This week on Twitter I came across a thread detailing how women can ensure their safety while in the back of an Uber. The week before that I saw a series of TikTok’s teaching women self-defence, yes specifically women. Then the week before I saw an Instagram post promoting a series of apps, built for the sole purpose of protecting women from sexual assault. What next? An instructional manual on how to make your own chastity belt?
Our society is plagued by our urgency to protect women, rather than the necessity of educating our boys and men. There is an undeniable disparity in boys’ perception of respect towards women or even young girls for that matter, yet the greater majority continues to repudiate the very idea. Instead, we strafe women, the very same women already subject to discrimination, prejudice, and objectification, with constant pressure to protect themselves from the very gender that is meant to help them create life, by learning fucking kung fu or carrying a pocket knife (illegal in most countries btw).
It’s all good and well to implement new laws and regulations to protect women from violence, which by the way are hardly ever enforced, as Home office statistics from 2019 found that only 1.7% of rape allegations are prosecuted. But, you cannot make basic human respect a law, and that is the epicentre of the issue, the lack of respect men harbour for women. As infuriating and inconvenient it is that respect can’t be written into the British legislation, it can be manufactured into social responsibility.
In this counterfeit progressive society, a plethora of men, regardless of race, religious background, or age, merely tolerate women rather than respect them. And respect may seem like an insignificant nuisance to those who can’t relate, in other words, men, as they will argue some ignorant shit like, ‘Be grateful you can vote now!’ or ‘At least you can vote.’ When in reality, lack of respect is the impetus for all the rape, sexual assault, gaslighting, objectification, voyeurism, domestic abuse, or just the sheer discomfort and anxiety women are engulfed by every time they’re walking home alone, alone in an elevator with a man, or going into an interview at a company where the CEO is a man. The list goes on by the way. See the thing is if new laws alone were to fix the epidemic of abuse on women, rape statistics would have not continued to gradually increase from 2010 from 15,000 cases a year to 2019 when we reached a disturbingly high number of around 55,000 per year, as found by Statista.
Men don’t respect women, and that means more than just disregarding everything we say or do, it translates into a lack of respect for our bodies, but even worse our humanity. The negligence of our humanity allows men to see us as less than human, and ultimately carry out inhumane acts of violence without thinking twice. This doesn’t apply to all men, of course, this isn’t an ‘all men are trash article’ but I am presenting you with the worst possible outcome if we continue to allow men to get away with this half-hearted level of respect towards their better half, women.
A recent study on Instagram by the social platform Impact asked its female users what they would do in a world without men for just a day. Now you’d probably expect some outlandish responses that involve personal gain, or even those of you misogynists reading this, would expect women to want to walk around naked. Well, that was not the case, the truth of the matter is that the most common response from women was to simply take a walk during the late hours of the day, without the threat of, as some may call ‘casual’ harassment, although no harassment is casual, or the menaces of potential rape looming over their heads. Perhaps the most shocking yet expected discovery from the study was that over 6 women said they would feel safe without men around, suggesting “that women live in a constant of anxiety when men are around,” as said by Impact.
This anxiety again relates back to respect, because if men were able to respect women’s personal space, bodies, feelings, mobility, and basic human rights then life wouldn’t be such a burden on women.
The disdainfully proud lack of respect for women is ingrained in the minds of not only young boys but also girls from a very young age. While boys are not taught boundaries in regards to girls’ bodies and overall personal being, young girls are fed the idea that if a boy is mean or borderline bullies them, it simply means he has a crush on them. This moronic ideology tempers what later transforms into harassment or abuse in not only the mind of boys but also the victims in the situation, girls. Hence why, boys must be taught how to respect girls, so that it can transcribe into their adult life.
Having said that, of course, women should know some form of self defence, as should men, its a dangerous world out there. Unfortunately, more for women than men, and let’s not bring race and class into this because that would overcomplicate things. So, to reiterate, respect can go a long way if implemented from a young age and renormalised amongst the male species.