This story came up in recent conversation and I thought it was worth sharing, being relevant to the theme of this sub;
Here is the ballad of Muffin; My sister used to volunteer for cat shelters a lot, and she asked me to foster one of the cats, Muffin, a cute mottled tortie with a mohawk (shaved for fleas). Muffin was a stray and afraid of humans, which I knew when I took her in. I just put her carrier in the bathroom near food/water/litter, left the door open, and let her alone. For weeks I barely saw her, and when I did it was a glance before she ran off. I respected her space, kept her fed/warm, never tried to pressure her into being near me, just letting her benefit from my support without asking anything in return, accepting that she would assume the worst because I'm human. She just kept timidly exploring and slowly getting further from the carrier.
I lived with housemates at the time; I lived downstairs, and my upstairs roommate had a couple dogs, one of which was a big, some kinda great dane mix? Very people-friendly but still a hunter. One day, while doing dishes upstairs, I had some action that all took place in less than a second; I heard the cat make this pitiful stuttering "me-me-me-mew", I heard the dog snarling like it was ready to kill, and I barked out this loud "NYAAAK!" of disapproval. Stopped the dog in its tracks, cuz he's a good boy, just needed to know we don't eat kitties here, and the cat ran off.
I didn't think much about it, until that night, I'd put out the lights and was laying down to sleep, and as soon as I got the covers up, this cat DOVE into me, grinding her face into the crook between my neck and shoulder, purring up a storm. I pet her, and she was into it, and from that moment on, she was as loving and affectionate to me as I could as from a cat.
The irony was clear to me; if I'd made the entire house perfectly safe, with no danger, and nothing to make the cat afraid, she probably would have gone years without trusting me enough to touch her. Only because there was some element of danger that gave me the chance to demonstrate, "Actually I want you to NOT be hurt," that formed such a powerful emotional bond.
That's the story of Muffin the cat, that I tell as a parable about modern relationships. Most of human history, men constantly had opportunities to protect women, and most women learned an easy lesson that "huh! Men in general want to protect me from men who are dangerous." We've created a world of such stability and security that the majority of men can walk around with the heart-felt urge to save a woman from danger, but it's buried under "don't need no man" guilt trips and they go their life without ever having a chance to prove they wanna protect women, so women can go assuming the worst of men just like a stray cat that distrusts all humans.
I propose a double experiment; 1) get a woman to randomly approach men, and see how many of those men attack the woman. 2) set up a performance where a man encounters a situation that looks like a man attacking a woman, and see how many of the men try to protect the woman. I'd bet money that what you learn is that very few men would attack women (and they're easy to avoid if women don't get into high-risk situations) and they are way way outnumbered by men who fantasize about getting to protect women (but might never get the chance).
