Fearless in the city

Boston Globe ^ | March 9, 2006 | Donovan Slack

[george76]

Some women still party as if invulnerable

It's midnight at Pravda, a trendy Manhattan bar where graduate students from nearby New York University are jammed into leather booths.

A group chants, ''Another vodka! Another vodka!" A young woman named Jovana is in the corner, kissing a young man she met hours earlier.

Days after the brutal rape and murder of a 24-year-old graduate student from Boston who had been drinking at a bar two blocks away, the scene is notable for an absence of fear.

''It happens here," Barbara Klen, a 24-year-old NYU student, said of the slaying. ''It happens everywhere. What can I do about it?"

Such carefree attitudes are more than the usual bravado of young adults, some sociologists say, and instead reflect false feelings of safety that are unique to the generation of women that grew up watching ''Sex and the City," chatting with strangers on the Internet, and relying on cellular telephones as lifelines.

Many young women were children when high-profile sex crimes such as New York's so-called preppie murder and the brutal rape of a Central Park jogger occurred in the late 1980s;

many weren't even born when the movie ''Looking For Mr. Goodbar," about a young woman who is murdered after drinking at a New York bar, came out in 1977.

binge drinking...

Seated next to Bassett Monday night at The Falls, the SoHo bar where St. Guillen was last seen alive Feb. 25, Bassett's friend Kiri Jewell sipped a glass of shiraz and pondered her own vulnerability.

[WorkingClassFilth]

Sounds like there's still a fine crop of young nitwits ready for harvest - if you're the grim reaper. Feminism has imbued these young women with a seriously dangerous sense of equality with men in all realm - including the physical. Coupled with the bogus fatalism of today's cynical hipness, a psycho ought to be able to cut a wide swath before his own pathology and blindside caught up with him.

[george76]

[george76]

Many of these girls will end up dead, or with a series of nasty diseases, and/or left in the gutter beaten and raped.

[sarasmom]

And many men will say they were asking for it...

[Intolerant in NJ]

Should be headlined "Foolish in the City".....

[q_an_a]

While it might be easy to target feminism, that is like Hefner taking credit for the sexual revoultuion...the real answer is THE PILL. If you feel safe from lifes biggest consequence then you take risks. Ask any man what changed in the 60s and it wasn't pot or "free love" it was the pill. Top that off with the free ride parents give their kids and nobody thinks they will ever be off the gravy train and face the music.

[wtc911]

Girls are stupid. I knew it when I was seven, forgot it when I turned thirteen and rememebered it again later.

[WorkingClassFilth]

I'll agree with you that the pill certainly had consequence, but to attribute the social changes of the last half century to a manufactured object is the same kind of distorted and fuzzy thinking that blames the gun for crime. In fact, people are free moral agents and technology only aids what is already corrupted underneath. It is people who are responsible for their personal choices and, collectively, for the overall effect on society. Truth is, pond scum like Hefner did play a significant role in augmenting moral change in society, but he is not the only strain of scum in the pond.

Feminism complimented Hefner's hedonistic moral message in that women were/are taught that they are the equal of men in every respect. Of course, this is patently false in the same way that people are not created equal - only under the law is there any sense of equality. In the vacuum of what total equality means outside of tradition and moral teaching, the feminists sought to become men (and, conversely, feminize men) because they are operating in a dreamworld that doesn't exist. The upshot is that women, in trying to be like men, have only gotten down into the mud to rut like pigs. Men like Hefner would only welcome that since it makes them a thousand times more available sexually. In fact, the slut image is now a feminist icon.

Finally, the consequence of these social changes may have been lessened by the advent of the pill, but abortion stats show another factor of sexual behavior not accounted for the much ballyhooed freedom of the pill. The bloody record of 44 million dead children argues more eloquently than any thing I might say about the underlying stupidity of hedonism and the do-it philosophy. My g-g-generation has killed about one half of their own children in spite of being the vanguards of the brave new world. Despite the lack of the pill, other cultures have responded to the consequences of moral degeneracy in much the same way we do in our sophisticated society - they killed their children. In fact, in our modern age, we sacrifice babies to Molech for much the same reasons as dead cultures did thousands of years ago - so that all will go well for us.

The sad and final chapter is that women are most emphatically not men. If they wish to believe that through the thin veneer of supposed social supports like the pill or instantaneous cell phone protection, it is only because they have been primed with inordinately stupid lies. This is but one grotesque legacy of feminism. When social order breaks down on any scale, the myths of feminism crumbles into dust. For some young woman, probably tonight, the truth about her disadvantages in a bestial world will come with frightening speed and violence. Unfortunately, that kind of seminal understanding will be a revelation that will come too late.

[highball]

One murder, in a city of over 8 million people, and we're supposed to panic? Please.

New Yorkers are made of sterner stuff. Thanks to Rudy, we live in the safest big city in America (by a long shot).

The murder is tragic, but it doesn't mean that we have to start living in fear any more than a traffic death on the streets of Los Angeles means they have to walk everywhere.

[nmh]

"Visits to nightclubs in New York and Boston this week found many young women slurring words, making out with men they hardly knew, and, in one case, sobbing alone in a back alley, shoeless, after a night of drinking. Seven of 12 women at the clubs interviewed by the Globe said they didn't think they would ever be victims of violent crime and felt no need to change their behavior to avert becoming one."

[nmh]

Another award winning denier:

"At The Rack, a popular nightspot near Faneuil Hall, 25-year-old Alina Brezitskaya sucked down the last of her ''Grateful Dead," a concoction of five different liquors, before saying she never worries about her safety."

''I just go out and get drunk," Brezitskaya said. Her friend leaned over and added, ''I'm sorry, we're kind of drunk. We're celebrating Spring Break."

[nmh]

Or how about

brain dead in the city?

[durasell]

Did you move to NY last week?

[nmh]

Rudy did a good job, however with females acting this STUPIDLY, that will change. Heck, if I were a rapist, where do you think I'd hang out? Just reading these articles I could easily target my prey. What's worse is that these stupid females don't even care that they are at EXTREME risk. They still foolishly believe, "It won't happen to me."

[nmh]

Perhaps that last "highball" fuzzied his mind.

Tell him gently that Rudy is no longer the mayor.

Introduce him to Bloomberg.

[nmh]

Okay, Rudy is not longer Mayor. It's now social liberal, Bloomberg. Rudy did do a good job, no doubt about that but what you see going on is becoming a TREND.

[durasell]

I've dropped more in change on the floors of NYC ginmills than most spend in them in a lifetime. I've also worked in them.

At 3 or 4 in the morning, it really doesn't have to do with Rudy or Mike or Ed. There are bad people in the city and if you're going to be out late, then you have to take precautions.

[nmh]

I agree however when females allow themselves to be such obvious targets, crime will go up! I hate to say this but maybe we need another law for bartenders to have taxis take these drunks home and bill them for it. I know, another law to make up for sheer stupidity. Then again ... if they think so little of their life ... oh, never mind.

[durasell]

They're talking about mandatory video cameras in all bars. And while i think video is a good, if not great idea, I'm against mandating it.

The bottomline is: There really is no solution or protection against stupidity or carelessness. Despite all the changes, NYC isn't a safe suburban community and you can't make it into one. Also, NYC has never treated the stupid or the careless kindly and probably never will.