Men are not protectors or providers.

Women are the only people consistently protecting women from male violence, or providing any form of meaningful support for one another.

This morning my kids and I enjoyed a trip to our local garden center. On the way in, we passed a woman pushing a cart overflowing with plants, pots, and planting tools. And then began the avalanche.

One large pot rolled off of the cart, removing the tenuous stability of the other items, which soon followed. Pots, plants, and soil were suddenly all over the parking lot. Several men walked past, ignoring her as she scrambled to gather the items, ignoring her still as the cart began to roll toward a car.

My kids and I, along with three other women with kids, dashed over to help her. It took us just a few seconds to gather all of her items and get them into her car. At the end of the interaction, a man who had initially walked past her struggle approached to hit on one of us.

What a great protector and provider!

A few weeks prior, at a home improvement store, a man snuck up behind me as I was loading the car. This was our exchange:

Dude: excuse me?

I jumped. He acted surprised to see me jump. I took a step back and said, glaring, “What?”

Dude: I have a question for you.

Me: back up or I'll scream.

Dude: are you married?

Me: I'm getting my bat.

Dude: I'm not homeless.

Me: women don't like to be approached by strange men in parking lots.

He took a step toward me. So I started screaming at him to get the fuck away.

Notably absent from this exchange were the dozen or so men in the parking lot who heard me scream, who no doubt fantasize about themselves as protectors and providers. But a woman in her seventies or eighties rolled up out of nowhere, parked next to me, supervised me unloading, and told me if the man came back she’d run over him.

The first time a man hit on me, I was 10 years old—and I looked it. In the intervening 31 years, I have never gone more than a few days without being sexually harassed by a man.

Every time I share stories like this, men jump into my DMs or onto my page to offer me advice: I need to stop focusing on cardio, presumably so I can defend myself in hand-to-hand combat. But I lift weights daily. They tell me I need to not be polite to men. Because clearly they don’t know me at all. I need a big dog. I have one. Or a weapon. Or more self-awareness, or self-defense, or maybe I should just never leave the house again—this does, after all, seem to be what a lot of men want from women.

They simply cannot imagine a world in which a person is exposed to violence for no reason other than existing, because in their world safety is a given. In their world, it is not normal for men to approach and demand to speak to you because they are attracted to you (or just want to assert their dominance).

It doesn’t matter that most of them have heard women talk about how dangerous men are for their entire lives. Or that every time they go out, if they just look around them, they’ll probably see a woman being harassed or abused. These men do not want to see what is in front of their faces, because it might require them to actually do something. So they’d rather tell me what I’m doing wrong. Men’s allegiance is always to other men.

Men love to scream about how it’s not all men, to remind us that it’s just a few bad apples. Yet they forget the second part of this adage: A bad apple spoils the entire barrel. And it seems that most men have been spoiled by the bad apples around them.

Because in 31 years of harassment by men—almost always in public, almost always in view of other men, and frequently with other men pausing to gawk at me while I am harassed—not one man has ever intervened to stop the abuse.

I can hear the excuses men will make for this already, all of which will imply that it’s some shortcoming on my part. Maybe if I was prettier/nicer/smarter/less crazy men would intervene. In patriarchy, men’s behavior is women’s fault. And women’s behavior is women’s fault.

But you can see, even in men’s excuses for the bad behavior of other men, how little they actually care for us. As if a woman not being pretty is a valid reason to not intervene when her life is in danger. As if anyone who was actually a protector or provider would pause and assess whether a woman being threatened in public seems nice before deciding to help.

In fact, the best way to assess whether a self-described provider and protector actually is either of those things is to look at how he responds to women’s complaints about men—and especially how he responds to women’s complaints about him.

A man who is actually invested in protecting women knows that you can’t protect people if you don’t pay attention to and listen to them. If your first impulse is to find reasons a person deserves victimization, then you’re not a protector. You’re a predator. The fact that I even have to state this reality speaks to how much patriarchy has brainwashed all of us.

Men have weaponized this protector and provider nonsense for too long. And we’ve met them at the debate table under their terms, all pretending that men actually do a damn thing to protect women. They don’t. Men are the biggest threat women face.

And providers? In capitalism, everyone has to have a job, and almost as many mothers as fathers work. Moreover, in the context of families, it is overwhelmingly women providing for their kids, especially after divorce, when support awards are almost never sufficient to cover half of the child’s expenses. And that’s without even getting into the myriad other ways women provide for their children.

The only people consistently protecting and providing for women are other women.

Even though they earn less, women give substantially more to charity than men. Mutual aid groups are full of women. And of course, it’s almost exclusively women working to get women out of violent relationships. Men’s main contribution seems to be yelling from the sidelines about what the victim should have done differently, while reminding her that it’s not all men. Some men, they want you to know, are nice guys—the sorts of guys who do nothing but heap blame on abuse survivors, while watching women intervene to help.

I think we should start using the hashtag #protectorandprovider to start talking about all the things men take from us, all the ways they create danger for us, and especially, the ways they fail to intervene in danger created by other men.

Tell me your favorite stories of useless or actively harmful male bystanders.

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