Except that they actually haven't. There is literally no time in history where men have protected women as a class. Read Katie Jlgn's excellent piece on that here.
“And no, the ‘women and children first’ thing was never a legal requirement either. Actually, according to a study by a group of Swedish economists on sea disasters spanning three centuries, it was women and children who had the lowest survival rates out of all demographics.”
And me not actively fighting genital mutilation in Africa isn't contributing to it happening because I'm not a part of that culture. If I lived there, it would be a different story. Men (and women) are co-creating the culture in the US both by their actions and their inactions, their words and their silence. And men, in particular, turn a blind eye to a lot of violence and discrimination against women because a lot of male bonding actually takes place around sexualizing and denigrating women. It's an affirmative aspect of masculinity in this culture. "I'm not doing it, I'm just a bystander" is actually a huge part of the problem.
I write most of the time about the patriarchal dominance hierarchy as a social system (not from a feminist perspective) so I touch all the time on the ways that this system hurts men, and am well aware that patriarchy primarily benefits a small percentage of men at the top of the pyramid. At the same time, when researchers asked men in the US, UK, and Mexico (ages 18-30) about what it means to be a man, they overwhelmingly identified traditional patriarchal traits. That doesn't mean that no men are resisting those, because many of them are, but they did all report experiencing significant pressure to adhere to the rules of the Man Box none-the-less. Some of that comes from women, but overwhelming it's coming from other men, and in fact, policing each other into adherence to that is one of the functions and facets of what the Man Box does. It's up to men to lead the way - in breaking out of the Man Box for their own wellbeing and for that of the rest of the culture.
My experience (which certainly isn't definitive) is that in fact a lot of men are very desperately fighting to maintain the status quo because they believe in the zero sum aspects of patriarchy which say that if you don't "win" you "lose." I hear from them all of the time about these behaviors are natural or biological (and therefore can’t be helped) so women should stop bitching (even though in some cultures rape doesn’t exist). The rise of the manosphere and the way that hatred and dehumanization of women is being intentionally spread and normalized is indeed a symptom of men who are fighting to maintain the status quo (including in racial and sexuality contexts as well). Many men have openly stated that they think that greater equality for women takes something away from men - and that's a problem. About 25% of men in the UK believe this.
Violence is overwhelming a male problem - against both women and other men. Sexual harassment and rape are overwhelmingly male problems - against both women and men. About 40% of men admitted to researchers that they’ve pressured women into doing sexual things that they didn’t want to do. Things like the "authority gap" where even women in the highest ranks of business and government still have to fight to be taken seriously is overwhelmingly a problem caused by men. I could go on and on with these statistics.
And none of that is because men are bad humans, it's because of the way that masculinity is constructed in this culture. That's on us all to confront, but it really is on men to do the bulk of the work to shift it -for women, but also for themselves, and I mostly don't see that happening because it's vulnerable and difficult, and takes work, and patriarchy breeds insecurity due to the constant jousting for rank and performance of masculinity.
I'm working on a story now about just how important it is for men to be allies on the side of gender equality - because men listen more often to other men. According to research done at Cambridge, "Essentially, people who otherwise would avoid listening to a message about sexual harassment or discrimination from a woman can be persuaded by that message if it is delivered by a man."
Most women are quite aware of a lot of the challenges that the average man faces, and they also see that most of those are caused by a social system which continues to largely be upheld by men anyhow. It's killing them with loneliness and depression and stress, and driving too fast trying to look cool - and they mostly won't do anything about it. All the while, 85% of American women started getting harassed on the streets as children, an American is raped every 68 seconds, most of them women, etc., etc., and not only is nobody doing anything about that, they are often hugely antagonistic about it - as we saw with the backlash to #MeToo.
I don't really fucking care if being told to actually stand up and be a man by cleaning up your shit makes men resentful. To me, that's just weak. These are all men's issues and we're tired of suffering because of them. We'd also like our son's and partners and male friends not to suffer because of them either. Women have to help, because women help to uphold some of this as well, but patriarchy is undeniably the problem, and the culture of masculinity within it, and the guys who aren't actively confronting that are, whether they want to be or not, complicit with upholding the system. They are what allows the dysfunction to continue.
