This is what is commonly known as “strawman argument”. Lets unpack.
Not all women are the same or have suffered attacks that cause them Post traumatic stress. But it is fact that some do. Some have been raped, some have suffered serious abuse. Of those, not all, but some have PTS that can be triggered. Since you don’t know who are those women, the polite thing to do is:
- Acknowledge they exist
- Help them avoid situations, text, images or films that might make them remember/trigger their traumatic experience.
You might chose not to, but you do at the cost of some women close to you suffering because that. They won’t tell you, since you have proved to be not trustworthy in this topic, neither they would ask for help or support. But it would happen anyway.
The fact that you talk about “being offended” makes clear that you don’t listen. Therefore, you would be unable to ever help a woman close to you if she gets raped.
Some men belive the myth that “protecting a woman” means that if she ever is attacked they would be there to “protect her”. in practice, that never happened because men can’t teleport and abusers and rapist only would attack when the woman is alone. And they usually prefer when she is drunk or otherwise he can attack her credibility and acuse her of lying.
Women know this, they listen to the men around them and if they hear comments like yours, well if something happened to them they would just asume you won’t believe them, that you wn’t be on their side. If the rape or abuse is really hard they might have PST and the comments that you think are harmless (because for the women who haven’t been victims are harmless or merely anoying), would hurt her. As a result, she won’t comfront you, she would just start drifting apart until she stops seeing you.
And then comes #metoo and some women who have remained quiet, start telling their experiences. The bad ones, the ones we usually hide from men and that they claim that “it doesn’t happen” and we “pop” their fantasy bubble about being protectors. That is when they become angry and ask “why didn’t you tell me?” Well, this is why.
Do what you want, but if some women around you “ghost” you after this kind of “harmless” comments, specially ones who previously have been close or even ok with this comments, well, do the math.
But I guess it is easier to acuse us of “irrational” and “oversensitive” than to address the fact that rape and abuse are common enough so almost everyone knows someone who have suffered that.
