LIFESTYLE
Let's get one thing straight before you assume this is a man-hating rant, it's not. It is a love letter to standards and holding out for what we deserve.
There's a reel that's been doing the rounds on Instagram for a while now. Opens with a woman saying that she doesn't need men in her life. Cut to a different clip, a different woman, reeling off percentages of how many law enforcement officers are men and so on. The message: we most definitely need men.
It misses the point entirely.
Nobody's arguing men don't do dangerous, physical, essential work. Of course they do, and genuinely, thank god for that. But that's not the same as "needing" men, women can and do the exact same jobs, there just statistically happen to be more men in them. Confusing "more men currently do this" with "only men can do this" is how the reel's whole argument falls apart. We can respect anyone doing a hard job, man or woman, and still not need a specific man to survive a Tuesday.
The world has changed, women don't need men anymore. Not financially, not logistically, not for status, not to have children, not to feel complete. We pay our own mortgage, book our own holidays, fix things around the house and go to weddings alone without a single person clocking it as tragic. And yet, somehow, men are still behaving like it's 1924 and we're waiting by the door for them to bring home the housekeeping money.
You'd think independence would raise the bar. Instead it feels like it's been lowered without any woman agreeing to it.
Chivalry isn't dead because women killed it by being capable. It's dead because it stopped being automatic. A man used to open the car door without thinking about it, now it's a special occasion move, reserved for a third date if you're lucky, performed with the slight self-consciousness of someone who it doesn't come automatically to. Letting a woman walk through the door first used to be muscle memory. Now it's a coin flip, and don't even get us started on road rage. How many men lay on the horn and scream at a woman merging lanes, like she's personally ruined his morning...
The point is not really doors and horns. Those are just the tells. What they point to is bigger: effort itself has been on a slow decline and because it was so subtle, no one said "hey, we don't stand for this". Somewhere along the way, gentleness and kindness got rebranded as weakness and a lot of men bought it. Taking care of someone, paying attention to them when they are speaking, remembering the small things, showing up without being asked twice, commitment and being true to your word, got filed under "extra," not baseline.
To be clear, we believe that good men exist. Plenty of them. Men who still stand when you leave the table, who wait for you to text that you got home safe, who are kind, caring and do so without agenda. They're just getting harder to find, buried under a swipe culture that rewards charm over character and a generation of men who mistake "independent woman" for "doesn't need anything from me, ever, including basic decency."
Financial independence was supposed to buy us the freedom to choose better, not the exhaustion of settling for less because at least he's consistent. Needing nothing from a man was never supposed to mean accepting nothing from one either.
So no, this isn't "all men." It's a question worth sitting with over your coffee this morning: when did we start mistaking the absence of red flags for a green one? And what would happen if we all, collectively, stopped calling basic decency a bonus?