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Thread About How Even Everyday Scenarios Are Scarier For Women Than Men Is An Eye-Opener

byJinal Bhatt
13th October 2018
4 minute read

For a woman, being alone is less a matter of peace and more a matter of latent fear. Whether we’re alone on the streets, in public transport or even in the safety of our own homes, there’s always that concern about our security and safety. Something that men never really have to be concerned about. A man can step out at all hours of the night or day, open the door to any stranger and get into a car with anyone, and he’s still very less likely to risk his life than a woman is.

Twitter user @tragedythyme highlighted this frustrating male privilege in a Twitter thread, as she describes an incident that happened with her recently. It proves how normal, everyday scenarios are much more scarier for women than they are for men.

She had listed a home appliance, a dryer, on a website to sell it and a potential buyer was supposed to drop by to get it. Mind you, she took all the necessary precautions about making sure her husband was home when the buyer was to come.

When her husband had to leave and the buyer had still not shown, she prudently tried to inform him to come some other time. Unfortunately, the buyer arrived just 15 minutes after her husband had left.

At this point, she had a decision to make. Should she allow him in? Should she send him back and ask him to come later?

Notice how in this same situation, a man would not have had to think twice to let the buyer in. However, since she was a woman alone in the house, she had to think a lot of things.

She went with her gut, and allowed him to enter in, even deciding to help him move the dryer out.

However, as the began lifting and moving the dryer, the situation suddenly underwent a drastic change.

The man, who up till now seemed not so dangerous, had suddenly decided to act like a creep.

Usually, when women find themselves in situations like these where they sense danger, they often try and play pretend. Talking over the phone loudly to show that there’s someone watching out for them is a pretty common act.

And that’s exactly what she did. She pretended to call her husband.

And just like that, the buyer, the creep, was gone! Without buying the thing he had come for!

What this incident taught the woman, and shows us all, is that even though ‘nothing happened’, it was still very emotionally draining to have lived through that fear even temporarily.

So every time we say, “Well, at least nothing happened!” we need to understand that even the fear of something happening can be a kind of harassment and can scare the life out of the women who have to go through it.

It calls out all men to make sure that when they are around women, they make them feel safe. Even unknowingly, some men can make a woman feel scared or uncomfortable.

As the thread went viral, @tragedythyme posted a few more updates, each of which further proved her point about things getting scarier for women.

The man returned to her house when her husband was home, and upon seeing him, pretended to be a drunk ringing the wrong doorbell!

She even had to inform the cops about it, because she was that shaken.

What the woman also revealed was that despite her fear morphing into rage while she was writing the thread, when the man actually returned to her house, she couldn’t muster any courage to do what she had planned to do to him.

She froze in the face of the creep that she planned to probably give a piece of her mind to. Because that’s how fear works.

Even though he had merely said some inappropriate things to her, and not physically assaulted her or anything, she still felt terrorised seeing him at her doorstep again.

Her thread got several responses on Twitter from men and women saying that it was her fault for letting the stranger in when she was alone at home. To them, she has something important to say….

Sarcasm was intended.

The thread really opened up a discussion on male privilege and how it often gets abused, intentionally and unintentionally.

Many other women spoke up about having similar scary encounters and living with the frustration that fear is a reflexive response for most women, as opposed to men.

There were several men commenting on the thread, acknowledging how terrible this was and promising to do better by the women they came across.

As one Twitter user wrote, this constant mistrust that women have towards men, and which men often find rather frustrating, is actually our survival instinct.

We’d love to be in a world where we didn’t have to be on our guard at all times. But till then, the least the men can do is be mindful of their actions so as not to scare off women.

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