Until I got to Athens, I didn't fully comprehend just how different safety is for girls than it is for boys. I grew up incredibly aware of the implied threat on my well-being every time I left my house. If I stopped for gas after dance at 9 or 9:30 p.m., I would make sure to park in a well-lit area and away from other cars so that if anyone approached me, I would see them coming.

My mom taught me to always have my keys out before I got to my car and scan around and underneath it before getting in, just in case someone was hiding there. I'd wear sweatpants or a sweatshirt during the summer if I was stopping somewhere on my way to dance so that my outfit — normally a tank top and shorts, since dance — wouldn't imply that I was "asking for it." I avoided walking around by myself late at night. I avoided being alone with older males I didn't know well, even if I was in public. As a girl, I live and have lived my life very aware of potential threats to my safety and what situations are risky for me.

I've been in college just over three weeks, and I can't count the number of times I've explained to a guy that "no, that's unsafe if you're a girl, buddy." One day at lunch, a friend of mine saw someone she knew from high school and pointed her out to us. The two guys we were eating with started talking about how amusing it would be if they walked up to her and already knew her name and where she went to high school, and my friend and I just exchanged concerned looks.

We proceeded to explain to them that as girls, if a guy were to walk up to us and already know our name, we would be incredibly worried for our safety. We would assume he was a threat. If a girl walked up to us and already knew us, we'd assume we had some mutual friend with her, but we would still be wary. The theoretical scenario of being approached by strangers who knew us when we didn't know them automatically set off warning bells for my friend and me, but the boys just thought it'd be funny. It wasn't until after my friend and I very insistently explained how threatening it would seem to us that they realized how it could be seen as a personal security issue.

I was talking to a few people during class one day about frat parties, and I mentioned how I had heard too much about the risk you're taking, as a female, by showing up to parties, especially alone. Fraternities, especially at large SEC schools like UGA, are notorious for letting girls into parties when they won't let guys in because they know they can get girls drunk and take advantage of them.

Not all fraternities are like this, but they have enough of a reputation that every girl I've talked to on campus knows to never go alone and never put down their drink, even if all they're drinking is water. The boy sitting next to me scoffed at my worry and told me to "not knock it until I've tried it," which is a fair point, but also a naive one. I'm not about to risk my health and safety just to try something out when I know that my gender puts me at a heightened risk for sexual assault and rape; I'm going to assume that the rumors I've heard are true, and take precautions accordingly.

Whenever the topic of rape or sexual assault comes up, especially in regards to college campuses, someone is quick to jump to the defense of boys. "Well, she was asking for it! Didn't you see her outfit?...She was drunk; how does she know she didn't want it at the time?" (Which also begs the question — how do you know she did want it at the time?) "She knew what she was getting into when she went to the party...Women make false allegations all the time; how do we know this one is real?....It was just a twenty-minute mistake. Don't ruin his life for this...She's a slut anyway. She probably wanted it...Boys will be boys."

I'm sick of it. Completely, 100 percent sick of it. I was sick of it before I graduated high school, and I'm even more sick of it now that I'm on campus and staring at a statistic that claims 20 percent of the girls I know will be sexually assaulted before we graduate. I'm not OK with that. Nobody should be. Do you know what the chance of a male being raped is over the course of his lifetime?

1 in 33.

1 in 11 for LGBT+ men.

I am by no means claiming that male sexual assault is not an issue, because it definitely is. My point is that men are statistically less likely to be assaulted than women, and therefore they are commonly less aware of the inherent dangers in certain everyday activities.

Most of the boys I've discussed this with are good people, and many of them are feminists. They didn't realize how scared women are of men, and they didn't realize that some of their behaviors help perpetuate that without them ever realizing it. Yes, we need to teach boys not to rape instead of teaching women to not get raped. We also need to teach boys that while they might never consider hurting a woman, that doesn't mean other boys won't. Just because they don't threaten or abuse their girlfriends doesn't mean it's not a rampant problem, and just because they're "good" doesn't mean that their actions don't occasionally perpetuate toxic masculine stereotypes.

1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted in college, according to statistics. My friend group has five girls. Which one of us is it going to be?

When you put it that way, it no longer seems so distant, does it?