Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

04 Jan 2002, 11:06 a.m.

Finished The Gift of Fear and will have to talk…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Finished The Gift of Fear and will have to talk more about it later, especially regarding de Becker's pet peeve: local TV news.

de Becker warns us that one indicator that signals danger is a person's resistance to the word "no." He laments that mass culture trains women to not reject or to let someone down lightly and trains men to disregard rejection.

I wish I could tell my mother "no means no!" when she tried to serve me more food.