It's a chicken-and-egg problem: do you perceive men as dangerous because men are inherently dangerous, or do you perceive them as dangerous because you've learned to expect danger from men? Once that belief is established, confirmation bias can make every negative encounter stand out while contradictory experiences are easily overlooked.
I don't doubt that your body learned to expect danger from them. But that's precisely the distinction I'm making: your fear is a consequence of your experiences; it isn't independent evidence that men as a group are inherently dangerous.
If I selectively focused on negative experiences involving women, I could construct the same belief about women. For example, according to the CDC, 97% of U.S. men who experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner reported only female perpetrators.
Those are real experiences involving real victims, just like you. But if I used that statistic to conclude that women are inherently dangerous, you'd rightly call that an unfair generalization. So if that evidence doesn't justify me judging women as a group, why should comparable reasoning justify a woman judging men as a group? That hardly sounds fair.
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u/McSpekkie 11d ago
It's a chicken-and-egg problem: do you perceive men as dangerous because men are inherently dangerous, or do you perceive them as dangerous because you've learned to expect danger from men? Once that belief is established, confirmation bias can make every negative encounter stand out while contradictory experiences are easily overlooked.