Expecting husband to be sole protector is unfair to both genders?

[AliasGrace47]

I've been reading a lot on issues of masculinity, gender relations etc and the notion keeps coming up that men have lost their role of protector & this is partly why there is a crisis of masculinity.

Articles are generally vague over what this means. Surely most men in the UK, Europe or even quite a lot of the US have not had to physically protect their wife very often, if at all, over the last halfcentury,at least, unless they lived in a particularly dangerous area?
If the notion is something broader - financial protection, emotional protection, then I can understand better...but they seem to generally mean physical protection.

The idea, floated by quite a lot of what I read, that we should keep this standard up, seems unfair to both sexes.

If a couple are walking and the man is the one physically attacked (which is much more likely to happen to men), should the wife not try to protect him? Obviously she'll probs be weaker than the assailant, but she could protect by fetching help.

In the US, where this protection discourse often seems to emanate from, women are more likely than here to have a gun which they could certainly use to protect others if need be.

If the family were in danger then I could understand (say in a burglary) the man being the one to fend off a burglary if the wife needed to protect kids. But if it's just a couple, I don't see why a man should be expected to handle an assailant alone & have the burden of protection fall solely on his shoulders

The depressing truth is that in situations where there is widespread danger, the ability of men to protect can often be limited, through no fault of their own. Eg.in postwar Italy, Germany, Poland & others, countless women were raped by conquering or even liberating armies. Most of their men had been called up, and the few left were normally unable, through no fault of their own, to stop their wives & daughters being raped. I'm studying history & have read a lot on the use of sexual violence as a weapon. Often the 'man as protector' archetype is a fuel for it, since it is designed to show the helplessness of the men & therefore lower morale.

And for women, the expectation that men should be to only ones to protect also seems to have significant downsides. You see the ugliest side of that in extreme corners of incel forums or forums which predict imminent societal collapse, where users wish for a breakdown of society so women will have to have relationships with them to get protection.

This is ofc extreme. But the inference is there, and this sentiment recurs in varied ways. Some right-wing authors (disclaimer: not all, obvs they are diverse & varied) mourn the days when a woman had to rely on a man to 'protect and provide' so there were no incels or birth rate crisis (obvs these things are v bad, but this kind of talk is hardly the way to solve it).

Douglas Wilson, the VERY conservative Reformed Christian who has worrying influence on evangelical US circles & politicians like Pete Hegseth (many evangelicals are probs unaware of his nastiest views), has said that women who claim they don't need male protection do so at their own risk, and that the only way a woman can be safe is by outsourcing her need for protection to male police officers. (He's the one who was in the ne

The late James Dobson of Focus On The Family described marriage as an arrangement where a woman exchanges sex for protection and economic support.

Obvs again these are fairly far-out figures, but their sentiments are to some extent implicit in the whole 'men must protect' idea. If men must protect, then it follows that any woman without a man is unsafe. The single mother is unsafe. The widow is unsafe. The woman who's single by choice is unsafe. Nuns are unsafe. The lesbian couple is unsafe (when Colette was imagining in a book the life of the Ladies of Llangollen, the 18th century Welsh probably lesbian couple, she included a scene where they fear the consequences if someone broke in, noting, 'Everything is permitted to two women except a certain kind of solitude.')etc

So what's the general opinion?

Note : I'm not saying that men should not protect, I'm saying it shouldn't be seen as only their duty. Obviously if a woman's pregnant or w a young child a male partner would probably take the protective role more. Obvs a man might be less able to protect for some other reason, likewise.

@CharmCharmCharm
The “But who will get up in the middle of the night to fight the burglar” type posts. In my house, most probably me as I’m perfectly capable and my husband is a deep sleeper.

I would be the one as well. My DH cannot move silently at all. I’m a much better shot than he is as well as being a smaller target. I’d send him to get the children out while I tackled the burglar.

Also, the way laws are written a man killing a home invader even if he only intended to wound/chase off is likely to be charged with manslaughter due to questions as to whether they used too much force and could have deterred the burglar through intimidation. Whereas if a woman ends up killing a burglar we get more leniency as it is assumed by being weaker physically that we couldn’t intimidate them into leaving, they’re likely to attack us so anything we do is presumed to be self- defence and we have better claim to being in fear for our life against a male burglar of any age/size.

I think it's unfair that women need protection, I certainly don't think that men are hard done by. Have a look at the gender based violence statistics, I think something like one third of women experience abuse so really we could do with protection but Men usually don't provide it. I say this as a domestic abuse survivor with four brothers, no one wanted to step up. There is a lady on you tube called Lisa Sonni who speaks about this issue, very, very sobering content, we have no idea what many women deal with on a daily basis
.

I don’t think it’s about extreme examples, more like give women a jacket when they’re cold, get rid of a spider etc.

Ugh. That kind of thing reminds me of my last boyfriend, the performative door opener. Opening doors is a poor trade for expecting someone to be your 24 hour unpaid mental health support worker, but it seems it's enough to be able to regard yourself as "one of the good guys" 🙄

I always found the idea that women should be scared of spiders to be very silly, but ikwym.

Why do you ONLY go for this? It’s like you’re in a cult!

Men have a part to play in calling out/ stopping;

catcalling
rape culture
misogyny
”banter”
”boys being boys”
sexism
gender inequality
sexual assault
incel ideology

but no. You have to talk about trans women.

Men make up 49% of the population.

Trans women make up 0.1%.

I think the whole premise of "should we remove this societal concept of men being protectors" is based on an assumption that this is entirely a social construct in the first place and has no biological link.

I don't think "protector" is quite the right word - I would instinctively die for my baby if I had to and I imagine most women would.

But I think a lot of us have babies in 2025 so we know what that instinctive feeling feels like, but how often are we actually confronted with stranger-originating physical violence in 2025 in the UK? Domestic violence is awful too but this is the example we think of, not armed gangs breaking into houses, carjackings, warzone front lines etc.

My home country has some of those things. Just as I know I would instinctively die for my child - I also know I would first instinctively hide in the cupboard with my child while sending my husband out to deal with them. I have felt the physical fear. I'm a confident go-getting active career woman etc - but that's because the day to day world here has been made safe for women. We are insulated from a lot. Physical fear is visceral, biological. It would be surprising if men and women experienced it identically.

I'm really sorry that you have experienced these things.

I want to clarify my argument a bit. I'm referring to husbands specifically, not men in general.
For example, in war, I don't believe that women should be on the front lines if at all possible. Women can be excellent snipers and other combat roles, but the sheer physical strength that front line and some other roles require is just not something that MOST women have. If she does, sure. But requirements have been lowered in the US apparently, and that's terrible.

I also think that women can have very important security roles, (I read Evy Pompouras' book recently, a bodyguard for several Presidents, very interesting) but the more physical side should be generally reserved for men. I think a similar divide should be in policing and similar.

I mentioned war zones in my OP. My point was that it's important for women to develop their defence skills any way they can, because in the very worst situations, through no fault of their own, men are often unable/unavailable to protect. Women in wartime Germany, France, Italy, Poland were relying on their men to protect them. But the fact that the men were mostly away fighting meant that they were at high risk of wartime rape. Women were often raped (or worse) by the supposedly 'liberating' Russian troops in Poland, France and others. My own great-aunt was hiding in the cellar with her mother near Warsaw for the duration of WW2. We don't know much about her wartime experiences, but I know all too well that cellars often weren't much protection, so I hope nothing horrible happened. ☹️

The same goes for huge numbers of other conflicts .

Carjacking- I was recently reading the SAS officer Chris Ryan's book on personal safety, Safe. He had an interesting section on carjacking. It seems it's fairly common in otherwise quite safe areas of Europe, not just countries that are otherwise dangerous (French motorways are apparently a hotspot). Also scarily common in the US. He gave some useful advice on how to minimise the risks, it seemed fairly similar advice for both genders. Most carjackers (at least according to the advice I've read from different security sites) are only interested in the vehicle, not abduction/murder, though ofc the situation is inherently very dangerous.

Armed gangs burgling homes- again I'd advise gun skills for both genders.. obvs need to be in a position to use them though. Are these gangs generally intending to murder/assault people? Or do they typically go if you hand over what they want? Obviously that's bad enough...

In your home country : is it OK to ask where this is? Or at least the area, roughly? I understand if not. For some reason I'm thinking it's South Africa, but I could be wrong.

In your home country, how is it for single women? Or lesbian couples for that matter, or women who live alone for some other reason? How do they cope without male protection? It sounds like an extremely stressful environment.

Have a bit more to add, later.. Thank you for posting, that was a very valuable perspective to have.

Agreed . The logical end conclusion of a society which bases social structure around biological differences and exaggerates small differences is The Handmaid's Tale . . Attwood's 1985 masterpiece ( not the crap Hollywood serial ) .... is telling us THAT WE ARE ALREADY LIVING WITH elements of this distorted hell , and that our patriarchal value system is a dystopia . Most of the oppression , discrimination , totalitarianism of Gilead is present in our society here today . . . . . . . . Why do women constantly have to feel protected by a man-guardian against dangers which either simply do not exist / hugely exaggerated and sensationalised by a rabid Mail-Express-Telegraph-Hello gutter press ?

The role of protector only exists because of other men, so I don't think women should feel bad if a man takes the lead in dealing with it.

I'm not sure I fully agree with this. It only works if we start from the assumption that every man is somehow responsible for the actions of others. But that doesn't really work IMO because then you'd have gay men taking responsibility for homophobic hate crimes and black men taking responsibility for racist attacks.

There's been a lot of condemnation lately on here of the thugs protesting outside migrant hotels. However, with this website having a predominantly white middle class audience it'd presumably be these same people that'd be responsible for stepping up and challenging their fellow white folk if we use the above logic.

Like the women above, POC wouldn't have to feel bad about white people taking the lead in dealing with it. However, it's clear most posters don't see themselves as having group culpability when it comes to Reform/xenophobia etc so it all seems a bit too pick and choosy to me if I'm honest.