When I was living alone in my old apartment, I would spend way too many nights lying awake in bed, paralyzed with fear as I listened to every little sound. I imagined that these sounds were the sounds of someone breaking into my apartment or someone who had somehow been hiding finally coming into my room. I knew that these fears were unfounded, but could not make them go away.
I think this type of fear is conditioned into many women from an early age. My parents always placed restrictions on where I could go alone as a child and as a teenager that they did not place on my brother. Just the other day, I was in a car accident and had to take the bus to school. I was on the phone with my mom and mentioned walking to the bus stop, and she said "I don't want you walking anywhere." If I allowed fear to run my life, I would not be able to leave the house.
I think one strategy of combating this fear is affirming that I/we are entitled to occupy our own space - we are entitled to walk down the street or live alone without fear. I live in a new apartment now and have not been experiencing the same nightly fear, and I think one reason is because I feel like this space is truly mine.

I always lock the door to our apartment if I am having a shower and my housemates aren't home. The rest of the time I don't worry, (I would hear a thief come in and be fully clothed) but the thought of stepping out of the bathroom to see a stranger in my house, scares me. My housemates are bamboozled by my daylight door locking obsession because we live in a fairly secure building.
On a side note, we are not the only ones who live on a schedule of fear. When I asked my brawny housemate if he got scared walking alone at night, his response was 'absolutely.' He's scared of bigger, stronger guys (there aren't many) and groups of guys. He is also the one who insists we lock up before going to bed (strangely, this never used to bother me much).
I think that part of beating fear is repetition, making a realistic appraisal of the risks, and then doing the thing which frightens you but isn't risky. If you can do that thing often enough without incident, it stops being scary.

I know exactly how you feel, and I'm glad I'm not the only one (although if I could be the only woman in the world with irrational fear of these things, I would take that burden gladly from anyone else. Otherwise, it's not worth it!!). Whenever my husband isn't around (and often even when he is), I have the same fears, mostly after dark and while showering. Showering is the worst because you can't hear anything, so I keep making up noises (I think) that scare me. I've been like this for years, and I have no idea why. I'm thinking about getting those door chimes that they have in stores that make a nice, loud noise whenever a door or window is opened, but are not a screeching alarm (in case I forget to turn it off and open something) - that way, I'd know if that distant scraping I hear is actually the door opening or not.

I hate these fears. My sister isn't like this, so I don't know where it comes from. I also don't really know how to change it. I have taken showers in the empty house before, sometimes several days in a row, and it never gets easier. When my husband leaves town for work for a few days, I can't sleep. I have to be where I can see the door and leave the lights on, so I usually end up on the couch, which is not the best place to be. Logic doesn't work; it's like as soon as it gets dark, all of my reasoning goes out the window.

So, you're not alone in this. I also hate people who tell me to just 'get over it', as I know intellectually that I'm pretty darn safe, but the irrational fears win out anyway. I can't just 'get over it'; I wish that I could.

Sigh.

Please, before I respond. Kate, were you venting and randomly thinking at 4am? or do you truely live by a "rape schedule".

I lived alone for a little while in my last apartment. My roommate moved out a month before the lease was up, so I had the place to myself for that month. Honestly, I loved it. However, I made sure all the doors and windows were locked all the time, unless I was actively using one of them, and I slept with my favorite dagger under my pillow and a throwing knife on the bedside table. And yes, there were nights when I thought every little sound was someone breaking in.

Now, I've lived with my boyfriend for a year. This neighborhood is significantly worse than my last one, so when he goes out with friends for a night, I will go and pull my favorite of his pistols out of the safe, load it, and put it in the special "hot spot" shelf next to the bed, so I know if I need it I can roll halfway out of bed and have it in my hand. I find this behavior odd in myself, because I have serious issues with guns and, while I'm proficient with every weapon he owns and a good shot to boot, I am generally uncomfortable having loaded guns lying around. Yet it makes me feel safer to have one near me when I'm alone in the house overnight.

The strange thing is, I never thought of this in terms of rape. I always just said to myself, in case someone gets in. It's not until I read this that I asked myself why I'm so afraid someone will "get in". And yeah. I'm not afraid they'll steal my stuff. I'm afraid of rape. Because that's the big stick that keeps us all afraid, that tells us to keep our heads down and don't attract anyone's attention. And it's effective.

I used to walk the bike paths through the woods between my on-campus apartment and the library or my friends' dorms at 2 or 3 AM when I was in college. Purely to prove to myself that I could - that I hadn't let them stop me. A silly act of defiance, maybe. But it did so much for my courage.

Don't feel like a bad feminist for having that fear-- all women are trained to see rapids around every corner once the sun goes down. We check under our cars to ensure nobody will slash our Achilles tendon, we make claws out of our keys when walking by ourselves, etc. I think it's important to remember that fear is only irrational once it starts getting in the way of what we really want/need to do: if you start avoiding parties because you're afraid of GHB, or things like that. That doesn't mean you should put yourself in situations you think will or may be dangerous, but there's got to be a middle ground where you do everything you can to keep yourself safe without forcing yourself to live in a self-created convent.

In my above entry, my spellchecker must have have switched "rapists" into "rapids." Telling, eh?

I know exactly what you're talking about. For me, the rape scehdual that all women live on is exaggerated, as my mom has taught me to unilaterally distrust and fear men. In my high school, probebly one of the safest places, since there is a teacher or dean around every corner, I start to worry, look behind me repeatedly, even my heart beat speeds up when I hear footsteps. Until I turned 16 I wasn't allowed to spend time alone with a boy- any boy. My best friend since 5th grade was included in this rule. My parents still try to stop me from spending time with a group of people made up entirely of guys. While being aware is good, being constantly afraid is not. I understand that most rapes are perpetrated by friends and family, but I refuse to distrust my best friends simply because they are men.

When I first learned of the "rape schedual" it was in Jessica's first book, and I felt rather relieved, vindicated, and angry. What a great way to stall women's liberation, when we are all too worried about walking through the dark parking lot to our cars to effect change. And I agree, a dialogue must be opened, because this strategy, of keeping women in a position of fear, works even better when we deny it is happening. I once tried to explain this theory to my pro-feminist male friend to which he said "you're constantly afraid of being raped? then something's wrong with you. no one can live their life that way."
He was wrong. There is nothing wrong with me, there is something wrong with America's rape culture over-all. And people CAN live their lives this way. It's just that people shouldn't have to.

j316, looking at my post, I guess it does kind of come across as a early morning vent. But in thinking about it, I know that I live by this schedule. Writing about it was a way for me to admit to myself that I do live in this manner in the hopes that verbalizing it would allow me to address the situation head on instead of just allowing to to take over me. I guess my breaking point just happened to be 4 AM.

"I think that women having to live by a rape schedule is a real problem in our country."

Girl, I totally know what you mean. I feel awful for admitting this but, whenever I go jogging and there's a man there (even if he's just an innocent bystander) I'll leave immediately. I hate having to live in fear.

kate, i hope you know that living that way is a bad sign. Expecting it at every turn...not good.

and lilly, just seeing a man while u r joggin scares you? again, that says more about you than anything else. I agree rape is a serious problem, but to be afraid at every turn is just downright unhealthy.

Thank you so much for this post. I have never spent an entire night alone because of the exact fear you discussed. And I hate it because in every other way I consider myself completely independent. The 'silly' feeling you said you have the next morning is so true as well but the next night that fear starts creeping back in again. I'm so glad you brought this issue up because I have never heard women talking openly about this issue in any way deeper than making a joke about how 'silly' us girls are sometimes.

How about this for conditioning women to expect something bad to happen to them? Since I graduated college and moved to Boston a year and a half ago, my mother has ended EVERY single phone call with with, "I love you, be careful."

I'm glad , unlike the troll that showed up, the men in my life recognize and understand that this is a problem. Maybe it's from knowing women in their lives who were attacked at random. This post has freaky timing - last night while driving to my boyfriend's house, a car behind me flashed its lights - in the rear view mirror, I saw it had no headlights on, and it was dark. I was going the speed limit, so as I pulled into his neighborhood, I made a few wrong turns past his house - car is still following. Three or four right turns later, the car turns left and I make my way back to my original destination, but feeling definitely freaked out. And I totally agree - that I didn't have to think, and did this automatically, is sick and wrong, because my response of fear and "what to do" has been so programmed into me, versus the indignation that someone was trying to scare me or cause pain.

I never really thought about this because, sadly, my own "rape schedule" is so ingrained as to be second nature. (Please bear with me on this, it's 1 pm and I'm running on no sleep in an effort to recover my normal schedule from two days spent sleeping off a cold. Forgive the lengthy ramble I’m sure this is going to be.) Thinking on it now, you’re right.

For me, the schedule varies depending on where I am. During the day, I feel perfectly safe in my own house, even all alone, except at night -though that's more from an overactive imagination and fear of the nonhuman things that go bump in the night. Same goes for all the nights I spend escaping the heat of a Georgia summer with no AC by sitting on a blanket on the trunk of the car, just me and the portable cd player blaring away with a corner of my attention spared to listen for things my inner-nerdy fangirl both hopes and dreads to hear: the shambling of zombies or the unseasonable clanking of Jacob Marley’s chains. I do this even though the weird alcoholic across the street, old enough to be my grandfather, has expressed an unusual interest in the state of my vagina since I became something of an established hermit thanks to severe teenage depression (he asked my uncle if I was still a virgin). Why do I feel safe doing this? Three reasons: I run up a hill nearly every night for exercise, so I’m pretty sure I can outrun him. Even if I couldn’t, the door is only 10 steps behind me and his front door is at least a hundred feet away. It’s a small, quiet neighborhood, where you can hear loud talking from the next yard at night, so a scream would quickly bring my dad, if not one of the neighbors; we’re a nosy bunch, no one ignores sirens or screams.

Feeling safe here, I’ve twice done what can probably be described as an incredibly stupid move and invited internet blind dates over while I’m home alone. Crowds have always made me nervous and turned me into a clumsy, hunched, cold-eyed shell of myself, so I knew there was no way I –being painfully shy at the best of times- was going to was going to make a good first impression if I had to deal with a crowd and first-date jitters. The first guy I met through yahoo personals, thanks to a whim sign up by a friend and I, and had only talked to a few times. The second guy found me on myspace, had gone to my high school, and even hung with some of my crowd though I didn’t remember him and another friend vouched for his truthfulness. After the first guy stood me up for our first “official” date after the meeting, I made sure to talk to the second one for awhile (nearly a year) before he got to meet my rather unimpressive self. Nothing bad happened either time, and it only briefly occurred to me that it might, being as I was in my “safe space” and knew the lay of the land, so to speak. Naïve? Maybe, yeah.

Now, my house and my street (a little back road that no one can find at night, unless they’re actively looking for it) are my protected little bubble, so I’m fine when cars turn in during mine and mom’s nightly walks; at worst, we’ll have to hurry a little so that we have a driveway rather than a ditch to scoot over into, since it’s generally neighbors or people who’ve visited them thousands of times over the years. On the slim chance that someone might pull over to attempt an assault, driveways and nosy neighbors aren’t that far off at any given point on the route. Would I go for these nightly walks alone? No, but again, that’s just fear of the dark.

On the other hand, turn the curve and take two steps off my street, heading towards the hill, and you’re onto a relatively obscure branch of the main highway, where several unknown cars pass at certain times. The later the better, since this is a small-town and basically dead from midnight til 4, barring the occasional pizza delivery, but if you go during a busier hour, it becomes –for me- full of terrors of the human variety. Apart from the fact that the guardrail to one side has been dented by more than its fair share of speeding geniuses on rainy days, there are also enough drive-by hootings (not a typo) on that short walk, that I don’t breathe easy until we set foot on the secluded subdivision that is the leg-killing Hill of Doom.

Would I feel the same anxiety walking it during the day? No. I know this for a fact, because in my early teens, a friend and I once bypassed the hill entirely and walked nearly a mile out to the county line and back, not telling anyone where we’d gone, no cell phones, and acting like idiots on a stretch of road with far fewer houses (well, mostly she did, laying down in the center of the road and rolling her gum up like a joint and holding it out towards a passing car...though not at the same time). It literally never occurred to us how much danger we could’ve placed ourselves in, simply because the sun was out.

Wow. I'd never....heard a name put to it before. But YES, I do understand. I do feel that.

I refuse to go anywhere - ANYWHERE - alone after dark, even if it's just to take out the trash. I won't do it. I make my husband come with me, and if no one is available, I just wait.

I hate that we're afraid.

But I hate that we have REASONS to be afraid, too.

I've never, ever heard it put this way before. This is extremely good food for thought.

I once went jogging on a path near my house and saw a Hispanic guy walking behind me, which he did for some time (I should mention I'm not a particularly speedy jogger). He was catching up to me, so I ended up losing control and literally screaming; I was so afraid. He then came up to me and asked me if I was okay before going off in another direction.

I feel so awful about that to this day. My behavior was both racist and paranoid, and I felt like I had no control over it. It is sad to see how fear can take over without anyone even realizing it.

So yeah, I guess the only way out is to try to name the fear and look at it when you're feeling more rational, otherwise it can lead to general paranoia and discrimination. It's good that you wrote this post and got the words out there.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more paranoid about the dark, but I've also gone from relatively safe situations to increasingly less secure ones. For example, when I was a teen, I could walk around my middle-class subdivision at all hours, as long as I was out with the big family dog. In college, it wasn't a big deal if I didn't lock my dorm while I was sleeping, since I lived in the all-female dorm. I would also occasionally walk at night, but only if I wore bigger clothes to disguise my gender. I stopped my campus walks, and even scheduled classes for daytime after getting followed and harassed one evening on my way home from a class. Now, I avoid being out at night, always check that doors and windows are locked, and do so many other things that make me feel like I'm being paranoid.

My work schedule requires me to be in my car between 4 and 5 am. It pisses my husband off that I do this, but I don't deadbolt our house when I leave because the other lock is automatic and fiddling with a key means I'm "unsafe" a few seconds longer. Then I run to my car, while I glance around the area to make sure I'm alone. As I unlock and open the driver door, the light comes on in my car and I always make sure there's no one hiding in my back seat. Then I lock the doors once I'm inside, before I even turn the car on. In the winter, I often make my husband go out to start my car, just in case, or even help me clean the snow off. I hate that I'm paranoid, but there's been a few occasions, when we were apartment dwellers, that I've been approached at that early morning hour in the dark. It scared the shit out of me. Sometimes I feel silly that I do all this, but usually I either don't think about it, or get pissed that I do all this so reflexively. Not pissed at myself, but pissed at our rape-positive culture that causes my paranoia to begin with.

I don't want to sound selfish but do you ladies know what pisses men off to no end. The fact that you all think you're all alone in the "fear of rape" area. I am a husband and a father to three young ladies and if you think that they're the only ones with fears for their safety your dead wrong. Every time I see a news story about a woman attacked, I want to run to the store and buy more bullets.

I just don't understand women sometimes. I read this blog and a good part of you seem to be thankful that you have a man that makes you feel safe and puts themselves at risk to go out at night so you don't have to. You have us go check out the creepy noise in the kitchen and we do it for you to keep you safe. Then I see a blog that says something about "not wanting or hating the alpha male" or something to that effect. So that means what? You want the beta male? The guy who will hide behind you if someone breaks in. I must say that the protection aspect of men is hardwired into men as much as the fear is for women, the reason we act on it comes from the belief that we are the alpha male. I mean you ladies may hate that about us men but at the same time you love that it's there.

I do not wish to start a gender war on this blog and it was never my intentions. I love women, they make my life worth living but I don't like that you ladies scold us for our masculinity up until the kitchen window breaks in the middle of the night and then it's "sic em' boy!" "Go kill or be killed for me but check your masculinity at the door if you come back." When us boys quit being boys as I think some of you would like, expect us to do little more then cower in the bed with you when that window breaks.

I always lock my apartment door - anytime, day or night. When I am sleeping or showering, I also close and lock my bedroom door. I have a knife in a box near my bed, along with a maglight flashlight.

I store my can of RAID next to the shower.

I am on my way to having a loaded gun.

I read a book about self-defense and have decided to fight, no matter what.

As a guy, I can't even come close to recognizing what you go through, but I hope that you are all safe in your lives.

Great post - I feel this way too - just a little frightened when I'm alone even though my brain and my ideals say I shouldn't be. I worry for those women who are less clued-in to feminist thinking and to the real stats on who is likely to attack you. I wonder how many women stay in bad relationships because they want to avoid living by the "rape schedule". To the point that some are probably staying with guys who are a threat to them because that seems better than facing the media-inspired stranger-rape threat.

And TAC do you really want me to sympathise that you worry about your daughters getting raped?

I think it's quite obvious that the point is that the fear of rape is hyped up by the police (certainly in the UK) and the media and that this is what makes women frightened rather than genuine threats.

"I must say that the protection aspect of men is hardwired into men as much as the fear is for women"

Except that people (not just men) should protect each other and people should NOT have to live in fear of being physically harmed.

Cruella - There absolutely is an abundance of "genuine threats," in addition to the rape culture perpetuated in part by the media.

TAC - First of all, the "hardwired" argument is biological essentialism and tired bullshit. Second, please do not assume that all us "ladies" are the same in our personal relationships and treatment ("scolding"? "syic 'em boy!"? really?) of men, as you seem to imagine. Finally, your "fear of rape" is very different from the fear of rape that the women here have described. Your fear seems largely based on a protectionist model centered on the fear of someone you love being attacked. Now I may feel that same way too regarding my loved ones, but in addition to that I also live with my own fear for my life every day, regardless of whether or not there has been a recent news story about another woman being attacked. I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of men do not truly understand what it means to live by a rape schedule, unless perhaps they themselves are survivors. I think that the rape culture forces most women, whether or not they are survivors, to live by a rape schedule to some degree.

That being said, I realized a few years ago that I live by a rape schedule and I still have not been able to overcome it. I lock the door as soon as I get into my apartment, day or night. I do it now because I live alone, but I even did it when I lived at home with my parents. When I hear a sound in the middle of the night my heart jumpstarts and I wonder if it is my cat or an intruder.

I always stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning because that is just the way my body clock works. I am generally fine with it, but lately I have begun to feel like a prisoner in my own home. Just the other day it was 3am and I wanted to go grocery shopping so I got dressed and had my hand on the doorknob when I got scared and changed my mind. I wasn't afraid of an attack so much as I was afraid of what people would say if an attack occurred and the victim-blaming that would ensue. "Did she really need milk at 3 in the morning? What did she expect going out this time of night?"

When I was in undergrad I had to face similar decisions. I had to take night classes that got out after dark. My campus was relatively safe (and by that I mean that there were "only a few date rapes reported each year," although we all know that doesn't mean shit) but there had been a string of stranger attacks the semester before. Every night I had a choice: wait up to forty-five minutes for the campus shuttle or walk 15 minutes in the dark back to my dorm. I had taken self defense and I carried pepper spray (because if I didn't I knew people would say I wasn't taking proper precautions for merely existing as a woman in a man's world), but I almost always waited for the shuttle, wasting who-knows how many hours each semester. I wanted to walk and I knew that I would probably be fine. But still I knew that if something did happen to me people would say, "Well, we have a shuttle service, so she should have known better. What did she expect walking alone this time of night?"

We are not free and we cannot participate as equals in this society because of the very real threat of rape. I don't care if I sound paranoid because I know I have reason to be, regardless the stats on stranger rape, acquaintance rape, and whatever else. And I wish I had some solutions, but sometimes even getting the mail at night feels like a small victory for me.

TAC, that's bullshit. My husband hides under the covers anytime we hear a noise that sounds like it could be an intruder and I am often (though not always - because we're equals like that) the one who fearlessly investigates. I don't love him any less for that.

Everyone else, I think it's interesting that nighttime comes up in everyone's stories so much. I am actually more concerned about going out alone in general or even going to parties with friends (probably because my experience with an attempted rape was at a party with friends). I don't go walking around my neighborhood at night but I generally don't like going walking around my neighborhood alone at all. And I've been trying to work up the courage to take the bus but I worry about that too, about being caught by myself on an unfamiliar street in town with nowhere to go. Maybe it's because I never really go anywhere at night without people for reasons other than fear, but nighttime doesn't have as much significance in my "rape schedule" (interesting concept that I've never even heard of before!) as everyone else.

This helps me understand some of my emotions from an incident two years ago. My first year of grad school I was living with a family and working as a nanny. They had a new baby, a five year old and a seven year old. They lived in an old Victorian house and I had the third floor. It was originally the servants quarters, by the walls had all been knocked down to make one large studio space. The parents talked a lot about being very respective of my privacy, but they didn't pass this along to their children. The older boys and their 10 year old neighbor had been up in my room once and eaten my M&Ms. When I was away for the holiday break, I know they had been playing in there because of the rearrangement of my DVDs and the television. Minor incidents. Then after a weekend home I returned to find the bottles and tubes on the sink had been disturbed. My drinking cup was filled with a mix of water, my toothpaste, and my lotion. When I asked the boys about it, I explained that I wasn't angry, but it was not okay for them to be playing in my room with my stuff. They both denied they had been up there, but I'd gotten good at reading the 7 year old and knew he was lying.
I spoke to the parents about it and learned that while I was away they had hosted a play group. While the mother was very insistent that I always be on the same floor as the children, she didn't follow this rule herself. Apparently while she and the other parents were chatting in the kitchen, the children went up to the second floor to play. The were told this was okay. At some point they went up to the third floor, my floor, and made the mess.
I was horrified. I didn't completely understand why I was being so irrational. I wasn't in any danger from 7 year old boys, even if they were children I didn't know, let alone had never met. But I was freaked out. I walked around my room shaking for a while. I went to the hardware store and bought a lock. I tried to explain to the parents how I felt violated, and the mother told me I was being ridiculous. I suppose it was this irrational rape schedule fear. I couldn't trust these adults I lived with to maintain some level of respect and privacy for my living space. Could anyone simply walk into my room? Realistically, I knew the answer was no. There were chimes on the doors, all doors were locked at night, and the only way up to my floor was through the second floor hallway outside the bedrooms of the parents, the baby and the children. But while I logically understood all this, I was still upset.
I live alone now in a very safe apartment complex in a very safe residential neighborhood. I lock the door when I'm home, but in general I feel more at ease now then when I was living with the family. If I leave something on the counter before I leave for work, it will be exactly where I left it when I return at the end of the day. Knowing that I am the only one in my space makes me feel safer. I don't have to see something disturbed and wonder who has been in my room.

When I first moved in to my apartment, I was 19 and had never really spent a night alone in a house.
I was scared of every little noise. The doors were locked, the windows shut, even though I'm on the second floor I still worried about 'creeps with ladders'.

In order to get to sleep, I needed my male friend to lay in bed next to me.

I'm anxious in a lot of situations. If I walk into an abandoned building, I'm afraid of 'crackheads in the basement' or something. I'm not really afraid of being raped in those cases. I'm more afraid of being killed.

My partner calls my irrational fears 'crackheads in the basement' now - and I'm beginning to get over them.

We leave the doors unlocked (we have to rememeber to lock them) and the back door open when we're home.

When I read Full Frontal Feminism, I decided that I was going to stop living by a rape schedule - that I was going to face my fears.

It was something that my partner said that helped me put things into perspective:

yeah, there could be a crackhead in the basement, there could be rapists in the closet. Deal with them when you see them.

It is very sad that we have to have this type of conversation, but the fact is that there are bad people out there. I don't know if I live my life by the "rape schedule" but I do know that at times I am worried about my safety because I am a women. But just because we think about this or take precautions to protect ourselves, I don't think that it is a bad thing nor something that we should change. I feel that we do need to get rid of the paranoia that every sound is someone coming, but how do we do that? How can we train ourselves so that we don't worry our life away? I had a class that didn't get out until it was dark, and I always worried about walking to my car because there were so few people of campus if I did need help. I thought about asking one of the guys to walk me to my car but I didn't know them very well and I felt embarrassed. So normally I would walk very fast to my car and even though it wasn't very far at all, I still would jump in my car and lock the doors and only then would I feel somewhat better. It is sad that we live in a world like this, and that women have to always have part of there choice influenced by if we will be safe doing it. What to do?

I have lived on a rape schedule for a few years now, all the while knowing exactly why I was staying up until 4am with an 8am wake-up time when my roommates weren't home.

I have always tried to get second story apartments; they have always felt safer to me (less possible entryways). I keep a baseball bat next to my bed, mace close by and I used to take my mace with me whenever I would get up to pee in the middle of the night, even though the bathroom was right next door to my bedroom. I lock all my doors and windows, I lock my bedroom door (and have even jimmied a chair up against the handle before when I was home alone). I always imagine that every creak is someone entering my house with intent to come and get me (not my stuff), and always thought that I had an overactive imagination and was being irrational.

This was until the time I caught someone at my window which was open save for a screen (damn first story houses), and until the time I caught someone coming up through my backyard to my back door (each incident a year apart, each at 3 in the morning on a cool summer night). It makes my heart beat faster and my palms sweat just thinking about the fact that my safety was in jeopardy in my own home, and as a result I am even more "paranoid" than I used to be. I put paranoid in quotes because that's what friends say I'm being. People tell me I'm acting crazy, until I tell them that I have had two almost-really-fucking-bad occurrences (which thank whoever nothing happened except my near heart attack at the fear of finding someone when I though I was merely imagining things), and then they back the hell off and admit that the "paranoid" precautions I am taking are probably not such a bad idea after all.

As sad as it is that we live in a rape culture where women feel the need to take these precautions, it is necessary. My situation is a perfect example. I always thought the noises I heard were all my overactive fear, just like everyone told me. Most of the time, it was all in my head. But two out of those times, it was not. Both were very dangerous situations that, without my overly cautious and paranoid attitude, could have turned into horrific situations. So keep your mace or gun or knife by your bed if it makes you feel better; you really may never know if you are going to need it. And don't let people make you feel bad about your actions, do what makes you feel safe, and trust your gut. If something is telling you that this time it isn't a false alarm, call the police.

Can I ask why TAC was banned? I mean, I definitely disagree with him, and I don't entirely appreciate the whole "you ladies" and "we men" BS, but it seemed a genuine comment. Or at least like someone who wanted to engage in the conversation. Am I misreading this? Maybe he's written other posts that were way out-of-line?

fatsweatybetty - I don't even go to the seminars required for my course because I'd have to walk home after dark. Good on you for going to yours.

Me too to all of this. I rejected a cool job because it would entail bussing/walking home after dark. I don't go out at night unless it's with my fiance. If I'm alone in the house at night, I must have all the interior and exterior lights ON, all sound-making objects OFF, and a dog right next to me at all times. I check and re-check curtains and blinds to make sure they are shut tight.

My close friend was raped by a man who was jogging behind her, during the afternoon (6pm). This has made me 'wary' during the day... but not scared like I am during the night.

I can relate completely.

I've always scoffed at friends who were so incredibly dependent on their boyfriends for everything.

But when my boyfriend starting going out of town on business, I couldn't sleep at night even with my main door AND bedroom door locked, with the light on, and with the kitchen knife and cell phone on my bedstand.

It always makes me feel so pathetic, as if I am too weak and dependent on him to survive alone.

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