Women Don’t Need Men to Rescue Us. We Need Them to Question Themselves.

Jillian Sanders

Aug 15

4 min read

After nearly two decades living and working in New York City, I moved to Colorado in January 2020. Looking back, I realized I’d been living inside a hermetically sealed bubble. Nearly everyone I knew was liberal. We read the same publications, shared our outrage, and spent so much time talking to one another that I forgot we weren't talking to everyone. I felt secure in my assumptions about what a "progressive man" looked like, confident that if we checked the same boxes on a ballot, we’d be operating from the same moral map.

Denver is decidedly blue, but beyond the city, politics becomes much less predictable. Like a lot of women, politics has become one of the first things I notice on a dating profile. When I see "moderate," I wonder: does it mean genuine political moderation, or is it shorthand for, "I didn't vote for Trump, but I'm not one of those woke weirdos!"

Recently, I went on a date with a 39-year-old man who checked all the right boxes. He’d spent fifteen years living in Washington, D.C., was well-traveled, and identified as liberal.

Within minutes of sitting down, though, he announced he’d recently lost his job. Before we’d even ordered drinks, he explained he was suing his former employer. They hadn't had cause to fire him, he said, and he expected a nice settlement.

I asked what happened. I’d spent years in corporate America before starting my own company, and I knew those decisions were rarely made without a paper trail. As he talked, I found myself paying less attention to the lawsuit than to the confidence behind it. What struck me wasn't whether he'd been wronged. It was how instinctively he assumed the system would ultimately work in his favor.

I told him he was fortunate to have both the resources to hire an attorney and a résumé that would make finding another job relatively easy. There were times I believed I was being treated unfairly in my career, but my instinct had never been to fight. As a young woman trying to establish myself, I was usually asking a different question: What will it cost me if I speak up? Will I be labeled difficult? Will I become the problem instead of the problem being solved?

He looked at me and said, almost matter-of-factly, "You would’ve had an advantage. You’re a woman."

I laughed. I thought he was kidding.

He wasn't.

I told him that hadn't been my experience. He didn't seem interested in discussing it any further. The conversation hit a wall, and we moved on.

When we said goodbye, he hugged me and told me he'd had a nice time. I don't think he left believing he'd said anything controversial. He genuinely believed he supported women. He just hadn't examined what that really meant.

Driving home that night, I realized I’d been asking the wrong question on dating apps. I’d spent years assuming that shared politics meant a shared understanding of what equality looks like.

Rights are shaped by elections.

Equality is lived every day, at work, at home, in our friendships, in our marriages, and on first dates.

It's easy to support women's rights in the abstract. It's harder when a woman tells you something about her own life that doesn't fit the story you've been telling yourself. The question isn't whether you voted the right way; it's what you do when a woman asks you to see the world differently.

That's the kind of allyship I realized I’d been looking for, not just from a partner, but from the men in my life.

A close friend is married to a lifelong Democrat who believes deeply in women’s rights. He also doesn't allow her access to their family's bank accounts.

Another friend is the primary breadwinner in her family. I watched her last week, balancing a client call on mute while updating a pediatrician appointment on her calendar, checking the school lunch menu, and texting her husband to remind him that the dog needed a vet visit. He considers himself a feminist. He believes in the wage gap. But as he relaxed on the couch, he seemed entirely blind to the invisible, relentless labor that made his own downtime possible.

Equality isn't just something you vote for. It's something you practice at home.

I don't think these men see themselves as the problem, and that's precisely the point. Sexism rarely looks the way we expect it to anymore. More often, it lives in assumptions: whose experience is more credible, whose time is more valuable, or who is expected to carry the emotional labor of everyday life.

Too often, we mistake the absence of overt misogyny for genuine allyship. But not making things worse isn't the same as making things better.

For years, women have been told we don't need men anymore. We've built careers, started businesses, bought homes, and created lives that don't depend on having a husband. But independence isn't the same thing as equality.

We don't need men to rescue us. We need men willing to question themselves.

We need men who carry their convictions beyond the ballot box. Into boardrooms, where they make sure women get credit for their ideas. Into bars, where they step in when another man crosses a line instead of pretending not to see it. Into marriages, where equality is practised every day. Into first dates, where curiosity matters more than certainty.

If I’ve learned anything since leaving my bubble, it’s that we need men who aren't afraid of the work of being an ally. Allyship isn't measured by the candidate you vote for every four years; it's measured by how you show up the other 1,460 days.

The strongest allies aren't the ones with all the right answers. They're the ones willing to leave the conversation, seeing the world and their place in it a little differently.

Women still need men.

Just not in the ways we used to.