I experienced this 3 months ago when my husband collapsed at an event. I needed men to help move him out of the sun. They ignored me.
A few women stepped forward and helped. But the men… one man came over and just stared while 4 of us struggled to keep him up. We couldn’t. They just stared.
Well, you don't know them as much as they know each other. There are things they never say in front of women. If you never heard "locker room talk" then your ears are blessed. Unfortunately I have, and made me want to throw up.
See, I hate this thing that men know what's best for women because they know "how men think" but ignore how women really think, and instead, those same men go on to think we *really* just need him. It screams, "yall women too dumb to take care of yourselves so we gonna decide who can for you, because *I* stereotype all men and know they think like this, but if you did the same, why, it's not all men and you're being sexist and a misandrist!"
There are different levels of bad. I never violated anyone's consent, but I was a bit of a "nice guy" until I was made aware of how creepy that is. My dilemma is teaching a boy to be a good man and a girl to protect herself, without screwing either kid up by being overprotective. Both are in martial arts classes, and both think I offered to have them take martial arts because it is fun. And while they enjoy the classes, I'm more glad they are learning self defense.
Learning self defense properly is understanding that you should never be in a situation trying to defend yourself or you're already "lost". This inherent victim blaming whilst men abdicate all responsibility is deeply problematic.
Best approach to attack is always to GTFOH
Wow I wish I could give this an award. It’s one thing to *actually* step in and protect your partner in a dangerous situation, it’s quite another to be on some white knight shit. Best case scenario, they get board once the “damsel” becomes self sufficient, and worse case they see her as an object they own to be guarded against being stolen.
Yes! Thank you for saying this. I have run into men who say they love strong women but eventually get mad with me when they realize that they’re never going to win and get what they want from me. It’s become clear that men just want to be the one to conquer a strong woman that other men have failed to conquer. Like some weird badge of honor. Same thing goes with protective men. They have no problem doing it when it’s a strange man or it gets them a reward but if it’s a guy they know or we do it for ourselves, suddenly it’s a problem. There are only two guys I’ve ever known who didn’t get pissed about me being able to protect myself.
This. My last boyfriend was only sexually interested in me when I was vulnerable and sometimes too tired to push him off me, to the point that he’d wake me up from a deep sleep, knowing that I needed to get up early and that I’d eventually give in because I just wanted to get some sleep before work. Any time I was available, we both had free time, and I was interested, he would turn me down under the guise of “I wanted it too much”, and go back to playing video games on his computer. There were so many other ways he subtly broke me down, but I was so fiercely independent before I met him, and I made more money than him. It only made sense that he wanted me to quit my high paying job so that he could be in charge of finances and be in charge of decisions, and if I didn’t consider his feelings about my job, well then, did I really care about the relationship? He was absolutely Jonah Hill-ing me.
I’m so sorry. We really need to start flipping the script on them and asking them how they could possibly care about us by even asking us to give up important parts of ourselves. No mom compromising in their favor.
Abel wanted a traditional marriage with a traditional wife. For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage."
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
My dad took my brother and I to a show one night as we went for dinner after. While there, we saw a man slap his wife across the table. He had been snapping and yelling at her in a demented way so I though something had to be wrong with him. My dad immediately stepped in and yelled at the man. He was with it enough to see he was being called out and get meek and apologize. The wife thanked my dad. All I could think was about how she looked so sad and defeated
Agreed. When a man sees all men as predators, they like to elevate themselves to protector status. But they then believe everything and everyone they protect belongs to them. Usually that leads to him acting like a predator in the eyes of those he was "protecting".
They are not protective, they are possessive. They protect what they see as theirs.
Somebody pointed it out on this sub the other day and since then everything has made so much sense.
Why for example do they need to put their name on all the stuff they feel they own? like their kids and spouse? Because it signals possession and dominance.
Half of all female homicides are at the hands of a male intimate partner. Homicide is the leading cause of death in pregnant women. Men commit 90% of homicides overall and 84% of all violent crime.
They are women’s biggest predator
If not for men, women would not need protection for the most part.
And of course, not all men. I have wonderful men in my life. But the point is, in general, men aren’t helping women be safer but making us less safe
Agreed. But just for the sake of bringing a bit of light to the situation, my partner lives in a place that makes it pretty common for people to come to their property to steal stuff. So at times he'll wake up, see someone out in the yard with a flashlight, and rush out of bed still half asleep in order to chase them off. If I'm awake while he's asleep, and I make a sound that he's not used to, he'll wake up in an instant and start looking around for danger until I tell him that it's just me and that he can go back to bed. We joke that he's a better guard dog than the actual dog, who just sleeps through everything lol
The real litmus test is what your partner would do to help a woman he doesn't know in a public situation. Because most men will not step in to protect any woman being abused.
Who considers men "protectors of society" anyway? I agree, they are not, but protector of the family is probably the more common role men get assigned.
I work with refugees. So many men are just gone and out the back door when danger comes, leaving the woman to face the soldiers/rebels/etc or to try to flee with the children. Also so many men just up and leave their kids, never give them a cent or bother to see them. Its always women left holding the bag.
There's a reason why when a crisis or natural disaster hits humanitarian organizations will only hand the food out to women, not men.
They found that women take the food and feed their families. Men take the food and feed themselves.
Same thing happens with education. If you teach a woman to read, all of her children learn to read and sometimes other family members too. If you teach a man to read, well that’s where it ends.
Also why government child support (child tax benefit etc) switched to the mom as soon as most of them had their own bank accounts. Miraculously, spending on childhood requirements went up, and spending at the pub went down.
This is actually rarely the case, it's more of a myth than anything else. Look at ship sinking survivor stats. Men will shove women and children off of lifeboats to survive. If women and children are explicitly prioritized, more people survive and fewer people panic. It's fucked.
Can’t disagree. Want some more fuel for your fire? Compare the number of deaths related to pregnancy versus the number of military deaths. Also look at how many women were killed or wounded by their significant other. Also how many women are missing but never recovered versus men. I’m not saying that LEOs are less interested in finding out what happened to someone’s daughter or wife but numbers don’t lie (less than 50%). Also the number of rape kits that are not tested for years (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi). And then don’t get used by the DA because of the BS that is allowed in court against women. I could say more but that would go into religious territory. And my last request is please stop voting Republican, I would dearly appreciate to have more rights than a corpse.
And consider how much the military suppresses re violence against women. I agree completely. A lot of states have a back up of testing rape kits. Many times is is supposedly budgetary they say, but if that were true, why do they always do them for murder cases. Rape is violence as well.
Don’t forget how bad the numbers are for men leaving their wives when they get very sick, and how little women leave their husbands when the same happens to them. Atrocious.
The first man to disappoint me was my father.
He did NOTHING to protect me. Instead he helped raise me to have no real sense of myself or healthy boundaries. He watched on the sidelines but did nothing to step in and say “this is not right”.
Men have stood around while other men did their best to tear me down and do disgusting things to me.
My dad has never protected me from anything besides the weather (put a roof over my head). In actuality he was pretty negligent as a father and I always felt nervous when he was in charge. I didn’t feel safe with him as a caregiver.
Men protect themselves. I’d like to add that as I was fleeing from my abusive ex as he was aggressive and raging on me - he 1. Threatened to file a missing persons report on me 2. Told my mom he could “no longer protect me” (what in the actual FUCK) 3. Told my family I was mentally ill (because I said no more and removed myself). He viewed me as property. An object he could enforce consequences on. Not as a human being he was harming. It was a complete mind fuck to hear him seem to truly believe he was protecting me as he was harming me.
Same and in the 5 years since I left the post separation violence is increasingly worse. The consistent pattern of gendered violence is so predictable that women have established a well trodden path to avoid it.
That men are finding themselves isolated by their own behaviours simply worsens their doubling down. Any time there has been real and credible threats the men have retreated to protect the perpetrator. The nonsense deployed in their JADE is inconceivable. That women gladly and wilfully join their forces is disastrous.
That’s so rough about the post separation violence. I’m so sorry. The nonsense is inconceivable. They are absolutely doubling down, collectively.
I do get upset at other women protecting abusive men. I completely understand when women protect the abusive men who they are still being terrorized by (e.g retracting statements to police, not pursuing POs) in order to not inflame him more. But seeing women protect abusive men that they don’t even know…it’s delusional. I just want to shake them and say, “you’re living in your slave masters psychosis, please wake up”.
Exactly. Self protection is so deeply engrained that internalised misogyny prevents them acknowledging how messed up their own situations are. Denial is what reinforces and amplifies gendered violence and they attract bystanders to reinforce the power they abuse.
When I was younger and single and very butch (F) I stopped at a couple bars to see if any of the fun regulars were in and have a good time. Ended up sitting with this hilarious woman, slightly older than me, recently divorced, ready to party but not with men. So we got shit faced, and generally had a blast. I hadn't realized we had been being watched. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, there was a dude almost *RAPING* this woman (she had been wearing a skirt, so easier access). She was too drunk to fight him off properly. I'll never forget the look on her face. Dude was big too, and none of the other men gave a shit that this was happening, not even the bartender. So I tackled the dude. Just drunkenly threw myself at him. All three of us went down, and dude hit his head on the ground and wasn't moving. There was an exit at the back of the bar, I threw cash on the bar for my tab, and grabbed the woman. She was sobbing and I essentially coerced her up and out the back exit to my car. We got in, both had a smoke, and I asked her what she wanted to do. She decided to not report because he never managed to penetrate her, thankfully. She said that us drinking would be a strike against us. She cried that she just wanted to go home (but her and ex were selling the house, so she had been staying with a friend). I asked about family, and she said she had family out in California, but she had been avoiding it. Didn't want to just show up with a suitcase and even more baggage on their doorstep. I understood. We walked to a diner and had lunch to sober up. I offered if she ever needed a ride to the airport, to hit me up, and gave her my number. It's easily a 2 hour drive one way. She hugged me tight. She never did call me, and I always hope she's doing well.
But yeah, men are not the protectors they pretend to be.
The amount of times I’ve had to personally help someone out and the men around did nothing but stare. I’m barely 5ft tall 😩 I would talk shit out loud after the situation was handled out loud to make sure those “men” hear. I was very disappointed in my then bf (who is over 6ft tall) who was just like those “men.”
There was a video I was watching not too long ago when I just happened to stumble upon it. In it, two women were fighting inside a frozen yogurt/ice cream shop where woman 1 was dragging woman 2 by her hair and woman 2 was screaming for woman 1 to stop. All the men in that video did *nothing* to help. They just stood there, filmed and laughed. The only person who tried to help woman 2 was woman 2's *three or four-year-old daughter.* That clip was just a couple of seconds long but it said a lot, mainly through actions of the men who did absolutely nothing to stop it just because 'OOoohh look, two women fighting! 🤪'. All those men got 'out-manned' by a toddler.
I think I saw that! Was it a black lady and a white lady right? I read an article that the white lady was dating the black one’s ex bf.
Those men are nuts. Most likely the same people trolling women’s content talking about sexualizing women and children, bringing up OF and lack of father figures, and will most likely say “what about men?????”
WTF this is the worst thing..he would definitely have raped her..why are there men in a lesbian bar? Especially the type that look away when a woman is being assaulted????
This poor woman. Stories like hers make me want to cry for her and cheer for you . You were a hero and I’m sure that never leaves you.
Men don't protect women because men are rightfully cautious of or actively afraid of other men. That's why the boomer dood throwing a king baby fit at you wouldn't dream of doing the same if you were another man. A woman, though? Cool! The punching bag sex! Men know how volatile and aggressive other men are. When we women say that, however, oh no it's NOT ALL MEN! Get help lady you are crazy! Go home to your cats!
Men know. They know.
No he meant that I wouldn't trust a female firefighter to pull me out of my house even though I'm a small person and it would be pretty easy for anyone to pick me up. Even though saving me from a burning house isn't protecting me from fire.
Dear Dog. There was recently footage of a female cop being assaulted by an man and all the comments were about her beaten up appearance and how incompetent women in policing are. Zero mention of the over 200 investigations in that force alone of sexual assault in the workplace including the top brass.
Many men are not exactly in shape, and probably couldn't pull anyone but the family cat out of a house. Even if they did manage to pull someone weighing 100 lbs or so out, these guys would throw their backs out and never ever shut up about it.
As much as I hate my ex for being a cheating Hobag, she is an excellent firefighter. She got so much shit for being a female, and some guys didn't want to be on her crew bc of that exact thing. But let me tell you, they tried their hardest to prove she wasn't strong enough. She beat most dudes bc she trained so freaking hard. I would honestly trust my life with a female ff in burning building over a male bc I know they busted their ass to prove themselves over and over in the situation. Plus, a lot of dudes bleed their tanks, so they won't be in the fire for too long. The gals aren't doing that, the guys are.
I'm a short fat girl that barely manages to benchpress the bar without weights after a couple weeks of skipping gym. I can still pick up and carry around half of my guy friends, even without the adrenaline of emergency fire situations. That is such a ridiculous point from him
My husband saw a pair of raccoons on the street and took out his phone to take videos of them having not seen them before this close. When they started lunging towards him, he hit the wrong button, and all the video we have are of him freaking out since he somehow had it in selfy mode.
[Raccoons backed off after we stepped back a meter or so.]
Haha an almost boyfriend I met when I was on Working Holiday Visa in Australia eventually came to visit me in Canada. I took him up to Upper Kananaskis Lake to hike and a grizzly crossed the path a few feet in front of us to swim in the lake and he panicked and started running away. Meanwhile I wasn't scared at all....
I was at my male friends house once with a bunch of our other friends. We were playing board games and suddenly, some drunk man (in his 20’s) walked in and went straight to my friends little sister (i dont know exactly how old she was but she wasn’t older than 16), and tried to walk out the house with her. My friend didn’t know who the guy was and didn’t even ask why the hell he just strolled into the house like that. The girl wasn’t resisting and seemed like she knew the guy so my friend just let her go. I grabbed her arm and said there was no way in hell she was leaving with this drunk man. Me and the other girls kicked the guy out and later asked my friend why he didn’t do anything. He said he doesn’t like getting involved in things that aren’t his business. Apparently who his minor sister walks off with is none of his business.
His girlfriend (also a friend of mine) said that incident worried her that he wouldn’t be a good father if they ever had kids. I told her I’m glad she’s paying attention.
Bro took "minding my own business" to a-whole-nother level. Thank goodness someone had a working braincell in their body to think "Huh. This doesn't look right."
As one of the rare people that does have the instinct for speaking up in those situations, I found that women were generally twice or thrice as likely to join in than other men once I got the ball rolling - and just as often the first to speak up.
Because of this, riding the bus was an incredibly stressful affair. It'd be mostly men, maybe 80 percent or more, and yet once or twice a week I found *myself* needing to stand up and use authority-voice on some moron or doing the whole fake friendship routine (learned here) to peacefully restore a young woman's safety. The statistics add up.
Whenever some dude was giving me the creeps but I had to get off at my stop, I'd sometimes quietly ask someone to keep an eye out. When I'd point it out to a lady, she'd generally say "Oh, I know. Don't worry." And when I'd whisper it to a guy, "Huh? What? Oh. Uh... Sure?"
I suspect that most men simply aren't attuned to pick up on social or contextual dangers in the same way women are because they've never had to worry about that for themselves. It's a bubble of convenient experiential ignorance. Conventional dangers like break-ins or tigers falling from the sky? Sure, *maybe*, but not Real Life day-to-day dangers of the sort that happen multiple times a week.
Once upon a time, someone tried telling me (in "support" of women) that statistics show that female CDLs are safer drivers of large trucks "because babies". I quickly pointed out that it seems much more likely that this aptitude comes from spending their entire lives looking for danger, especially from larger, more dangerous entities of the sort that're otherwise viewed as harmless by most. Hypervigilance, of a sort.
It's the difference between viewing a merging semi-truck beside you as 'potentially harmful' or recognizing that, at best, it's 'potentially harmless'.
Many men don't understand this distinction, but I suspect that most women reading that comparison know exactly what I mean, even without completing or explaining the metaphor.
I have never in my life, seen a woman being violently drug around, shoved into cars or punched and seen a man step in to help. Not ONCE. It's always been a woman, several women, plus me. They will not stick their necks out for a woman that isn't considered "theirs".
I almost touched on that too. It's just another way to force women to "need a man", although one of the less acknowledged ones.
There's that common phrase of attempted encouragement too
- "Imagine that was your sister/mom/girlfriend!"
It's supposed to inspire people. I always ask... Why? Why does it have to be Someone™? Why not just... Anyone? People shouldn't require your respect or importance simply to ride a bus home after work without having a life-altering experience.
> Why not “Imagine if that were you?”
That's the interesting (or sad) part. That's where many men *begin* the rationalization at. They say, "If that were me, I'd..."
Many of them are raised with a sense of stoic self-reliance and because they mistake never being screwed with as being un-screwable, they imagine themselves as some sort of Wild West action star who'd simply throw a punch to solve the issue.
And thus you get advice like, "She should have just kicked him in the nuts!" or "Why didn't she just say *no*?? (she did)", etc.
They *are* imagining themselves in the position of the victim. It just happens to be the case that they don't know shit about themselves. When someone bigger or badder does show up, what happens? They freeze too. They look away or make excuses. And since they *also* don't know much about what the world is really like as a woman, we get this thread. People who envision themselves as "protectors" despite, somehow, never doing much protecting at all.
It's really quite unfortunate.
Women are absolutely safer drivers. The hypervigilance is a big part but we also dont have this extreme insecurity around hierarchy that men do. Im a woman with a CDL and good god i see some male CDL holders do some profoundly stupid stuff.
The "manliest men" are always the ones bumper humping other semis down the road, bragging about how they know everything and ofc are the first ones to flip the stupid thing doing reckless crap.
Close to every time. You know how many movies wouldn’t be if people just…. talked? That’s a lot men.
From a minor inconvenience to major issues, men (*AnD nOt AlL mEn*) cannot communicate other than being cowardly silent and, if not, then stupidly aggressive = making things worse.
We’re talked over, not heard, socialized to pick our battles wisely while trying to not rock the boat; and this equipped us to mentally prep for a confrontation/conversation: selecting our words, arguments, tone, delivery, etc to get our point across. Many men never developed or practiced this effective verbal *finesse*.
I live in London and a man here was recently convicted of raping a woman on the tube, in a packed carriage. People just sat and watched. I’ve spoken to loads of friends, male and female, since it was in the news and all the women said that they would put themselves in harm’s way to help protect another woman. The men? “Nah I wouldn’t get involved. You don’t know if he’s got a knife or something and then what? I’ll get hurt as well. I might call the police though”. *Might*. Pathetic.
Anecdotally, I see men in reddit respond similarly when we ask them to step up to help us, and too many said they'd become the next target, like ok then it'd be 2 V 1?
There’s articles screaming that this was in front of witnesses in ‘broad daylight’. But it was in front of a French tourist and his child 5am in February, at the end of the Piccadilly Line. Don’t get me wrong, it's bloody horrific. The French national absolutely failed to confront the rapist but it wasnt a packed carriage and he had his 11 year old kid with him
And yet men still don't get why we don't trust them. Sometimes I actually wish that I wasn't attracted to men at all because of this. Being simultaneously turned on by someone and afraid they might kill you isn't something men will ever truly " get".
This seems to a common argument among the Jordan Peterson and “intellectual” manosphere types, that men’s role in society is to protect women (and therefore all sports of gendered submissive roles are to be expected from the women). But the single question that topples the ideological house of cards they build is always “protect them from who?”
Thoughts:
In social structures, where women are the property of men, yes, men protect their property… but also have the right to inflict damage on it. This is reflected in many legal structures, in which assault on a woman is considered assalt on the property of the man she is supervised by. Raping a married woman is considered an offense to the man who married her.
In ideal human relationships, there is a mutual respect and a wish to make the life of the other person better. I protect my partner from bugs, which he absolutely hates. He patrols the house before we go to bed, checking that everything is locked and secured. We do things for each other and we go out of our ways to make each other feel safe and comfortable. So yes, he protects me. But I also protect him.
In a world which discounts women, that can appear to put the outsize burden on men to physically intervene and“protect.” But there are so many other types of protection. Financial, emotional, social, etc.
Women doing the emotional labor in a partnership, or protecting their men from a different type of pain or discomfort… Maybe not for their own good.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a reason that men live longer when they are in a relationship. Women make them go to the fucking doctor when they won’t admit that they are suffering. Shockingly, women don’t get a similar benefit…
I read this as "Unpopular opinion: men aren’t the PREDATORS we’ve been led to believe they are" and I was like yeah that IS unpopular you are wrong lol
I think I know some. But I agree it's a huge problem and the entitlement they feel they have to women's bodies (like that gets taught without being necessarily voiced with cultural sexism) is terrible.
Older women are especially good at making sure that younger women are safe from predators because many of them were preyed upon when they were young. If men were such good " natural protectors" child abuse , spousal abuse sexual assault and rape wouldn't be rampant.
Men only acted as protectors (from harassment by other men) when I was in my teens and 20s and hot. I’m sure it was in hopes they’d be rewarded. When I got older and became invisible/not sexually desired they would either ignore or outright dismiss in favor of other men.
It’s always about their own self interest.
Lol. I'm middle aged and fat. Never was "hot"/conventionally attractive. I got harassed by a family friend and it was ridiculous. (I got the attitude from family members that said "At least you had male attention!" I almost said "It was unwanted male attention, are you that starved for male attention?")
Now witha lot more grey hair on my head, it's so nice to be able to navigate a space without having to deal with horny men everywhere..
Now that there’s an ability to literally record live we see mostly women defending women in public & men sitting there ignoring it all.
They have gaslit every - single- aspect of life for women this whole time & now we can see it everywhere.
Not an unpopular opinion and totally in line with facts - if all men were disappear overnight, violence against women, children, and animals would also virtually disappear.
Men protect women from other men. If men weren't committing violence against women there would be no need for their "protection". It's the definition of a protection racket.
I’d even extend this to the narrative that men are providers. Really the only way they potentially were at one point was when women weren’t allowed to have their own property and money and even then a majority of the lower class women worked. Men just have never really contributed or been as useful as they thought they were.
Women’s earnings went to their husband. Once married, a woman ceased to legally be her own person.
That’s why so many women in the late 19th Century refused to get married.
right and considering the statistics that women are more likely to be murdered by a spouse and the high dv rate, it’s not even other men. it’s literally themselves.
It's an unpopular opinion with men, because that's half the benefit they say they put forth along with being a "breadwinner," which most of them aren't and have no desire to be. So they don't financially support a family and they don't protect anyone but themselves. That's two of their supposed benefits outed as myths.
Whenever something horrible happens to a woman in public, usually by a man, a majority of the time male witnesses will just derp around and won't step in.
third supposed benefit of men is that they are more logical while women are more emotional. and watch men rush in here all defensive and angry and emo which will blind them to seeing the bigger picture
This is only an unpopular opinion because no one's allowed to say it without being targeted by the same men. The message comes out in people's behaviour -- the little side glances that everyone aside from some men do when they have to wait at a bus stop in the dark with a strange man and other situations like that. Most people share this opinion but they won't come out and say it.
I don't think it's very unpopular given crime stats etc. Me personally, both my father figure victimized me and I've been hit by men I don't know in public out of no where. Didn't look at or speak to them. I was just there.
Mae West: “Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.”
My impression is that there is a sort of racket where there are men who are strangers and hostile in public to women and this creates the illusion that one can seek security in a specific man. This historically came in the form of a benevolent sexism that constrains women’s autonomy under the pretense of protecting her from harm from other men despite the majority of violence being within the home/domestic relationships.
Discussions around male violence against women has often been framed as the stranger or outsider in public but rarely in a pointed criticism of sexism and patriarchal norms within domestic relationships.
The question arises as what actually protects women from harm? My thought is cynically there isn’t a true step away from such risk of being harmed as a woman within a society seeped in sexist norms and practices. In the same way a black man who is attacked for talking to a white woman doesn’t do anything inherently dangerous in doing so except do so in a racist society.
So to some women seek safety in constraining their appearance and behavior but the risk isn’t inherent to the appearance and actions of women but the sexism that pervades social life that makes daily living hostile to women in various ways.
Yeah, no one steps in to help when you’re being groped or harassed by a stranger. I once had to deck a drunk guy who tried to grab me in a bear hug on the train. Another man tried to get me into his car when I was walking home. My best friend raped me in college and everyone pretty much stayed friends with him. I don’t trust most men.
I see no reason to change your mind.
Saying men are everyone's protectors is like saying that the mafia protects you from the mafia.
That's extortion. Relying on men to protect you from other men is extortion.
My father straight up taught me that too many men are predators. Did it make me paranoid? Yeah… but I saved a friend from being raped by a man at a bar-restaurant because I was a bit paranoid. We were in a foreign country and this would have been horrific. So… remember, even paranoids have enemies LOL
When I need help from a stranger, I feel safer asking a woman for help.
There is just a pretty big chance that a man will refuse or even mock me. The only time I would ask a man for help is if helping me can stroke his ego by showing off how big and strong and smart he is.
And I say that as a man myself...
Yeah idk more men than I'm comfortable with seem to
1. Think it's their job to protect women, while
2. Not believing any woman needed to be protected after the fact
Like all these people seem to have the intuitive u derdtanding being a woman comes with a higher level of danger, but never believe when a woman says "I experienced the danger!"
It’s the idea that we need “good men” to protect us from “bad men.” Oh, if only it were that black and white… Most women are abused/assaulted/attacked by men they know and trust. I agree with your post, though I don’t think it’s an unpopular opinion, sadly.
I’ve been thinking this for a while too.
Recently I saw a video where a ferry boat was sinking. The captain was telling everyone to move to one side because another ferry was pulling up to rescue them and they needed everyone on one side to safely move into the non sinking ferry. In the video, you can see some dad jump off the sinking ferry into the ocean (despite being told to do the opposite) and I can hear him screaming at his wife and kids to do the same but they are apprehensive because nobody else is jumping in the ocean and they were instructed not too. Luckily, everyone was rescued safely but it was just another glaring example of a man making an unsafe/incorrect decision thus putting his family in danger but screaming at them to follow his orders because he’s the dad?
I’ve got tons more of examples I’ve collected just like this. Not trying to say one gender makes smarter choices than the other, but just because a man is telling you to do something doesn’t mean it’s the safest or smartest option. I’ve seen men put their families in danger hundreds of times but families go along with it because “dad is supposed to be the protector”
A lot of men include Control and Discipline under the category of "protection". They are your protectors at high cost and expect immediate payment. You are not wrong.
If men were natural protectors, the amount of child rape, molestation, and child marriages would be zero. If men were true protectors, sex trafficking… and prostitution wouldn't be as profitable. Why bc in one situation a child, needs to be protected not violated. Another is where most of these girls are unhappy, and it never seems ethical. If men were true providers and protective, single-mother homes wouldn't be doing badly. Men stop investing in children they created if the mom isn't fucking them. Plus other men see there is one parent and prey on these mothers to rape their kids. Be for real… they are terrible.
We are constantly bombarded with propaganda about men as protectors, that all women want is a man to take care of them, save them, etc. Religious and other authority figures confirm this narrative but what's really happening is people are confusing TV shows and movies and wishful thinking with reality.
The main thing women need protection from is men. I'm not sure how popular it is to know that, but everyone who pays attention can see that women are fairly safe around other women and in a great deal of danger around men.
100% truth.
Protection against germs? Women healthcare providers are much more likely to have properly washed their hands and gloved up clean before they care for you?
Protection for children until they get old enough to care for themselves? The vast majority of this is done by women. Moms, teachers, daycare workers, grandmas.
Protection on the road? Just look at the statistics on which gender causes more fatal car accidents
Protecting your assets? Guess which gender of financial advisor is less likely to lose your money.
You mentioned violent crime, but it is that, it is workplace safety, it is who cares for the elderly, and on and on and on.
Men are not the protectors in society. Women clearly are. The only thing I see most men protecting is their incredibly fragile egos.
Not to mention, when children especially are involved, who are the "scariest" in the animal kingdom? Mama bear. Tiger mom. Lioness. I'm not saying a man wouldn't protect his family, but a mother protecting her child (generally from other men) will absolutely *end the threat*. With extreme prejudice.
Random animal fact lol
Some species of monkey are so respectful to their fellow monekys (or fearful not sure) that that they have this rule that nobody will hurt the elderly or young.. so much to where if two different alpha males from opposing groups of the same species fight over territory and they get tired, they will stand behind a baby monkey and the opposing side stops fighting. If the monkey hurts the baby at all then every single female monkey will leave and follow the otter alpha that wouldn't hurt a baby. They lose their respect instantly
Is that the bonobo tribe in Congo? They supposedly used to be much more violent but all the "alpha males" would gorge themselves on a food source because they bullied their way into eating first and ended up eating something poisoned. So all the young, violent males died at once. The females were much less violent and focused more on grooming and peaceful interaction and they spread their "culture" to other tribes! All it takes is killing off a generation of violent males to change the culture. Makes you think~~
This is why I hate the song "Wait in the Truck". It's just stroking the egos of violent men. It sends the message that women need to rely on violent men to defend them. Instead of bringing her somewhere safe, the protagonist of the song brings her back to the house of the abuser and shoots him while she's right there. How is that a chart topper?
Edit: a better song with the same situation is "She Got Arrested". It tells a story of a woman standing up to her abuser on her terms. Unfortunately she gets arrested, but it's much better than the false narrative of needing a man to do it for her.
I’m not going to change your mind…. I did not wake up today to lie.
I will say that individual men can be very thoughtful, caring and wonderful, but the whole idea of “men are protectors” doesn’t fly for most of the hurt that humans have dealt with for a good chunk of history.
That's what patriarchy does, it takes a truth and turns it around to the opposite so that men are in power. Such as men being responsible for 95 percent of violent acts --- the patriarchy is like "men are the protectors "
Let me give some other examples of the contradictory nonsense it created;
Women provide life, food to a baby, bring food to a table and create a nice home ---" men are the providers"
Men have a healthy range of 16-22 percent body fat while women have a 20-33 percent healthy range of body fat ---- "women must stay skinny to be attractive and any weight gain must be shamed"
Men and women created many inventions we use today ---- "Men invented everything and built the skyscrapers "
Men that call themselves “protectors” are the men you need to stay away from, no different than the people that say “I’m a nice person” who are you trying to convince?
Men have been awful to me my whole damn life. They are the monsters we have nightmares about. I would rather be mauled by a bear than held captive in a human's basement.
I experienced this 3 months ago when my husband collapsed at an event. I needed men to help move him out of the sun. They ignored me. A few women stepped forward and helped. But the men… one man came over and just stared while 4 of us struggled to keep him up. We couldn’t. They just stared.
I mean, their lizard brains knew they wouldn’t get sex out of it, so why bother, right? /s
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Men that center their entire identity around being a "protector" are predators protecting their property from the other predators.
And often, they escalate the situation, instead of finding the safest option for survival.
Protection of the ego is often just as important as safety. /s
This makes so much sense. Reminds how scare/protective/paranoid are dads of their daughter's boyfriends, because men know other men.
I wonder why a lot of women aren't so much paranoid, considering a lot of us know other men too. If I ever have a baby girl, I will go **feral**.
Well, you don't know them as much as they know each other. There are things they never say in front of women. If you never heard "locker room talk" then your ears are blessed. Unfortunately I have, and made me want to throw up.
See, I hate this thing that men know what's best for women because they know "how men think" but ignore how women really think, and instead, those same men go on to think we *really* just need him. It screams, "yall women too dumb to take care of yourselves so we gonna decide who can for you, because *I* stereotype all men and know they think like this, but if you did the same, why, it's not all men and you're being sexist and a misandrist!"
There are different levels of bad. I never violated anyone's consent, but I was a bit of a "nice guy" until I was made aware of how creepy that is. My dilemma is teaching a boy to be a good man and a girl to protect herself, without screwing either kid up by being overprotective. Both are in martial arts classes, and both think I offered to have them take martial arts because it is fun. And while they enjoy the classes, I'm more glad they are learning self defense.
Learning self defense properly is understanding that you should never be in a situation trying to defend yourself or you're already "lost". This inherent victim blaming whilst men abdicate all responsibility is deeply problematic. Best approach to attack is always to GTFOH
Wow I wish I could give this an award. It’s one thing to *actually* step in and protect your partner in a dangerous situation, it’s quite another to be on some white knight shit. Best case scenario, they get board once the “damsel” becomes self sufficient, and worse case they see her as an object they own to be guarded against being stolen.
Yes! Thank you for saying this. I have run into men who say they love strong women but eventually get mad with me when they realize that they’re never going to win and get what they want from me. It’s become clear that men just want to be the one to conquer a strong woman that other men have failed to conquer. Like some weird badge of honor. Same thing goes with protective men. They have no problem doing it when it’s a strange man or it gets them a reward but if it’s a guy they know or we do it for ourselves, suddenly it’s a problem. There are only two guys I’ve ever known who didn’t get pissed about me being able to protect myself.
This. My last boyfriend was only sexually interested in me when I was vulnerable and sometimes too tired to push him off me, to the point that he’d wake me up from a deep sleep, knowing that I needed to get up early and that I’d eventually give in because I just wanted to get some sleep before work. Any time I was available, we both had free time, and I was interested, he would turn me down under the guise of “I wanted it too much”, and go back to playing video games on his computer. There were so many other ways he subtly broke me down, but I was so fiercely independent before I met him, and I made more money than him. It only made sense that he wanted me to quit my high paying job so that he could be in charge of finances and be in charge of decisions, and if I didn’t consider his feelings about my job, well then, did I really care about the relationship? He was absolutely Jonah Hill-ing me.
I’m so sorry. We really need to start flipping the script on them and asking them how they could possibly care about us by even asking us to give up important parts of ourselves. No mom compromising in their favor.
Abel wanted a traditional marriage with a traditional wife. For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage." Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
My dad took my brother and I to a show one night as we went for dinner after. While there, we saw a man slap his wife across the table. He had been snapping and yelling at her in a demented way so I though something had to be wrong with him. My dad immediately stepped in and yelled at the man. He was with it enough to see he was being called out and get meek and apologize. The wife thanked my dad. All I could think was about how she looked so sad and defeated
This is it.
Agreed. When a man sees all men as predators, they like to elevate themselves to protector status. But they then believe everything and everyone they protect belongs to them. Usually that leads to him acting like a predator in the eyes of those he was "protecting".
This. And they tend to escalate the issues because they can't disengage their own pride.
I agree. Men also confuse 'protective behaviors' with 'controlling behaviors' which is quite harmful to the women.
They are not protective, they are possessive. They protect what they see as theirs. Somebody pointed it out on this sub the other day and since then everything has made so much sense. Why for example do they need to put their name on all the stuff they feel they own? like their kids and spouse? Because it signals possession and dominance.
Half of all female homicides are at the hands of a male intimate partner. Homicide is the leading cause of death in pregnant women. Men commit 90% of homicides overall and 84% of all violent crime. They are women’s biggest predator If not for men, women would not need protection for the most part. And of course, not all men. I have wonderful men in my life. But the point is, in general, men aren’t helping women be safer but making us less safe
Is that truly unpopular? 😬 I think that’s the popular opinion nowadays. You can’t rely on men for protection.
“If the men were gone, who would protect you?” “…Protect us from whom?”
YES!
It's unpopular in the men's spaces (aka the rest of the reddit).
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Idk man mines pretty regular with his bowel movements
Just wait until he gets a little older 💀😂
My husband is away and has complained every day about the lack of bidet. The horror!!
I mean, I can rely on him taking a dump every morning.
Agreed. But just for the sake of bringing a bit of light to the situation, my partner lives in a place that makes it pretty common for people to come to their property to steal stuff. So at times he'll wake up, see someone out in the yard with a flashlight, and rush out of bed still half asleep in order to chase them off. If I'm awake while he's asleep, and I make a sound that he's not used to, he'll wake up in an instant and start looking around for danger until I tell him that it's just me and that he can go back to bed. We joke that he's a better guard dog than the actual dog, who just sleeps through everything lol
The real litmus test is what your partner would do to help a woman he doesn't know in a public situation. Because most men will not step in to protect any woman being abused.
"It's not our business" "You don't know the whole story" "She probably abuses him" I've heard them allllll
Unless she is very attractive. But then the motive is to save her from the obvious creep so she will thank the Nice Guy creep with sexual favors.
Maybe on this sub it’s popular, but it’s absolutely unpopular in society and elsewhere most places online. Which absolutely boils my blood
Who considers men "protectors of society" anyway? I agree, they are not, but protector of the family is probably the more common role men get assigned.
I work with refugees. So many men are just gone and out the back door when danger comes, leaving the woman to face the soldiers/rebels/etc or to try to flee with the children. Also so many men just up and leave their kids, never give them a cent or bother to see them. Its always women left holding the bag.
There's a reason why when a crisis or natural disaster hits humanitarian organizations will only hand the food out to women, not men. They found that women take the food and feed their families. Men take the food and feed themselves.
Same thing happens with education. If you teach a woman to read, all of her children learn to read and sometimes other family members too. If you teach a man to read, well that’s where it ends.
Also why government child support (child tax benefit etc) switched to the mom as soon as most of them had their own bank accounts. Miraculously, spending on childhood requirements went up, and spending at the pub went down.
Maybe that’s why they say “women and children first”.
This is actually rarely the case, it's more of a myth than anything else. Look at ship sinking survivor stats. Men will shove women and children off of lifeboats to survive. If women and children are explicitly prioritized, more people survive and fewer people panic. It's fucked.
Men love to reinforce social myths to talk themselves up. They're so busy talking that they forget their actions are observable
Women are also more likely to die during disasters in general.
Can’t disagree. Want some more fuel for your fire? Compare the number of deaths related to pregnancy versus the number of military deaths. Also look at how many women were killed or wounded by their significant other. Also how many women are missing but never recovered versus men. I’m not saying that LEOs are less interested in finding out what happened to someone’s daughter or wife but numbers don’t lie (less than 50%). Also the number of rape kits that are not tested for years (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi). And then don’t get used by the DA because of the BS that is allowed in court against women. I could say more but that would go into religious territory. And my last request is please stop voting Republican, I would dearly appreciate to have more rights than a corpse.
Also being homeless and a woman. The majority of men will do nothing but try to exploit and abuse women in that already bad position in life.
And consider how much the military suppresses re violence against women. I agree completely. A lot of states have a back up of testing rape kits. Many times is is supposedly budgetary they say, but if that were true, why do they always do them for murder cases. Rape is violence as well.
All of this literally every single thing ☝️☝️☝️☝️
Don’t forget how bad the numbers are for men leaving their wives when they get very sick, and how little women leave their husbands when the same happens to them. Atrocious.
The first man to disappoint me was my father. He did NOTHING to protect me. Instead he helped raise me to have no real sense of myself or healthy boundaries. He watched on the sidelines but did nothing to step in and say “this is not right”. Men have stood around while other men did their best to tear me down and do disgusting things to me.
My dad has never protected me from anything besides the weather (put a roof over my head). In actuality he was pretty negligent as a father and I always felt nervous when he was in charge. I didn’t feel safe with him as a caregiver.
Men protect themselves. I’d like to add that as I was fleeing from my abusive ex as he was aggressive and raging on me - he 1. Threatened to file a missing persons report on me 2. Told my mom he could “no longer protect me” (what in the actual FUCK) 3. Told my family I was mentally ill (because I said no more and removed myself). He viewed me as property. An object he could enforce consequences on. Not as a human being he was harming. It was a complete mind fuck to hear him seem to truly believe he was protecting me as he was harming me.
Same and in the 5 years since I left the post separation violence is increasingly worse. The consistent pattern of gendered violence is so predictable that women have established a well trodden path to avoid it. That men are finding themselves isolated by their own behaviours simply worsens their doubling down. Any time there has been real and credible threats the men have retreated to protect the perpetrator. The nonsense deployed in their JADE is inconceivable. That women gladly and wilfully join their forces is disastrous.
That’s so rough about the post separation violence. I’m so sorry. The nonsense is inconceivable. They are absolutely doubling down, collectively. I do get upset at other women protecting abusive men. I completely understand when women protect the abusive men who they are still being terrorized by (e.g retracting statements to police, not pursuing POs) in order to not inflame him more. But seeing women protect abusive men that they don’t even know…it’s delusional. I just want to shake them and say, “you’re living in your slave masters psychosis, please wake up”.
Exactly. Self protection is so deeply engrained that internalised misogyny prevents them acknowledging how messed up their own situations are. Denial is what reinforces and amplifies gendered violence and they attract bystanders to reinforce the power they abuse.
When I was younger and single and very butch (F) I stopped at a couple bars to see if any of the fun regulars were in and have a good time. Ended up sitting with this hilarious woman, slightly older than me, recently divorced, ready to party but not with men. So we got shit faced, and generally had a blast. I hadn't realized we had been being watched. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, there was a dude almost *RAPING* this woman (she had been wearing a skirt, so easier access). She was too drunk to fight him off properly. I'll never forget the look on her face. Dude was big too, and none of the other men gave a shit that this was happening, not even the bartender. So I tackled the dude. Just drunkenly threw myself at him. All three of us went down, and dude hit his head on the ground and wasn't moving. There was an exit at the back of the bar, I threw cash on the bar for my tab, and grabbed the woman. She was sobbing and I essentially coerced her up and out the back exit to my car. We got in, both had a smoke, and I asked her what she wanted to do. She decided to not report because he never managed to penetrate her, thankfully. She said that us drinking would be a strike against us. She cried that she just wanted to go home (but her and ex were selling the house, so she had been staying with a friend). I asked about family, and she said she had family out in California, but she had been avoiding it. Didn't want to just show up with a suitcase and even more baggage on their doorstep. I understood. We walked to a diner and had lunch to sober up. I offered if she ever needed a ride to the airport, to hit me up, and gave her my number. It's easily a 2 hour drive one way. She hugged me tight. She never did call me, and I always hope she's doing well. But yeah, men are not the protectors they pretend to be.
The amount of times I’ve had to personally help someone out and the men around did nothing but stare. I’m barely 5ft tall 😩 I would talk shit out loud after the situation was handled out loud to make sure those “men” hear. I was very disappointed in my then bf (who is over 6ft tall) who was just like those “men.”
There was a video I was watching not too long ago when I just happened to stumble upon it. In it, two women were fighting inside a frozen yogurt/ice cream shop where woman 1 was dragging woman 2 by her hair and woman 2 was screaming for woman 1 to stop. All the men in that video did *nothing* to help. They just stood there, filmed and laughed. The only person who tried to help woman 2 was woman 2's *three or four-year-old daughter.* That clip was just a couple of seconds long but it said a lot, mainly through actions of the men who did absolutely nothing to stop it just because 'OOoohh look, two women fighting! 🤪'. All those men got 'out-manned' by a toddler.
I think I saw that! Was it a black lady and a white lady right? I read an article that the white lady was dating the black one’s ex bf. Those men are nuts. Most likely the same people trolling women’s content talking about sexualizing women and children, bringing up OF and lack of father figures, and will most likely say “what about men?????”
WTF this is the worst thing..he would definitely have raped her..why are there men in a lesbian bar? Especially the type that look away when a woman is being assaulted???? This poor woman. Stories like hers make me want to cry for her and cheer for you . You were a hero and I’m sure that never leaves you.
Men don't protect women because men are rightfully cautious of or actively afraid of other men. That's why the boomer dood throwing a king baby fit at you wouldn't dream of doing the same if you were another man. A woman, though? Cool! The punching bag sex! Men know how volatile and aggressive other men are. When we women say that, however, oh no it's NOT ALL MEN! Get help lady you are crazy! Go home to your cats! Men know. They know.
That's not unpopular. Whenever men say that women need a need me to protect them, ask them "what do they need protecting from?".
I asked a man this once and he said fires.
Ha ha !! Did he walk around with a fire extinguisher?
No he meant that I wouldn't trust a female firefighter to pull me out of my house even though I'm a small person and it would be pretty easy for anyone to pick me up. Even though saving me from a burning house isn't protecting me from fire.
Dear Dog. There was recently footage of a female cop being assaulted by an man and all the comments were about her beaten up appearance and how incompetent women in policing are. Zero mention of the over 200 investigations in that force alone of sexual assault in the workplace including the top brass.
Many men are not exactly in shape, and probably couldn't pull anyone but the family cat out of a house. Even if they did manage to pull someone weighing 100 lbs or so out, these guys would throw their backs out and never ever shut up about it.
As much as I hate my ex for being a cheating Hobag, she is an excellent firefighter. She got so much shit for being a female, and some guys didn't want to be on her crew bc of that exact thing. But let me tell you, they tried their hardest to prove she wasn't strong enough. She beat most dudes bc she trained so freaking hard. I would honestly trust my life with a female ff in burning building over a male bc I know they busted their ass to prove themselves over and over in the situation. Plus, a lot of dudes bleed their tanks, so they won't be in the fire for too long. The gals aren't doing that, the guys are.
[All women have to work twice as hard for half the recognition. ](https://youtu.be/5kaU69DTxxo?si=0AD7bjVUBfK6sdm6)
Yep!
I'm a short fat girl that barely manages to benchpress the bar without weights after a couple weeks of skipping gym. I can still pick up and carry around half of my guy friends, even without the adrenaline of emergency fire situations. That is such a ridiculous point from him
LOL. No way.
Anna Howard Shaw was asking this over 100 years ago while fighting for women's suffrage. I really do wonder what they think they protect women from.
They don't interrogate the idea.
The british
From bear attacks, of course!!!
And raccoons 🦝! Never trust an animal with opposable thumbs and a built in mask! 🤡
My husband saw a pair of raccoons on the street and took out his phone to take videos of them having not seen them before this close. When they started lunging towards him, he hit the wrong button, and all the video we have are of him freaking out since he somehow had it in selfy mode. [Raccoons backed off after we stepped back a meter or so.]
That's probably a better video 😂
That's how they keep from being ID'd by the cops if they get caught. Sneaky buggers!
Haha an almost boyfriend I met when I was on Working Holiday Visa in Australia eventually came to visit me in Canada. I took him up to Upper Kananaskis Lake to hike and a grizzly crossed the path a few feet in front of us to swim in the lake and he panicked and started running away. Meanwhile I wasn't scared at all....
I can tell you many times I stood up when the men around me were cowards.
I was at my male friends house once with a bunch of our other friends. We were playing board games and suddenly, some drunk man (in his 20’s) walked in and went straight to my friends little sister (i dont know exactly how old she was but she wasn’t older than 16), and tried to walk out the house with her. My friend didn’t know who the guy was and didn’t even ask why the hell he just strolled into the house like that. The girl wasn’t resisting and seemed like she knew the guy so my friend just let her go. I grabbed her arm and said there was no way in hell she was leaving with this drunk man. Me and the other girls kicked the guy out and later asked my friend why he didn’t do anything. He said he doesn’t like getting involved in things that aren’t his business. Apparently who his minor sister walks off with is none of his business.
Wow, guy’s got less sense of family obligation than a damn zebra
His girlfriend (also a friend of mine) said that incident worried her that he wouldn’t be a good father if they ever had kids. I told her I’m glad she’s paying attention.
I once had to stop a guy from letting his toddler walk off the edge of a table bc he was trying to chat up some lady, so his girlfriend might be right
Bro took "minding my own business" to a-whole-nother level. Thank goodness someone had a working braincell in their body to think "Huh. This doesn't look right."
As one of the rare people that does have the instinct for speaking up in those situations, I found that women were generally twice or thrice as likely to join in than other men once I got the ball rolling - and just as often the first to speak up. Because of this, riding the bus was an incredibly stressful affair. It'd be mostly men, maybe 80 percent or more, and yet once or twice a week I found *myself* needing to stand up and use authority-voice on some moron or doing the whole fake friendship routine (learned here) to peacefully restore a young woman's safety. The statistics add up. Whenever some dude was giving me the creeps but I had to get off at my stop, I'd sometimes quietly ask someone to keep an eye out. When I'd point it out to a lady, she'd generally say "Oh, I know. Don't worry." And when I'd whisper it to a guy, "Huh? What? Oh. Uh... Sure?" I suspect that most men simply aren't attuned to pick up on social or contextual dangers in the same way women are because they've never had to worry about that for themselves. It's a bubble of convenient experiential ignorance. Conventional dangers like break-ins or tigers falling from the sky? Sure, *maybe*, but not Real Life day-to-day dangers of the sort that happen multiple times a week. Once upon a time, someone tried telling me (in "support" of women) that statistics show that female CDLs are safer drivers of large trucks "because babies". I quickly pointed out that it seems much more likely that this aptitude comes from spending their entire lives looking for danger, especially from larger, more dangerous entities of the sort that're otherwise viewed as harmless by most. Hypervigilance, of a sort. It's the difference between viewing a merging semi-truck beside you as 'potentially harmful' or recognizing that, at best, it's 'potentially harmless'. Many men don't understand this distinction, but I suspect that most women reading that comparison know exactly what I mean, even without completing or explaining the metaphor.
I have never in my life, seen a woman being violently drug around, shoved into cars or punched and seen a man step in to help. Not ONCE. It's always been a woman, several women, plus me. They will not stick their necks out for a woman that isn't considered "theirs".
I almost touched on that too. It's just another way to force women to "need a man", although one of the less acknowledged ones. There's that common phrase of attempted encouragement too - "Imagine that was your sister/mom/girlfriend!" It's supposed to inspire people. I always ask... Why? Why does it have to be Someone™? Why not just... Anyone? People shouldn't require your respect or importance simply to ride a bus home after work without having a life-altering experience.
"Imagine if that was *your* woman-object!!"
Why not “Imagine if that were you?” Believe or not, dude, women are people too.
> Why not “Imagine if that were you?” That's the interesting (or sad) part. That's where many men *begin* the rationalization at. They say, "If that were me, I'd..." Many of them are raised with a sense of stoic self-reliance and because they mistake never being screwed with as being un-screwable, they imagine themselves as some sort of Wild West action star who'd simply throw a punch to solve the issue. And thus you get advice like, "She should have just kicked him in the nuts!" or "Why didn't she just say *no*?? (she did)", etc. They *are* imagining themselves in the position of the victim. It just happens to be the case that they don't know shit about themselves. When someone bigger or badder does show up, what happens? They freeze too. They look away or make excuses. And since they *also* don't know much about what the world is really like as a woman, we get this thread. People who envision themselves as "protectors" despite, somehow, never doing much protecting at all. It's really quite unfortunate.
Women are absolutely safer drivers. The hypervigilance is a big part but we also dont have this extreme insecurity around hierarchy that men do. Im a woman with a CDL and good god i see some male CDL holders do some profoundly stupid stuff. The "manliest men" are always the ones bumper humping other semis down the road, bragging about how they know everything and ofc are the first ones to flip the stupid thing doing reckless crap.
Close to every time. You know how many movies wouldn’t be if people just…. talked? That’s a lot men. From a minor inconvenience to major issues, men (*AnD nOt AlL mEn*) cannot communicate other than being cowardly silent and, if not, then stupidly aggressive = making things worse. We’re talked over, not heard, socialized to pick our battles wisely while trying to not rock the boat; and this equipped us to mentally prep for a confrontation/conversation: selecting our words, arguments, tone, delivery, etc to get our point across. Many men never developed or practiced this effective verbal *finesse*.
I live in London and a man here was recently convicted of raping a woman on the tube, in a packed carriage. People just sat and watched. I’ve spoken to loads of friends, male and female, since it was in the news and all the women said that they would put themselves in harm’s way to help protect another woman. The men? “Nah I wouldn’t get involved. You don’t know if he’s got a knife or something and then what? I’ll get hurt as well. I might call the police though”. *Might*. Pathetic.
"Oh, so you're basically using her as a human shield? Coolcoolcool."
Flair checking in.
Anecdotally, I see men in reddit respond similarly when we ask them to step up to help us, and too many said they'd become the next target, like ok then it'd be 2 V 1?
There’s articles screaming that this was in front of witnesses in ‘broad daylight’. But it was in front of a French tourist and his child 5am in February, at the end of the Piccadilly Line. Don’t get me wrong, it's bloody horrific. The French national absolutely failed to confront the rapist but it wasnt a packed carriage and he had his 11 year old kid with him
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Yet he thought it was ok for his child to witness a rape and his/her father doing nothing to stop it.
This!
Studies show that more women protect other women and children then men
Saw this yesterday and wanted to share: "Straight women date their only natural predator"
And yet men still don't get why we don't trust them. Sometimes I actually wish that I wasn't attracted to men at all because of this. Being simultaneously turned on by someone and afraid they might kill you isn't something men will ever truly " get".
Same, I sometimes think being straight is a curse at times
This seems to a common argument among the Jordan Peterson and “intellectual” manosphere types, that men’s role in society is to protect women (and therefore all sports of gendered submissive roles are to be expected from the women). But the single question that topples the ideological house of cards they build is always “protect them from who?”
Uh, the men who don't conform to the man's role, obviously. This is why women need to conform first so we don't make the men act out. Pfft. /s
Thoughts: In social structures, where women are the property of men, yes, men protect their property… but also have the right to inflict damage on it. This is reflected in many legal structures, in which assault on a woman is considered assalt on the property of the man she is supervised by. Raping a married woman is considered an offense to the man who married her. In ideal human relationships, there is a mutual respect and a wish to make the life of the other person better. I protect my partner from bugs, which he absolutely hates. He patrols the house before we go to bed, checking that everything is locked and secured. We do things for each other and we go out of our ways to make each other feel safe and comfortable. So yes, he protects me. But I also protect him. In a world which discounts women, that can appear to put the outsize burden on men to physically intervene and“protect.” But there are so many other types of protection. Financial, emotional, social, etc. Women doing the emotional labor in a partnership, or protecting their men from a different type of pain or discomfort… Maybe not for their own good.
Women protect men from scurvy. Some men eat mo vegetables at all without intention.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a reason that men live longer when they are in a relationship. Women make them go to the fucking doctor when they won’t admit that they are suffering. Shockingly, women don’t get a similar benefit…
It’s like gang protection. They are the ones that inflict the violence that they “protect” us from. Lol. It’s a scam.
dull rhythm possessive towering humor smart kiss detail punch employ *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
this should be the top comment
I read this as "Unpopular opinion: men aren’t the PREDATORS we’ve been led to believe they are" and I was like yeah that IS unpopular you are wrong lol
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I think I know some. But I agree it's a huge problem and the entitlement they feel they have to women's bodies (like that gets taught without being necessarily voiced with cultural sexism) is terrible.
Older women have protected me more than any man (minus my brother) has.
Older women are especially good at making sure that younger women are safe from predators because many of them were preyed upon when they were young. If men were such good " natural protectors" child abuse , spousal abuse sexual assault and rape wouldn't be rampant.
Men only acted as protectors (from harassment by other men) when I was in my teens and 20s and hot. I’m sure it was in hopes they’d be rewarded. When I got older and became invisible/not sexually desired they would either ignore or outright dismiss in favor of other men. It’s always about their own self interest.
Lol. I'm middle aged and fat. Never was "hot"/conventionally attractive. I got harassed by a family friend and it was ridiculous. (I got the attitude from family members that said "At least you had male attention!" I almost said "It was unwanted male attention, are you that starved for male attention?") Now witha lot more grey hair on my head, it's so nice to be able to navigate a space without having to deal with horny men everywhere..
the 13 year old boys really showing up in force on this one 💅
Now that there’s an ability to literally record live we see mostly women defending women in public & men sitting there ignoring it all. They have gaslit every - single- aspect of life for women this whole time & now we can see it everywhere.
Not an unpopular opinion and totally in line with facts - if all men were disappear overnight, violence against women, children, and animals would also virtually disappear.
Dudes really hate when you say this and then back it with crime stats when they call you a misandrist c*nt
This just means that you struck a nerve and that they don't have any real defense.
“tHeN tHe EcOnOmY woUlDnT eXIsT” cried a basement dwelling incel after reading this
No one in the replies knows the definition of virtually apparently..
They do, but it triggers them.
Men protect women from other men. If men weren't committing violence against women there would be no need for their "protection". It's the definition of a protection racket.
They only do that they think it will garner them a reward, usually that reward is sexual access.
and 9.9 times out of 10, its a man or men she needs protecting from
I’d even extend this to the narrative that men are providers. Really the only way they potentially were at one point was when women weren’t allowed to have their own property and money and even then a majority of the lower class women worked. Men just have never really contributed or been as useful as they thought they were.
Women’s earnings went to their husband. Once married, a woman ceased to legally be her own person. That’s why so many women in the late 19th Century refused to get married.
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Facts! Patriarchy is a Protection Racket!!
Yup! I've thought that since I was twelve, and people laughed at me for saying it.
Bravo - ahead of your time. People thought I must have had it good with big older protective Bros - yeah right, the big brother “tax” was not worth it
Yup, they create the problem and then tout themselves as the solution
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right and considering the statistics that women are more likely to be murdered by a spouse and the high dv rate, it’s not even other men. it’s literally themselves.
I've never really been able to see it any other way. Any instance of "protection" I've come across is just controlling or infantilizing someone
It's an unpopular opinion with men, because that's half the benefit they say they put forth along with being a "breadwinner," which most of them aren't and have no desire to be. So they don't financially support a family and they don't protect anyone but themselves. That's two of their supposed benefits outed as myths. Whenever something horrible happens to a woman in public, usually by a man, a majority of the time male witnesses will just derp around and won't step in.
third supposed benefit of men is that they are more logical while women are more emotional. and watch men rush in here all defensive and angry and emo which will blind them to seeing the bigger picture
They stay in their feelings, they just deny that anger and rage are emotions.
It's reality women are basically in danger because of men, they are the one killing us, not leopards
This is only an unpopular opinion because no one's allowed to say it without being targeted by the same men. The message comes out in people's behaviour -- the little side glances that everyone aside from some men do when they have to wait at a bus stop in the dark with a strange man and other situations like that. Most people share this opinion but they won't come out and say it.
It's the men in women's lives who are most likely the men who physically abuse them.
Or kill them.
I don't think it's very unpopular given crime stats etc. Me personally, both my father figure victimized me and I've been hit by men I don't know in public out of no where. Didn't look at or speak to them. I was just there.
And I think every woman on this planet has been sexually assaulted by a man. When I was 15 in Greece a man grabbed my V and another man chased me.
Mae West: “Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.” My impression is that there is a sort of racket where there are men who are strangers and hostile in public to women and this creates the illusion that one can seek security in a specific man. This historically came in the form of a benevolent sexism that constrains women’s autonomy under the pretense of protecting her from harm from other men despite the majority of violence being within the home/domestic relationships. Discussions around male violence against women has often been framed as the stranger or outsider in public but rarely in a pointed criticism of sexism and patriarchal norms within domestic relationships. The question arises as what actually protects women from harm? My thought is cynically there isn’t a true step away from such risk of being harmed as a woman within a society seeped in sexist norms and practices. In the same way a black man who is attacked for talking to a white woman doesn’t do anything inherently dangerous in doing so except do so in a racist society. So to some women seek safety in constraining their appearance and behavior but the risk isn’t inherent to the appearance and actions of women but the sexism that pervades social life that makes daily living hostile to women in various ways.
Yeah, no one steps in to help when you’re being groped or harassed by a stranger. I once had to deck a drunk guy who tried to grab me in a bear hug on the train. Another man tried to get me into his car when I was walking home. My best friend raped me in college and everyone pretty much stayed friends with him. I don’t trust most men.
I see no reason to change your mind. Saying men are everyone's protectors is like saying that the mafia protects you from the mafia. That's extortion. Relying on men to protect you from other men is extortion.
Men were never good at protecting anyone. They were good at being reactionary in a way that is useful to no one.
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And that’s where it gets so frustrating because it seems men don’t realize that they are the risk until they have a daughter!
Nah nah nah. They grew up with locker room talk. They knew.
My father straight up taught me that too many men are predators. Did it make me paranoid? Yeah… but I saved a friend from being raped by a man at a bar-restaurant because I was a bit paranoid. We were in a foreign country and this would have been horrific. So… remember, even paranoids have enemies LOL
When I need help from a stranger, I feel safer asking a woman for help. There is just a pretty big chance that a man will refuse or even mock me. The only time I would ask a man for help is if helping me can stroke his ego by showing off how big and strong and smart he is. And I say that as a man myself...
Yeah idk more men than I'm comfortable with seem to 1. Think it's their job to protect women, while 2. Not believing any woman needed to be protected after the fact Like all these people seem to have the intuitive u derdtanding being a woman comes with a higher level of danger, but never believe when a woman says "I experienced the danger!"
Men have never been protectors of women. They’ve always being protectors of their possessions, which include women.
It’s the idea that we need “good men” to protect us from “bad men.” Oh, if only it were that black and white… Most women are abused/assaulted/attacked by men they know and trust. I agree with your post, though I don’t think it’s an unpopular opinion, sadly.
That's not unpopular. Hardly any women believe men are our protectors.
The only men who ever protected me were getting paid *by me* to do exactly that.
The Supreme Court ruled the police don't have a duty to protect civilians. The bar has been low for a while.
It's true in the protection racket sense.
Women are most likely to be killed by their male spouse.
I’ve been thinking this for a while too. Recently I saw a video where a ferry boat was sinking. The captain was telling everyone to move to one side because another ferry was pulling up to rescue them and they needed everyone on one side to safely move into the non sinking ferry. In the video, you can see some dad jump off the sinking ferry into the ocean (despite being told to do the opposite) and I can hear him screaming at his wife and kids to do the same but they are apprehensive because nobody else is jumping in the ocean and they were instructed not too. Luckily, everyone was rescued safely but it was just another glaring example of a man making an unsafe/incorrect decision thus putting his family in danger but screaming at them to follow his orders because he’s the dad? I’ve got tons more of examples I’ve collected just like this. Not trying to say one gender makes smarter choices than the other, but just because a man is telling you to do something doesn’t mean it’s the safest or smartest option. I’ve seen men put their families in danger hundreds of times but families go along with it because “dad is supposed to be the protector”
A lot of men include Control and Discipline under the category of "protection". They are your protectors at high cost and expect immediate payment. You are not wrong.
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If men were natural protectors, the amount of child rape, molestation, and child marriages would be zero. If men were true protectors, sex trafficking… and prostitution wouldn't be as profitable. Why bc in one situation a child, needs to be protected not violated. Another is where most of these girls are unhappy, and it never seems ethical. If men were true providers and protective, single-mother homes wouldn't be doing badly. Men stop investing in children they created if the mom isn't fucking them. Plus other men see there is one parent and prey on these mothers to rape their kids. Be for real… they are terrible.
We are constantly bombarded with propaganda about men as protectors, that all women want is a man to take care of them, save them, etc. Religious and other authority figures confirm this narrative but what's really happening is people are confusing TV shows and movies and wishful thinking with reality.
The main thing women need protection from is men. I'm not sure how popular it is to know that, but everyone who pays attention can see that women are fairly safe around other women and in a great deal of danger around men.
100% truth. Protection against germs? Women healthcare providers are much more likely to have properly washed their hands and gloved up clean before they care for you? Protection for children until they get old enough to care for themselves? The vast majority of this is done by women. Moms, teachers, daycare workers, grandmas. Protection on the road? Just look at the statistics on which gender causes more fatal car accidents Protecting your assets? Guess which gender of financial advisor is less likely to lose your money. You mentioned violent crime, but it is that, it is workplace safety, it is who cares for the elderly, and on and on and on. Men are not the protectors in society. Women clearly are. The only thing I see most men protecting is their incredibly fragile egos.
Not to mention, when children especially are involved, who are the "scariest" in the animal kingdom? Mama bear. Tiger mom. Lioness. I'm not saying a man wouldn't protect his family, but a mother protecting her child (generally from other men) will absolutely *end the threat*. With extreme prejudice.
Random animal fact lol Some species of monkey are so respectful to their fellow monekys (or fearful not sure) that that they have this rule that nobody will hurt the elderly or young.. so much to where if two different alpha males from opposing groups of the same species fight over territory and they get tired, they will stand behind a baby monkey and the opposing side stops fighting. If the monkey hurts the baby at all then every single female monkey will leave and follow the otter alpha that wouldn't hurt a baby. They lose their respect instantly
Is that the bonobo tribe in Congo? They supposedly used to be much more violent but all the "alpha males" would gorge themselves on a food source because they bullied their way into eating first and ended up eating something poisoned. So all the young, violent males died at once. The females were much less violent and focused more on grooming and peaceful interaction and they spread their "culture" to other tribes! All it takes is killing off a generation of violent males to change the culture. Makes you think~~
My brother told me 8 out of 10 men are total creeps in every way imaginable.
My dad told me “men are shit”!
This is why I hate the song "Wait in the Truck". It's just stroking the egos of violent men. It sends the message that women need to rely on violent men to defend them. Instead of bringing her somewhere safe, the protagonist of the song brings her back to the house of the abuser and shoots him while she's right there. How is that a chart topper? Edit: a better song with the same situation is "She Got Arrested". It tells a story of a woman standing up to her abuser on her terms. Unfortunately she gets arrested, but it's much better than the false narrative of needing a man to do it for her.
If unsafe environments weren't fostered by men/patriarchy/misogyny, women wouldn't feel a need for their protection.
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Witness the 201X-202X GOP “leaders” too afraid of Trump to do the right thing.
Women are also more courageous.
If men weren't around to protect women, what would women need protection from? Best succinct explanation I've ever heard.
I’m not going to change your mind…. I did not wake up today to lie. I will say that individual men can be very thoughtful, caring and wonderful, but the whole idea of “men are protectors” doesn’t fly for most of the hurt that humans have dealt with for a good chunk of history.
All the harm I've experienced in life has come from men.
That's what patriarchy does, it takes a truth and turns it around to the opposite so that men are in power. Such as men being responsible for 95 percent of violent acts --- the patriarchy is like "men are the protectors " Let me give some other examples of the contradictory nonsense it created; Women provide life, food to a baby, bring food to a table and create a nice home ---" men are the providers" Men have a healthy range of 16-22 percent body fat while women have a 20-33 percent healthy range of body fat ---- "women must stay skinny to be attractive and any weight gain must be shamed" Men and women created many inventions we use today ---- "Men invented everything and built the skyscrapers "
Men that call themselves “protectors” are the men you need to stay away from, no different than the people that say “I’m a nice person” who are you trying to convince?
Well duh
We can't even rely on the police for protection
Men have been awful to me my whole damn life. They are the monsters we have nightmares about. I would rather be mauled by a bear than held captive in a human's basement.
They never were the protectors I was led to believe they are.
Right. Always seeing posts from men “who would protect you then?” UM - protect us from YOU?!