By Celine Schreiber
Phone charged, and at least two friends are informed. That is how almost all of my female friends prepare before they go on a date with a man. “Text me and I’ll call and say there is an emergency and that you have to come by” is my standard briefing before any of my friends goes on a date with a guy.
This may seem childish or overly cautious, as many of my male friends would tell me, as well as many other women. It’s just a date, after all, she could just say she wants to leave.
But a bad date for straight women is not that simple. When straight men go on a bad date with a woman, their biggest fear is losing a couple of bucks and wasting time. When women go on a bad date with a man, their biggest fear is being raped, killed, or both.
That is why women still feel safer having a mechanism in place that allows them to escape potentially unsafe situations, because saying no or wanting to leave is often not enough.
On college campuses, up to 90 percent of rapes occur in the framework of a date, as one study reports. It is why many women still need a way out of bad dates that involve the cliché call from a friend.
Women on dates avoid rejection not out of spite or the unwillingness to be honest and open. They do so because any confrontation increases the risk of harm to our bodies and psychological well-being.
Being afraid of all men is not the goal of feminism and female empowerment. In fact, it is the very fear that it aims to eradicate from women’s lives. However, statistically speaking, there is still an increased risk for straight women to date men. One in five women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, compared to 1 in 71 men. Dating is, and always has been a feminist issue. Empowering women to use their right to say no is not worth much unless we teach straight men in this country that a bad date and a woman’s rejection is not a threat to their masculinity and identity, because that ultimately means that this threat becomes a threat to the safety of women.
In fact, it becomes a threat to the lives of women. In a 2017 study by the Center for Disease Prevention and Control reports, over half of the female killings in this country have been committed by a male intimate relative.
These statistics reinforce that we need to make straight dating part of the public discourse when we talk about women’s empowerment, their mental and physical health and redefining gender roles.
And not only that, we need to make this an issue of intersectionality, by talking about the repressive notions of masculinity that shape men’s perspectives of themselves as partners and as dates. Because the next time one of my friends goes on a date, I want to tell her “Have fun!” not “I can be your emergency way-out”.