Is intervening always a good idea?
I keep hearing that men should defend women who get catcalled or bothered in public. I generally think this is a good idea — but I don't think we should always intervene, and I think the idea that we should blindly intervene is a bad one. To me it can be an emotionally driven response: motivated by genuine empathy in the moment, but not always a good strategy.
In some situations intervening is genuinely life-threatening. There are men who will not hesitate to kill you for telling them to turn their music down on the subway, let alone for stepping between them and someone they're harassing. Sometimes there are no good outcomes except keeping your head down and asking for help when you have time.
I somtumes see videos where someone is clearly in a life threatening situation and everyone around them is blamed for freezing and doing nothing. The comments are filled with "if I were there I would intervene." But this conveniently ignored videos where the men intervening get stabbed and murdered
The idea that intervention is always necessary is tactically silly — all it does in those cases is create another victim. I don't understand how that outcome is better than doing not intervening.
A lot of the "real men always intervene" rhetoric feels like a bougie assumption. If you've only ever had to make that call in relatively safe environments, you're not accounting for what it looks like in the projects, or facing someone who is visibly unstable and has nothing to lose. The calculus is completely different. Plenty of people who intervene survive by luck, not principle — and some don't survive at all. I've personally known multiple people who tried to be brave and were killed for it. Two of them were parents who stepped in to stop a young guy causing trouble in their building. Both were murdered.
So my question is: does the expectation that men should always intervene actually put people in danger? And is it fair to morally judge someone for making a realistic threat assessment in the moment?