In the summer of 2001, I was having nightmares and trouble sleeping.  There was a rapist loose in Fort Collins, the college town where I live.  He would come in through an open window, (it was hot and those without air-conditioning would open their windows at night to let in the cooler air), sometime between three and five a.m., usually choosing a young college woman who lived alone.  He would blindfold and tie her up, then force her to perform a sexual act.  Young women were sleeping with ice picks under their pillows and none of us would go out at night alone.  A rumor was circulating that sometimes, after this guy was done with the girl, he’d hang around her house while she was still tied up in the other room and cook himself breakfast, but it wasn’t true.

I wasn’t afraid because I thought it would happen to me, I didn’t live alone, but I could easily imagine what it was like to be those girls.  At night, my imagination has no limits and I am not an entirely rational person.  This is aggravated by the fact that in any given hour of any day, the media is filled with stories of human violence, (all the while arguing that we insist on it, that they are just giving us what we want, that we wouldn’t watch otherwise).  Although the culture we live in is truly one of the most violent, the media makes us feel that the threat is everywhere and ever present, putting us into a shared, cultural panic attack.  This fear, to some extent, benefits our government and economy.  It makes us willing to trade our freedoms for protection, makes us stock up on bottled water and duct tape.