Skip to content

The Landscape Of Fear

Friday 14th June, grey and perishing cold.

Loved Caroline Lucas's teeshirt stunt in the Commons, and her quick-witted connection between this modest white teeshirt, deemed offensive, inappropriate dress, and the half-naked "glamour models" relentlessly assaulting us, from the pages of a national newspaper. . . and then I remembered an article I read in last week's New Scientist, called "Landscape of Fear". It was based on an animal behaviour survey in Yellowstone Park, meant to see how the elk population was responding now wolves have been reintroduced. The received theory is that predators keep prey species in check by eating them. The discovery was that the process works by intimidation alone. Where the elks can smell wolves, where they can see signs of wolves, they can't thrive. Physical condition suffers, reproduction rate suffers, population goes down. Young elk don't play, stressed adults leave the meadows, and retreat into the forest, where food is harder to find. "it was like looking at two different countries" says the scientist. "One at peace and one at war." Conclusion: top predators don't have to kill, their kills are relatively infrequent and isolated events, compared to their mere presence. They just have to be around, being scary. . .

This is what men do to women, I thought. They don't have to rape and kill (and if actual violence against women were aberrant behaviour, it would hardly have the same impact). It's the relentless, "harmless" low-level intimidation that keeps women "in their place", that's what does the trick.

I remember how I felt in the Seventies, and even the Eighties. How close change seemed, how I could walk with my head up; how sure I was that the men I counted as friends in sf genre understood what equality meant, and could be trusted. But after a while, I knew had to change my mind. I knew it would be much harder than I'd thought, because nobody, ever gives up entrenched privilege and unjust powers without a long, dogged struggle. And it had to be a non-violent struggle, this dogged one step forward two steps back mission to make the world a better place, whatever form it takes, and no matter how long it might take, because once the weapons are out, everybody loses. And then it was September 2001, and I knew that women the world over, not only in the overt warzones, would be living in a landscape of fear again.

I am so proud of the young women of today, the ones who stand up, who speak out, even in this landscape of fear; even despite the endless intimidation.
I have such respect for them.