"Few of us have enough vitality to make any of our instincts imperious." - George Bernard Shaw. I think Shaw was right that you have to make an effort to listen to your intuitions. Nowadays, it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to protecting your life, but people can go a little too far by letting their naive, discriminating, and generalized ideas develop negatively in their heads. Race and gender are the select topics that we let influence the freedoms of our culture because of the media, the distorted opinions of family and friends, or a bad experience. In Susan Jacoby's story Unfair Game, she meets a man in a bar and a man with a wife on a flight to San Antonio. After describing each encounter, she ends up complaining about her disgust for men. It's obviously not fair how some men treat her, but her generalizations about men are quickly disproved. When the last man in her story asks her to join him for a drink, she denies it; he takes it very kindly and leaves. This woman allows her ego and insecurities to cloud her judgment. She says no to every man she meets and doesn't seem the least bit flattered that men notice her. He doesn't even have the slightest idea how difficult it is for a person to ask another person out. He can't tell the difference between the slimeballs he meets and the real guys. Jacoby's reactions tend toward the extreme of women having valid reasons for keeping the bat in the bag. Jacoby was beaten by men, but there are men in the world who assault, abuse or rape women. Jacoby seems to overreact to his mild experiences with men. He closes himself off to any kind of progress, even though all the experiences he described made men seem quite harmless compared to what was possible. As the story begins, her friend also shrugs at the same man at Jacoby's bar. An educated guess would be that the two friends probably discuss their distaste for men in depth, only encouraging their distorted opinions of all men. Women with Jacoby's perspective seem very narcissistic and apprehensive. You would think that the most receptive audience for this piece would be women, but if a woman were to consider some of my points suggesting that most men don't deserve Jacoby's style of treatment or rejection, they would find that generalizing the idea that all men are pigs is sexist.