Several bloggers I know and love had posts up in response to this great one from Echidne. I thought all of them were wonderful and important. Here’s one of them:
Echidne has a spot-on piece up about the very basic ways in which male terrorism has restricted and destroyed women’s lives. She is deliberately talking about the basics that get lost in the flurry of theory that is modern feminism, and one of the basics is the right to go out.
Just that. Walk out of the house. Drive a car without the fear of some asshole rear-ending you just so he can rape you (this happened recently in California and in fact happens frequently), go hiking by yourself, go running, walk into a parking lot, go camping – do anything outside (not that women aren’t raped in their own homes).
I have huge personal experience with this and I didn’t even grow up in a pre-feminist world. But I grew up in an artificial construction of the middle ages, known to most people as Saudi Arabia. I didn’t go for a walk by myself until I was 20 years old. My leg muscles when I arrived in the United States were so weak, I couldn’t run around the block (I have since run a marathon). In one of my earlier solitary rambles in Lahore, I did get raped. I wasn’t allowed to drive. I wasn’t allowed to assert my existence in the outside world. I was disappeared – as are millions of women even as we speak.
Read the rest at The Apostate
mirabile dictu 
Very powerful and yes, spot on. You are right. This is so, so important.
Apostate is pretty amazing, all the time.