The Undefended Annie Le
September 15, 2009
Annie Le, the graduate student murdered at Yale last week, was alone in a basement laboratory when she was attacked. This makes no sense in today’s world, even in buildings with secure entry. Young women should not be alone in isolated corridors, offices or rest rooms. Ever.
Should women carry weapons to protect themselves? Lawrence Auster addresses the question at View from the Right. He says:
What is needed is two things: (1) for society to protect women (and everyone) by punishing murder (and, I would add, violent rape) with death; and (2) for individual men to be armed or otherwise prepared to protect women. While both of these solutions would represent a big change from our current society, the same is true of all changes in the direction away from liberalism and toward traditionalism.
Most people would agree that if a danger is real and ever-present, the logical thing to do is prepare for it. But, Michael Daly, New York Daily News columnist, uses the opposite argument. If a danger is real and ever-present, the reasonable thing to do is not worry about it. That’s what he told his daughter who is a student at Yale and who called him in tears about the Le murder. Precisely because she lives in a higly sexualized world in which predatory men stalk and kill undefended women, she should not worry at all. A woman’s body was stuffed this summer into a ceiling in a Wall Street office building after she was attacked while cleaning at night. See it could happen to anyone. “I love you, Monkey,” Daly tells his weeping daughter.
Remember the days when fathers thought it their duty to protect their daughters? Now, they simply enfold them in cornball sentiment and leave them to tremble with fear in apartments, dorms and offices. A young woman today is stalked whether she is ever physically attacked or not. She knows predatory men are there and she knows she is unprotected. At the same time, she is encouraged to be recklessly free and to walk alone through hallways and cavernous buildings or work in empty offices. She is living in a maze of contradictions.
Most women lack calm in a crisis and the aggressive instincts to use weapons. They don’t want to carry them and find the very idea repulsive. But, we live in extraordinary times.
Melissa writes:
My husband has a gun and teaches the boys to shoot. It’s in a safe by the bed.
Neighbors find it odd, but my 16 year-old-son walks his sisters everywhere. I am so grateful he sees it as a responsibility. Good fathers make for good sons.
Laura writes:
There’s an old-fashioned idea: boys and men actually accompanying women in public places! It made sense years ago and it makes even more sense in our more dangerous world in which sick and impulsive men, many of them raised by single mothers, are fed a steady diet of sexual material.
Lydia Sherman writes:
Girls should not be in colleges at all. There are so many safe alternatives to college today. Unaccompanied by a father, brother or husband, no girl is safe in a public place alone. Colleges deny the danger because they don’t want to lose business, and colleges are businesses that need our business to stay in business. That woman’s life really did not depend on her college education. She could have got married, had children, and taken care of business at home.
College put her at risk, and that risk cost her her beautiful future and her life. Shame on all of those who promote colleges for young women–college away from family and away from protection. The college where I live provides a “security car” for young women on campus, but none of them want to use it because it would be admitting it is not a safe place and that they are not able to look after themselves and they are not really free. The fact there even has to be a security car is an admission that it is dangerous for a girl to be alone on campus.
Urging young women to go to college to “make something of themselves” is based on a false belief that being a wife, mother and homemaker is not worthwhile. Thousands of girls experience the loneliness and fear and peer pressure, not to mention stalking, on college campuses. In the name of what? Education? Education is far over-rated. It all goes back to the money involved.
Most women realize too late that they spent their best child-bearing years confined on campuses or in classrooms. We should all be more bold in warning the world’s young women and urging them not to give up their time, their money and their lives to colleges, which only put them into careers, which then rob them of their time with their children, whom they must put in the care of others. This is a great loss to the world.
I wrote about this in an article called Get in On Life at Homeliving.blogspot.com.
Laura writes:
