"Real men provide. Real women appreciate it": NC billboard sparks protests

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It's just seven words long, but that's enough to start a firestorm: "Real men provide. Real women appreciate it."

A billboard containing those words sits along an interstate in North Carolina, and it's inflaming passions. Some people find the message sexist.

A group of those who don't like the billboard's message plan to hold a protest this weekend.
Molly Grace says she's never organized a protest before, but she's putting one together now after seeing the billboard earlier this week.

Grace, who owns a clothing and lifestyle store in Winston-Salem, says the point of the protest isn't to bring the billboard down (although she wouldn't be sad to see it go) but to rail against the message behind it.
"We are not protesting the right to have a billboard or express a message on it," she told CNN. "This is only a protest against the type of thinking that creates a message like that."

Grace, who took to Facebook to organize the protest, feels the message promotes patriarchy and sexism and an antiquated way of thinking about women.

"We are protesting the implied demand that women be silent and appreciate, regardless of whatever circumstances, their role as non-providers," she wrote in the post.

Or, as she later told CNN, that women should "shut up and smile and be grateful for what this man does for you."

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