Basic Safety Guide for Men

I am not a lawyer. This article contains no legal advice.

There are ample resources informing women about how dangerous some men can be. It’s good that those resources exist. For example, it’s common knowledge that women have to worry about being roofied or otherwise overpowered.

Being physically overpowered by women is less of a concern for men, but what do men need to consider? I haven’t seen a basic safety guide for men. For example, a DuckDuckGo search for ‘safety guide for women’ readily returns results such as “A Former Police Chief Shares 10 Must-Know Safety Tips for Women”, “10 Essential Safety Tips Every Woman Should Know - Safety First”, and “8 Safety Tips for Women from a Woman Cop”. Those are the top three results; there are many more. Yet when I search for ‘safety guide for men’, I get links to health checklists and tips for how to use a razor safely.

Men’s safety concerns regarding women are typically of a legal, financial, or biological nature.

As a general rule, men should not get involved with women who have an incentive to evade accountability. Such situations are potentially dangerous for men because accountability can be unfairly shifted onto them.

For example, do not sleep with a girl who has reason to lie about sleeping with you. If she has a boyfriend, say, and he finds out, she may claim that you raped her just so she’s not responsible for cheating on him.

Sound far fetched? Think again. Consider this case, where a woman slept with two football players and later accused them of rape because she didn’t want her boyfriend to think she cheated. The football players did jail time and still suffer from these false accusations today. Some women feel safe joking about threatening men with false accusations. They also use altruist-collectivist thinking to justify such accusations.

Never date a coworker – especially, but not only, if your workplace has a no-dating policy. More generally, you shouldn’t date anyone in a professional context, even if it’s not your workplace. Is the dental assistant flirting with you? Do not get involved with her. You don’t know if her dental office has a don’t-date-patients policy, in which case she has an incentive to shift blame onto you if she gets caught being involved with you.

Some women falsely claim they’re on birth control, especially (but not only) women whose clock is ticking. If those women do get pregnant and don’t want to be responsible financially, they can shift that burden onto the man. Men can even be on the hook for children that aren’t theirs: if the wife cheats, gets pregnant, and decides to have the child, the husband can be on the hook financially even if a paternity test proves he’s not the father. Men do not have reproductive rights.

Some men can’t even safely report physical abuse because it is they who end up in jail, not their abusive girlfriends.

A man should avoid women who are suddenly interested after they learn he has money.

Men are widely considered the workhorses of society. If the man might be held accountable for something that is actually the woman’s responsibility, he should assume that he will be – that she will hoist some unchosen obligation on him. Think alimony laws, child-support laws, custody laws, etc. I understand there are some jurisdictions where merely having a girlfriend, not a wife, can obligate a man to pay something like alimony when they separate. In an era of #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen, where the women’s ‘rights’ movement has become an effort to shield women from the consequences of their own actions¹ at the expense of men, there is a clear cultural bias against men and in favor of women.

Most women, just like most men, are decent people. But it takes just one false accusation, one unwanted pregnancy, one divorce, to ruin your life.