#YesAllWomen

[lydy]

So, I've been seeing the #YesAllWomen thing about, as a response to #NotAllMen, and the various discussions about it. And I've been feeling positive and supportive towards the #YesAllWomen response, while thinking that it really didn't apply to me. But, you know, I kept thinking. And began to wonder why it was that I thought it didn't apply to me; why was I discounting or ignoring my own actual experiences?

When I was fifteen, I was a volunteer at the Scaife Gallery in the Carnegie Museum. It was usually boring, averaging about one request for the bathroom per hour, and one request for the mummies per week. One day, a clean-cut, nicely dressed, well-spoken young man started chatting me up. It was surprising and flattering. I didn't get a lot of positive attention, especially not positive male attention. He offered to buy me something at the coffee shop. I think I got a milk shake. He was fun to talk to. He was either on leave from or had just left the armed services. I don't know how old he was, early twenties at a guess. Now, I lived in Penn Hills, and the museum was in Oakland, and there were two express buses (The 72U I believe) in the afternoons. I told him I had to leave, in order to catch the last of the expresses. If I missed it, I would have to take the 73 Highland to East Liberty, and change there, and I would be hours late to home. He gallantly offered to drive me home, and we lingered in the coffee shop a brief period longer. I should note that if he was flirting with me, I didn't realize it, and if I was flirting with him, I didn't know it. But I was very young, and very naive.

We went out to his car. It was parked in a fairly small parking lot. There were some people about, and it was late afternoon. I got in, buckled my seat belt. He did not start the engine. I thought that this was odd. I started giving him directions to my home. He said, "I could rape you, you know." I think I must have been surprised. I don't remember surprise, though, what I remember was a white hot rage. An overpowering fury. It has been more than 35 years, and I don't remember exactly what I said. I do remember telling him that if he tried, I'd scream. He said that no one would hear me. I told him I had a really, really loud voice. I also remember telling him, with absolute certainty, that he would do no such thing. There is a thing I do when I am very angry, where my mouth lives a life of its own. It's prone to, for instance, telling someone the truth about themselves to their face in a way that makes it impossible for them not to listen. I wish I could do this when I'm not enraged, it seems like a useful skill. But when I'm enraged, I evidently have some weird power of voice. I no longer remember what I told this young man, but when I was done, he was speechless. I then told him to drive me home. Which he did. We did not speak for the entire half hour drive.

Of the many strange and crazy things that I've done in my life, not getting out of that car is probably high on the list. Insisting that a person who had just offered to rape me start the car and drive me, well, anyplace at all, has to be an act of monumental hubris. However, for me it was very much a matter of being more afraid of the devil I knew than the devil I didn't. That overpowering rage? That was not because he had offered to violate me. It was because if he did, I would have to explain it to my parents. Being raped didn't particularly sound like fun, you understand, but the idea of explaining how it had happened to my parents was purely terrifying. And if this very scary person didn't actually drive me home, as he had promised to do, I was going to be hours late, and have to explain that to my parents, and again, that was much more frightening to me that what he had threatened to do to me. Indeed, if he did actually attack me, at least then I'd have something distracting to tell my parents when they were upset that I was home late.

About a month short of my seventeenth birthday, I lost my virginity. I tell this story as a performance piece, and it's quite funny. While the actual process was traumatic, the final outcomes were largely wonderful, and the whole thing is part of my incredibly complicated relationship with sex and empowerment. But stripped of context and consequences, there are some bare facts that I rarely draw attention to. I was not yet seventeen. He was twenty-five. I was drunk. He helped me get drunk. He was perfectly aware of my age, the fact that I was a virgin, and that I was drunk. He did not use a condom. Now, it is true that for me, it didn't feel like rape. There are weird, important ways in which I was very much an empowered actor in this story. But there is no getting around the fact that, had he been an even minimally decent sort of bloke, he would not have had sex with me. The fact that the outcomes were largely positive for me are important to me, but were not in the least predictable to him. If someone tries to kill you with a shot gun, misses, and cures your hiccups, you still don't think that what he did was a good thing. He tried to fucking murder you. This man, he could easily have ruined my life. The fact that he didn't is a great thing for me, but no virtue redounds to him.

In the Eighties, I spent a lot of time being very sexually available in fandom. It started out partly because I was unable to conceive of having any other type of social capital. It was also easy and fun. Through it, I learned a huge amount of useful things. It was definitely a tool for me, a way to learn about empowerment, empathy, responsibility, and joy. I genuinely don't regret it. I regret some of the mistakes I made, I regret the people I hurt. I don't regret using my sexuality as a tool to become a bigger, better person. But I do wonder if I contributed to making fandom a less good place for women who didn't make that choice. Women who were shyer, women who found the male gaze to be threatening rather than flattering. Is there a place for both of us, I wonder. A place where I could have gotten the positive male attention that I found so enticing, and ultimately wonderful, and not create an environment in which those same men felt it a right to ogle, proposition, take pictures, and generally importune women who weren't interested in that kind of attention. I think that it might be possible, but only if we require that the men actually, you know, make real attempts to differentiate, to notice which of the women are advertising availability and which are not. And to respect both choices.

And for all that the promiscuity was my choice, for my reasons, and served a bunch of really useful purposes for me, it had its downsides. I sometimes felt like a public utility. My right to choose felt slightly eroded. There was also the memorable occasion where I was at a SFLIS meeting and one of the members demanded, in front of everyone, to know why I wouldn't sleep with him. After all, I'd slept with all of the other men there. I remember looking around and realizing that this statement was correct. And I remember failing to find an adequate explanation. I remember feeling that I needed to have an explanation. Which, in retrospect, I really didn't. It was my choice, and I didn't need to explain it to anyone. Most especially not him.

It's actually rather hard to creep on me. I tend to accept the male gaze as a form of compliment. It doesn't frighten me. Random propositions to go to bed with men I don't know very well rarely insult me. But this is entirely me. It is built from weird building blocks that other people don't have. It comes from a childhood of abuse, where I never learned certain types of self-protective behaviors. It comes from having had sexuality as my only form of power at a critical age of learning, and having had that be a largely positive thing. It comes from never having been actually raped. It comes from having had a number of truly wonderful lovers and teachers. Which, you know, is all very nice for me in some ways, but isn't exactly a recipe for building a better world. I don't particularly wish for a different set of boundaries and triggers, but I think it stunningly important that we all start understanding that other people do have other boundaries and triggers and learning to respect those. Which starts, by the way, with figuring out what they are for each of the individuals that we interact with.

I do think that one of the things that #NotAllMen is about is trying to get us to have a _less_ nuanced view of men. It wants us to divide up the male gender into predators and heroes, and then to laud the heroes. The man I eventually married did many wonderful things for me. He helped me free of my abusive family and my abusive religion. He gave me many intellectual tools for moving forward with my life. He loved me, and helped me find a sense of self-worth that I had never had before. And one of the things I did with that burgeoning self-worth was kick his ass to the curb, because he was also a controlling, sexist alcoholic. There is no universe in which Nigel is the hero or the predator, he is always both.

I wonder, do the people behind #NotAllMen actually think that women have a binary view of men? Or, worse, a unitary view? Are they projecting their unitary view of women on the responses they get from women? Is this actually born of their own inability to see women as complicated individuals with actual, lived history which informs their choices? Do they think that the choices people make, regardless of gender, are somehow choices made in a vacuum, based on ideal forms and not on messy real life? And do they think that maybe, they'd get laid more often if women looked at them as the Platonic form of a man, rather than the person that they actually are? Or am I living in a weird bubble where the women I associate with, when they talk about their encounters with men, tend to talk about it in complicated, nuanced ways, trying to sort out the pieces of their experience which are influenced by their past, by existing social constructs, and making complicated cost-benefit analyses where there isn't a single, obvious benefit, but instead a weird buffet of good and bad outcomes, many of which are not entirely obvious on the face of things?

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Is there a place for both of us, I wonder. A place where I could have gotten the positive male attention that I found so enticing, and ultimately wonderful, and not create an environment in which those same men felt it a right to ogle, proposition, take pictures, and generally importune women who weren't interested in that kind of attention.

When I read this the first time I thought you were assigning yourself responsibility for creating the to-some hostile environment. As I look at it again I'm not sure, but if you are, I'd strongly suggest you didn't. The responsibility is on the people who can't treat people as individuals who need different things, and make a good-faith attempt to figure out what those things are. While in the end an environment that disregards your wishes is probably better than one that disregards the wishes of the people who want to be left alone, your wishes are still legitimate, and that's a false choice.

I wonder, do the people behind #NotAllMen actually think that women have a binary view of men? Or, worse, a unitary view?

Women, no. Lots of women on the internet, yes. In a sense perhaps you are living in a weird bubble, though I prefer to think of them being the ones in the bubble. I had an extremely creepy conversation this week (based on a repost of a thing that treated men as undifferentiable) with a woman who has generally behaved as if she were my friend in the past. I got six or seven emails from her that were completely unindividuated, with zero attempt to talk to me as a person or relate to the things I was saying. The stock phrases and non-sequiturs flew wildly, and she was clearly treating me as some sort of homonculus made up of a collection of dumbass dudebro arguments she'd encountered in the past. I eventually called mrissa into the conversation, at which point she magically started listening and interacting. It reminded me very much of the second time I was in Hungary, when the male leader of our group had to go home early due to a medical emergency. That left two women in charge of the American group, and I (21 and totally not supposed to be in charge) had to go around essentially being their interpreter because many older Hungarian men were incapable of taking them seriously. A male voice saying the exact same words was meaningful to them when a female voice wasn't. It's one of the creepiest things I've ever had to do. And it's not uncommon for us to run into that in reverse.

And do they think that maybe, they'd get laid more often if

And in terms of a unitary view, you know, we do have more than one motivation. If I had a choice to give up sex in return for never again being treated as a potential rapist, I'd probably take it.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I don't really feel responsible for creating a hostile environment. But it seems possible, even likely, that the presence of women like me validate behavior that is not appropriate in all circumstances. And while that doesn't make me responsible, it does make it complicated.

I am very sorry about your creepy conversation. That's genuinely horrible. The experience of a conversation going toxic because my conversation partner is only engaging with a weird, gender essentialist construct instead of with me is entirely familiar, and is a humiliating experience.

Perhaps I was a little too snarky with the "maybe. they'd get laid more often" crack. I don't have to worry about being treated like a potential rapist, obviously, but I do go through life often defined as a potential rapee. And that, too, is several different sorts of not-fun.

People, complicated. Who knew?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have not seen #NotAllMen used as anything but snark, for whatever that's worth.

I don't regret using my sexuality as a tool to become a bigger, better person. But I do wonder if I contributed to making fandom a less good place for women who didn't make that choice. Women who were shyer, women who found the male gaze to be threatening rather than flattering. Is there a place for both of us, I wonder. A place where I could have gotten the positive male attention that I found so enticing, and ultimately wonderful, and not create an environment in which those same men felt it a right to ogle, proposition, take pictures, and generally importune women who weren't interested in that kind of attention. I think that it might be possible, but only if we require that the men actually, you know, make real attempts to differentiate, to notice which of the women are advertising availability and which are not. And to respect both choices.

I think that's entirely possible to achieve. I think we're all sort of working on it right now, individually and collectively, trying to figure it out.

Here's a sort of parallel example: for a lot of people, coming into fandom and finding out that they can be in a large social circle where they don't have to be religious (usually in the form of being a Christian, American culture being what it is) is amazingly liberating. And that's wonderful. It's great. I want it to be that way. And the minute that becomes a place where nobody can be religious, it kind of sucks.

We need to stay good at "this is a way that people can choose to be" without it tipping over into "this is the way that our people are."

And that's one of the places I've really run into problems with fandom and physical/sexual availability of women. People who came into fandom and found, with joy, that it was not full of repressive rules about not hugging anybody ever, not kissing until the third date and certainly never hugging or kissing anybody you were not formally dating, etc., sometimes codified their own rules and assumed that they were what being fannish is all about. Shutting your mouth and letting people grope you when you don't want them to grope you is all part of the deal. And if you object, then you are not a real fan. Or worse, because they already know you are a real fan, because you are friends with real fans, they already know you won't object, so they are in your space and gone so fast you can't even object without chasing them down the hotel hallway shouting, "Don't touch that, it's not yours!"

You having arrangements with various people, historically and currently, that you want to have sex with them--or casually feel each other up or whatever--is not a problem. The people who belittle problems with, "Oh, that's just how BillyJoeBobTed is, he'll just grab your ass and get on with his day, you can't get upset about it, that's fandom," that's a problem. The people who think that no arrangements are required: problem.

And it's the same problem outside fandom. It's the same problem when someone tells you that you can't get upset about it if you want to keep your job because that's how men are. Because it's not how men are. If it was just "how men are," we would have a very different problem. And that's what makes me furious about the phrase "not all men" becoming this piece of snark. Because in fact, no. Not all men. It is relevant that not. All. Men. It is relevant that we can expect better of each other as people, and should. It is relevant that we can treat each other as people and demand to be treated as people ourselves. All of us.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree with everything you say. But I do think that the asymmetry between NotAllMen and YesAllWomen is an important piece of some damn thing or another. Something difficult to talk about in useful and nuanced ways, ways which recognize both the fact that Timprov is not in any way a potential threat and ways that recognize that almost every person who presents as female in this culture has had a negative experience which was because of her perceived gender. The fact that I don't routinely find men threatening is something I want to be a part of the conversation, without belittling women who do routinely find men to be threatening. One of the things I find so incredibly infuriating about the so-called "Men's Rights Activists" is that I truly believe that our current society, with its gender-related power imbalances, does, indeed, damage men as well as women. But the MRAs poison the conversation, concentrating on all the wrong things, and make it much much harder to get at the true human costs of the problem. Having people be afraid of you is a problem if what you want is an authentic relationship with another person. But living in fear also makes that authentic relationship difficult to achieve.

That we need to expect better from each other is something I completely agree with. I have not seen the #NotAllMen as actually advancing that cause. Instead, what I have seen has been much more along the lines of "I have acted like a decent human being, I am entitled to a cookie." Just as I am unwilling to take on guilt for having been sexually promiscuous and possibly giving some guy an unrealistic set of expectations towards someone who wasn't me, I am not interested in making some random guy I don't know take on a load of guilt for the actions of some other dude somewhere. Moreover, although all women have these types of experiences, we deal with them differently. So, #NotAllWomen needs to be a part of the conversation, too. But at its core, I do think that we are trying to insist that this extremely common experience be acknowledged and dealt with, rather than treated as some sort of aberration which only "certain" women have had.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Acknowledging and dealing with the commonness of this experience is indeed important.

I'm glad to be seeing you talking about how people deal with it in different ways, because that's exactly what I haven't been seeing in #YesAllWomen, and what I do not have the time/energy to deal with personally at the moment.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

One benefit of the frustrating conversation I mentioned above is I finally came up with a name for what I want: men's rights in the tradition of Rosey Grier. Because I do think my rights to do needlepoint and have emotions need protecting (even though I only do one of those things) but I really would rather not be associated with those people. Also because Rosey Grier is awesome.

I do think that we are trying to insist that this extremely common experience be acknowledged and dealt with

This is where the core of #YesAllWomen was really great.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Do you see the part here where you, quite seriously and not at all snarkily are saying "but not all men"?

If the important thing is making sure that men are rewarded for acting like decent human beings, then we aren't going to get much of anywhere. Decent human being is the baseline, not something worth a parade or a song or being reassured that people didn't mean you so that you can be centered in the conversation whenever other people want to talk about ways in which they have been hurt.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

"And the minute that becomes a place where nobody can be religious, it kind of sucks."

I had a much better experience with early religious upbringing than many I've heard about. I tend to believe in something I call God; it's probably not the same thing atheists think of when they say they don't believe in God.

I'm not dogmatic about any particular creed and have studied a wide range of religions and respect them all as attempts to understand certain aspects of human experience in relation to the wider universe.

This said, I hesitate to talk about spirituality in many fannish contexts because of the feeling that people will think I'm stupid for not disbelieving the way they do.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

When I found fandom, I found the freedom from religion intoxicating. I was a bit obnoxious on the topic, actually. I'm much better, or at least, much older now. I understand your hesitance to discuss religion in a fannish context. I think this is another area in which we are, as a community, getting a little better.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I see #NotAllMen as having lead to #YesAllWomen, which while no doubt untrue as all generalizations are, gets to what I think some men still need to have pointed out to them -- women in our society do learn, and need to learn, lots of self-protective behaviors against men, because there is some far-too-big subset of men that they need them against, and we don't wear uniforms so you can't tell which are which until it's too late (at least some women also suggest it's much more nuanced than that, and that any man can become a monster fairly easily; that one bothers me more, given how often the neighbors of actual monsters say "he was quiet, he never made any trouble; I'm totally shocked"). There is a really severe shortage of women without multiple bad experiences with predatory men. I think a lot of men don't really understand that. (That subset might be only 10% or something; but it's big enough that, so I hear, you run into them every day. I only hear the random street cat-calls and a few remarks in groups; mostly these things happen in semi-private and not at random. I don't estimate the sub-set as being 10%, I just use it as an example of a quite small fraction that's still big enough to lead to many encounters.)

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

" any man can become a monster fairly easily"

I wouldn't say that, but any man could unwittingly step on boundaries that some individual woman might have that are not what he'd expect.

Fandom is a subculture with different women who have different expectations, as discussed above, but we're fairly tolerant of having differences.

Encountering a woman from another subculture, say where polyamory is unheard of, it could be taken as a gross insult even to flirt with her while involved with some other(s). Offering to shake hands with a Muslim woman. Making eye contact with a woman of another culture, etc. Lots of things could lead someone to be seen as a monster when we don't know enough about where the other person is coming from.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I think that you are missing the point, possibly with great deliberation in order to talk about something else. Which, you know, is fine. But I think that the people who are arguing that any man can become a monster are not, in fact, concerned with a man failing to correctly understand a cultural context, but a man who actually understand this current cultural context entirely too well. He understands that men are often given a free pass to treat women badly, and that some men do this with glee and impunity, and that it can be very difficult to tell, until it happens, that this charming person one has been dating is capable of behaving that way. Part of the problem is that the waters we swim in are so murky. There are a suite of behaviors which can signal either a gentleman behaving with kindness and circumspection or a man who thinks that women are territory which belong to a male person. And there are a huge number of unconsidered behaviors which may or may not mean anything, because they are the fucking norm, and so maybe they speak to an underlying misogyny, but maybe they're an unconsidered habit learned young in a culture which doesn't value women's autonomy. All people have different public and private behavior. But trying to predict and defend against private behavior based on public behavior is a crap shoot, all too often.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Virginia Woolf nailed the problem with #notallmen and then people who sincerely say it.

Virginia Woolf "As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking." - Orlando

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Oof. Right you are. Or she is.

[skzbrust.livejournal.com]

You will shocked, shocked to learn that I read this through my own filters, beliefs, and attitudes--my own understanding of you and of society. That said, I'm very pleased you wrote it. I think the internet in general is a terrible medium for trying to change someone's thinking 180 degrees; but it can be very powerful for drawing out nuances, and giving people (like, in this case, me) increased understanding of the complexity of complex issues that some of us (ahem) are inclined to over-simplify. Or, in short, thank you.

[skzbrust.livejournal.com]

Oh. And should add that, "If someone tries to kill you with a shot gun, misses, and cures your hiccups, you still don't think that what he did was a good thing." is now on my quotes page.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

I think of this set of social problems as an argument about which default narrative, and I'd rather there wasn't a default narrative.

(It's the same issue with many religions; the religion asserts the propriety of a default narrative. There's a diversity of such default narratives, but the issue is usually the default part, not what it actually says.)

So, "Not unless they say", rather than "this is the (implicitly only) kind of story there is to tell". You have to negotiate everything every time.

I also think the expectation of sex adds a lot of stupidity, but the majority of the narrative is about confirmation of status and social order; the insistence on mechanistic social rules is a tool to avoid having negotiate. (Status means being able to organize things so you're less likely to lose than you'd be without status.)

That sounds really dry; a huge part of the problem is that the social order presupposes an absence of female agency sufficient to refuse the proper ritual behaviour. It's not a trivial problem of politeness or other social ritual, it's a question of constructing status in some other way.

I'm still going to vote for "no default narrative is legitimate" but I know just how much extra work that involves. Not especially likely to win in the end

[lydy.livejournal.com]

This sounds interesting, and smart, and I find that I need it unpacked, more. I've read it several times, and I think there's a lot of stuff that you're implying that I'm not quite understanding.

So, I think that one of the things that you are saying is that the real problem here is that hashtag war is actually an argument about whose narrative is the default, rather than an attempt to effect change. If so, I suspect that you may be right, but I would also say that challenging the default narrative is probably part of the process of creating change. It's important not to stop with a simple substitution of defaults, though.

I am less sure what you are saying in regards to status. What do you mean by "proper ritual behavior"?

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

I'd say that "Not all men" is an argument that the extant default narrative is just fine. I don't think "YesAllWomen" has a default narrative attached to it -- the accusation is made, but I don't see one coallesced yet -- but the pattern of the argument is the kind of thing that happens when there's an argument over what's the legitimate default narrative. (The 30 Year's War was an argument over the legitimate default social narrative. That's not supposed to be a trivializing phrase.)

I agree that challenging the default narrative is a start; I think it's just about impossible to get any default to not be really tough on people. So a "we're necessarily collaborating" instead of "do you want a part in this play I'm writing?" as the construction of politeness would, I think, work better. Hard, though, because it's more work and you have to admit that there might not be any good reasons someone would want to collaborate with you.

You know how there are those depressing surveys where some double-digit percentage of people agree that, if there have been three dates and he's paid for dinner, she should sleep with him? The really creepy MRAs are an extension of that (very common) pattern; it's a ritual, it's basically an AD&D spell, you have your semantic component and your guestural component and your physical component and something happens. No female agency whatsoever. The really creepy MRAs have made the whole thing conscious and overt -- These Are The Rules, dammit -- and are complaining that the universe is broken because they did the ritual, they keep doing the ritual, and there wasn't any sex.

So, it's a belief system that insists that if they do the proper ritual -- buy dinner, be Nice, whatever -- they get sex. The idea that there's a choice involved isn't in the belief system. (is objectionable as a possibility to the belief system.)

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, so many women are so tired of their very real concerns eliciting "Not all men . . . " that the hashtag took off like a zeitgeist fueled rocket.
"But, not all men are rapists!"
"Yes, but All Women live with the very real possibility of rape." *

Heaven (and most of the people who will read this) knows I have little patience for over-simplification, or single-issue, or one-drop political correctness tests, but there's real substance here. But it's the troops on the front lines who get battle fatigue, not the support workers back home. I bet that enjoyment/appreciation of the two tags is proportionate to how many times someone has been answered, "But not all men . . ."

* using the archetypal abuse for which innumerable lesser, more complex abuses can be substituted

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

p.s.
Proceeding through my daily web intake, I've just run into this excellent illustration.
So You’re A Man With An Opinion About Feminism And #YesAllWomen

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

I have found the post and the comments very interesting, thank you.

The discussion also has helped me understand that, even if I was born with body of a woman, I do not belong into that body.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

If you were willing to expand on your last statement, I would be very interested in listening. Gender dysphoria is something I understand far less well than I would like, and I am also very interested in how that fits into this other conversation about misogyny.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

As I think we have touched on before in conversation, we come from very different places and yet have quite a bit in common. I could have written a lot of what you write here. I was particularly struck by "The fact that I don't routinely find men threatening is something I want to be a part of the conversation, without belittling women who do routinely find men to be threatening." Yeah. But I have never had much luck with making my experience part of the woman-conversation...except on rare occasions such as with you.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

"Threat" is properly evalutated in terms of capabilities, if "threat" is going to be a technical term and not a description of a response.

I'd generally expect that "not routinely finding men threatening" is a function of evaluating intention, rather than capability, or being high-capability yourself. It might just be not having much of the response.

But, anyway -- there's the response, and some people just don't have it. (This doesn't reduce their risk in all cases.)

There's evaluation by intention, and some people can do that well enough they trust it. (I am not one of those people; I don't think there are a very many people who can really do that reliably, which might just be a reflection of my own inability.)

There's evaluation of capability, and that's generally going to find most men threatening. (Irrespective of your own gender; statistically, you're much better off with bears than groups of young men who've been drinking, and there are a *more* of those than bears, too.)

So I've seen a lot of men insisting that they be evaluated on their intentions. (Which is, to try to be polite about it, most extremely rude of them.) I've seen people who are just plain frightened and can't really stop because there is no plausible mechanism for reducing their perception of risk. (Nor can I say they are wrong.) I've had someone be laudably honest and point out I was very unsettling to consider as a romantic prospect because I was obviously not going to be easy to tie into cognitive guilt-knots and that's what they normally relied to maintain a sense of safety in the presence of significant physical differences. It's not one process, but the available language doesn't permit distinguishing the three cases of "threat".