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I was standing on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, feeding a parking meter before dinner, when I felt someone directly behind me.
My body registered immediately that this was not neutral, too close, and didn’t feel safe.
I turned around fast, startled, as a man stood inches from my face, already looking at me like, Calm down, lady. No need to overreact, while reaching to feed the meter right next to mine.
I said, “Oh, you’re a man. You have no idea what this feels like.”
Every woman reading this knows that feeling. The heart-racing, stomach-dropping, hairs on the back of your neck standing straight up edge that arrives all at once, shaped not just by the moment, but by everything we’ve learned to anticipate. It’s hypervigilance mixed with the horror stories we’ve heard or personally experienced.
He turned out to be harmless, if you define harmless as someone who didn’t lay a finger on me or say anything overtly threatening. But he also didn’t recognize what had just happened in my mind and body, and that matters.
For women, safety isn’t about what just happened. It’s about what could happen, what has happened before, and what we’ve learned to calculate at all times. It’s a constant, low-level vigilance most men never even think about, let alone have to carry.
That moment, on one of the busiest streets in the country before an overpriced sushi dinner, wasn’t an overreaction. It was awareness shaped by reality.
And that reality is not rare.
We are living in a culture where tens of millions of men have visited websites explicitly dedicated to teaching them how to drug and rape their wives. That is not fringe. That is scale.
At the same time, we continue to see high-profile cases involving powerful men—politicians, public figures, people entrusted with authority—accused of exploiting, trafficking, or assaulting women and children. The names change, but the pattern does not.
It would be easier to sleep at night and walk down the street, paying our parking meters in peace if these were isolated incidents, committed by a small number of “bad actors.” But the numbers don’t support that story. And more importantly, neither does our lived experience.
This isn’t just about individual pathology. It’s about a culture that has, in many ways, lost its ability, or its willingness, to see women and children as fully human. Because when you truly see someone as human, violation becomes unthinkable.
What is being revealed more publicly now through credible reporting, legitimate investigations, and actual evidence is what happens when that recognition of a woman’s humanity erodes.
When a culture objectifies bodies, it trains people to disconnect from personhood.
When power matters more than truth, people learn to override their own conscience.
A culture that minimizes harm by questioning victims, protecting reputations, or reframing violence as misunderstanding, creates conditions where violation can continue unchecked.
And a culture that numbs itself, that scrolls past discomfort instead of confronting it, slowly loses its capacity to intervene at all.
This is not only about the most extreme acts, but about the environment that allows them to exist: the jokes dismissed as harmless, the behavior excused as normal, the instincts we override because acknowledging them would require us to change something.
As women, we are taught to doubt ourselves in the name of being “nice,” to be agreeable and easy to manage. We learn early on to override our own perception, and question whether what we felt was real enough to matter. We are encouraged to soften our responses, many of which are trauma responses, so we’re not seen as difficult, dramatic, or too much.
I am a survivor of sexual violence. I don’t need to offer details to make that real. It is part of the reality so many women carry, whether they speak about it or not.
That reality shapes how we move through the world, assess risk, interpret energy, who we trust, and when to trust ourselves or second-guess what we feel.
And yet, even with all of that, we are still told—explicitly or subtly—that we are overreacting, misreading, or making something out of nothing.
We are not angry enough.
When millions of people are searching for ways to violate others, when case after case reveals patterns of abuse at the highest levels, and when everyday interactions still require constant vigilance, the issue is not women’s perception.
The issue is what we have collectively normalized.
This is where the conversation often breaks down because it’s easier to stay in outrage or denial than it is to sit with responsibility.
Outrage alone does not change culture. And denial only protects it.
If we want to effectively change anything, we must be willing to look at the conditions we have created and sustained.
Staying human, in this context, is not passive. It requires participation.
I’m not talking about empathy in theory, but truth in practice, even when it disrupts comfort.
This looks like:
>> Refusing to minimize behavior we know, at some level, is not okay.
>> Raising boys who are emotionally aware and safe to feel and express the full range of human experience.
>> Believing people when they tell us what they have lived through, instead of immediately searching for reasons to discredit them.
>> Choosing not to look away.
The greatest threat is not just that violence exists, but that we adapt to it and begin to call it normal. When we absorb it into the background of our lives and move on, we don’t just lose our sense of safety. We lose something more foundational—our ability to recognize each other as human.
We lose the part of us that knows, without needing to be taught, that another human being is not something to use, control, or violate.
We lose our humanity.
And once that is gone, no amount of power or progress will compensate for it.
The answer is not more outrage. It is honesty.
It is restoring empathy where it has been stripped away, choosing to tell the truth, and refusing to participate in the normalization of what we know is wrong.
Staying human is not an abstract idea, but a decision we make, again and again, especially in the moments when it would be easier not to.
A culture does not lose its humanity all at once. It loses it in every moment we choose not to see.
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