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.

So there’s nothing special about running which makes women particularly vulnerable, and men attack and kill women everywhere, outside, whether running, walking or cycling, and inside too in even greater numbers. But when I was writing my book In Her Nature, I focused on women who were attacked and murdered while out running, specifically, because, for me, running is freedom, and not being able to run without fear makes clear how one of the chief harms of men’s abuse of women is to erode our freedom.

It took a long time for me to be able to articulate this. A lot of the literature that I read about street harassment talked about safety rather than freedom, and the importance of keeping women and girls safe. The word safe dominates feminist social media as one of the key aspirations for women, in conversations about the necessity of ‘safe spaces’ and discussions about ‘the kinds of things that [women] do to stay safe [from men]’ (such as slotting keys between our fingers as makeshift weapons, and never leaving windows open at night). ‘Women just want to feel safe’, is an oft-repeated phrase among the feminists I follow.

I’m not against safety for women and girls, by any means! Safety is a word I use a lot myself in relation to women’s rights, and making women unsafe was how I thought about the principal harms of male abuse for a very long time. But, as I was writing In Her Nature, the more that I thought about it, the more that safety started to feel unsatisfactory as the be-all and end-all of feminist aspiration. I started to doubt that if, on my deathbed, all I could say for my life was that it had been ‘safe’, that that would feel quite enough.

I also realised that safety is a concept that can be weaponised against women. Women’s fear of men’s violence is often rational, based on our own experiences and on the statistical reality of men being overwhelmingly more likely to perpetrate violence and abuse against women than vice versa. But it’s also true that risk and fear, and the perception of feeling unsafe, can be exaggerated and used against us. ‘Women just want to feel safe’ is not solely a feminist phrase; it’s also employed by conservatives, who use it to justify women’s dependence on men.

Abusers often exaggerate the dangers of the world outside their dominion, and model themselves as ‘protectors’, in order to keep their victims in a state of ‘safe’ subordination. Furthermore, the state frequently places responsibility for keeping ourselves safe onto women and girls, rather than onto male perpetrators. Julie Bindel has written about how, instead of focusing on deterring perpetrators, the police consistently warn women that going out alone after dark is ‘taking a risk’ and ‘putting yourself in danger’ - as if male violence is inevitable and natural, and the only way for women to be safe is for us to restrict our lives accordingly. Heaven forfend that men’s behaviour might be curtailed instead! As a result of such exaggeration of the dangers that face women, and because the onus for keeping ourselves safe is disproportionately placed onto women’s shoulders, women are far more likely to suffer agoraphobia than men; unable to leave the house because of the overwhelming sense of danger. And in a particularly insulting DARVO move, women who follow the entrenched cultural edicts to keep ourselves safe and not put ourselves in situations that feel dangerous, are now being criticised for making men feel unsafe. Protecting ourselves from men, as we’ve been taught to do, can apparently make men feel upset and jeopardise their feelings of safety in the world. In 2017, a woman on a date took a photograph of his car’s registration number and texted it to her friends, before getting in - as a precaution, in case he attacked her and she disappeared. He was so offended that he instantly cancelled the date and took to social media to berate her. Similarly, an advert produced by the state government of Victoria, Australia, in June this year, in which a woman who didn’t want to be alone in a lift with a trans woman (perhaps because she was a survivor of male violence?), and simply silently left the lift, was used as an example of someone who apparently makes trans and gender diverse people feel unsafe.

So I became a bit dissatisfied with thinking about male violence in public spaces solely in terms of how it erodes women’s safety. I was groping around for a different way of understanding the harms of male violence, when I came across activist and researcher Fiona Vera-Gray’s 2018 book The Right Amount of Panic: How Women Trade Freedom for Safety. And there it was, in the subtitle, like a lightbulb going on: “women trade freedom for safety”. YES. That’s exactly it! She describes brilliantly how women and girls are encouraged to make significant changes to our lives to increase our safety from men’s violence - and how all these practices, all these ‘safety behaviours’, have the result of limiting our freedom:

‘These limitations to freedom are not just about actions, limiting our ability to do something, but…they are disrupting women’s ability to be. [We end up] safe but not comfortable. Safe but not free.’

(There’s also an argument that women do not, in fact, become any safer, even if we radically restrict our freedom.) The precise ways in which women’s freedoms are curtailed, and the extent to which we are made unfree, is never properly monitored or assessed, because, as Vera-Gray describes, government policies and crime surveys focus only on safety; and because women have been encouraged not to properly value freedom, or pay attention to it, and to focus on our safety instead. So we are not as affronted as we should be, when our freedom is eroded.

Upon reading Vera-Gray’s book, I realised that safety is still important - but not as the be-all and end-all of feminist aspiration. Instead, it’s instrumental. Being safe from violence is the necessary precursor to being free; and, ultimately, being free is what’s most important.

I don’t think we talk enough about women’s freedom these days. Emancipation was a watchword of early feminists, who were working to free women from the many laws by which their lives were constrained; such as not being able to vote, own property, inherit, protest against marital rape. It’s obvious that women’s freedoms in, for example, Afghanistan are severely curtailed, so perhaps here in Britain we feel a little embarrassed about talking about our own lack of freedom. And perhaps we’ve been convinced by ‘choice feminism’ that, because many of us do have the ability to make certain choices, then we must be free - even though many of the choices that are open to us are pretty shit.

But I think it’s important to realise that many women experience a profound lack of freedom relative to men, which is related in part to how fear of male violence curtails our actions inside and outside the home, and also to how women are much more likely than men to bear chief responsibility for other humans, such as children and elderly parents. Oliver Burkeman’s very recent book Meditations for Mortals reflects on psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp’s statement that ‘You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’ But Burkeman rightly stresses that the freedom that Kopp describes is unevenly distributed in society, because the consequences are unevenly distributed in society: ‘the consequences of any given choice might be vastly more severe for some people than for others.’ In general, women face far worse material, psychological and social consequences for making choices in which our own desires and needs are placed above others. Women in abusive relationships are berated for not leaving, but the consequences can be terrible: women are often financially dependent on men, and are determined not to risk a family court settlement in which children are left alone with violent men, and men are particularly likely to inflict deadly violence when women are in the process of leaving.

Vera-Gray stresses that there is a crucial difference between ‘feeling safe from and feeling safe to. The gendered expectation of women’s safety work means that we learn that keeping ourselves safe from violence is more important than feeling safe to express and expand ourselves freely in the world,’ she writes. The same could be said for freedom: that women often learn that being free from (eg. abuse) is more important than being free to (eg. effect changes in our lives). I think this is absolutely right and that, as a society, we could do with re-prioritising women’s freedom, and not fobbing women off with the lesser, but necessary, condition of safety.