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Holly of The Pervocracy digs in hard not just to Cosmopolitan for propagating destructive myths but the actual myths:

...There’s an article on home security for women living alone that basically comes off as “you fool, a woman can’t live alone, she’d be a babe in the woods!” (Naturally, it doesn’t even mention guns. This is a magazine for women, sillypants!)

Plant something thorny, like a small cactus or rosebush, in front of your windows to keep Peeping Toms or potential thieves at a distance.

I’m pretty sure thieves don’t care if they have to destroy a little bit of landscaping, and as for peepers, maybe you should just close your curtains when you take your clothes off.

20 percent of all violent crimes occur in the victim’s home—more than in any other venue. The greatest number of rapes and sexual assaults (33 percent)... happen in the victim’s home as well.

That’s because you’re massively more likely to be assaulted or raped by someone you know. These statistics don’t represent home invasions, they represent truly shitty boyfriends, and there’s nothing you’re going to plant in front of the windows to get rid of those.

She said it here.

It’s a killer point that shows up in Yes Means Yes as well: women are taught over and over (there are whole cable networks just for that <cough>Lifetime<cough>) that scary happens out in the world. Jessica Valenti doh! Jill Filipovic puts it bluntly, and accurately:

Women are more likely to be victimized in their home or in the home of someone they know, whereas men are more likely to be victimized in public. ... And yet it is women who are treated to “suggestions” about how to protect themselves from public stranger assaults.

Source: Yes Means Yes, pg. 23.

And not to put too fine a point on it, cactus bushes? Rose bushes? Seriously? And when they recommend getting a dog they suggest precisely the cutsie but useless little lapdogs they say guys hate (and would admit if they “had the guts” and ever “told the truth.” Undercut much, Cosmo?) Seriously? I know, and how about putting an ottoman somewhere in the living room for burglars to trip over Dick Van Dyke style!!! Yeah, that’ll work! Then you’ll be safe!

Oh, and do complete the circle of gender obliviousness, let’s not forget the countless “home security service” ads pitched, hard, on men’s programming about how your hot-looking but down-home wife is by herself in your big house with all the glass windows and no curtains and she’s lovingly wiping invisible crumbs off the some-kind-of-expensive-substance counter and there’s a man behind her, and because she’s cleaning the kitchen with no lights on it’s too dark for her to notice, and he’s got ropes, or an ax, and he’s really big and the music’s getting all dumm-dumm-doom-y… and… oh if only you hadlocked her inside a secure perimeter before you went… wherever it was in that big SUV and/or first-class plane seat and you keep dialing and dialing to warn her about the big guy who’s right behind her right now only she’s deaf and… and…

And meanwhile on average women are safer when there aren’t men there to protect them. Because as I’m pretty sure Holly can confirm as an ambulance-company employee, the number of 911 calls about home-invasion injuries is dwarfed by the number of plain old-fashioned domestic violence calls.

The point here isn’t that men are violent brutes, by the way. In fact almost none of us are and (not to sound too much like the constable in Pirates of Penzance) most of the time those who are violent brutes aren’t being violent (gimmie one more second here before you press ‘fail,’ I’ve got a point here.)

The point here is that the gender modeling we have for women and men isn’t just about watching threats that are fairly low-probablility. It’s that we’re narrating gender plot lines that leave us unprepared for much more real, much more high-probability problems: domestic violence, domestic sexual assault, acquaintance rape, and date rape.

The point is we’re not narrating scripts for detecting, assessing, communicating (“if he had the guts to tell the truth” indeed!), mitigating or resolving issues while they’re still precursors to conflict and not triggers for committing or failing to confront violence and sexual assault where it happens — in generally familiar locations with perpetrators and victims who are generally very familiar with each other.

And that’s seriously bad. A moment ago I asked for patience after making the possibly wild assertion that even violent men aren’t violent most of the time. If this was a “whut about teh menz” post one could jump into a little victim-blaming and talk about avoiding triggering and all the crap I’m… pretty sure would be the closest Cosmo would come to addressing domestic violence issues.

I’d like to propose instead that rather than coaching each other and ourselves to go tiptoeing around trying not to trigger violent outbursts we consider that a lot of our gender narratives are so wound up with stranger-danger distractions and interpersonal relationship obliviousness denial that when men, and women, run out of script we don’t always improvise, um, competently. Or safely. So I’d like to figure out how to model responding to freaky, high-cortisol-level situations a little less often in favor of preparing people for the situations they’re more likely to wind up in… and in trouble in.

Making up not just fear-mongering stories as Cosmo, home security and, say, firearm vendors do but making up highly gender-enforcing stories about insecure women helplessly “protecting” themselves with cute prickly window boxes, and about insecure men wish-fullfilling violent preemptive-revenge and “protector” fantasies on their way home from work doesn’t just get in the way of solutions, they’re part of our problem.