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Notes -
As others have suggested, many women (performatively or genuinely) overestimate the danger men pose, due to a combination of lipstick feminism, movies and television, being meme-susceptible, humble bragging as to being so desirable as to be a constant target for rape, a lifetime of being sheltered away from actually being under real risk of physical harm, perhaps some rape fantasy and hybristophilic wish-fulfillment sprinkled in there.
I’d also posit that on the flipside, women underestimate the danger animals, whether wild or domesticated, pose in general. Or at least, the modal woman underestimates the danger animals pose to her in particular, under the belief that in such situations her Disney Princess powers will kick in and she’ll have immediate rapport with the animals. Hence why defending pitbulls as nanny dogs is female-coded and the countless selfies of young women making a sad face with cuts and scratches after some mostly gentle mauling from getting too cuddly with a dog.
There’s a video that comes to mind but I can’t find, of a girl in a skirt or dress and Uggs getting rammed by a goat or sheep (wait, not that kind of video) because she picked up its offspring for a cUtE Insta photo. When she saw the mother coming, she tried evading by daintily kicking up a puff of dirt (“ugh, stupid mother! shoo”) and half-heartedly jogging away with the offspring in her arms before getting chased down in like half a second. Thot status: patrolled and offspring protected.
And of course, as always there’s the whole Who? Whom? aspect, as the bear vs. black man permutation hilariously illustrates.
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