Prepared for What?

If you’re going to keep weapons, (which you should) you should absolutely know how to use them. If you’re going to live in a dangerous world, you should be prepared. Calm under pressure saves lives. I don’t resent the instinct to protect. What unsettles me is who gets to train for safety as a choice, and who’s trained for it as a condition of existing.

Because while men are paying to simulate danger, women have been enrolled in mandatory survival courses since childhood.

Men’s preparedness training is marketed as power - control, strategy, precision.
Women’s preparedness training is politeness - de-escalation, empathy, self-blame.

We are taught to read a room, to soften our voices, to use humor as a shield.
To text a friend when we get home safe.
To hold our keys between our fingers, just in case.
To carry pepper spray or bear spray. Even though we chose the bear.
To negotiate with the man who’s already decided not to take no for an answer.
To humanize the attacker, to tell him you have a child, a dog, a family... anything to make him see you as real before he decides to end you.

Years ago, a man I was casually seeing refused to leave my home after a few drinks turned into an argument.
I asked, I begged, I reasoned.
I tried every polite script we’re taught to use when we’re scared but trying not to show it.

When those failed, he grabbed me. He slammed my head into the wall while punching me in the kidneys.
When I fought back, he bit into my shoulder, hard enough to tear the skin.
The pain was blinding, but what came after was worse.

My neighbors called the cops. 
It took nearly forty minutes for them to arrive.
When they finally did, they put me in the back of the cruiser and let him walk away.
His car stayed in my driveway.
I was told I needed to calm down.

I spent that night in my neighbor’s guest room, shaking, remembering “to protect and serve” is simply PR.

It was a domestic assault, but it didn’t look like the kind you see on posters.
There was no long-term relationship, no shared home, no clean label.
Just a man who felt entitled to control me and a system that treated my fear like an inconvenience.

That night wasn’t unique. It was just one more proof of how the illusion works.
Maybe that’s why I can’t watch these tactical drills without feeling something twist in my gut.

They’re rehearsing heroism inside a system that abandons real people in real danger.
Preparedness culture celebrates a kind of masculine vigilance that exists only because institutional protection has failed everyone — including the men it claims to empower.

Because patriarchy doesn’t just endanger women, it weaponizes men and then calls the result “order.”
It trains one half of the population to dominate and the other half to endure.
Both sides lose.

Men are taught to protect what they love by controlling it.
Women are taught to survive love by shrinking beneath it.
Everyone learns to mistake violence for security.

So we keep training - one side in aggression, the other in submission - and the cycle keeps spinning.
The rest of us become the obedient collateral, carrying the consequences of someone else’s lesson plan.