There’s a scene in The Paper (1994) where pregnant reporter Marisa Tomei is freaking out from fear her husband, editor Michael Keaton, is too addicted to his job to be the devoted father and co-parent he says he wants to be. At one point she asks him, what if a terrorist broke into their house and gave him a choice — he’ll either blow up the newspaper offices or shoot Tomei. Keaton replies “That will never happen!” “Exactly! You’re waiting for some big dramatic moment to prove how much you love me and missing all the small ones.”
As Don McPherson says in You Throw Like a Girl, being the chivalrous hero protecting your woman is held up as the gold standard for being a good husband (though as noted at the link, some conservative Christians don’t see a problem with being both a protector and an abuser). Trouble is, McPherson goes on, protection may not be what she needs. As that conversation in The Paper drives home, a woman doesn’t need constant protection: on a given day she may need you to cook dinner, handle the laundry, or listen while she vents much more than she needs you to stave off an axe-murderer.
Still, the image of what a man should be persists. It dovetails nicely with beliefs about chivalry, and even more with right-wing beliefs that men are aggressive brutes by nature — our lust for violence can’t be contained so women can either help channel it into protecting them or risk it being used against them. Plus women looove manly heroes — every woman wants one for her own! So it’s not just a right-wing thing.
As White Pages puts it, “There’s so much toxicity in the stories that we men internalize about ourselves: about how we are the heroes of ours and everybody else’s lives, about how every time we feel threatened or diminished in any way that we get to throw a fit, about how the world demands our dominance and force more than it begs us to be alive to the humanity of all those who surround us. To say that we are a ticking time bomb is to diminish the fact that we aren’t ticking at all. We’re always going off.” Hence the popularity of fictional protagonists who may be failures as family men but by god, they’ll fight to save their kids! “It is a fantasy that allows many of us to escape (albeit temporarily) the terrifying thought that we don’t really know dad, and that he doesn’t really know us.”
This puts me in mind of John Wayne’s 1949 film, The Sands of Iwo Jima. He’s a Marine lifer, completely unfit for civilian life, let alone family life, and the movie is quite clear that post-war we’ll need citizen soldiers like John Agar much more than Wayne.
The old analogy, as Celeste Davis says, is that while most of us are helpless sheep and some of us are vicious wolves, a few people are sheepdogs, wolves who fight the other wolves for the rest of us. Trouble is, “Men are our protector. Men are our predator. Our protectors are our predators. If men stopped harming women, there would be no need for protection. The person most likely to attack a woman is not some other man, it’s HER man! Her husband or boyfriend.” Plus we’re all sheep: the predators and the defenders aren’t some other species from us, they’re the same as us. “Our problem isn’t that we have an innate predator problem. Our far greater problem is that by needing to be a hero, our “protectors” turn themselves and their fellow humans into predators.”
There are lots of ways to be the hero (male or female or non-binary) our family, or people in our circle need. So let’s bloody well be one.


