In the age of endless grievance, few essays capture the selective outrage of modern activism quite like Qasim Rashid's "Women Are Not Safe Around Men." The Pakistani-born American lawyer and activist paints a picture of universal male predation, where men as a class bear collective guilt for violence against women, demanding taxpayer-funded restitution, shaming campaigns, and systemic preferences for women to atone for centuries of supposed patriarchy. This isn't nuanced analysis; it's ideological scapegoating dressed as "data-driven" truth. Rashid's piece ignores inconvenient realities about violence, human nature, and mutual accountability, while eroding the very chivalric impulses that have long motivated men to protect the vulnerable. Far from a crisis demanding male submission, the evidence reveals a more complex human story, one where men are both primary perpetrators and primary victims of lethal violence, where women are not passive innocents, and where collective punishment solves nothing.
Rashid's core thesis collapses under scrutiny of the very statistics he deploys. He leans heavily on the World Health Organization's claim that one in three women experiences physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime, framing it as proof of endemic male threat. Yet the WHO's broad definitions encompass everything from "controlling behaviour" and "unwanted sexual touching" to psychological acts and attempts, elastic categories that inflate numbers without distinguishing severe crime from subjective offense. Actual reported rape and severe assault rates, while serious, do not support a narrative of women living in perpetual terror from men. Underreporting exists for many crimes, but so does overbroad categorisation that conflates regret, miscommunication, or relationship conflict with "violence." Rashid dismisses men's non-violence as unworthy of note: "you do not get a cookie for not being a rapist," but this dodges the obvious: the vast majority of men are not violent toward women. Most build, provide, protect, and form loving families. Painting billions with the brush of a criminal minority is not justice; it's bigotry.
On homicide, Rashid cites the Violence Policy Center's "When Men Murder Women," noting that most female victims knew their killers, often intimate partners. True enough — around 2,400 women killed by men in recent data, with many in domestic contexts. But this selective focus conceals the fuller picture from Bureau of Justice Statistics. Men are murdered at rates over three times higher than women overall. In intimate partner homicides, men comprise a substantial share: hundreds killed by female partners annually, often without the same media frenzy or policy panic. Globally and in the US, men account for the overwhelming majority of homicide victims, frequently at the hands of other men in public or stranger violence. Rashid's outrage stops at female victims, ignoring male disposability in wars, dangerous jobs, policing, and street crime, the very risks chivalry historically prepared men to face.
Recent cases underscore the hypocrisy. Women have stabbed boyfriends over dinner arguments, run them over for ending dates, or slit throats in sleep. These aren't anomalies; intimate partner violence flows both ways, with women perpetrating non-lethal aggression at comparable rates in many studies, often in response to bidirectional conflict rather than one-sided male tyranny. Rashid offers no parallel reckoning for female violence, no calls for women's accountability programs, and no therapy mandates for female perpetrators. His solutions: free tampons, abortions, girls-only schools, tax-free status for women, universal healthcare focused on female needs, and endless DEI, place the burden entirely on men and government largesse. This isn't equity; it's entitlement that treats women as perpetual wards while demonising men.
The chivalric tradition Rashid implicitly attacks offers a wiser path. For centuries, men were socialised to restrain their strength, protect women and children, and channel aggression into defence of the innocent. This wasn't oppression but a civilising compact: male protection for female vulnerability in an era of physical realities. Modern feminism dismantled much of this without replacing it with mutual respect. Instead, we get narratives that pathologise masculinity itself, male silence as complicity, male achievement as entitlement. Rashid demands boys take "consent classes" from early grades to internalise guilt. What about classes on female agency, resilience, and the realities of dual violence? Or recognizing that most men already reject predation?
Rashid's gun argument exemplifies the distortions. He claims firearms in domestic situations make women "100 times more likely to be killed," citing selective studies that lump all gun deaths without isolating defensive uses. Responsible armed women (and men) deter crime; the data on defensive gun uses vastly outnumbers tragedies when properly contextualised. Dismissing self-defence while pushing state dependency ignores women's capacity for strength and men's role as protectors.
Broader claims fare no better. Rashid ties violence to "Right-wing extremism" and patriarchy across cultures, yet ignores that family and intimate killings occur everywhere, often rooted in poverty, substance abuse, mental illness, and cultural breakdown, not a singular male conspiracy. Black women face higher rates, as he notes, but this intersects with higher Black male homicide offending and victimisation, pointing to subcultural factors feminists often sidestep. Sex work demand is male-driven, yes, but supply and cultural shifts involve female agency too. No society has achieved perfect "gender equity" because biology, psychology, and choice produce differences, not just oppression.
True accountability requires rejecting collective guilt. Men do not owe "restitution" for the sins of outliers. Societies thrive when men and women cooperate, honouring strengths: male risk-taking and provision, female nurturing and selectivity. Chivalry's "last stand" isn't defeat but a call to revive civilised norms: protection without patronisation, strength with restraint. Men built the modern world, fought its wars, and innovated its comforts, often dying younger and in greater numbers. They deserve recognition, not ritual shame.
Rashid's vision leads to division and dependency. A healthier response affirms shared humanity: robust prosecution of all violence, support for victims regardless of sex, cultural emphasis on responsibility for both genders, and rejection of zero-sum gender warfare. Men are not the problem. Criminality, broken families, and ideological excess are. Defending men isn't denying real harms, it's refusing to let selective statistics justify misandry. Civilisation advances through truth, not targeted blame. The data, fully examined, demands nuance, not surrender to grievance.