WINE CHATS: Would you rather be stuck in the woods with a bear or a man? We choose bears

Would you rather be stuck in the woods with a bear or a man — this is the question that has gripped the world and the answer doesn’t seem to surprise anyone.

This week on The Nightly edition of Wine Chats, we are simply two women drinking wine with not enough alcohol in it, expressing our thoughts and feelings about the thing we should all be talking about — the perpetual violence against women by men.

We’re not here for facts and figures

Lyndsey: So we just want to say, we’re not here to rhyme off facts and solutions, because we all know the facts. They’re horrendous. And unfortunately, there are no solutions in place right now. But we’re just two mums, two women on the couch, and we just keep getting angrier and angrier as these news reports come in. And this is like our therapist, like our therapy.

Billi: Yes, welcome to the therapy couch. Personally, for the first time in my life, I genuinely feel scared going out and doing stuff. Do you know what got me really bad — Samantha Murphy? This is the 51-year-old mum who disappeared probably like a month ago, a couple of months ago now. They still haven’t found her. A guy got charged for it. That hit home for me so hard because she just went out running on Sunday morning. This is the exact same thing I’ve been doing. I’ve been training for a half marathon. So I’ve been getting up early and going for a run. And I’ll go when it’s still dark, the sun is only coming up. So it’s like, if you can’t go running during the day, what can you do? They still haven’t found her. God knows what happened to her.

Lyndsey: I don’t even think about myself. I just think about my daughter. My mind’s not even on me. My mind is on when my daughter gets to the age of dating, even 15-year-olds are being killed by their partners. I think it’s so crap that as parents, you have to worry about your daughter when they start dating. If and when they break up with a guy, whether he’ll have this mentality of like, well, you pissed me off, if I can’t have you, no one can type mentality, killing them. Or they’re in a DV situation and they decide that they have control over her and murder her. To me, that scares the crap out of me. I haven’t even thought about myself to be honest.

Billi: At the moment both my daughters are still so young and I feel like I can, to an extent, look after them because we control where they go at the moment. So I haven’t even thought that far down the line but as you bring it up, we just spoke about this in the car the other day, I did have a friend who was 15 or 16 at the time. This is about 20 years ago now. And she got murdered by her boyfriend. Same thing. You know, they broke up. He wasn’t happy with it. He very, very violently killed her. She was so young.

Lyndsey: This is the reason why I get so freaked out by it, it’s factual that every year that goes by, more and more women are getting murdered by their partners. What’s going to happen? Like our daughters are still young, but what’s going to happen in seven years time when they do start dating? How crap is it going to be at that point?

Billi: This is why my girls started Muay Thai as an exercise thing. But in my mind I’m like, you need to know how to protect yourself. You need to know how to karate chop someone in the throat. I think I have these conversations with them way more than what my parents ever did with me when we were younger. I don’t think my mum and dad when I was six or eight had to sit me down and say, hey, if somebody tries to do this to you, you do this to them. But I haven’t really thought that far ahead, like when they start dating, when they start seeing people. Right now, I’m sort of more focused on me not getting snatched while I’m out. Because I still need to come home to my kids. I still need to come home to my husband. I still need to come home to you. Lindsay would be devastated if something happened to me. Wine Chats would be very sad.

Bear vs Man

Billi: So that question of, would you rather be stuck in the woods with a bear or a guy hit so deep because I would totally take my chances with a bear? There was one woman, who said at least if a bear attacked me, I would be believed. And I think that again is so true because of the amount of noise that women have been making about how we’ve been treated sexually and, physically, and it’s just falling on deaf ears. These guys are getting put in jail just to be let out on bail.

Lyndsey: But are they even getting into jail? This is a part of my anger and I know nothing about law. I do not understand how the system works, but in my mind, I just don’t understand it. I don’t know my stats, but I would say the majority of these dudes that have a restraining order against them, they don’t care. They break them all the time. How come they don’t get tracked and then an alarm system goes off to alert you he’s approaching the perimeter that he shouldn’t be in?

Billi: I love that idea. Why isn’t that a thing? We want to protect the human rights of these guys, right? But why are we protecting the human rights of animals? These men are animals. That is the only other way I can describe it. Like when you behave like that when you are doing this to women, when you think it’s your right to be able to do this to us because you’re physically stronger, like what is happening in the world?

Have we terrified you enough?

We’re terrified, you’re terrified and there are no answers in sight, just sadness, frustration and fear for our present and the future.

Let’s hope that by talking about it and continuing to put pressure on lawmakers, we are heard and stronger punishments are put in place to protect all women. We have some solutions, primarily castration and chopping hands off, in the event that our lawmakers need ideas.

Thank you for joining us on the couch again this week and please find us again next Friday evening, right here on The Nightly.