Feminism has a special preoccupation with women’s physical safety. “Violence against women” is a key topic in feminist discourse, frequently discussed with a tone of unique seriousness, urgency, and outrage that portrays it as something separate from, and worse than, “regular violence” (i.e., against men). What is interesting, but hardly ever remarked on, is that this special concern for violence against women actually looks a lot like the protective attitudes towards women commonly found in traditional gender roles. Feminists and traditionalists obviously differ in some of the details but both sides have rhetoric that sends similar messages when it comes to violence and safety.

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It should be entirely uncontroversial to say that a protective attitude towards women is a major component of traditional gender roles. It’s a commonly mentioned theme from people who support those traditional gender roles, like the following religious websites:

This component of traditional gender roles is also widely acknowledged by those on the other side who oppose traditional gender roles (although they often interpret it as being “benevolent sexism” and ultimately harmful for women, which makes the resemblance between feminism and traditionalism here even more strange):

“Women should be cherished and protected by men” is an example of traditional sexism under the Ambivalent Sexism framework of Susan Glick and Peter Fiske.

Traditional gender roles and stereotypes depict men as “wage-earners and protectors”, according to a 2012 report to the European Parliament.

“Men are sought out as the natural protectors, which means if anything happens, women look to the man for help.” (“Gender Expectations For Men”)

The basic point of this article is that this traditionalist protective attitude towards women has been a major blind spot in our society’s efforts to recognize and reevaluate traditional gender roles and attitudes. Ideas like men being the head of household (or women’s careers mattering less) get questioned and scrutinized but ideas like violence being inherently more tragic when it happens to women generally fly under the rader.

“It’s the death of a woman, sadly, again in our city […] This is an horrendous crime, as all murders are, particularly the murders of women.” A Melbourne homicide squad detective (ABC News)

If we’re serious about gender equality then we have to recognize and reevaluate the protective attitude towards women that we’ve inherited from gender traditionalism. Caring more about women’s safety can feel entirely natural and unremarkable to us (see male disposability) but in the past the same could have been said for seeing men as the head of household or seeing women’s careers as less important too.

1. Feminism and women’s safety

Let’s take a look at feminism’s special preoccuption with women’s safety. One of the most common slogans within feminism is to “end violence against women”, which can be seen from various feminist/progressive parties, politicians, and organizations:

This slogan elevates women’s safety to a special status because it sets lofty, unattainable goals for women’s safety (no woman ever experiencing violence) and usually doesn’t mention men’s safety at all. Other progressive parties, politicians, and organizations single out the importance of women’s safety using different language:

“No woman should be left feeling afraid of violence” (Planned Parenthood)

“Labour will emphasise the safety of women and girls” (Labour Party, UK)

“Violence against women is a stain on the moral character of a society” (former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden)

It’s common to single out violence against women as a “human rights violation”:

“Violence against women is one of the most pervasive human rights violations of our time” (European Institute for Gender Equality)

“Violence against women and girls is one of the most widespread, persistent and devastating human rights violations in our world today” (Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Canadian Minister of Health in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal cabinet).

“Violence against Women [any act of violence that results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women] is a Violation of Human Rights” (Association SOS Help-line for Women and Children)

See also various Take Back The Night events; “[t]he mass gatherings and marches are a call for safety and equality for women in all places, at all times”, bringing “attention to the violence faced by women, girls and gender minorities in their daily lives”.

2. Discussion

Many aspects of feminism (such as its emphasis on women in leadership positions and dismissal of ideas like “sexual purity”) clash with gender traditionalism in very obvious ways, but its focus on women’s safety has a much more traditionalist flavour. They may differ in some of the details, which will be discussed, but feminism and traditionalism are clearly going in the same direction on this topic.

What exactly this means to you depends on your view of gender traditionalism. The main point I want to make is that if you believe that traditional gender roles and attitudes should be questioned and scrutinized then you should at least be skeptical of feminism’s focus on women’s safety. If you believe in gender equality then you should not want anything resembling gender traditionalism to be taken for granted.

So let’s question feminism’s focus on women’s safety. What are possible justifications? Maybe a special concern for women’s safety over men’s could be justified by biological sex differences, like women’s lower average physical strength or women being the bottleneck in reproduction. I address these in more detail in male disposability, but these seem like distinctly traditionalist arguments. I don’t think most feminists or progressives are eager to set the precedent that we should treat men and women differently due to differences in physical strength or reproductive roles (this precedent could easily justify gender norms like sports as a “man’s domain” and childcare as a “woman’s domain”).

A special concern for women’s safety might also be more practically justified if violence was a much bigger problem for women, whether in prevalence or severity (which might or might not be related to physical strength differences). This still wouldn’t justify labelling violence against women but not violence against men as a rights violation, but it would justify referring to violence against women as an especially pervasive violation.

Violence victimization by gender is a big topic. There are differences between countries, years, types of violence, and data collection methodologies. But, looking at the big picture (covered with more detail and more sources in the Non-Feminist FAQ), it really doesn’t look like violence is a much bigger problem for women, certainly in the Western world but even probably in other regions. Here’s crime survey data from the United States:

Based on the 2017 survey, there was no statistically significant difference in the percentage of violent acts committed against males and females. “Criminal Victimization, 2017 ” (from National Crime Victimization Survey, NCVS)

Crime surveys only cover nonfatal acts, and if we look at murder (the most severe form of violence), men are the predominant victims in most countries.

Many people seem to have the impression that violence is a bigger or much bigger problem for women. Some types of violence arguably are, like sexual assault and partner violence, and gender disparities there receive a lot of attention (“76% of Canada’s domestic homicide victims are female: study”). But there are gender disparities against men in other types of violence, like murder overall, police violence, hate crimes, and stranger violence. Here’s historical data on stranger violence in the U.S.:

There is a strong case that the perception of violence as a particularly bad problem for women is driven more by stereotypes and assumptions (about women as vulnerable victims worthy of sympathy) than by a sober look at the facts of gender and victimization. A clear example is that in 2016, Canada’s feminist-identified government undertook a national public inquiry into the issue of “Missing and Murdered Indingeous Women” (its “guiding principle”: “Our Women and Girls are Sacred”) even though Indigenous men get murdered (and probably go missing too) at significantly higher rates.

Another reason to believe that this focus on women’s safety is divorced from objective evaluations of victimization and harm is that these concerns reach as far as mere portrayals of violence. A Netflix series changed a book’s torture scene to involve a man instead of a woman, and culture journalist Carli Velocci (who writes about feminist issues on her blog) praised the decision of “sparing viewers from a gratuitous scene of a woman being violated — one of the most responsible changes the series makes”. It appears that violence against women elicits more of an emotional reaction of concern, sympathy, and outrage, beyond practical considerations of harm. From TVTropes:

Male characters get more explicit and brutal deaths. It’s no secret that viewers are more uncomfortable watching women get tortured, maimed, and/or killed. If a man and a woman are killed in equally grisly ways (or even if the woman’s death is less gruesome than the man), the woman’s death is still treated as worse. “Men Are the Expendable Gender” from TVTropes

Having our approach to violence be influenced by a selective appraisal of victimization statistics, by stereotypes and assumptions about gender, and by our base emotional reactions—these are exactly things feminists and progressives should be wary of.

3. Differences between progressives and conservatives

I’ve drawn this parallel between the traditionalist protective attitude towards women and the “progressive” preoccupation with women’s safety, but there are differences too.

I think conservatives and traditionalists put more emphasis on protecting women being a man’s duty in particular. It’s not hard to find rhetoric on the progressive or feminist side that focuses on what men must do (“Justin Trudeau calls on men to help end violence against women”, “men must challenge the violence of other men”, etc.) but I think feminists and progressives are more likely to portray “ending violence against women” as something that society in general must do. I do prefer the progressive approach here a bit, but I don’t think it’s a massive difference. We’re still prioritizing women’s safety over men’s regardless of how much we focus on men in particular as women’s protectors. (And elevating women’s safety to a special status does implicitly rule them out as protectors to some degree, because that means being put in harm’s way.)

Another difference is that conservatives and traditionalists are more likely to explicitly appeal to traditional masculinity (“real men …”): “[r]eal men don’t hit, they don’t threaten and they don’t bully women or children” (Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia from the right-leaning Liberal Party), “real men don’t hit women” (Malcolm Turnbull, former Prime Minister of Australia from the Liberal Party). This isn’t surprising. Feminists and progressives are more critical of traditionalism, so they’re less likely to explicitly appeal to that rhetoric. This doesn’t mean they can’t have some “blind spots” of traditional gender roles or attitudes they they haven’t fully recognized or questioned, which are even perpetuated under the banner of feminism/progressivism.

And of course progressives and conservatives have various other political differences, so even if they both commonly demonstrate a special concern for women’s safety, it doesn’t always manifest itself in support for the same laws and policies. In the U.S., many Republicans were hesitant to support the Violence Against Women Act due to its gun control measures, feminist associations/involvement, and other complaints. Nevertheless, this paper talks about it receiving cross-ideological support:

“Feminists gained the support of both liberals and conservatives in Congress by collaboratively constructing a frame for understanding violence against women as a gendered crime that was compatible with multiple ideological positions. The gendered crime frame became a dominant way of understanding the issue, linking crime frames to feminist ones, and remained dominant despite Republican votes against VAWA in 2012.” “Carceral and Intersectional Feminism in Congress” (Nancy Whittier)

4. Historical examples

There are lots of interesting historical examples demonstrating how a protective attitude towards has been pervasive in traditional gender roles and attitudes.

Violence against women has been a central focus of wartime propaganda, used to assert the barbarity of the enemy and to underline the justness of the struggle against them. The article “Rape” in the International Encyclopedia of the First World War explains that rape of women in France and Belgium was a key component of anti-German propaganda, and that “this violence against women left a strong mark in people’s minds at the time”. The article “Women in World War One propaganda” from the British Library talks about how, particularly during war, women were the “embodiment of the nation [epitomizing] the nation’s moral rectitude, its virtue and innocence, the justice of its cause”.

Women have been given special status in the rules and conventions of warfare. The International Committee of the Red Cross lists policies towards women:

“Women shall be especially protected against any attack” (UN Secretary-General’s Bulletin, 1999)

“Women … are entitled to special respect and protection” (US Naval Handbook, 1995)

“Women [in occupied territory] shall be especially protected against any form of insulting treatment.” (Sweden’s International Humanitarian Law manual, 1991)

“Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour”, “Women shall be the object of special respect” (Geneva Conventions, 1949, 1977)

“The United States acknowledge and protect … the persons of the inhabitants, especially those of women.” (Lieber Code, 1863, applying to the Union Forces in the U.S. Civil War)

Even gangsters, dictatorships, and mass murderers—those we expect to care less about morals than regular people—frequently observe or acknowledge an extra taboo associated with being violent to women.

According to a National Post article, James Bulger (“once the daring overlord of Boston’s Irish mob”), when on trial for 19 murders (17 men and 2 women), was unfazed by being called a “gangster, killer and thief”, but he had two objections: “that he’s not an informant and that he didn’t kill the two women. He wants to get into the gangster hall of fame, and you can’t get in by killing women or being a rat”.

During the Cold War, communist East Germany used violence to stop its citizens from leaving to the west. One 1973 instruction document to border guards reads: “Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage of”. The policy itself takes an egalitarian approach to killing, but its relevance here is that it acknowledges an existing hesitancy on the part of its guards to shoot women.

Finally, this extra hesitancy or taboo about violence against women can be seen even from actual Nazis. Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful people in Nazi Germany, references the “difficult decision” of including women and children in the Holocaust in the Posen speech (Poznań, occupied Poland) of October 6th, 1943:

“We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had.” Heinrich Himmler, speech of October 6th, 1943 in Posen (Poznań), Occupied Poland

Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, expressed in his autobiography that those working at the camp were deeply affected by their role, frequently asking him questions like “[i]s it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed?”.

Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them. Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked; is it necessary that we do this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? Rudolf Höss, from “Commandant of Auschwitz” (1951), Wikiquote

5. Conclusion

My point is not that no discussion should ever focus on women’s safety, but rather that we should understand that a general preoccupation with women’s safety over men’s is not new or progressive. It is, in fact, a notable component of the “patriarchy”, or traditional gender roles and attitudes. The fact that this connection receives so little attention in this context is strange, but it reflects what happens when traditional gender roles and attitudes are framed as “patriarchy” and “male privilege”—we’re not as likely to recognize and question aspects of traditionalism that prioritize women over men.