Look, I'm not going to sit here and debate the ethics of a precautionary behavior with you because you, like many other men, misinterpret the behavior itself as a slight against men as a whole.

There's no way I can do that without venturing into the realm of defending that kind of prejudice, which you'll inevitably take as an invitation to just say is wrong on principle.

I'd probably say they are prejudiced but that might be out of fear rather than malice and rather focus on what to do about that.

Here's the thing. The kind of person you'll be responding to will cover their ears and say prejudice of any kind is wrong. You won't convince anyone that way.

I literally had someone tell me the last time I had this discussion that the act of determining to do something based on the gender of someone is the very same as determining to do something based on their race. So it's also racism.

There is no winning that. Once someone is bent on being against prejudice on any order, they will make false equivalencies to bludgeon their point.

that might be out of fear rather than malice and rather focus on what to do about that.

Let me ask you something: For a solution short of reeducating the world's men, how come the onus is on women to be forced to take a chance with someone who they don't know how they're going to react?

Why are we looking at a situation where a woman might say "I shouldn't walk alone from the gym to my car because there was this one guy staring at me and I saw him go out just before me" and saying "That woman is obviously a bigot, what can we do to correct that behavior?"

I honestly don't think there's anything to do about this. There's no way to make women be less prejudiced against men in these situations that doesn't also inherently raise their risk of being assaulted.

The only thing left is a man who will insist that a woman take the chance of raising her risk so that his feelings don't get hurt. But here's the thing. The worst that can happen to that man is his feelings get hurt because a stranger doesn't trust him. The risk to a woman is an actual, physical thing.