** I feel the need to clarify that when I say you, I mean the architects and keepers of the patriarchy, men and women alike. If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it. And no, I really shouldn’t have to keep saying that.

I’ve noticed an increase in the prevalence of pleas to men when I scroll through the news, opinion, and social media sites—if you want to protect us, stop being the thing we need protection from.

I know, that’s hard to hear.

As women, we’ve long been trained to sugar-coat most things for you. But we can’t do that anymore because, the truth of the matter is that this batch of prototypes being pumped out by the manospere/broligarchy has convinced themselves that the answer to all their discontent is a return to the manly-man and the girly-girl, and yes, I do mean girl, because woman is too intimidating. In this scenario, there is soft, vulnerable, submissive feminine, and hard, brutish, dominating masculine. They huff and pump and grunt and beat their chests. They binge testosterone and protein, and in their mirrors, they are Odin, the just and justified god of war, secure in the validity of their decrees and their bloodlust. They go forth into battles of their own invention against enemies only they can see. They go forth, they say, to protect us.

“Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”

So, as one of those passive, trembling, feminine whisps, I ask myself what exactly we need protection from. Presently within the halls of power, which have been completely commandeered by the above prototypes, they’ve cut funding for medical and scientific research, so they’re not protecting our health. They’ve revoked our right to choose, so they’re not protecting our autonomy. We still don’t receive equal pay for equal work, especially during, and after, fulfilling our ever-so-sacred feminine role of mothering, so they’re not protecting our financial health and our ability to sustain our existence once they’ve tossed us aside, grown old, or died from eating too much raw liver. They’ve repeatedly blocked the Violence Against Women Act from becoming law and elected a rapist to the most powerful office, so they’re definitely not protecting us from violence and assault.

So, what, I ask, dear muscley manly-man, do you propose to protect us from when the most significant threat to our safety from every perspective continues to be—you?

I know. Brutal.

It’s okay. Take a deep breath.

And check your shoe size.

Physical fitness is a laudable goal. By all means, protect your health. But physical health and strength are a tiny slice of the pie when you take into account that the greatest impact on us is the state of your emotional and mental health, those things that have dominion over the machine of your body that you often turn against us. If physical strength is in pursuit of domination and a persona of invincibility, then you are no good to us. Yes, you could use your body to shield us, from something, at some point, I guess, but we aren’t ancient humans, no one’s aiming a spear at us. But they are coming at us with poverty, a lack of healthcare, the absence of childcare, with ridicule of mental health care, unlivable wages, stolen bodily autonomy and a justice system that largely blames us when we are attacked or abused.

The prowess we need for you to master isn’t the physical ability to bash someone’s face in, but the mental strength and courage and the emotional intelligence it takes to be a different kind of man, the kind who knows that protecting the people he loves means swimming against the current, being an outlier and an outcast in the halls of power, and being derided and despised because of it.

Ever notice that most insults hurled at men are considered derisive precisely because they are reductive to the feminine? Son of a bitch—the bitch, the mother, is the object of derision. Pussy—because from someone’s twisted perspective, vaginas are more fragile than testicles? Pussy-whipped—because a man who doesn’t dominate the women in his life must certainly, and tragically, be dominated by them.

As if it’s an either/or sort of situation.

But I digress.

My point is, the man we need would wear those insults with pride and make it his life’s work to topple the patriarchy because he knows, in the end, we will all benefit—his woman, his daughters, his sons, and yes, even himself. When humans are allowed to breathe, and fill up, and reach for the stars, it is uncanny what we can achieve. In fact, the resentment of women’s achievement is one of the many things that triggered these fragile manly-mens’ defenses.

We aren’t the ones who reopened this discussion. We were chugging merrily along, somehow satisfied with the measly version of equality you’d served up, convincing ourselves we’d won because it was better than before, so, that’s something at least. For more generations than I care to count, we’ve been conditioned to settle, to be hugely grateful for so little that it’s practically spliced into our DNA. But, by revoking the few privileges you so graciously granted, you’ve awaked a monster, the goddess actually, but monster to you because now we roar, and we quake the earth, and we’re done settling, we’re done sugar-coating, done making ourselves smaller so you don’t feel threatened, done pretending you’re smarter so you’ll like us, done laughing at your jokes so you’ll feel relevant, done being king-makers.

Done.

Protecting.

You.

And that’s on you, Bro.