What if part of modern social harassment of women is not simply random cruelty, but a social pattern that feeds itself?
Not in the crude sense that one side is guilty and the other innocent, and not in the sense that everyone passes through it. Most do not. Some people are hurt and grow kinder. Some are hurt and withdraw. Some become more disciplined, more careful, more decent. But some go looking for company, meaning, and recognition in exactly the wrong places, and that is where a social injury can begin to repeat itself. A boy grows up near girls and yet, after a certain age, increasingly apart from them. Not necessarily by wall or rule, but by atmosphere. Different circles form. Different ways of speaking. Different expectations. Ease is replaced by self-consciousness. He does not learn women in a calm and ordinary way, as simply other people moving through the same world. He learns them instead through distance: as mystery, as audience, as hope, as risk, as something to impr...
