Magic Eye #2: Ideas that Changed Me

'Women trade freedom for safety' (Fiona Vera-Gray)

This is part of a series of posts about ideas that have had a big impact on me. These ideas have often been comparable to the Magic Eye posters that everyone seemed to have on their walls in the 1990s, which, if you found the right way of looking at them, revealed an image that it was then impossible to un-see. In fact, Magic Eye produced a book called ‘A New Way of Looking at the World’. The ideas I’m going to write about are those that not only changed the way I looked at the world, but they also made it almost impossible to un-see the new reality they revealed. And so I’d love to share them with you.

‘Women trade freedom for safety’

Over nine days in the summer of 2016, three separate women out running were murdered by men. Ally Brueger was a nurse at a Michigan hospital, who dreamed of becoming a writer, and ran ten miles daily. She was murdered by a man on Saturday 30 July. Karina Vetrano was a speech pathologist who worked with children with autism and was running in NYC’s Spring Creek Park around 5pm on 2 August when she was attacked and killed by a man. Five days later, on 7 August, twenty-seven-year-old Vanessa Marcotte, who worked for Google, was murdered by a man while out running in Princeton, Massachusetts. Over the next six years, between 2016 and 2022, more women out running would be murdered by men than in the preceding twenty-eight years.

There’s nothing about running that makes women particularly vulnerable. Not one of the murdered female runners I’ve studied was running in the dark, nor in especially remote surroundings. (Not, of course, that this matters. Women should be able to run alone at night, in wild places, wearing whatever we want, with earbuds in, without being told that we brought it on ourselves if men attack us.) Carolina Cano was murdered while running in family-friendly Liberty State Park, New Jersey, on a Sunday morning, on her way to open up her church, while children played nearby. Several women were carrying tracking devices, so partners could monitor their movements. Molecular biologist Suzanne Eaton was a taekwondo black belt, but a man raped and murdered her anyway, while she was out for a run one morning during a conference in Crete. In short, these women were all doing the ‘safety work’ that women and girls are taught, from childhood, to employ to keep ourselves safe from violent men - and men murdered them anyway.