This right here, is an equivocation and an excuse.

I'm not saying there's not a lot of talk around it or that there's not a lot of pressure places on men.

I'm saying the word itself, especially as a mantle of manhood is so ambiguous as to be practically meaningless or a sure fire way for men to shoot themselves in the foot.

Men were never providers for women, historically speaking. It was women who provided most of the calories consumed by our paleolithic ancestors.

Even if you go back to the pre-industrial pastoral era when women were kept under laws of coverture, men did not provide for women. Women worked those fields and in trades too. There was a gender split of work, but it was a trade off. Meaning, women provides for men just as much as men provided for women. In the end, it doesn't matter how many fields you plow, if no one preserves the food for you to eat when there's none else available. And tends the fire. And makes clothing to keep you from freezing to death. And so forth and so on. It was a more or less equitable labor trade off.

It wasn't until industrialization economically disenfranchised women that you had this concept of men being providers for women rearing it's ugly head. And let's be clear here. It was mostly for white women, whether they wanted it or not (most didn't, seems like). Other women, women of color, never stopped working. They had no choice either.

So all this 'pressure' is supremacist in it's origin, in it's execution, and it's based on a false narrative. It's bullshit. Abject bullshit.

You can easily apply the same logical reasoning to the protector myth.

These ARE myths. They are not reality. They never were.

So when people.give space to the idea that these poor abusive fucks just can't help themselves from being abusive fucks because of all the pressure to live up to a lie...well, then you're giving them leave to continue being abusive fucks. You're making it okay. You're excusing it. You're giving them an equivocation beyond their own character deficits to normalize it and explain it away as just one of those sad and unfortunate things that just is what it is and we all have to accept.