Half-formed theory: men can smell rapists

When I was 9 years old, I was allowed to go trickertreating without parental accompaniment for the first time in my life. After many many lectures on safety, I went around the neighbourhood with another neighbourhood girl, collecting candy, feeling very cool walking around in the scary dark without a grownup. Then we got to this one house where there were two great big scary teenage boys in the driveway playing a very violent-looking game of basketball. We quickly consulted with each other. What should we do? They're Big And Scary! Look at how they're body-checking each other to get at the basketball - they totally look like the kind of people who would beat someone up! (At the time, beating someone up was the worst thing we could imagine.) And we'd totally have to walk right past them to ring the doorbell! So we decided to skip that house, and hurried along to the next house. But the big scary teenage boys saw us skip their house, and shouted at us "SNOBS!" OMG! They saw us! They're shouting something at us! What do we do? So we went straight home to my house (because it was closer) and told my parents what happened. My parents were like "What's the big deal? They were just playing basketball to pass the time between giving out candy."

Thinking back on it as an adult, they were totally just playing basketball to pass the time between giving out candy. But my 9-year-old self couldn't tell that. She saw large intimidating man-sized boys behaving in a way that was unusual and unpredictable, outside of the norm for the context, and seemed unnecessarily violent. She was scared, so she decided to remove herself from the situation. She also saw that when she went to remove herself from this situation that she found scary, the large intimidating guys tried to shame her into coming back. So while she did completely misread the situation, isn't that what you'd want a 9-year-old to do with the information she had on hand at the time?

Now, as a mental exercise, I want you to think about how you would explain to my 9-year-old self, in terms she can understand, why exactly those boys were safe. Give her clear specifics without any adult "Because I said so!" involved. You want to empower her to autonomously make more accurate decisions in the future without putting her at risk. Remember, Paul Bernardo is going to turn up in just a couple of years. So give her the information she needs to reduce false positives without introducing false negatives.

That's a tall order, isn't it? I was there, I saw the boys through my nine-year-old self's eyes, I can see them now through adult eyes, I see exactly why my child-self saw them as dangerous, and I can see them now as harmless. But I can't articulate in a way that my child-self would grok why exactly they're harmless. "They're just playing basketball!" But playing basketball wouldn't make a person harmless. "They're just teenagers!" But teenagers aren't automatically harmless, especially not to a preteen child. "They were just being violent with each other as part of the basketball game. They wouldn't hurt kids trickertreating." Yes, that's my read on the situation as an adult, but how exactly do you tell? I've been thinking about this for some time, and I still can't articulate it clearly. It might have something to do with the fact that on Halloween there are all kinds of adult eyes on the street, so if those guys had been up to no good they would have been more stealthy about it or waited until later at night, but I still wouldn't quite be comfortable telling a 9-year-old that without further precisions.

That Halloween night was the first of several false positives I've gotten when attempting to assess whether a particular strange man is a threat to me. There have been maybe 5-10 false positives over the years, but no false negatives. A man behaves unusually, or invades my personal space, or just gives off a wrong vibe, so I raise my shields and take evasive manoeuvres. Then I either find out that there was a perfectly good explanation for his strange behaviour, or I remove myself from the situation without him actively attempting to hurt me. None of that is noteworthy, that's just everyday life. What is noteworthy is that I often have other men - men who were completely uninvolved in and have no particular investment in the original situation - scold me for behaving so rudely to the strange man who pinged my creepdar. They really seem rather disproportionately offended that I'd take evasive manoeuvres against a man who wasn't a rapist. That was always really WTF to me. Can't they tell that I have no way of knowing who is and isn't a rapist, and only have my gut instinct to work with? (c.f. Schrödinger's Rapist.)

This all came to mind with a recent internet meme, Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed To Work. Again, the reaction from some men (not all men, but I only ever saw this reaction from men) was the same as the reaction some men have to my false positives - rather disproportionately offended, as if to say "How dare you show this to men who aren't rapists!" This reaction really seemed bizarrely disproportionate, as though there was something else going on that I couldn't see. So I've been thinking about this a really long time, and come up with the following theory:

Men can smell rapists.

Specifically, there are some men who can just tell by gut instinct, far better than I can, whether another man is a rapist, just like we as adults can tell better than my 9-year-old self could that the teenage boys playing basketball were harmless. Extrapolating to a general theory, men have better creepdar than women, at least in terms of avoiding false positives. (I have no data for false negatives.) So these men with the more effective creepdar think our creepdar works the same as theirs, thereby assuming that we can tell that dude isn't a rapist just as easily as they can, and therefore are taking evasive manoeuvres against some dude who clearly isn't a rapist due to some technical violation or perceived slight. Meanwhile, we're assuming that men's creepdar works the same as ours, so what we're hearing from them is that we should ignore our gut and take greater risks with our instincts so as not to inadvertently offend someone.

So what do we do with this? It sounds like I'm teeing up to saying that women should just listen to men's judgment on whether other men are safe or not. That's not workable. As we all know, some men are rapists, some men have different concept of what does and does not constitute rape, and it's certainly not unprecedented for a guy to vouch for his buddy to help him get laid. On the other side of things, some men are overprotective of women they care about, and might be reading false positives themselves. (Oddly, I've never seen a man get similarly disproportionately offended at another man's false positive on behalf of a woman he cares about.) There's also the problem that the vast majority of hitting-on happens when the woman is unaccompanied by a man, so the disproportionate offence/retroactive creepdar reading happens after the fact.)

So I think what we do need to do is just be aware of this difference in creepdar effectiveness, and communicate. If you're a man and you see a woman taking evasive manoeuvres with another man who clearly isn't a rapist, start thinking about how to articulate precisely why you can tell he isn't a rapist - to the same degree of specificness and with the same care to avoiding false negatives as you'd use in explaining why the basketball boys were safe to my 9-year-old self. Not why he "might not" be a rapist, not hypothetical explanations for his questionable behaviour; you need to describe the actual tangible ways you can tell for certain. You might not be able to articulate this right away, but just think about it. Try to figure it out so you can articulate it next time. Conversely, if you're a woman and a man scolds you or otherwise seems pissed off that you took evasive manoeuvres on what ended up being a false positive, ask him for specifics about how he knows the guy in question was safe. He might not be able to articulate it right away, but have him think about it.

And if you're a man and women seem to be getting false positive readings from you, think about why they should be able to tell that you're safe, and work on highlighting those aspects. (Schrödinger's Rapist can also help you avoid inadvertently giving off false positives.)