fisky wrote:
When I got RW in the mail Saturday, the cover heading jumped out at me... "84% of women runners have been harassed, assaulted, or even murdered while running. THIS. MUST. STOP. Here's how/ P. 41.
Intrigued, I turned to page 41 and found 23 pages addressing this topic. The article cited by the OP was probably the worst and left me shaking my head in disbelief. Basically, the message was, "I don't feel safe while running. Men can feel safe, but I can't! It's not fair! Somebody (not me!), do something about it!"
The article "How to Defend Yourself" had me shaking my head again. The opening sentence reads: "You don't need to learn how to defend yourself from an attacker." Okaaay... that's an interesting opening statement, given the title of the article. It then describes some self-defense moves, which is about as useful as giving someone a few paragraphs on how to perform a gymnastic move and expecting them to be able to do it. There was no advice whatsoever on how to find self-defense classes.
I think it's really a disservice to women to write so many pages and omit so much potentially life-saving information. Such as...
1. Maintain situational awareness. (There's actually a technique to this. An entire article should have been written on how to maintain situational awareness. It's routinely taught in most firearms classes.)
2. Run with someone else if at all possible.
3. Don't just read about self-defense. Take a self-defense course. Ask around and find a good instructor. Invite some of your friends to go with you. Reading about some self-defense move is not going to hack it should you ever need to react in a split second.
4. Consider proactive self-defense weapons and take a course to learn how to use it/them. Learn the pros and cons of pepper spray, stun guns, knives, and handguns. (I recognize that 9 out of 10 women would never consider such weapons, but it is a huge disservice to those that MIGHT consider them to not even mention them as options.)
5. For goodness sake, don't play the victim card like the author of the toxic masculinity article. Take charge of your own safety as much as possible.
In short, this was like a lot of RW's articles... big on promise, but superficial and having multiple errors of omission.
Being responsible for yourself is the anthesis of the liberal’s core belief. That’s not a joke or an exaggeration.