The Freedom of Movement

It truly is a woman's issue. Men are never confronted with this at all. They are just assumed to be real people who can just go about their business all times of the day and night and anywhere they want. Women are frequently hamstrung from moving freely about because too many men see them as prey, not as real people.

Of course in some countries it is unsafe for women or anybody for that matter to be alone, but in countries such as the United States, it can be pure paranoia on the part of women. That stems from social conditioning.

Is it any wonder? The reason for all of the idiotic warnings from mothers and sisters, as in my personal life, is not that there are real dangers from some men, but the reality that the warnings are there to keep women in "their place" and force them to be further dependent on men. They can't just be dependent on men financially; that isn't good enough. They have to be dependent on men just to move around.

Well, bullshit to that. I have always done things alone despite the moronic warnings by my mother and especially one of my two sisters. I couldn't travel across the United States alone, heaven forbid in my mother's eyes, when I went to Lexington, Kentucky, back in 1989. I wasn't supposed to do it because women don't do that. She didn't say that in so many words but the implication was clear. Ditto for the fact I had an apartment and lived alone. She read some bullshit article in Family Weekly or one of those Sunday insert magazines that it was "unhealthy," so I wasn't supposed to do it. I did it, of course, and lived alone off and on for many years. Wish I could do it now, I will tell you. So does my brother with whom I live.

The article:

In Washington DC, non-profit worker Hannah Geyer has all but given up her regular 15-minute walk through a park to and from the venue where she performs in a variety show. The groups of men who loiter in the park have literally frightened her off her feet.

“They would get really, really, really close to me,” Geyer says. “It’s one thing if you’re yelling at me from across the sidewalk, because I can just be, like, ‘whatever’ and keep walking. But physically putting their bodies into my path or getting into my bubble when I don’t answer or look irritated at them – which is all the time ... It was [them saying]: ‘I’m gonna stop you from walking where you’re walking.’”


Now Geyer takes ride-share cars, paying US $5-10 each time. But she is adamant that if she still felt safe enough to walk, she would.

And of course "ride-share" cars are infamous for sexual assaults. God damn it, woman, get a life.

That is no life at all if you live in paranoia.