A while back, I believe 2015, I was at a town council meeting and the town council was voting on whether to approve the construction of a new playground. In what should have been a resounding approval, a NIMBY rose her voice. Now, her reasons for not wanting the playground likely had to do with trafffic and the inconvenience of lengthening her commute by thirty seconds. Of course, that is not a reason to deny children a playground. Instead, her infallible reasoning was that a playground could endnager children and she was concerned for their welfare. Taking the stand, she would not support a measure that would attract pedophiles into her community.
Do playgrounds attract pedophiles? Well, a little but not much. More importantly, most child molestation occurs in domestic settings so the private residences of her community are, statistically, sexually more dangerous for children. A public playground has, likely, many parents of small children watching and, nowadays, surveilance cameras and police while a private home lacks many responsible adults and that level of security. In a similiar phenomenon, many women are, stereotypically, afraid to walk down a street alone at night but while they will clutch their pepper spray for this clichéd fear. If they are at a frat or frat-type party rife with alcohol, cocaine, and horny jocks, they lose their alertness and feel safer than they do alone at night.
As a friendly extrovert who frequents coffee shops, I can attest that strangers rarely speak to one another at coffee shops. If women got tipsy over craft beer at a hipster coffee shop as opposed to a bar, they’d be assaulted and creeped on far less. If, in college, they went to the anime club or the ecology club, the same would be true. But the price of fun is danger for a lot of them. As long as Kim Kardashian is considered more fun than Greta Thunberg, the dangers women face shall remain unabated. A significant portion of society is unable to have relatively innocent fun. I can have fun playing chess over a chai latte and discoursing about international politics. If one lives in the hot, sweaty, world of parties and bars then Nancy Grace may be taken seriously but in the sober world of intellectualism and sobriety from which I hail, Nancy Grace looks like a ridiculous Alex Jones figure narrating the attrocities of a third-world shithole my smart, sober, ass who can point to Budapest on a map has never been to.
Perhaps, the argument could be made to focus on making people feel safe than actually making people safer. Statistically I am among the safest males in society but being Asperger’s, am sometimes called “creepy”. On a daily basis, the average person is unlikely to be the victim of any street crime. On a level, they are the victim of things like environmental law violations and some of the car exhaust they breathe in has more carbon monoxide than is legal but that’s too nerdy for any respectable true crime fan to give half a shit about. But given the lack of crime and the feeling of being unsafe is more common, should the authorities should focus on creating the feeling of safety? The problem is that is often racist or otherwise bigoted. In my case, it is ableism. Plus, it leads to kids not getting playgrounds.
The world according to true crime isn’t true but people don’t want it to be. They want the world to be sexier and more suspenseful and one that is convenient for themselves. The girls would rather be assaulted by a loser in a hoody than a winner at a party because they want to go to parties. They want the hottest, most masculine, guys to be safe and the guys they don’t like to be the people the muscular guys protect them from. They intensely dislike the idea that the good guys are nerdy and the bad guys are hot. True crime is a fantasy of the nightmare they want to be true as opposed to the nightmare that is. When Trump supporters are xenophobic, they want to believe their jobs are being stolen by immigrants and not that automation is the most responsible because unlike robots, people can be evil and they want villians for their story. Like true crime, it is the nightmare they want to be true as opposed to the nightmare that is.
The Autistic Resistance 