That's What Girls Have To Think About All The Time.

On women's safety and the disappointing reality of 'nice guys'.

This post was triggered by

Lauren Brook

’s recent piece about her Reclaim the Night event, “It’s not just a clock change”. I highly urge you to read it! Lauren discusses the universal sense of anxiety felt by women as the nights draw in; how our plans have to change and we have to be more considerate about how we’ll find our way home.

This week, a moment from my favourite chat show, The Graham Norton Show, went viral after Saoirse Ronan sobered up a boisterous conversation about self-defence.

For those of you who haven’t seen the clip, I’ll insert it below. For context, Eddie Redmayne is discussing that he recently learned that you can defend yourself with your mobile phone if you’re ever attacked. This sparks laughter from the other men on the sofa, Denzel Washington, Paul Mescal, and Graham Norton, who are joking about the absurdity of it. Paul dismisses the idea, laughing as he says, “who’s actually going to think about that? If someone attacks me, I’m not going to go, ‘phone’”, prompting a further surge of laughter from the audience and back-and-forth from the men. Saoirse attempts to interject here, but the men continue to talk over her, until she cuts in to point out, “that’s what girls have to think about all the time”.

The silence in the room after she says this is incredibly revealing. It’s almost as though you can see each of them recount all the media training they’ve ever had. We slowly see the men realise their ignorance, with Eddie humbly admitting “that’s true”. Saoirse stops their suffering, gracefully breaking the tension with a little “am I right ladies?” to a round of applause, relieving the men of their self-inflicted (deserved) awkwardness, and Graham swiftly moves on with the show. God forbid they launch into a conversation about women’s safety! Saoirse’s interjection has made headlines this week for “silencing men” and delivering “stone-cold truths”. I’m not even sure if that’s what she was consciously aiming to do as such, she was really just stating the obvious.

A couple of friends and I watched this clip on our lunch break. My female friend and I were on the exact same page - the laughter from the men reeked of privilege. My male friends argued that what she had to say didn’t stand up, because men have to think about these things too. Now, I am in no way saying that men do not have to be self-aware and street-wise, or that they are never victims of attacks, but there is a distinct difference in the fact that the men were able to laugh at Paul’s joke, whereas it didn’t occur to my female friend and I to find it funny, simply because it is something we do have to think about all the time. Not because we’re dramatic, not because it’s just ‘what the girlies do’ - because we are genuinely, honestly scared.

I watched Dermot O’Leary talk about this scenario on This Morning, and he points out that the men on the sofa take their safety for granted. The fact that they can laugh about it means that they don’t feel plagued by the risks, or take them seriously for their own safety. Even though statistically the odds are stacked against them, the sheer fact that they can walk down the street without feeling the need to call someone, to switch on their location, to fix their keys between their knuckles - it’s a privilege.

Perhaps statistics tell us that men are more likely to be attacked at night than women, but women are more vulnerable to violence than men, and thus more fearful of it. A study by the Office for National Statistics found that women are significantly more likely to feel unsafe walking alone at night than men. This is due to a variety of reasons, for example the fact that sexual assault and other criminal activity is more common at night, that they are often physically weaker than men when it comes to defending themselves, and the tragic stories that we read in the news. While men are more likely to be victims of random attacks, women are more likely to be victims of sexual assault, stalking, and harassment. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, 98% of victims of sexual assault reported that their perpetrator was male. According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, at least one in twelve women in England and Wales experience violence from men each year, and over one million Violence Against Women & Girls (VAWG) related crimes were recorded during 2022/23, accounting for 20% of all police recorded crime. 

It’s slightly hilarious to me that at the centre of this debacle is Paul Mescal, one of the internet’s (many) boyfriends. I’ll preface this by saying that I don’t think he intended to upset anyone with his comments — he was just trying to be funny on a chat show. I’m afraid we’ve been holding him to an unfair and unrealistic standard. He is not a character in a book; he is a real man with flaws. It’s not his fault that he has never experienced what it means to be a woman at night. He wasn’t speaking on behalf of women. It doesn’t surprise me that he can poke fun at the concept of self-defence, because he’s probably never had to think about it outside of filming Gladiator II. Yes, it’s ignorant, he should have known better, he should have thought about it, but at the end of the day, he didn’t. I’m sure Paul Mescal is a nice guy, but being a ‘nice guy’ doesn’t mean that he is going to completely understand the female experience and constantly be conscious of it. I think this says more about society than it does about Paul himself. I don’t think Paul will ever joke about this again, do you? What this whole incident tells me is that even in 2024, there is not enough understanding of the way women feel with regard to their safety. I don’t think boys really know about how we feel. We assume they do, because, as women, we think about it all the time. When we’re walking home after a night out, when we’re in a car park, when we get inside a taxi — it’s second nature. Men don’t have to think about this in the same way, so they don’t think about us thinking about this. Unless they’re in the mood to be chivalrous. After all, we only live life through our own lens.¹

It’s disappointing that so-called ‘nice-guys’ don’t live up to our expectations or understand and consider our fears in the way that we’d hope. It’s a shame that men that we trust are still oblivious to our concerns, despite the amount of conversation there already is. Apparently it’s not enough. And I for one am sick of explaining and justifying my fears to men who will never experience them, no matter how sweet they may be, or funny, or chivalrous.

A couple of years ago I went for a walk around my local area. It was snowy, I’d been doing online university all day, and I needed some fresh air. So I pulled on my wellies and headed out on my usual route. I live in a very small and safe area, so it hadn’t occurred to me that it was perhaps a little foolish to walk the same route often. When I was on my walk, I encountered two men and their dog. I had seen them in passing a few days before, when I had walked the same route. They clearly recognised me, because they began shouting to me from the opposite side of the road. My stomach immediately began to churn, and I started walking faster. So did they. I decided I would walk back home a different way, but they followed me. So I turned a corner and started to run, and I decided to run to the house of someone I knew who lived nearby. Fortunately, she was at home, and we called my mum to come and pick me up and take me back home. This was supposed to be a thirty minute walk to clear my head, and instead I was filled with panic. I felt sick. I hadn’t experienced a situation like that before, where I felt so deeply intimidated that I felt the need to run away as fast as I could.

Even typing that and recounting the memory makes me feel anxious. My stomach is tightening into knots. I don’t go for walks alone anymore - I tried to but I just felt uncomfortable, I couldn't relax, I felt like I had to look behind me every thirty seconds. Now if I want to go for a walk I’ll go with a friend. Some people might think that this is a silly decision, that I’m letting the anxiety win, but in all honesty it’s a decision I’ve made that makes me feel better. I’m sure most women have a story like this, or have had to alter their habits to make them feel more at ease in day-to-day life.

What Saoirse said wasn’t groundbreaking. Really, the discourse surrounding what she said shouldn’t be taking up this much space. In an ideal world, we’d all just be like ‘yeah, exactly’. We shouldn’t need to analyse the reactions from the men, or what this teaches us about society, and the reminders it gives us. Apart from the fact that we don’t live in an ideal world, and Saoirse’s comment does make women sickeningly aware that our fears are still trivialised by men, even those with the best of intentions. This won’t change until they do.

1. Since I first wrote this post, Saoirse has spoken further about her comment on the show, which you can watch here. She says, ‘it felt very similar to when I’m at dinner with a bunch of my friends, and I will always make the point that, well, this is actually an experience that we go through every single day, 100 percent, and Paul, being one of my very dear friends, I’ve had conversations like that with him before, and he completely gets that and completely understands that, but I think the fact that there was a moment like that that happened on a show like Graham Norton, which is something that the entire nation tunes in to watch […] It seems to have had an accessibility, which seems to have really gained traction. I think is amazing it’s opening a conversation, and hopefully it’s allowing more and more women to just be like, “Well, yeah, actually, let’s talk about our experience,”’