Honestly, men.

I couldn’t help myself. My eyes started to look around me, on the floor, under the seats as a small strange subconscious panic overtook me as I was standing on the subway reading the latest TIME magazine book excerpt from Ron Suskind about Al-Qaeda’s plot to attack the New York City subway.

Great. As I read the article (and other people tilted their heads to read it too) I think all of us started to wonder when the morning might come when something could go terribly wrong. When I finished the article just before I made my exit at Houston, I took a deep breath, shoved the magazine back into my bag thinking there’s nothing I can do. No one knows what might happen tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, and living in fear is no way of living at all.

However this article from the New York Times gives me yet another reason to try to suppress fear on the subway. It happened on the T in Boston, but with all the more people on the subway here in New York it happens more often. While I’ve yet to be “groped” on mass transit, I have been verbally harassed, and have, on more than on occasion given withering looks to men standing next to me who have more than enough room that they don’t have to be pushed up against me and their eyes have more than enough other angles to look than the general proximity of my chest.

While I am someone who has yet to really understand the overall thought process of the opposite sex, this subway exposure thing really takes the cake. Men grabbing women as they pass and dropping their pants in front of them on the 4/5/6 really doesn’t make any sense to me at all. But then again, neither do men. In Tokyo they have already started the movement towards all-female subways. That’s just what I need – a morning stuck in a perfume packed car full of women ranting about the latest sale at Bloomingdales all while struggling to find room for their huge sunglasses and Louis Vuitton bags.

It’s getting more hazardous living in this city than ever, and it’s not because of what’s happening between the high-rises and cab filled streets – it’s what is taking place underground that has people living in fear. Whatever happened to the days when people could commute to work without worrying about whether or not they’re actually going to make it to the office? Whatever happened to the days when men respected women? Perhaps those days never really existed at all and what is happening now is the slow destruction of a society as it seeps down beneath its surface, infecting the core.

So when I finished reading the Times article I took a deep breath, shoved the newspaper back into my bag and thought there’s nothing I can do. Because this is New York and the city plays by it's own rules and because some men just never grow up.