Excerpt from a YouTube talk (Connor Beaton) arguing that many women are highly attuned to whether men can 'contain' impulses—anger, aggression, violence—and that women commonly experience hypervigilance and fear in public spaces. The speaker frames male containment as central to women’s subjective safety and describes a predator–prey dynamic between men and women.
Women are very sensitive and attuned to men that have some level of containment. And women are very attuned and afraid of men that do not have containment, that are not able to contain urges, violence, aggression, anger. The reason why this is so important is that men and women, for better or for worse, have a kind of predator and prey dynamic. And if you listen to any woman talk about what it is like to be a woman, to walk through the streets of Los Angeles or New York or Seattle, what you will hear them talk about is the feeling of being afraid. And I've heard this from pretty much every woman I've ever spoken to about what it is like to be a woman. And it's a very different context for the majority of women. Their experience is a kind of hyper vigilance towards am I safe? Am I okay? And there's a kind of experience that many women have which is feeling like pray.
How to Raise Strong, Unshakable Boys in Today's Culture, with Dr. Shefali Tsabary
