In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from
car accidents than from crazy murderers.[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#UN_Statistics
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_accident#Statistics_...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Under-_and_over...
Are you suggesting that knowing the gender of people is a risk factor for rape?
It seems like a few people are making this odd connection between assault, stalking and rape with knowing somebody's gender. You do realize that most humans can sit on any street corner and identify the gender of passers-by with a high degree of certainty, right?
I mention gender because that modifies the statistics. Women get raped much more often than men do, so the rapes/person stat is misleading; rapes/woman, the stat we care about here, is almost twice the number I quoted.
Anecdotically, none of my female friends were ever raped which doesn't match with your assertion that "one in five American women experiences a rape".
I do think that our culture tends to objectifying women in the medias but I don't think that rape and sexual assault is as prevalent as many people think it is... There's also a lot of paranoia due to the media looking for good sensational stories and latching on any sexual assault story they can find.
So far as you know.
The stereotypical scary guy with pantyhose pulled over his head is only one manifestation of rape. "Date-rape" and taking advantage of people not capable of giving consent (drunk, drugged, etc) happens all of the time.
Men are also victims of that.
If someone decides they want as much privacy as possible, and maximally locks down their profile, they are exposing exactly two things: name and gender. The argument is that this is calling undue attention to that one particular field. No doubt Google has a reason for this -- it is an exception, after all; why implement an exception without a reason? The question is whether this reason (that we don't know) is good enough.
[1]OK, maybe somebody is, but it's not Randall, and it's certainly not me.
This has got to be one of the most overused and misappropriated statistics I've heard during a multitude of arguments. I can't even deduce what point is being made beyond X is greater than Y. You can't simply invalidate a problem, because you found a larger (scarier) number on Wikipedia. Have you considered the amount of time spent and km traveled in a car versus time spent in bars and social gathers? I hope not because it's a rabbit trail and a moot point.
From Randall's post: Our culture's relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them [...]
> "Do you want to walk around Baghdad at night alone?"
An American man's likelihood of getting killed in Baghdad is a couple of magnitude higher than a woman's likelihood of getting killed by a sexual predator in NYC. In fact, my educated guess is that far more women die from car accidents than from crazy murderers.