Fear is a message. But it isn’t always a useful one.

A lot of early feminist internet writing stressed fears, maybe most famously a now-offline piece called “Schrödinger’s Rapist” that was about the reluctance to talk to strange men in public. This was not a bad piece, but, like a lot of pieces from around that time, got steadily expected to do more and more work it couldn’t really do, and was never meant to. It was trying to explain to men why a woman might give them the cold shoulder and became, instead, a kind of total explanation of how women feel when men talk to them all the time.

It did; that piece became the excuse a lot of women used for why they treated men like garbage all the time. “Because every man might be a rapist, I am now going to treat them all horribly! It’s my right and duty as a feminist!”

I mean, terrible people of both genders are always going to find an excuse to treat others poorly, but that piece was the excuse for a whole lot of women to let their inner sociopath out. It was disappointing to see because I thought it was a good piece, for what it was. But misapplied, it was harmful.