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When's the last time that you were concerned about your safety? Last time I was concerned about my personal safety, I can't recall that. Um, I don't know. I can't remember. It's never been a, never been a problem for me.
That's a good question. Um, if you ask a woman, when's the last time that she was concerned about her safety? She will say it's every day. I mean, it's something maybe you could notice every single day. When I go to my job, I have to park like blocks away. So every time I go to work, every day, we come here to work, I walk to a bus. And no matter which bus stop I'm going to, every time, it's got to watch your back, got to watch your front, watch the sides.
If I'm in an unfamiliar territory and it's, it's dark, it's dark and it's late, and I live kind of far, and so, and I'm a girl alone. A couple nights ago, I felt very nervous and very, you know, just scared. And I kind of just wanted to walk in the middle of the road. I'm always kind of rushing to my car. I'll get my keys out before I leave the restaurant, just in case anyone can be a threat to us. I wish I was a little bit more like naive sometimes. I mean, I wouldn't say naive, but so unaware of the dangers in the world.
The experience for men and women is just completely different. The reality is, you will all be, and you all have been targeted at some time. And there are no strategies that can help women in particular avoid being targets. So then the question is, all right, now how do I not become a victim? How could fear be a gift? Well, it is. These feelings are gifts. They're not things we should ignore.
The gift of fear was a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a PhD all rolled into [Music] one. This is a, a group of, you know, a fairly average group of women. You know, there was no pre-interview here that said, please give me the list of 15 ways in which you've been victimized in your life. We have basically a room full of women, and isn't it quite extraordinary what all of you have experienced? I suspect if you got 18 women in a room together anywhere in America, you'd have a whole lot of stories of victimization, and a whole lot of stories of fear, and a whole lot of stories of violence.
And if it's not us, it's somebody we know. If it's not somebody we know, it's something we see on the news. People at work, relatives, nobody is untouched by this thing. All my experiences really just came from being female in the world and the vulnerabilities of that.
Do you think almost every woman you know has had some kind of victimization or knows somebody who has? Yes. Every woman I know has experienced, if not an out-and-out assault, they've experienced a feeling where they felt as though their power was going to be taken from them. It's a really complex thing that comes and goes from your life for a long time. This is women, period. Yeah, all women in Western Society are affected by either the fear of this, uh, or the reality of this. Yeah.
The World Health Organization says one in three women will be assaulted sometime in her lifetime. One and three. Now, I'm really upset that people don't, don't go, "What? That's horrible. That's a pandemic." But most people go, "Oh, okay. One and three." It's very understandable that men and women have a different view of safety in Western culture because of this reality. At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them. And at core, women are afraid men will kill them. This is really the way it is. And it's not the way it has to be.
So what I hope to do today is look at how we don't get paralyzed with fear in society, knowing what we know. I really struggled as, as a young woman. I was constantly afraid of being pursued, of someone breaking into my home. I was afraid to be alone in my home at night. You cannot live in a state of constant shock, awe, and rage. You have to operate from a place of hope and love, or you'll fatigue yourself to an impossible degree.
When you have a lot of your systems on guard, being afraid, being afraid when you walk to your car, being afraid when you're in a parking structure, being afraid at home when you hear a noise, it is sapping. We don't know really the cost to women's health, especially if they've already been assaulted. And it's not just some kind of imaginary thing. They have already been assaulted, maybe when they were a girl, and they have all their systems being wary. We don't know the cost of that. In fact, weariness of everybody makes a person more likely to be victimized because, for one thing, they're using up their fear resource when it is unnecessary. They're using up the constant weariness when there's no place for it. And thus, when they see something that really is a concern, they often do not observe it and don't take it in because they're applying the same strategy to everybody.
I, I really wish more girls would, um, open their eyes to their environment a little bit more instead of everyone's face being stuck in their phone. Or you should never walk around with headphones on either. And I see that all the time. You shouldn't do it. We each have been given the responsibility for our own safety. The government's not going to do it for you. And, uh, the police are not going to do it for you. And the corporation that puts lights and security guards at the parking lot is not going to do it for you. It's going to come down to you doing it for you.
And there are ways in which you can cooperate with your attacker that clearly I would recommend you avoid. One of them, wearing the headphones when jogging through the park. The very nature of jogging is that you're moving from environments that change into environments that change. It's not one place. And of the senses, hearing is the one that is most volumetric. It means it's all around, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Vision is actually far less valuable, but hearing is everywhere. That sound of a tennis shoe squeaking on the sidewalk behind you is enough to get your attention, but not if you're wearing headphones and listening to music. And it gets a step worse with the headphones because not only do you disable the main survival sense that we have, but you've told everybody around you that you've done it. Because there are those wires that say to the right kind of predator, "I am your victim."
Here's the hard part of this message. The hard part is, you mean I, I should just be allowed to listen to music? You mean I can't just listen to music like everybody else? Joy of the listening to the soundtrack of their day while they walk. And I mean, music is everything to me. Like walking the streets of New York with earbuds in is like, it's my number one favorite thing. It's all about context. Where the circumstances you're walking around in a, in a crowded environment, you know, on the sidewalk in New York, fantastic. I don't love it for the ability to hear a car tire screeching or a car horn or a car as you cross the street, but it's not a violence issue. But alone jogging in a park, I think it's a big mistake.
Well, I just, I, you know, it's, it's hard to, hard to take. I know it's a, it's a jagged pill to swallow because, yeah, it's this is a hard reality. I wish it wasn't this way, right? My point on all of this is only that people be aware of it, be conscious about what you're choosing to do.
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Reality. Reality. Reality. That's the key because that's where you can see everything coming, right? You can't say, "I'm not going to be aware because I shouldn't have to be." That's what people do. So it's about empowering people to understand what are the pre-incident indicators of violence, and am I seeing them right now? And if I am, I want to get out of this situation. I want to start using my advantages. And the idea of staying present in the current moment is the key to being aware of people in your environment who might act in a predatory way. Being alert is not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about being on edge at all. I'm simply talking about being open to what actually is.
Does our dependence on electronic devices, cell phones, get in the way of using our senses? It really does. Human beings now are choosing to distract themselves. I was on a subway platform in New York, and every woman I saw was doing that. There was nobody not doing that in some way, looking down, giving their entire attention to something that takes them out of the present moment and out of the present environment. As soon as this happens and all your attention goes there, the whole rest of the world falls away. And you can be sure that your predator is not texting, and your predator is not thinking about answering an email or responding to a phone call. Right then, he's looking very attentively at you, not paying attention, completely engrossed in this. And so being aware of the circumstance that you're in and the situation you're in is very important.
Go ahead. I have a question about, um, is there any advice you would give if alcohol is in the equation? Because I find it hard to follow your intuition more when you're not in your right mind. So your question contains the answer. Uh, so many cases that I've been involved in after the fact, where people have come and wanted to understand better what happened to them and what they could do, involve alcohol, both on the victim's part and the offender's part. You know, there is nothing more anti-nature that a being of any kind could do than turning off its various sensory resources. Right? We don't want to be deaf. We don't want to be blind. And yet we're both if we're drunk. To voluntarily say, in effect, to nature and the universe, "Thanks for all these fantastic resources. I'm going to shut them all down right now because I want to feel different. I want to change my state." It's a mistake. I, I should clarify this. Drinking is one thing. Drunk is another. A glass of wine is fine for people who think it's fine that it's not a problem. But around being drunk, uh, is a tremendous amount of victimization. Yes.
Go ahead. The few times that I have been a victim is because I let my guard down and didn't pay attention to my intuition. Once I knew the neighborhood, when I walked in the daylight off the bus, I said to myself, "This is not a good neighborhood to be walking at night." And then I continued to drink wine at my friend's for dinner, and they called a cab, and I says, "It was taking too long. I'm just going to go take the bus like I always do." And I walked out into that neighborhood, and the minute I did, there were four or five boys on that street. And the only thing that kicked in was "run," because they had already started harassing me. But I had 4-inch heels on, and running from four teenagers wasn't happening. I, I was lucky enough to fall right at a bus stop, and a bus driver jumped out and peeled the kids off of me. Never knew what their intent was or anything.
Thank you for sharing all that. And in, in hearing your story of the things that were disadvantages for you, A, the environment itself, the neighborhood. B, having been drinking, not waiting for the taxi. And yes, 4-inch heels. Right? So before we laugh that off too much, is it good gear? No, right? Have you, whoever seen a police officer who knows he's going to have to encounter people in 4-inch heels, uh, or a football player, or anybody who wants to be in a circumstance where they can defend themselves? Boxers don't wear them. I carry flats in my purse now. It's a really good idea. And, you know, some people will hear what I just said and say, "That's outlandish. You should be able to wear whatever you want." All fine. The, I'm glad to take the criticism, but that's part of, uh, how prepared you are to deal with, let's say, getting from point A to point B at night, using the bus, using the taxi, using the subway. The reality is, there are environments in which 4-inch heels don't do you any [Music] good.
When there's like a guy in a bar and they won't leave you alone, I feel like I can't really do anything without being accused of like being rude and impolite and like a, basically niceness is a very overrated attribute in both men and women. Absolutely. On the part of people who are targeted, niceness is a true problem because it says you ought to smile, you ought to be polite, you ought to be open to my approaches on the street whether you want that approach or not. Women in the culture are not allowed to say no. I had Oprah on in the background. I remember her emphatically holding up the book because, you know, I'm a woman in America, and we've all, I think, been trained by our culture to some degree to be much more polite and to not be so assertive and to not be so pushy and to not ask questions that are uncomfortable. I've heard parents say, "Well, I don't want my child to learn to be unladylike or impolite or, you know, whatever." And I don't often say this, but I have in my mind, "Oh, so being beaten up or raped or murdered is ladylike? Really? I don't think so."
The invitation to keep someone in your environment is at the beginning of almost all criminal victimization. Right? You have to control, above all, who's in your environment and not feel compelled to engage with every man who wants to engage. And no joke, it comes with a cost because somebody or many people will say, "Why are you being such a..." Yeah, typically the way the word is used is somebody approaches a woman in public, "Hey, hey, and give you a hand with those." She's not interested in the approach, and she's not particularly inviting, and she says, "No." "What's your problem, lady? You know, I was only trying to offer a little help to a pretty woman. What are you so paranoid about?" In my imagination, the woman says, "You're right. I shouldn't be wary. I'm overreacting about nothing. I mean, just because a man makes an unsolicited and persistent approach in a society where crimes against women have risen four times faster than the general crime rate, and three out of four women will suffer a violent crime, and just because I've personally heard horror stories from every female friend I've ever had, and just because I have to consider where I park, where I walk, whom I drive, what I wear, and whom I date in the context of whether someone will kill me or rape me or scare me half to death, and just because several times a week someone makes an inappropriate remark or stares at me or harasses me or follows me or drives alongside my car, pacing me, just because I have to deal with that manager at my apartment that gives me the creeps for reasons I haven't figured out, but I can tell by the way he looks at me, he'll probably get us both on the evening news, and just because these are life and death issues that most men know nothing about, so that I'm made to feel foolish for being cautious, even though I live in the center of a swirl of possible hazards, doesn't mean a woman should be wary of a stranger who ignores the word 'no'." Our homework is to memorize that and know it. Know it by heart by Monday.
So whether or not you can relate to this, that is the way it is in this culture. Given that you would tell me that you live in a circumstance where you have to think about your safety a lot more often than men do, you may encounter boyfriends, husbands, male friends who want to discount your concern. I've had friends where the husband or the boyfriend even ridicules the fact that they're taking precautions or that they feel unsafe. And my message is to say to Mr. "I know everything about danger" that he has nothing to contribute to the topic of your personal security. And tell him that your survival instinct is a gift from nature that knows a lot more about your safety than he does. And tell him that nature does not need his approval.
I want to include in being feminine, being protective of oneself and one's loved ones. That's really our human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person." Maslow rates in the hierarchy of needs, security right there with food and shelter. And we have not shifted that understanding to women. It's absolutely every woman's struggle because it's not only about in-the-moment prevention, but it is a bigger discussion about how we put women on pedestals, how we objectify, how we project things onto them. And the simple act of letting go of pleasing others and of getting your own power, getting in touch with your own intuition, is a lifelong journey that every woman I know is on. Being nice is not an absolute requirement. And above all, I tell you from having studied so many thousands of cases, that niceness is not an inoculation against violence. Other, always being nice to someone does not increase the likelihood that he won't act in a violent way or in a disturbing or controlling way. He either has the characteristics associated with that kind of attack, or he's planned it, uh, or you're a great victim and it's a great situation at this moment, but it's not because someone acted assertively.
If a man you don't know smiles at you, and you haven't initiated some kind of contact with him, does it ever feel good? No. Never. And men just don't know it. They think that's a good thing to do from across the room. But the, the woman is virtually obligated to smile back in this culture. But in fact, if she does, she's engaging in a communication which is an invitation and an opening. So the automatic smile is very destructive to women. The idea of losing the smile, it's a very profound thing. It's kind of the journey of most women is to figure out how to lose their smile, only use it really when they mean it, when they truly want to. In Western culture, women are trained to be just like the flight attendant. When I'm leaving the flight, she has to smile. Has to smile at everybody, even for the people who were profoundly rude to her during the flight. I'm giving an example there where it's, quote, "part of the job." But I would assert for all of you that it's part of women's job all the time. Be nice all the time.
Go ahead. Um, I've been mugged three times, and I'm 5'2", so I'm always really conscious, uh, of something happening to me. But two of them, I couldn't have expected. I, I was blindsided. It could have happened to anybody. But there was one in particular that always has bothered me. I was walking my dog near my neighborhood, mind you, it's 2:00, so it's the afternoon, and it's well lit, and I'm maybe two or three blocks from my house. I heard footsteps behind me. And I turn around, and I see someone like 6'4", like 270 pounds. He's big. And I had a funny feeling. Then the second thought was like, "Oh, he's African-American. Don't be that person." So I felt guilty about that thought. Turned around and smiled and waved and kept walking. And then I was thinking in my head, "Oh, maybe he's a football player at the high school." And telling the story, you want to hear? Yeah, I was trying to beat it down. And I didn't want to make this person feel bad. Then I turned around and smiled again. And as I was turning around, he'd gotten a lot closer. And next thing you know, he like pushed me to the ground. He knocked me down. Was not expecting at all. My bag got twisted on my arm, and he tried to pull it, and then was going to kick me in the face. I always thought in those moments I wouldn't be able to scream, but I managed to, and he took off with my purse and then jumped in a getaway car. And I realized it was all planned afterwards. When the cops came and I was telling him about what had happened, he said, "You know, you should just cross the street." And I thought, "Well, you know, I was a block away from my house. I didn't, I, I didn't want to be rude." You know, I didn't want to signal like I'm scared of you, cuz I thought that that might be rude. I, I remember the thing that I was really pissed about was like, "I smiled at him twice, and then he still mugged me." You know, I thought like, "Maybe if I was nice to him, he wouldn't do this to me."
Well, I'm sorry that happened to you, and I'm glad that, uh, that it wasn't more serious. And I want to share with you, as is often the case when I hear someone's story of victimization, that, uh, a lot of the answers are contained in your story. And you said several times, "I didn't expect it." Of course, you did expect it, right? That's why you turned around, and you used a strategy you thought would be a good strategy. You felt he was too close. You reacted to the fact that he was so big, and you went through the whole dialogue in your head to discount it. But you did get the signal. It's a different kind of thing than literally being attacked as if somebody jumped on me from behind me right now, and I didn't know anybody was there.
I want to talk about that for a second. There are basically two strategies of, uh, human predation. One is the power predator, and the other is the persuasion predator. Uh, the power predator is sort of like a bear. It just charges you and knocks you down. Very, very rare. Much more rare because that one requires a lot of skin in the game on the part of the predator, and he doesn't get an opportunity to assess the person that he's attacking very well. The far more common one is the persuasion predator. The persuasion predator persuades you to participate. The circumstance you're talking about is a mixed model because he didn't come out of nowhere by any measure. Yes, he used violence, and you could say you didn't see the escalation, but I, I will submit to you that you actually knew he was getting closer. You heard the first footsteps. I heard his footsteps, and already, look, we, there's a, a nuclear defense system around each of us all the time. And I can tell you right now that if I heard a sound behind me when I know there's nobody behind me, I'd react to it, and I would register it, and and want to figure out what's going on. And I might, in this room right now, I might look at all of you to see if all of you are looking off at something behind me, not that I'm in danger, but rather that it's a surprise. And I'm constantly registering, as we all are, we're constantly registering what's going on in our environment. And the footstep too close to you is one of the very, very best pre-incident indicators.
Now, I don't like to, uh, to say to somebody who's been victimized, "Ah, well, you should have done this or you should have done that," because the reality is, you're here, you've survived that, you're able to tell the story. And it is not fair for anybody to say, "It would have been different if..." Right? If you had crossed the street. Look to the police officer who gave you that advice. He may have been right, he may have been wrong. I don't know what was on the other side of the street or what the circumstance was. But the belief that simply crossing the street, uh, is somehow the magic amulet, the lifesaver that will always work. If that were the case, we'd have no victimization in America. You'd have no muggings if it were just a matter of crossing the street. And I always ask, you know, what prevents your attacker from crossing the street with you? You haven't gone through passport control to get there. It's just the other side of the street, and it may be better or worse for all we know. The other side of the street held many more advantages for your attackers and many disadvantages for you. We don't know. The other side of the street might have held a little alleyway that you could be pulled into and victimized much more profoundly. And all we can really assess is what happened right now for the next time you might do it differently, right?
I like, as a general concept, turning around and giving people a look that says, "No more than I know you're there." That's really the extent of it. Do you advocate for in the book, kind of when you feel like you're being followed, you need to turn around and say, "I see you"? Yes. I wonder if it's almost harder these days because that eye contact is so rare. And eye contact, as we know, is a sign of aggression, or sign of intimacy, or it can represent many things. But we're really losing basic eye contact with each other. It's true. If someone is being followed, or somebody's standing too close to you, the right thing to do is to turn around and look straight at them. And you don't say anything. But this communicates, as an animal does in nature, communicates to a predator, "I do see you're there." And that's really very significant and important in terms of reducing victimization. But young people aren't used to looking at anybody now. And so it's a harder thing to teach.
Since I was little, at least, you know, that adults are always saying, "Don't be scared. Don't be scared." And you get these messages to be fearless. I, I actually have a necklace that says "Fearless" in Sanskrit as a reminder to be courageous in all of these sort of situations. But I realize that there's a lot of benefit to to paying attention to that fear. Well, of course. You know, they're not in conflict. Courage and fear are two entirely different things. Courage, very valuable thing. To remember about courage is that courage is always a choice you make. It's not a feature of a human being. There's no human being who's just courageous because that would be stupid, right? But courage is a choice to act in the face of fear. Fear is absolutely not a choice. And courage requires fear as a component. It's not courageous to do something if I'm not afraid of it. But there's no courage sitting here right now. But if we were on a 3,000-foot, uh, cliff, uh, then I have fear of falling off, and then it takes courage to stand at the edge of the cliff. Fear is a component of courage. Right now, that's not true in the other sense. Courage is not a component of fear. Fear is intended to be a brief signal in the presence of danger. It's not something that you want to push down, and it's not something that you want to get courageous about. You want to register the signal, "Okay, what's that about?" And listen to it. One hopes you could go through your whole life without feeling fear. It can happen. But if you feel it, then the key is to register it. And the idea that you should be fearless, that's crazy. That's like me saying that to the mouse, "Just be fearless. Just forget about that cat." Fear is a feature of your being that is there for a reason. Now, should you live in fear every second? Of course no. I think that would be highly destructive. But listening to fear when it comes, very important.
I want to go back to something with you particularly, and that is dragging around the belief that you caused your victimization by not crossing the street extends your victimization. It continues the feeling of, "I made a mistake here." The reality is, many kinds of victimization are simply not preventable. The circumstance, the situation, the moment, the person, the predator. And many could be worse, and many could be better, right? Let's look at the reality. 6'4", four, 5'1". Am I okay? Sorry. People are so protective of that last inch. All right. Uh, 5'2", 6'4", an intention to be your predator, working with somebody else, intending to do it, having already selected you as his target. And I can tell by the way looking at you now that this has some resonance for you. You have carried around the idea that you should have done something differently. True? Sure, sure. Absolutely. Well, let me give you something else. That you are, in fact, small. 5'2", as you corrected me. If we were on the plains of Africa and we saw all the antelopes, and some of them were big and muscular and fast-running, and some of them were small at the back of the group, who would we say is more likely to be victimized? The little ones, of course. Mhm. Right. The, the little ones who have fewer just pure physical options. In nature, who's the head of the gorilla pecking order? Who's in charge? The big one. The biggest. And the baddest. And so, you are yourself, and I, I ask you to give yourself a break. You are walking around in a world in which that is a physical disadvantage. Now, you have a whole bunch of emotional and mental advantages that you can bring to the table, but that's just a reality. If we were a bunch of animals in Africa talking about this, it would be a no-brainer. And so this is something to accept and not try to talk yourself out of being wary when you feel wary, or being concerned when you feel concerned.
You know, men are bigger. They, they, um, they can kill me, you know. And so, uh, I've developed a healthy fear, I think. But, um, that healthy fear makes you a little bit fearless in that you're willing to protect yourself. I know you don't like the idea of being afraid all the time, and I certainly don't encourage you to be afraid all the time. One of the things I hope happens here is that you walk out of here at the end with more confidence and with more certainty that you will listen and you will register the signals when they come. Because listen, we want the signals. There's not an animal in nature that would say, "Hey, let's turn off that damn annoying fear that I get all the time when I'm near the lion." Yeah. And I think that actual, like, repressing that fear actually makes I feel more sick with it, you know, because it's a lot more effort to sort of suppress it than to just address it and keep yourself safe for something. And as you ought to feel more sick with it, because what are you repressing? An absolute gift of nature, one of your components. It'd be like squeezing your kidney. This is as real as your kidney. This is a component of you that's there for a reason. And you have a right to be safe, and you have a right to use the resources that you have. And the number one resource, before your fingers in somebody's eyes or kicking somebody in the balls or screaming or any of the other resources would come into play, is your intuition. That's the number one resource. It's like, you can get a signal. You can, you could get a signal earlier than other people do if you work on this. And and it only means working on listening to yourself. All of these ways that you get an opportunity to say, "Let me assess my situation and change it, change the environment." Um, yes, go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to ask, what happened when you were walking your dog when that happened? Did the dog like run off or bark? No, the, the dog barked. She, I mean, she was like a three-pound dog. Like, the dog was actually worth more than my bag, you know? Um, and look how quickly we registered here. And you said, you know, the dog's just a little three-pound dog. And so give yourself the same, uh, gift, which is accept it, right? So I'm not talking about you as if there's some deformity here. I'm talking about you as if this is you. And it's good to know. No different than if you were, as I hope you will be one day, 85 years old, you would register and accept the fact that, gee, I'm not going to be as fast as I used to be. I'm not going to carry the same punch I used to carry. If you looked around the arena, uh, and and you're going into combat, and everybody else was 250 pounds, and you were 80 pounds, you wouldn't ignore that fact. Sure.
I mean, getting mugged three times in three different cities, um, I'm like, "Okay, obviously I'm the common denominator." And I've known other people that have actually, you know, a cross-section of my friends, not very many have been mugged. I mean, in all three cases, I've been pushed. There was one time I was at the ATM, and from behind, someone pushed me so hard I got knocked out, and a cab driver came and took me to the hospital. And isn't that interesting from the point of view of how you now treat yourself about it? It has no charge. It does. You're right, because that I feel like that could have happened to anybody. Whereas the other one, I beat myself up because I ignored my intuition. So what can you change? And I'm talking about now, what you can do going forward, not lessons from what happened to you. Those are done. Lessons from what we're talking about here. One of the things you can't change is your size. Maybe you are a more likely predatory prize than somebody else. Uh, the other thing is making direct, "I see you there," eye contact. The other thing is losing the smile in interactions with strangers. It's just not relevant. It's not, it's not a necessary component with strangers. It doesn't get you anything. In my head, I remember thinking, "If I'm nice, they'll leave me alone." I hear you. But tomorrow you won't. No, not tomorrow. Right? It's just a matter of reframing things. It's a shift in perspective, um, that he managed to do with just some few insightful sentences that completely made something very complicated in my head, very, very simple. And, you know, when it's simple in your head, you're, you can follow through a little bit better.
Do you think you'll feel safer or more at risk after this? Absolutely safer.
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