"It's all men till no men"

Putting “all men” in perspective

A good way to expose how extreme the blanket-suspicion slogan is, is to compare it with everyday hazards that really are everywhere—cars on the road and wet floors. Both injure or kill far more people each year than male strangers do, yet we don’t declare “all cars” or “all floors” off-limits.

Annual U.S. numbers (2023–24 data)	Deaths	Non-fatal injuries	Per-capita chance of being hurt¹
Motor-vehicle crashes	40,901 nhtsa.gov	≈2.2 million reuters.com	0.65 %
Falls (uneven or wet surfaces are the #1 cause)²	46,653 nsc.org	≈9 million cdc.gov	2.6 %
All violent victimisations	—	6.4 million incidents (22.5 per 1,000 persons) bjs.ojp.gov	2.3 %
Men arrested for violent crime	—	0.50 million arrests (≈79 % male) ucr.fbi.gov	0.30 % of men

¹Population denominator ≈ 340 million. ²Uneven/wet surfaces account for 55 % of slip-and-fall incidents smithlawcenter.com.

What the comparison shows

• Higher absolute risk does not trigger blanket condemnation.

  • Slipping on a wet floor is statistically more likely to injure you this year than being assaulted, yet nobody says “all floors are dangerous” or refuses to walk.

  • Society accepts that cars will kill ~41,000 people a year; instead of banning cars or shaming every driver, we mitigate with seat-belts, speed limits, and DUI laws.

• Proportionality matters.  Treating 100 % of men as threats because 0.30 % are arrested for violent crime is a false-positive rate of 333-to-1—far steeper than anything we tolerate for cars or floors, even though those hazards harm more people overall.

• We separate the object from the operator.

  • If a drunk driver kills someone, we punish that driver; we don’t turn on every sober motorist.

  • When a janitor forgets a “Wet Floor” sign and someone falls, the response is better signage and training—not a moral crusade against all flooring "All floors until dry floors."

Why the “all men” logic breaks down

1. Category error.  Cars and floors are recognised as situationally risky, not morally malicious. Branding all men “risky” smuggles moral blame where a small-target safety heuristic would suffice.

2. Selective application.  Using the same arithmetic, “It’s all women” could be applied to child-abuse (mothers are the lone perpetrator in 37 % of single-offender cases) yet almost nobody endorses that slogan because it is obviously unjust.

3. Counter-productivity.  Over-policing an entire group diverts resources from the real predictors—prior violence, substance abuse, coercive control—and erodes the co-operation you need from bystanders (most of whom are men) to stop predators.

A saner safety model—borrowed from cars & floors

Everyday hazard	How we actually handle it	How the same principle would handle violence
Cars	Licensing, speed limits, DUI checks, crash-safety tech—but no blanket driver shaming	Focus on the tiny repeat-offender pool, design environments that deter assault (lighting, CCTV), and remove offenders quickly
Wet floors	Spot the risk, post a sign, mop it dry; treat the spot, not every hallway	Teach situational awareness, flag specific risky contexts (isolated areas, impaired company), don’t stereotype half the population

Bottom line

Risk-reduction doesn’t require group vilification.  We can (and do) make cars and floors safer without despising cars or floors. Apply the same evidence-based proportionality to interpersonal violence: punish the offenders, improve the environment, support all victims—male or female—and drop the mathematically indefensible “all men” rhetoric.