Romantic relationships are the primary tool men have for controlling women. We must avoid them to stay safe.

The most important thing women can do to protect themselves from conservative politics is avoid romantic relationships with men.

The law doesn’t have to change for patriarchy to control women. In fact, all forms of violence and abuse can be illegal, and patriarchy can still thrive, if women continue to have romantic relationships with low-value men.

Like most women, I am scared about how increasingly right-wing politics in the United States might affect our collective safety. I worry that increasingly Draconian divorce laws will make an already abusive family court system worse, potentially trapping women and children in abusive marriages. I see how judges already weaponize the law against women, routinely giving abusers custody of their children and denying women protective orders, allowing their partners to kill them. I know that with more conservative judges, and an authoritarian Supreme Court backing them, it could all get so much worse.

I also know that things were never good. And that it doesn’t matter what the law says when most men endorse horrifically misogynistic beliefs.

We are a long way away from the actual handmaid’s tale for women as a group. But many women in heterosexual relationships are already living in a dystopian nightmare dominated by foolish men.

All it takes is getting into a romantic relationship with a man and having his children.

The reality is that in a patriarchy, we don’t need officially discriminatory laws or authoritarianism. We just need heterosexual men to weaponize women’s love as a tool of control.

This is the case no matter who is president, no matter who controls the government, no matter what laws are on the books. Electing Kamala Harris, or any other moderate-to-conservative leader, would not have changed the family courts, or the myriad of other local structures that trap women in abusive marriages. Women in this country were facing serious problems before Donald Trump, or any other specific misogynist.

Once you get into a relationship with a man, especially if you share a home or finances, leaving becomes difficult to impossible. Violence against women, in all of its many forms, is officially illegal, but almost all violent men get away with it. Seeking a protective order is expensive and challenging, and even with compelling evidence of physical of abuse, you might not get one. Even if you do, the police may fail to enforce it. Perhaps that’s why so many men become physically abusive only when their partners leave. Perhaps that’s why

Patriarchy is a system of men in lockstep, which is how and why seemingly gender neutral laws can be so thoroughly weaponized against women when they seek protection from abusers, fight back in self-defense, leave abusive marriages, or seek to protect their children.

Men known to the woman, almost always a romantic partner, commit 75% of rapes.

Most stalking victims know their stalker, and current and former intimate partners comprise the largest share of stalkers.

Sixty percent of murdered women are killed by an intimate partner, and the leading cause of death among pregnant women is murder. Women who have given birth over the last year are more likely to be murdered than to die from pregnancy-related complications.

Taken together, this data shows that men are also the leading cause of most forms of trauma, and therefore play a significant role in both mental and physical health issues among women. I’ve argued before that men, not hormones, are the leading cause of postpartum depression.

That’s without even getting into the ways in which co-parenting with abusive men makes parenting harder, more labor-intensive, and less effective, while also damaging the next generation.

And let’s not forget the main tool abusive men weaponize against their women victims: children. Because in a patriarchal culture, we believe there’s no specific parenting bar for men, but that if they get divorced, they are automatically entitled to 50% custody of the children they’ve never gotten to know or bothered to parent, except to occasionally abuse them.

This is, overwhelmingly, the main reason women stay in abusive relationships: fear of what will happen to their children without them around to protect them. Women’s love for their children is what keeps them battered and abused, and what convinces them to forego their hopes, dreams, careers, health, friendships and more for men who can’t be bothered to wipe their own asses.

It’s not that they’re deluded or have battered woman syndrome or whatever victim-blaming nonsense we devise this week. It’s that they’re justifiably terrified.

Romantic relationships with men, statistically, are the single biggest threat to the health and well-being of women.

They’re also the tool patriarchy most uses to control us.

Single women are freer and safer—and they will be even more so as the incoming administration attacks women’s rights.

There is a reason men are so obsessed with getting women to get married.

There is a reason society spends so much time convincing women to overvalue men.

And there is a reason so many women feel obligated to give men endless chances and tolerate objectively abusive behavior just so they can stay in a relationship.

It’s that patriarchy can only work when individual women are controlled by individual men. As always, the personal is political.

Every relationship opportunity is an opportunity to be abused, controlled, and lose your rights.

Every man is a potential danger to you.

Moreover, men are getting a great deal under patriarchy: free labor, low effort sex, every imaginable privilege.

As long as they can get access to women who offer them immense value without changing, they won’t. Avoiding sexist men isn’t just individually protective. It’s a feminist act—especially in a world where men are currently emboldened to get so much worse.

One small thing

In the new year, I’m publishing tips for how to become a more engaged and effective activist, even if you’re inexperienced or don’t have a lot of time. Here are three options for this week, based on your time and commitment level:

• Volunteer for your local domestic violence hotline or shelter.

• Become an online hotline support worker for RAINN.

• Research the judges overseeing your local family court system. Depending on where you are, these judges may be called magistrate judges, or be part of the superior court or an independent family court. Learn about each one, as well as how they come into power; in many states they are elected, and good judges can run against bad ones.

You might also like…