such threats give in to the pervasive pressure to just keep quiet about them, those who never have to deal with such threats can continue to claim
~that those threats are not happening,
~or that they do not happen often enough for society as a whole to be concerned about them,
~or that when they do happen, whether they happen often or not, they really are just not that significant or scary for those who experience them
Any of those attitudes creates a general atmosphere that insists that nothing should be done because those threats are just not that big of a deal.
Furthermore, that same general atmosphere also denigrates the women who, having received such threats, dare even to mention that they have been threatened, much less that they are made uncomfortable or even terrified by being threatened in that way.
When the public at large had its nose rubbed in the reality of how black people, especially black men, are harassed, brutalized, and often even killed by police, even when they have done nothing to warrant suspicion, much less anything to justify such brutal treatment, a lot of essentially well-intentioned but careless white people who had been able to hide from that reality were forced to confront it and to "choose sides."
As a result, many previously uninformed white people (again, I am referring not to the out and proud racists, but to those who mean well but who just never bothered to become fully informed--and often because doing so would have been so darned
uncomfortable and
inconvenient for them) finally had to come out against the abuses perpetrated by our country's police forces against black citizens.
In the process, those previously uninformed people also ended up learning about the militarization of the police and about the fact that the cops can and do routinely and outrageously violate
anyone's civil rights, with virtually no risk of ever being held accountable for their own criminal behavior. These people became aware at last that although their white skin might offer them somewhat more protection against police brutality than is afforded to people of color, it does not give them any
guarantee that they won't be brutalized or even killed at any time, regardless of their innocence, by a cop on a power trip, or one who is just having a bad day and needs someone to take it out on.
Similarly, otherwise more or less well-meaning men who have hitherto maintained their ignorance about what women and girls are subjected to in terms of street harassment, sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, online threats, and physical sexual assaults
must be informed about the reality of what women experience, including how pervasive it is and how very, very ugly it gets.
People who are not subjected to such behaviors don't know about them unless we make the information public and disseminate it widely. In general, not knowing is a
comfortable condition, because as long as you don't know, you don't have to feel responsible for doing something about it. People are busy, and they have a lot of their own problems to deal with. Most will resist taking on the burdens carried by others when they know deep down inside that they themselves will not have to face those problems. That being so, a lot of people bury their head in the sand and go "Lalalalalalala," simply because they realize that if they are forced to actually
know, they won't be able to stand on the sidelines and ignore the issue any longer.
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