Mums of sons. (Hard hat on for this)

Pretty much the whole site during the 14 years I've been on it?

No HQ clearly have an understanding of structural racism and emotional responses to it. They have been very careful and thoughtful about it in recent years. Not without limits, I'm sure, but they were open minded about critics race theory and so on.

They were very good on BLM, and endlessly patient with less important but still sensitive areas such as the Meghan Markle wars.

I remember reading a huge Site Stuff thread on which 3 or 4 main posters were duking it out on the issue of whether any royal person's behaviour was fair game for criticism, or whether any criticism of MM was automatically racist because any comments made about her un/intentionally invoked racist tropes about black women. It was hotly contested and went on and on, and HQ's handling of it was so careful and not at all trigger happy.

I think sometimes it's easy to generalize about Mumsnet, and think there's a hive mind when I'm fact the posters who have very negative opinions about men are different from the ones who have a different viewpoint.

If the generalisation of large groups of humans didn't exist then the world would considerably be a much better place.

Completely agree with all of this. Plus almost every woman I know has been sexually assaulted at some point.

Oh the double standards on MN are ludicrous, actually the point of hilarity at times. It really blows my mind at times, some peole just can’t see it. My favourites are things like it being ok for a woman to cheat (just don’t tell him, it’s fine) or ok to snoop through a phone for no reason but the opposite being true and it’s LTB if a man even speaks to a woman by accident. Of course there are terrible men out there, but if an alien landed and read MN theyd assume all women are perfect and 99% of men are disgusting excuses for humans.

Educating that son that women are not playthings/punchbags, inferior beings and that no means no every time would be a start to that change

@Rosscameasdoody of course. I mean having a son doesn’t change the statistics or the actions of a lot of men.

Spot on, OP. The venom with which some posters talk about men is vile. A man could save everyone from a burning orphanage yet there would still be posters on here who would find a way of maligning him. It's so tediously predictable.

Pretty much the whole site during the 14 years I've been on it?

Educating that son that women are not playthings/punchbags, inferior beings and that no means no every time would be a start to that change.

I certainly don’t hate all men but I am highly suspicious of most. Having worked in a male dominated industry I’ve seen first hand what a lot of people’s ’loving husbands’ are like. Cheating, affairs, their disdain for their wives, misogyny.

As an example of this I once worked with a male friend who I adored. He had twin babies and seemed a lovely dad. He was respectful to me and a good friend. I found out a few years later that the entire time he’d been fucking a colleague. And I realised then. It’s most men.

Plus the horrendous statistics around VAWG speak for themselves. Men are a danger to women a lot of the time. Statistically most women have experienced at least low level VAWG behaviours. And 1 in 5 men are perpetrators.

This has to change.

Having a son doesn’t change that and I can’t see how you perceive it would

Yep. As evidenced by a recent thread in which the OP suggested a curfew one night per week for all men, so that women could walk the streets without having to plan to be safe. As if that suggestion wasn’t bad enough, some of the suggestions that came after were unbelievable - incarcerating all men between the ages of 16-25 until they had ‘earned’ a licence to go out - that licence being subject to ‘points’ and eventual revocation for ‘bad behaviour’. It was a real eye opener.

I agree there is a a lot of sexism and double standards on here. But on the other hand, I am finding myself increasingly disliking the majority of men I meet as most of them have sexist and misogynistic views towards women. I think a lot of posters saying “ltb he’s a wanker” etc are just so sick of most men’s behaviour that they have started hating them all.

Nope, I've been on MN long enough to know that if a poster said "I hate all black people" for example, they'd quite rightly be banned.

It wouldn't matter what trauma reasons they stated.

ETA: And also if a black poster said they hate all white people.

Well you aren't reading the whole site, clearly.

Perfectly put.
I have a trans son and had to deactivate my account on here and take a step back for months, because the hatred and the venom just got too much, and Mumsnet themselves did nothing to stop it yet had no problem deleting and censoring my comments defending him and people like him.

I just accept that this is a website full of very bored, very angry and at times very ignorant people and thank feck that I'm not like they are.

You’re kind of making her point for her TBH.

Nope, I've been on MN long enough to know that if a poster said "I hate all black people" for example, they'd quite rightly be banned.

It wouldn't matter what trauma reasons they stated.

ETA: And also if a black poster said they hate all white people.

Yes I fucking do. So shove your sanctimonious crap up your butt.

I have adult sons. They are wonderful, caring, emotionally literate people and I’m proud to know them. I think many of us saying LTB are women in healthy relationships with men who can see how very wrong things look from the outside when posters talk about their relationships.

There’s a thread with a woman whose partner won’t introduce her to his friends until she gets a promotion, for example. She deserves to know healthy relationships are not like that.

My sons tell me I underestimate how awful men (especially young men) are as a cohort. (Obviously NAMALT and all that.) Lots of great individuals, obviously but the entitlement, sexism and toxic masculinity of so many have shocked them.

Also to answer your question, I don't see any tension between loving my sons and thinking that the patriarchy creates conditions that make men dangerous to women. In fact, this belief informs how I raise my sons. It's not like I think they're exempt because they're special. It's that I've worked very hard form when they were young to teach them how to respect women and use their social power to help rather than harm others. Obviously I have no idea if it will work. I've always known though that I'm raising people who at some point will (a) be physically stronger than 50% of the population and (b) enter a culture and society that sends them the message that they and their wishes matter more than that of women. I have done my best.

Many women on MN who "hate men" are women who know that men pose a danger to women, and that we live in a male-centric society that prioritises men. Compatibly with this, there are many good men who won't seek to use their superior physical and social strength to put the women in their lives down. Where is the contradiction? If you've raised a dickhead man who beats his wife, you shouldn't take his side.

And anyway, love is complicated. Sometimes we love people who do bad things. It's not difficult to see how someone who has raised a baby into a boy into a man would carry on loving them, even if they do end up behaving in entitled male ways. That doesn't mean that these women agree that this behaviour is wonderful.

Black/brown people saying they "hate white people" would get a softer treatment, though. It's a trauma response.

The parallel with women who've been badly treated by men and male society is so glaring. Trauma response.

I find it odd how comfortable some posters are at admitting they hate roughly half of the world population, yet they'd be the first to jump on any poster who said they hate black people/Muslims/Jews etc.

And if they admitted that anyway, MNHQ would quite rightly ban their arses from this forum.

I think most of us are here for parking threads and general entertainment, to be honest.

According to 'reputation' we're all raging terfs and man-haters, but isn't that just what happens to women when they air their opinions openly? Name calling and the usual 'shutting us down' rubbish?

If I think someone's man sounds like a twat, I'm going to say he sounds like a twat. It's frankly insulting to suggest that this means I must have a thing against all men and consider them one big homogenous mass of twatness.

I'd go so far as to wager that most of us here are either married or in a relationship with a man. Doesn't really equate to hating them all, does it?!

I, and several other female members, had to leave a support forum (not specific to men or women) because an unfortunate number of the male
members were vile to women. Incel and incel-adjacent types. They are everywhere online and MN is one space where it’s a breath of fresh air to escape that.

As for your comment that a man’s career can be damaged by false accusations…this is the very reason given when handing down lax sentences for SA cases, and CSAI cases, because a harsh sentence would affect his career, or that the damage to his career was punishment enough, therefore slap on the wrist. There are instances as well where women are also dissuaded from even pursuing cases and are asked ‘Are you sure you want to proceed, because this will negatively impact his career’.

There are so many examples of this but just one off the top of my head, that soldier who beat a women on the street. His career would be affected if he was given a harsh sentence, therefore, he didn’t get one.

www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2024/06/20/serving-soldier-who-beat-woman-unconscious-and-boasted-about-it-on-social-media-gets-suspended-sentence/

I don’t tend to post on threads so I’m not one of those you’re talking about, but I admit I hate men, and I no longer will give them the benefit of the doubt. Just because a man is decent to YOU, doesn’t mean he is safe or trustworthy to every other woman out there.
This comes from 40 plus years of men being the ones who have hurt and used me repeatedly, who have taken and taken and taken. And this is the same for pretty much every woman I know; their lives have been made harder and much worse by men. Women have been the friends who have been there to pick up the pieces.
The statistics of the amount of sexual assaults and murders of women and girls speak for themselves, maybe it’s not all men, but always is men isn’t it.

I have read the whole thread. Even if you've suffered your own trauma, this sentence: Perhaps it's like therapy for those posters. It does something to their minds due to their own trauma. I genuinely mean that too with no ill intent. is weaponising of trauma. You're suggesting that because these women have had traumatic experiences with men, they get online to say negative things about men as a whole as a form of therapy. In reality those women are stating their opinions based on facts, including statistics about violence against women.

I only have a son and don't feel like that comes with the need to defend all men at all.

This is all just a bit OTT, imo.