Safe from whom, exactly?
Just under a fortnight ago a murder was committed in NYC, one which has attracted a certain amount of national attention because it fits all the criterion of the "proper" tabloid murders - the right balance of gore, sex, sadism, fear-mongering, race-baiting, and a victim simultaneously "worthy" (ie not an unwed mother or random bystander of minority origin) and yet condemnable. Everything that the Arthur Dimmsdales and Miss Barbarys of 21st c. America delight in clucking their tongues in delighted horror over, in this tragedy, as yet unsolved. There is much that is offensive in the news coverage of it, particularly the loving repetition of the phrase "brutal rape" as if there were any other sort. But there is even more offensive social commentary seizing on this new missing dead white woman, a silent victim who cannot speak in her own defense, and making her a symbol.
Flash back oh, fifteen-odd years ago, when I was still living at home, to the dinner table, when one of my younger sisters was griping about her experiences of sexism at high school or work, and being told by our father to shut up and be grateful because after all, women needed men to be soldiers to protect us - a declaration which penetrated my depressive haze and assumed manner of bovine, nonconfrontational demureness enough to make me ask,
"Protect from whom?"
This was taken as a stunning put-down by my father, who was left speechless and red-faced, in a surprise twist to me, because he honestly didn't know how to answer it, since the only and obvious answer was, Other men. It was one of the few times I actually won an argument, and didn't instantly get put down in some other way, so I cherish it, while at the same time feeling a little bemused and as if I'd cheated, since I hadn't even been trying to contest any more at that point in my life.
This absence of what adversary, what hostile force women are supposed to submit to verbal abuse (and other sorts) in the name of being protected against, this curious erasure of the Dangerous Male from the picture, even as we were warned against the risk of rape or seduction by our father, and this being evidenced even in the erasure of the word "rape" from the warnings, the vague and incomprehensible "Something bad might happen to you if..." or "You could get hurt if..." leaving one with the impression that teenage and 20-something girls were particularly at risk of tripping on the pavement (ok, so I was a klutz, but--) or having, I dunno, pianos and anvils fall from the sky on us - this case of mokita was merely a reflection of the way our society is, prudish and prurient both, particularly when it comes to the fact of rape.
So the murdered young woman may possibly have been drinking alone, and may or may not have gone away with someone she knew, or knew slightly - and ended up raped and dead in a manner that has more in common with the serial killers of popular horror novels than your average "Down by the Banks of the O-hi-O" bones in the woods/bones in the river killing by angry boyfriend or husband.
Predictably, a conservative blogger goes on to repeat the meme that is stereotypically asserted of stereotypical feminists but is actually the belief of most if not all conservative males, that of every male in the world being a potential rapist-murderer, without even realizing he's doing so. This is something this blog makes a habit of, happily invoking Heinlein:
Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
- Robert Heinlein
--as they demonstrate that in their eyes at least, all males are dangerous, evil animals who should be regarded as rabid and aggressive until proven innocent, and presumably shot on sight if not under control of a responsible female owner.
Oh wait, that's not what they conclude - but it is the logical conclusion, not that women should be forbidden to walk alone or at night or gods forbid alone at night, and judged to have met their just fate as fools if raped and/or killed after having done so. We don't let bears or cougars roam urban neighborhoods, even if the neighborhoods have been built right into the beasts' territory, so why should women tolerate the presence of bipedal predators, hm?
--Then again, how can we blame the Wizbangers for their folly, and refusal to even face the fact of what they are agreeing to, when the mass media does the same thing? These are just a typical sampling of the many editorials out there:
Reckless partying rises among young women
Despite being aware of the many dangers of the big city bar scene, many say they still feel secure.
Donovan Slack / Boston Globe
NEW YORK -- It's midnight at Pravda, a trendy Manhattan bar where graduate students from nearby New York University are jammed into leather booths. A group chants, "Another vodka! Another vodka!" A young woman named Jovana is in the corner, kissing a young man she just met.
Days after the brutal rape and murder of a 24-year-old graduate student from Boston who had been drinking at a bar two blocks away, the scene is notable for an absence of fear.
"It happens here," Barbara Klen, a 24-year-old NYU student, said of the slaying. "It happens everywhere. What can I do about it?"
Such carefree attitudes are more than the usual bravado of young adults, some sociologists say, and instead reflect false feelings of safety that are unique to the generation of women that grew up watching "Sex and the City," chatting with strangers on the Internet, and relying on cellular telephones as lifelines.
"I think it gives them a false sense of security, because they feel that they have total control and they don't have to be concerned about their safety," said Jack Levin, professor of criminology and sociology and director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University.
For today's young women, popular culture has depicted strong, sexually independent women who negotiated an urban life that, while full of romantic intrigue, was presented as essentially safe, Levin and other specialists say. Many young women were children when high-profile sex crimes such as New York's so-called preppie murder and the brutal rape of a Central Park jogger occurred in the late 1980s; many weren't even born when the movie "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," about a young woman who is murdered after drinking at a New York bar, came out in 1977....
For Women: Safety In Numbers
(CBS) When it comes to going out at night, women have heard safety warnings for years. But since the shocking murder of Imette St. Guillen, 24, a New York graduate student, many women have been re-evaluating the steps they take to stay safe.
To discuss how women can better protect themselves, The Early Show brought in CBS News legal analyst Wendy Murphy, and Atoosa Rubenstein, editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine, for an in-depth discussion.
Murphy points out that random murder, as in the case of St. Guillen, is relatively unusual. "It's not that common," she told co-anchor Hannah Storm. "This type of random act of violence really doesn't happen frequently to women."
Thus, while the incident is an important reminder about threats to women, it's also important not to blow it out of proportion for all women. "We have to be careful not to do fear mongering, over the top," Murphy said. "Women have a right to live full and free lives. But this is a very, very serious case. There's no question women are at risk to some extent, so we want women to be careful.
"We also want not to blame women," Murphy adds. "We always want to make clear it's always the criminal's fault, 100 percent."
Rubenstein emphasized that the first of the hard-and-fast rules for women is to stick together, finding safety in numbers. "Stick with a group and really look out for each other, even if your friend meets the guy that she's falling for. Even if he has a group. It doesn't matter. The crowd you came with is the crowd you must leave with."
She also points out that women need to be mindful of the effects of alcohol. "Of course, when girls are out, they want to have fun - and we're talking about girls that are of drinking age. But it's really important, even when you're hanging with the boys, not to run with the boys, because girls' bodies metabolize alcohol differently than men .If you are going drink for drink with a man, you're going to lose that."
[...]
Spring break, which is coming up soon, is always a time of concern. According to the American Medical Association, 83 percent of college women and graduates admit heavier-than-usual drinking and 74 percent increase sexual activity on spring break.
Rubenstein says that should be a big red flag. "You have to be very careful. Girls have to remember, everybody has to remember, that your spring break can go from being that postcard, that picture perfect postcard, to a nightmare in a flash," she said. "Really keep your guard up."
It can go from perfect vacation to nightmare.
It can go.
Um, excuse me, but - how? I don't think they're talking about the dangers of alcohol poisoning, not really. And I don't think, despite Pandagon's whimsy, that it's lesbians who they're warning against when they say that 74% of women on spring break "increase sexual activity" - inebriated buxom Sappho-quoting seniors getting too aggressive is not what they're tiptoing around at the Boston Globe. Nor is, if they were being honest, the increase in drinking, "sexual activity" or both together in themselves a danger other than perhaps forgetting to take care of the contraceptives. It might be a sin depending on your religion, but the secular, so-called liberal media is not generally in the business of warning people against sinning - "Whoops, Boston Catholics, you're supposed to go to Mass today, if you haven't gone this morning you'd better get cracking or else it's confession time for you!" is not something that CBS broadcasts on the Sunday six-o-clock news, at least not that I've noticed.
No, what they're talking about is the fact that fellow students of the male persuasion know that they can get away with raping women and are more likely to try it if they or the woman with them are drunk. And maybe, if they think they can get away with it, if their formal selves, their inhibitions are lowered by drink, to murder her. Guys. Attacking Women. That's what they're pussyfooting around, in these articles, even by saying "We also want not to blame women. We always want to make clear it's always the criminal's fault, 100 percent." The problem is with the male criminals - but that's mokita, omnipresent but unmentionable.
This is something that we feminist bloggers get a little hoarse about, the problem of the passive voice in society, of the invisible rapist, of the onus for rape prevention being put on the victim to the point of excising the figure of the criminal from the picture entirely, but this is why. No, women don't "get raped", men rape women. She wasn't raped and murdered by an impersonal force of nature: some guy (or guys) raped and killed her. "The bar scene" is not dangerous: male predators who choose to prey upon women are dangerous. It's the rational sentients that are the threat: severed penises don't fly around with little wings or run about on little dog legs looking for homes like in Roman art, not really.
And it's not enough to say "the bad guys are out there" (to say nothing of the advisability of a bunch of drunks carryin guns) because a) they don't think of themselves as bad guys, any more than you think of yourself as a bad guy for grabbing a coke off the table and popping the top, and b) bad guys don't come with a label on their foreheads saying "Bad Guy: Beware!" in this reality. So you either assume that all men are bad guys, because that's what they're telling us we should do, or you try to figure out which are which on a case by case basis - and meanwhile, you come down like the wrath of Diana on the Bad Guys when you catch them, and when you don't - I mean, you do not give them any free passes, do not screen them in any way, you slam them verbally and when some self-proclaimed good guy squeals in pain, thereby picking up the shoe and waving it around yelling "Mine!" - you slam even harder.
If men respected women as human beings, if men considered women as they consider other men, then it would be no more dangerous for a woman to go bar-hopping (or even out on the town with no alcohol involved, because if Ms. St. Guillen had only been working late on her thesis when she was abducted and killed, you know there would be the same tsk-tsking, albeit without quite the same Neo-Puritan glee and moral superiority as with the admixture of alcohol and giving-one's-self-over to abandoned pleasure implicit in going to bars) than for a man, and no less - that is to say, one might expect the chance of being robbed, one might expect the possibility of getting in a fight with another bar patron, one might expect some unwelcome flirtations, because these things happen at bars, no matter what gender you happen to be, depending on how nice or sleazy the bar and the neighborhood.
But if a man turns down a drunken pass from a woman, he does not have any anticipation of being assaulted and raped by her after leaving a bar. If he leaves a bar, he has no dread of being stalked by some woman who saw him there and fixated on him, any more than he fears leaving his drink sitting on the counter with women present (and nobody tells him he should, more to the point.) If he goes home with a strange woman (or women) met at the bar for a casual hookup, nobody tells him he was crazy and lucky not to have been strangled and dumped in a ditch by a female psychopath. Instead, he's just considered to have gotten lucky. The assumption is that he, being male, is necessarily safe, as safe as if he were with male friends; men are the active ones, for good or ill, women the passive recipients of whatever men choose to dish out, kissing or killing, romance or rape, and the only way to avoid giving this implicit consent is to avoid all male contact - even potential contact - whatsoever.
If, n other words, I go by myself (because my friends are working, or studying, or otherwise busy with their lives) to one of the local pubs, to hear the live Irish band this weekend, and have a Guinness, and afterwards go home, and on my way home am raped or killed, I will have brought it on myself by virtue of being a woman alone at a bar at night. I may have, as the CBS safety "experts" say, "a right to live a full and free life." --But not if that means going alone to a restaurant, just as if I was a man, attending an event, in my own hometown - because I am "at risk" and should "be careful."
Which is why I do not think, "Thank God I'm not like that slattern, Imette St. Guillen," because I know that there but for the grace of God go I, and I have no right to judge the prudence or imprudence of her actions because she is dead and we do not know what her actions were - we don't know if she was drugged by a stranger, or if she was being "smart" and with some trusted male "protector" who betrayed her, and moreover it is fundamentally unjust that we judge women according to a different standard from men, and do not hold men accountable as we hold women - and because I know that if I am ever targetted by a predatory male, and (as anyone and anything who lives in a dangerous predator-filled environment may do) make one slip and win a Darwin Award, then I too will be blamed for it, no matter how careful, how armed, how chaste, or how sober I was at the time.
She should have known better, they will say. Men and women both, they will say it.
I should have known better, apparently, than to be born with a cunt. I should have known better, than to be born a prey animal.
--Defend me from these defenders!
Edit: And for the morons of the Wizbang ilk, when innocent, well-meaning, non-rapist males are shot and killed on a regular basis by "paranoid" women who have taken the NRA doctrine to heart, well, that will be tragic, and of course we shouldn't blame the victim of such manslaughter, but hey - life isn't fair! They should have known better than to approach a possibly-armed woman, being male, in a world in which any man might be a rapist-murderer-psychopath. I'm sure the conservative blogosphere will agree wholeheartedly.
Flash back oh, fifteen-odd years ago, when I was still living at home, to the dinner table, when one of my younger sisters was griping about her experiences of sexism at high school or work, and being told by our father to shut up and be grateful because after all, women needed men to be soldiers to protect us - a declaration which penetrated my depressive haze and assumed manner of bovine, nonconfrontational demureness enough to make me ask,
"Protect from whom?"
This was taken as a stunning put-down by my father, who was left speechless and red-faced, in a surprise twist to me, because he honestly didn't know how to answer it, since the only and obvious answer was, Other men. It was one of the few times I actually won an argument, and didn't instantly get put down in some other way, so I cherish it, while at the same time feeling a little bemused and as if I'd cheated, since I hadn't even been trying to contest any more at that point in my life.
This absence of what adversary, what hostile force women are supposed to submit to verbal abuse (and other sorts) in the name of being protected against, this curious erasure of the Dangerous Male from the picture, even as we were warned against the risk of rape or seduction by our father, and this being evidenced even in the erasure of the word "rape" from the warnings, the vague and incomprehensible "Something bad might happen to you if..." or "You could get hurt if..." leaving one with the impression that teenage and 20-something girls were particularly at risk of tripping on the pavement (ok, so I was a klutz, but--) or having, I dunno, pianos and anvils fall from the sky on us - this case of mokita was merely a reflection of the way our society is, prudish and prurient both, particularly when it comes to the fact of rape.
So the murdered young woman may possibly have been drinking alone, and may or may not have gone away with someone she knew, or knew slightly - and ended up raped and dead in a manner that has more in common with the serial killers of popular horror novels than your average "Down by the Banks of the O-hi-O" bones in the woods/bones in the river killing by angry boyfriend or husband.
Predictably, a conservative blogger goes on to repeat the meme that is stereotypically asserted of stereotypical feminists but is actually the belief of most if not all conservative males, that of every male in the world being a potential rapist-murderer, without even realizing he's doing so. This is something this blog makes a habit of, happily invoking Heinlein:
Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
- Robert Heinlein
--as they demonstrate that in their eyes at least, all males are dangerous, evil animals who should be regarded as rabid and aggressive until proven innocent, and presumably shot on sight if not under control of a responsible female owner.
Oh wait, that's not what they conclude - but it is the logical conclusion, not that women should be forbidden to walk alone or at night or gods forbid alone at night, and judged to have met their just fate as fools if raped and/or killed after having done so. We don't let bears or cougars roam urban neighborhoods, even if the neighborhoods have been built right into the beasts' territory, so why should women tolerate the presence of bipedal predators, hm?
--Then again, how can we blame the Wizbangers for their folly, and refusal to even face the fact of what they are agreeing to, when the mass media does the same thing? These are just a typical sampling of the many editorials out there:
Reckless partying rises among young women
Despite being aware of the many dangers of the big city bar scene, many say they still feel secure.
Donovan Slack / Boston Globe
NEW YORK -- It's midnight at Pravda, a trendy Manhattan bar where graduate students from nearby New York University are jammed into leather booths. A group chants, "Another vodka! Another vodka!" A young woman named Jovana is in the corner, kissing a young man she just met.
Days after the brutal rape and murder of a 24-year-old graduate student from Boston who had been drinking at a bar two blocks away, the scene is notable for an absence of fear.
"It happens here," Barbara Klen, a 24-year-old NYU student, said of the slaying. "It happens everywhere. What can I do about it?"
Such carefree attitudes are more than the usual bravado of young adults, some sociologists say, and instead reflect false feelings of safety that are unique to the generation of women that grew up watching "Sex and the City," chatting with strangers on the Internet, and relying on cellular telephones as lifelines.
"I think it gives them a false sense of security, because they feel that they have total control and they don't have to be concerned about their safety," said Jack Levin, professor of criminology and sociology and director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University.
For today's young women, popular culture has depicted strong, sexually independent women who negotiated an urban life that, while full of romantic intrigue, was presented as essentially safe, Levin and other specialists say. Many young women were children when high-profile sex crimes such as New York's so-called preppie murder and the brutal rape of a Central Park jogger occurred in the late 1980s; many weren't even born when the movie "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," about a young woman who is murdered after drinking at a New York bar, came out in 1977....
For Women: Safety In Numbers
(CBS) When it comes to going out at night, women have heard safety warnings for years. But since the shocking murder of Imette St. Guillen, 24, a New York graduate student, many women have been re-evaluating the steps they take to stay safe.
To discuss how women can better protect themselves, The Early Show brought in CBS News legal analyst Wendy Murphy, and Atoosa Rubenstein, editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine, for an in-depth discussion.
Murphy points out that random murder, as in the case of St. Guillen, is relatively unusual. "It's not that common," she told co-anchor Hannah Storm. "This type of random act of violence really doesn't happen frequently to women."
Thus, while the incident is an important reminder about threats to women, it's also important not to blow it out of proportion for all women. "We have to be careful not to do fear mongering, over the top," Murphy said. "Women have a right to live full and free lives. But this is a very, very serious case. There's no question women are at risk to some extent, so we want women to be careful.
"We also want not to blame women," Murphy adds. "We always want to make clear it's always the criminal's fault, 100 percent."
Rubenstein emphasized that the first of the hard-and-fast rules for women is to stick together, finding safety in numbers. "Stick with a group and really look out for each other, even if your friend meets the guy that she's falling for. Even if he has a group. It doesn't matter. The crowd you came with is the crowd you must leave with."
She also points out that women need to be mindful of the effects of alcohol. "Of course, when girls are out, they want to have fun - and we're talking about girls that are of drinking age. But it's really important, even when you're hanging with the boys, not to run with the boys, because girls' bodies metabolize alcohol differently than men .If you are going drink for drink with a man, you're going to lose that."
[...]
Spring break, which is coming up soon, is always a time of concern. According to the American Medical Association, 83 percent of college women and graduates admit heavier-than-usual drinking and 74 percent increase sexual activity on spring break.
Rubenstein says that should be a big red flag. "You have to be very careful. Girls have to remember, everybody has to remember, that your spring break can go from being that postcard, that picture perfect postcard, to a nightmare in a flash," she said. "Really keep your guard up."
It can go from perfect vacation to nightmare.
It can go.
Um, excuse me, but - how? I don't think they're talking about the dangers of alcohol poisoning, not really. And I don't think, despite Pandagon's whimsy, that it's lesbians who they're warning against when they say that 74% of women on spring break "increase sexual activity" - inebriated buxom Sappho-quoting seniors getting too aggressive is not what they're tiptoing around at the Boston Globe. Nor is, if they were being honest, the increase in drinking, "sexual activity" or both together in themselves a danger other than perhaps forgetting to take care of the contraceptives. It might be a sin depending on your religion, but the secular, so-called liberal media is not generally in the business of warning people against sinning - "Whoops, Boston Catholics, you're supposed to go to Mass today, if you haven't gone this morning you'd better get cracking or else it's confession time for you!" is not something that CBS broadcasts on the Sunday six-o-clock news, at least not that I've noticed.
No, what they're talking about is the fact that fellow students of the male persuasion know that they can get away with raping women and are more likely to try it if they or the woman with them are drunk. And maybe, if they think they can get away with it, if their formal selves, their inhibitions are lowered by drink, to murder her. Guys. Attacking Women. That's what they're pussyfooting around, in these articles, even by saying "We also want not to blame women. We always want to make clear it's always the criminal's fault, 100 percent." The problem is with the male criminals - but that's mokita, omnipresent but unmentionable.
This is something that we feminist bloggers get a little hoarse about, the problem of the passive voice in society, of the invisible rapist, of the onus for rape prevention being put on the victim to the point of excising the figure of the criminal from the picture entirely, but this is why. No, women don't "get raped", men rape women. She wasn't raped and murdered by an impersonal force of nature: some guy (or guys) raped and killed her. "The bar scene" is not dangerous: male predators who choose to prey upon women are dangerous. It's the rational sentients that are the threat: severed penises don't fly around with little wings or run about on little dog legs looking for homes like in Roman art, not really.
And it's not enough to say "the bad guys are out there" (to say nothing of the advisability of a bunch of drunks carryin guns) because a) they don't think of themselves as bad guys, any more than you think of yourself as a bad guy for grabbing a coke off the table and popping the top, and b) bad guys don't come with a label on their foreheads saying "Bad Guy: Beware!" in this reality. So you either assume that all men are bad guys, because that's what they're telling us we should do, or you try to figure out which are which on a case by case basis - and meanwhile, you come down like the wrath of Diana on the Bad Guys when you catch them, and when you don't - I mean, you do not give them any free passes, do not screen them in any way, you slam them verbally and when some self-proclaimed good guy squeals in pain, thereby picking up the shoe and waving it around yelling "Mine!" - you slam even harder.
If men respected women as human beings, if men considered women as they consider other men, then it would be no more dangerous for a woman to go bar-hopping (or even out on the town with no alcohol involved, because if Ms. St. Guillen had only been working late on her thesis when she was abducted and killed, you know there would be the same tsk-tsking, albeit without quite the same Neo-Puritan glee and moral superiority as with the admixture of alcohol and giving-one's-self-over to abandoned pleasure implicit in going to bars) than for a man, and no less - that is to say, one might expect the chance of being robbed, one might expect the possibility of getting in a fight with another bar patron, one might expect some unwelcome flirtations, because these things happen at bars, no matter what gender you happen to be, depending on how nice or sleazy the bar and the neighborhood.
But if a man turns down a drunken pass from a woman, he does not have any anticipation of being assaulted and raped by her after leaving a bar. If he leaves a bar, he has no dread of being stalked by some woman who saw him there and fixated on him, any more than he fears leaving his drink sitting on the counter with women present (and nobody tells him he should, more to the point.) If he goes home with a strange woman (or women) met at the bar for a casual hookup, nobody tells him he was crazy and lucky not to have been strangled and dumped in a ditch by a female psychopath. Instead, he's just considered to have gotten lucky. The assumption is that he, being male, is necessarily safe, as safe as if he were with male friends; men are the active ones, for good or ill, women the passive recipients of whatever men choose to dish out, kissing or killing, romance or rape, and the only way to avoid giving this implicit consent is to avoid all male contact - even potential contact - whatsoever.
If, n other words, I go by myself (because my friends are working, or studying, or otherwise busy with their lives) to one of the local pubs, to hear the live Irish band this weekend, and have a Guinness, and afterwards go home, and on my way home am raped or killed, I will have brought it on myself by virtue of being a woman alone at a bar at night. I may have, as the CBS safety "experts" say, "a right to live a full and free life." --But not if that means going alone to a restaurant, just as if I was a man, attending an event, in my own hometown - because I am "at risk" and should "be careful."
Which is why I do not think, "Thank God I'm not like that slattern, Imette St. Guillen," because I know that there but for the grace of God go I, and I have no right to judge the prudence or imprudence of her actions because she is dead and we do not know what her actions were - we don't know if she was drugged by a stranger, or if she was being "smart" and with some trusted male "protector" who betrayed her, and moreover it is fundamentally unjust that we judge women according to a different standard from men, and do not hold men accountable as we hold women - and because I know that if I am ever targetted by a predatory male, and (as anyone and anything who lives in a dangerous predator-filled environment may do) make one slip and win a Darwin Award, then I too will be blamed for it, no matter how careful, how armed, how chaste, or how sober I was at the time.
She should have known better, they will say. Men and women both, they will say it.
I should have known better, apparently, than to be born with a cunt. I should have known better, than to be born a prey animal.
--Defend me from these defenders!
Edit: And for the morons of the Wizbang ilk, when innocent, well-meaning, non-rapist males are shot and killed on a regular basis by "paranoid" women who have taken the NRA doctrine to heart, well, that will be tragic, and of course we shouldn't blame the victim of such manslaughter, but hey - life isn't fair! They should have known better than to approach a possibly-armed woman, being male, in a world in which any man might be a rapist-murderer-psychopath. I'm sure the conservative blogosphere will agree wholeheartedly.