Sit up straight. Cross your legs. Carry this pepper spray at all times. Call me when you leave. Listen to your surroundings. Don’t go anywhere alone. Keep the police on speed dial. Don’t stay out past dark. If you do, you’ll be asking to get assaulted. It’s scary being a woman. In a matter of one week, at least 3 women from across the United States appeared on our local Texarkana news station as physically assaulted and beaten by men in broad daylight. 2 of these women died. Did they ask for this? Seeing the horrifying and gruesome images cast on-screen, alongside the details from the sole survivor, pulled me back to a recent concert I attended in Shreveport, Louisiana. Originally I was going to write a review, but there’s a more pressing issue here. There were no cellphones allowed at this concert.

Some might argue that it’s just Gen Z/millennial exaggerated worry of exiting the digital world, but it goes deeper than that. The worry wasn’t a loss of letting everyone know I was at a concert. The problem became more intense every time I had to leave my seat. True enough, the of exposure to stories of pain rather than pleasure skews our perceptions a bit, but the fact that my first thought when told I wasn’t allowed to have a form of digital communication was not ‘how will my friends know I’m having a good time,’ but ‘I shouldn’t go to the bathroom by myself.’ The fact that this occurs to women to the extent it does is disgraceful and disgusting.

According to NPR, in 2018, 81 percent of women had been sexually harassed at some point, with 77 percent having been verbally harassed, 34 percent being followed, and 27 percent being sexually assaulted. And the fact that one cannot google search the amount of women assaulted in a time frame without running into anything but sexual assault cases is baffling. Understand that women who feel this way aren’t just terrified of rape. Fear of leaving the side of someone else for various reasons strikes some women. These include being beaten to death, being raped, being shamed for being raped and wanting to abort a fetus that resulted from it, being shamed for what they wear, hearing people say that they could have prevented it, and the list goes on.

This is in no way meant to say that men do not experience some of the same things, but they certainly do not to the same extent (a Huffington Post article says that 90 percent of rape victims are women) and cannot fully understand the scope of the matter because they have not lived it. This is true for any situation involving someone of a different gender, race, or ethnicity. We cannot begin to comprehend some of the things our brothers and sisters have experienced. For this reason, women all over are just begging anyone to listen, a basic human interaction that many women don’t always get.

In terms of cell phone use, the problem with taking them away during a large public event where everyone are strangers is that something terrible, like the above mentioned beatings, could happen to anyone. But, as a woman, I felt more threatened. Accompanying men thought I was being ridiculous, but that is the meaning behind saying it’s difficult to understand if you haven’t been there. And, whether it’s the media or a random stranger who doesn’t know anything about the victim, someone will offer the ideas mentioned above: that they did something to deserve this, that they could have prevented it, and so on. And if they’re lucky enough to survive, they have to live not only with the traumatic experience, but also the pain of harsh side glances and crude gestures.

The gender problems in society run deep. Having to raise our daughters to constantly watch their backs, only wear one ear bud at a time, make sure their always wearing long pants and t-shirts, and so on, is terrifying. Having to design products specifically for women, like bejeweled pepper spray or security bras is insane. The problem has shifted from needing protection to needing self-defense training and better human interaction education.

So, don’t stand around and wait for big companies to tell you what is safe, because, despite rape incidents dropping sixty percent since the nineties, an alarming number of our women are still experiencing issues and feeling trapped. Get out there and fight for a better future, not just for you, but for your daughter, mother, girlfriend, self.