We need to talk about men needing to be partners, not 'providers and protectors'

I think men's height matters more in casual dating which is what a lot of men hope for and measure their desireability by the number of conquests. In marriage if he is rich or really nice his height can be overlooked.

I don't have much patience with men like that, I think it's basically laziness. For millennia they got away with claiming all the benefits of civilization due to their "protecting and providing".

But in 2025, especially in rich countries, as women have started participating more fully in the working world - We've realised , actually providing isn't that difficult. And we don't actually need that much "protection", being not at war or having to deal with wild animals.

It also seems very convenient for men - I personally much prefer the providing and protecting part of life, i.e. working/financial independence/making decisions for my family, than the endless domestic drudgery of housework. How convenient if I could claim this was naturally biologically my role and someone else should deal with the rest, and be grateful for it!!

Short men certainly do find wives, but most of the short men I know have wives who are as short or shorter than they are! All the things you mention matter, but they don’t take away from the fact that across the whole population, sex differences also matter. This includes psychological sex differences. Ideally we’d have societies that allowed everyone to find relationships that worked for them, including men and women who want to have distinct roles. None of this means that you can’t have outliers. Outliers always exist in nature.

Yeah I agree, I’m just pointing out that this where a lot of the manosphere is getting it’s ideas from but they haven’t fully engaged with what evolutionary psychology says. I think it does leave space for individual behaviours and preferences but can’t explain everything. I think it talks about on average behaviours and drivers which if I’m being honest probably would cover about 70% of people. I also think a lot of the stuff is confusing around for example preference for youth, you would see every single wealthy man with a 20 yr old on his arm but thats not actually the case, high earning men tend to prefer women with similar levels of education etc to them or women who have equal careers with much smaller age gaps than you would expect vs what incel twitter thinks.

I think the tall short thing is most women want a man who is taller than them not tall in an absolute sense. My best friend only wanted to date men her height maybe an inch or two taller max, I have a cousin who’s married to a woman who is taller than him so it’s not that these things are absolutes even in evolutionary psychology. I don’t think it’s as prescriptive as that. The evolutionary psychologist I follow on twitter generally caveat statements they make because humans are varied.

My natural instinct is to say yes men shouldn’t be talked about as protectors and providers and should be talked about as partners instead. I do actually agree with OP. I just think there are probably a lot of subconscious psychological drivers we are dealing with which mean that people default to a particular position when they are actually selecting a mate (and this is sticky because it involves what we find attractive in potential mates). But the thing is we are conscious beings and can alter our behaviour, we don’t just behave reactively. So I think men can shift their behaviour to be partners, it’s just that many don’t want to. It’s too much effort.

Aw love that. My DH does that too and despite being a hard-ass feminist I will let him! I could defrost the car myself, but it’s his love language and I appreciate it.

The suffragettes got me the right to vote, yes. They also put explosives in letterboxes. That's a hard pass from me. I spoil my ballot in protest, so my vote isn't discarded. I leave the actual voting to everyone else.

My husband defrosted the car for me this morning. That’s modern day chivalry as far as I’m concerned.

I think the 1950s paradigm was very unusual in historical terms. For most of history, especially prior to industrialisation, everyone in the family had to pull together. The precise jobs done by men and women might have different, but it was definitely a team effort.

😴

People can talk about that all that like; personally I feel no need to sit around tables and endlessly analysis what men are or should be.

But that is probably because, like most women I know IRL, I am surrounded by very good men who are providers and protectors and also empty the bins and bath the kids.

My DH is both - equal partner/parent and protector/provider (provider only because he is the higher earner).

He is a grown up who doesn’t need a mummy or housemaid, he has me as his teammate. He would have no time for the ‘manosphere’ dweebs.

I don’t think you have to be black and white about it. My DP is an equal partner at home and I out-earn him. But I have found our marriage has become much happier since I’ve accepted that we are not interchangeable. Some of this is just personality but ingrained sex differences matter. We have different approaches to our children. I rely on him to do some physical tasks because he is stronger than me. ‘Provide and protect’ doesn’t have to mean ‘do nothing at home’.

I also think it’s important to listen to the men who feel the current culture doesn’t work for them.

Spot on. Apart from the ethics of it , that model is simply impractical now. Women tend to do better in education for example. And it's nigh impossible to run a home on one wage these days.
The manosphere gurus give young men advice which is really of no use to them and just leaves them feeling inadequate. You can't reverse the effects of AI on the job market by lifting weights and following a keto diet.

This is black and white thinking when most relationships exist in the grey area, I think - some particular balance where both protect and provide based on how they can do this and what they bring to the relationship. It’s different for everyone.

Can you honestly have no idea how misogynistic a term ‘girl boss’ is? Try ‘boy boss’ on for size and see if this helps you check your internalised misogyny. Exactly what is it that you think is anomalous or misery-inducing in women CEOs, QCs, professors? Do men not ‘Chase’ these careers to exactly the same extent?

Feminism got you the vote, the right to equal pay and to control your fertility. Or do you misunderstand that too?

I don’t recognise the “traditional roles” you are espousing OP. You seem to have missed huge parts of the story and what you are describing isn’t the set up nor has been in my family for several generations despite. In most adult partnerships of any kind the partners don’t have the same role but that doesn’t make one intrinsically less than the other. What ruler are you measuring with?

The problem with evolutionary psychology is that it doesn't take social conditioning, cultural differences or significant outliers into account, and just makes broad-brush generalisations and calls them "biological hardwiring" despite all the evidence against it.

It can't explain matriarchal societies throughout history across the world. It can't explain LGBT people. It can't explain the correlation between female education and women choosing to be child-free.

It can barely explain women who don't care about a man's height, really - of which there are far more than the very loud TikTokers would have you think, judging by the number of short men I know who've had no issues finding girlfriends and wives.

Partnership absolutely
provide and protect is so old fashioned and doesn’t help men navigate the modern world
and yes it’s clear from the behaviour of many men that women as well as men are failing to bring up boys well

My DH provides and protects. I also provide and protect. DH also does more than provide and protect (as do I). We both contribute our time and abilities.
OP is rather reductive/ simplistic.
Some men are shite but plenty aren't.

The flipside to the emphasis on men being "protectors" is that it means men who buy into it feel they can't be vulnerable or in need of protection themselves - they have to be emotionally stoic (which is tedious for any woman who dates them).

What do I need protecting from, as a woman in the west in 2025? Not physical threats, by and large - or at least there's no physical threat I might face that a single man by my side would be any more useful to fend off. Protection in modern relationships is 99% emotional - protection from the doubts and fears in our own brains that hold us back and stop us being our best selves. Protection is having someone to calm me when I'm anxious or to say they'll have my back if I take a risk. Physical protection is mostly about nurturing me when I'm vulnerable (such as when I'm ill) - on which note, this is why I'm always flabbergasted by all the MN threads mocking their ill husbands.

All of this can be reversed of course, men need emotional protection as much as women, and women can be protectors as much as men.

To be honest the entire idea of nurturing and protecting existing at opposite ends of a false female/male binary seems bollocks to me.

Regrettably, I don't live like a trad wife, because thanks to the push to get women into the office, I can't afford that lifestyle. The choice was removed decades ago. More power to you for pushing yourself to aim high in the workplace, it's just not a life that everyone wants but many are forced into, like myself. The life I want is a pipe dream, so I'll continue building someone else's dream on the promise that I'll be able to retire in reasonably good health. Retirement. Lol yeah, that's a barrel of laughs on it's own.

I don't think its just men who link 'success' to financial earnings. Plenty of women, whether they would admit it or not, would view a high salary as an attractive trait in a potential partner, along with the other conventional trappings of attractiveness (tall, kind, intelligent, funny etc). Men are still bombarded with advertising that indexes their alpha male status to expensive material goods that they can use for peacock displays to both women and their male peers.

Yes, of course. Women have always worked and they are absolutely well within their rights to get a job. I mean the women who chase high-flying careers, who become CEOs, you know, the 'girl boss', 'yass kween' types. I think they are some of the most overworked, fatigued and generally miserable women on the planet at the moment, but they'd never admit it as that would shatter the illusion that feminism is the best thing ever.

But you were being hassled by a man. One of the supposed ‘protectors and providers’.

I have been in situations where other men have had to step in, I’m 5ft 2 and was being hassled by someone who must have been 6ft 4, there is no way I would have been able to handle that entirely by myself. I think it’s more to do with unlikely but catastrophic events iyswim. I also don’t think it’s a conscious decision or thought women have. I don’t think women set out to find someone to protect them but on some level the belief that they would at least try to is there somewhere.

I think theres a reason most women prefer their partners to be taller than them. Why? If we didn’t still have some hardwiring that said it’s important? You would expect women to then not be fussed about male height. I think men make much more of a big deal of it to feel sorry for themselves than is actually the case but there is some truth to it. Maybe it’s just male beauty standards but women will fall in love with all sorts of men (as I said I don’t actually like men who would be considered traditionally attractive) why is height such a sticky standard for women?

I think perhaps we are evolving. Once women can gain and control their own resource a male is not much of a prize for just providing resource. Men perhaps haven’t caught up with this. I was reading an evolutionary psychology book on this and it placed resource and status (or potential to be able to acquire it as the most important thing) but things like stability and industriousness (I think I made this point before but trad men don’t actually go home and then do nothing, they are fully involved with the household as well) were rated extremely highly by women.

Perhaps the manosphere have basically stopped at the first step and didn’t bother thinking much further than that. They are thinking in terms of an imagined tribal societies where physical protection or hunting is required (I read somewhere even with the hunting, women gathered 80% of the calories a tribe ate which was interesting). It’s basically half arsed evolutionary psychology they picked up from the internet. A lot of womens value for men (according to evolutionary psychology) is not just providing resource but dependability, stability, trustworthiness etc. theres no point in having a man with resource if he won’t share it, directs it at other women, is lazy, unable to maintain shelter, unable to manage children or teach your children anything (tribe would have died out fast if men didn’t spend time teaching their sons how to hunt, how to create and maintain weapons, how to build shelter for example) etc. These manosphere types just don’t think like that.

I would say you do need someone who is geared to being a provider when it comes to for example having children. I’ve seen women on here saving up before having a child so they can continue paying half their bit of the bills whilst on maternity leave. These men did not see the family as a joint enterprise at all. There have always been men who don’t want to pay for the new school shoes, or hoard their own money away from their family (again seen on here multiple times) or spend their wage on themselves whilst their families struggle. Theres research on aid, when given to women it will go on the family when given to men the men spend it on themselves. So actually I would say a man with a provider instinct can rapidly become important when children are involved. Do you strictly need it as a woman in a western society with a welfare state, probably not, but is it ideal for a family to function optimally, well yes I would say so.

On a personal level, I agree with you, OP, but I think there are actually a lot of women who are still looking for a man who will protect and provide.