Have you considered that it might just be you live in a dangerous place? None of the women I know carry around those things and never have. If they have stories

Have you considered that it might just be you live in a dangerous place? None of the women I know carry around those things and never have. If they have stories of being harassed in public places, it never came up in conversation either. But I live in a place that's quite well policed and safe. In a more dangerous city, out on the street if there's nobody around, yes you're going to be safer if you're a ripped 6'3 man than a small lady. No doubt about it. But again, to stress this, it's the other way around if you're at a managed venue of some sort like an office, a conference, etc. There it's actually the men who have to fear the women and not the other way around, although fortunately as bad incidents are very rare in both directions, we can all mostly live without fear. With respect to hitting on women - again, please don't be tricked by others into thinking these are universal global truths. I successfully flirted with and got dates with female strangers quite a few times in the past, in all sorts of places (before I met my wife). In fact I even got picked up by a stranger myself once! So it's not only men that hit on strangers. Of course it's heavily dependent on how you do it - I definitely found it much harder to do that when I was in my early 20s. As with all men, you're just a lot more awkward and less able to read the signs at that age, as well as less successful, so much more likely to come across as undesirable ('creepy'). That's true of both genders. But it didn't stay that way. A lot of women had big problems with #metoo and the general culture it was trying to create. My experience has been that for every woman who loudly proclaims their hatred of creepy men there are multiple others who quietly wish that a nice man would strike up a conversation and chat them up, and are sad that men have now been trained not to do it. #Metoo and the feminism that surrounds it is intensely ideological, so people who disagree often are afraid of speaking up because they know they'll be viciously attacked by the left, even if they are themselves female. If you live in a very lefty place like San Francisco, especially one with a gender imbalance (so attractive women get hit on a lot and badly), you're probably going to draw conclusions like the above. If you live somewhere a bit more normal you'll see both sides of this and realize the balance of power has been tipped so far in the direction of women now that it makes quite a lot of them unhappy. They are now expected to take risks and do the work that traditionally men would do, because the men are afraid to do so.