In the preceding chapters, we saw how survival historically depended on a woman choosing a man who would die to protea her. We also saw why choosing male killers to protea us now threatens survival. But what are some of the most important gut-level internal responses we must confront if we are to stop dividing the sexes into the disposable sex versus the proteaed sex? And how is our tendency to do that already affeaing our ecology and preparing us for two legal systems — one to prosecute the ‘’perpetrator" sex and one to protea the “viaim" sex? The best confrontation starts with self, so III start by confronting myself.
A few years ago, I was walking in the woods with a woman friend when a man jumped out in front of us. Within a second, my woman friend had jumped back and I had jumped forward. Whether we did it because of differences in our size or differences in our socialization made little difference. Like most men. I unconsciously bring to my relationships with a woman an unspoken understanding: my body, not my choice.
I wish this happened only in the woods. But when I have been with a woman in my home and a suspicious noise scared us, it took a long time before I no longer felt guilty asking her to accompany me as we checked it out. (The first time a woman volunteered to go with me, my res pea for her increased enormously.)
Most men are not only women’s unpaid bodyguards, they actually pay to be a woman’s bodyguard: when they pay for the date, pay for the weekend, and therefore pay for the walk, they are zea\paying to be her bodyguard. It is one of many male forms of indirea nurturance. By calling it power, we have made the nurturance invisible.
Don’t many women today protea themselves, and protea children too? Yes, and yes. Women often protea themselves and risk their lives to protea children, but a woman will rarely risk her life to protea an adult man. We have all read of a mother lifting a car to save a child, but not to save an adult man.
In Stage II societies, confronting the desire to save the female first starts with the propensity to save girls first.