These are forms of female aggression that only men see. But even when women are afforded a front seat to harassment, they don’t always have the correct vantage point for recognizing the subtlety of its operation. Four years before the murders, I was sitting in a bar in Washington, D.C. with a female friend. Another young man was alone at the bar when an older woman scooted next to her. She was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but he smiled curtly at her ramblings and laughed softly at her jokes as he patiently downed his drink. ‘Why is he humoring her?’ my friend asked me. ‘You would never do that.’ I was too embarrassed to say: ‘Because she looks scary’ and ‘I do it all the time.’ Men who have experienced this can recognize that placating these women is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to female bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto her target, who’s failed to respond with the type of feminine hysteria that women more easily recognize.