I've seen it asserted in many places that most women are constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped. Now obviously women in general aren't always visibly on edge whenever they're out in public, but some proportion clearly do feel that way, or at least claim to. Unfortunately this is the kind of thing which it's rather socially difficult to conduct an informal poll on. Does anyone know of any studies or surveys or anything which might shed some light on the issue?
Edit: The most helpful thing turned up by a quick google scholar search was this. Table 2 on page 4 gives us a good rough estimate that ~38% of people worry "very/pretty frequently" about rape (this makes the rate for women possibly as high as ~76%, if we assume that men never worry about themselves or others being raped).
This paper seems to suggest that levels of fear of crime are about equal in males and females, although women are more likely to worry about rape specifically. It's based only on 64 qualitative interviews in Britain, but it also points to this conclusion being predominant in the literature.
A poll: Are you constantly aware of and distressed by the possibility of being raped? Also, are you a man or a woman (however you define it)?
[pollid:579]
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.