I’m not sure what you mean by “pay me for the privilege”. I’m not being bossy though.
I’ll rephrase to highlight what I meant (a “you” plural neutral, not you directed to a person.)
==> I’ve found that rules for women aren’t the same as for men and that one needs to respect that.
Central London and Central Paris have different issues from US cities (acid and knife attacks for London, for instance, which aren’t significant problems in the US as far as I know). Also, European city centers tend to be the oldmoney, old power areas - back to the times where that’s where the Lord was in his castle, with the cathedral nearby, then the courtiers, then the burghers; the little people lived in the close periphery although within the “walls”, if servants they literally lived above the nobility and wealthy commoners - the top floors were for the poor, lots of stairs, no running water so heavy buckets to carry up there, nothing like the way we think of penthouse apartments. Just 2 days ago I was looking at LSE’s overlays of Charles Booth’s London map with today’s. Both cities have been razed and re-imagined (by Haussman, by fire, by Millenium projects)
Baltimore is often discussed on these boards because of JHU and many people consider the area around JHU unsafe in ways that New Haven isn’t. (For the record, I disagree with these statements and was ridiculed for it.) Mostly I think it’s related to The Wire. For a while another city was used due to a film where a woman walked alone at night and there’d been a huge outcry at how completely unrealistic it was.
Some cities have a bad rep, I guess, or stand for something else (ie., Manhattan stands for Wall Street, skyscrapers, 5th avenue, crowds, Times Square, lights 24/7, capitalist greed, expensive real estate… not “danger walking down the street”. Now, if you’d said “Central Park at night”, it’d have been another story).
Again, it’s about going where you feel like going - not about putting yourself in danger expecting to escape unscathed. There’s a difference between being clueless and being reasonable, and between being reasonably fearful and reasonably fearless.