adult lives, but actually never, period, full stop. So when men talk about violence... risks, motivations, costs, benefits, needs... they simply have no idea what we are even talking about. Violence is an abstraction to them. A theory. But loss of social status is a real and daily terror. This why women will cheer for the destruction of civilization rather than disagree with their friends.