To think this comment about women with no female friends is problematic?

I would find it unusual for a woman to have no female friends whatsoever. Even just one or two close ones, then plenty of male friends as well.
But I can't imagine having the closeness one gets in a single sex friendship being as meaningful.
I've got plenty of male friends, but yeah, I have to say no female ones would look a little off to me.
But if they were enthusiastic to be friends with me then I wouldn't shun them based on that alone.

The only woman I knew with no female friends also said she didn't trust women and preferred the company of men. Continued to say she actively disliked a lot of women and thought they were "bitchy". Her marriage lasted 2 years and now apparently she is a lesbian...go figure. She was not a stable person at all so from that experience I'd agree with OP.

Fair point. And by now the 'strong female lead' is in many ways just another safe stereotype, a tickbox.

But the cynical part of me feels that society is evolving in spite of feminism rather than because of it. Similar to how it arguably wasn't the suffragettes that got the vote so much as times changing - the female war effort and other countries like Australia having already granted women the vote.

I have one real friend my other friends over the years have turned out to be self centred users out for their own benefit. I consider myself to be decent person who knows how to be a decent friend, i wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of anyone but people often take advantage of me, so I drop them. Does that make me a red flag, then? I do have boundaries, hence I end the friendships!

Obviously people generalise or you wouldn't have people dismissing 3bn people because they've encountered a few bad apples. If I said that I didn't like Asians because I had been bullied by some Asian people, I doubt I'd get much understanding or sympathy.

I think it's weird. I used to have mostly male friends, and now I have mostly female friends. You just make friends with who you make friends with 🤷🏻‍♀️

As I said to the pp some women do behave that way though. You see many threads on here about the perils of friendship groups and their dynamics. I wouldn't refuse to be friends with someone on the grounds they are a woman but, these days, I would swerve being part of a group.

But people tend to generalise when they have too much of bad experience from one group of people, even if it is purely coincidental. Humans becomes, subconsciously, a bit irrational after a string of bad experiences.

I think the statement is pretty shallow. There could be many reasons why a woman has only male friends. Maybe she went to all girls school and was bullied badly, and lost confidence in approaching women for friendships. She becomes a people pleaser and attracts women in adulthood who are her friends for the convenience. She also meets men who are nice to her, may be out of interest in her, but they treat her better than any of her female peers did, so they tend to feel more comfortable with interacting with males.

Other reason could be growing up with oldet brothers, being shy. And ended up playing sports with brother and his friends and in adulthood repeating the same patterns in friendships.
Red flag has become such an every day word that anyone a little out of the normis a red flag for some people.

There's a difference between not having friends due to a set of circumstances and actively avoiding women and befriending men.
I've known quite a few women who clearly do not like other women; usually very nasty and belittling of other women & 'oh i'm one of the lads' that's a red flag type

I've met plenty of dickheads from both sexes. I try not to stereotype and generalise.

Well women can be all those things. Men can be abusive violent arseholes so they are not perfect either obviously.

I had one girl appear in my social circle in my mid 20s. A couple of my (female) friends had met her when they were out in a bar, as she was with two guys they ended up talking to. It did cross my mind at the time it was weird she seemed to have no female friends and kind of came from nowhere but I just shook it off and welcomed her as a friend. Let me tell you - she wreaked absolute havoc in my friendship circle for the next decade! And I learnt exactly why she gets new friends every two years.

I’m definitely more cautious about opening my circle to friends with no discernible “friendship history” after that 😆 OTOH one of the kindest and most principled coworkers I’ve had, had no friends other than her sisters.

I wouldn’t judge someone for having no friends or no female friends but I do switch off when they start going on about how terrible women are and how cool men are.

I am also ND and I get how male friendships can be easier. Until I was 12 and sent to an all girls school most of my friends were boys. I didn’t have to work so hard to figure out all the unwritten social rules with them, we could just ride our bikes and play football. And even now as an adult one of my very best friends is a (married) guy .

So I do understand but at the same time I feel there’s a certain depth and richness I gain from my conversations with fellow women that I can’t get from most men. I think the type of woman that is happy with having only male friends is probably not going to be the friend for me, but I won’t necessarily think badly of her.

I do think that. Yes. And there's a difference between representations of women in the media and how women are perceived and judged in real life.

Characters on TV don't have to do the whole justifying using full time child care in the same way for example

You think?

Personally, I'm bored to tears with the amount of 'strong female leads' I see in films/TV today whose only perceivable attribute seems to be being independent and sassy. As somebody pointed out in an interesting article (which I'm really annoyed I can't find again) it's rare that we see men portrayed this way outside of cardboard cutout action heroes.

Sherlock Holmes isn't 'strong'. He's wry, brilliant, aloof, occasionally arrogant, insightful yet reserved....many things but not just 'strong'.

Thanks. If I've come across as a bit 'over invested' it's probably because a lot of posters on here tend to jump on anybody that dares to question the accepted narrative by looking at the other side. It's easy to become defensive when people get snarky.

My points were mainly that the data paints an arguably different story from what most people assume/accept as 'truth' and that neither sex really comes out smelling of roses, although in aggregate most people are decent if not perfect.

I do think some branches of modern feminism (especially online) focus too much on the blame game and that non abusive men and women (the majority of the population) are best off working together to tackle the deviant minority rather than infighting.

I don't feel it's helpful to confront every male with "oh, but how do we KNOW you're not one of the bad ones. We have to assume you could be a rapist". You'd never leave the house if you applied this logic universally.

So women who only have male friends deserve the non-judgmental friendship of other women.

But women who do have female friends but don't want to be friends with women who don't have female friends are problematic and unfair.

Make it make sense!!!

I feel it's like some sort of Venn diagram quiz but with added internalised misogyny.

Men are allowed and encouraged to be independent. Women who are are sneered at. Women are expected to fit in and conform.

I've responded to your claims in the other thread.

The vast majority of studies conducted in the last 50 years have found that women commit similar levels of DV to men (varies a bit by study) and about 70% of non reciprocal violence. Whilst men cause more serious injury and commit more murders. However, crime data shows a completely different story which may or may not be down to mens reluctance to admit they're being abused by a woman - charities like Mankind emphasise that men not wanting to be seen as 'weak' is a real barrier to helping them.

This isn't my opinion. I'm just stating what the studies have concluded and what the charities say. I've linked every single study I've quoted on the other thread. People just don't like what they say.

Men rape women and children all the time. Men sell women and children all the time.

Of course men can be as cruel as women.

I'm not denying that girls can be cruel or bully people. I find it mystifying that someone who has so much contempt for women, who has nothing positive to say about them would spend time amongst them. I certainly wouldn't.

You're not aware of the poster's history. They're currently arguing about how women are predominantly more violent than men more likely to be abusers and how 'feminists' are the cause of everything wrong in society.

I think you proved @Galadriell point there.
Her life experience may have led her to not have much faith in other women.
On MN, it seems ok to hate men in general because a few go and murder women or whatever.. but be a woman who has had bad experience with other women, and you get gaslit over it.

I used to work in digital forensics. If you'd seen some of the videos I've seen you'd be shocked.

For example, I dealt with an IIC case (indecent images of children) where the guy had all sorts on his laptop from bestiality to ISIS beheadings etc. But what really got under my skin was the bullying vids he seemed to have a thing for - perhaps because everything else I'd already seen many times previously.

There were maybe 7-8 of these videos and they involved teenage bullies stripping their victims and filming it to post online. Most were from Asian countries (mainly China) and a couple from Eastern European countries.

The 'least disturbing' one was a Russian one where a girl of about 16yo had her hands tied behind her by her classmates (she didn't resist and was laughing awkwardly) and they then pulled up her jumper and bra, exposing her breasts, and pulled down her jeans and underwear with the whole class laughing, including loads of teenage boys. She sort of bent over to try and protect her modesty and you couldn't really see her genitalia. But she went bright red and was clearly mortified.

The worst by a long stretch was a Chinese one involving seven bullies and a victim, all around 15yo. They pulled off all her clothes and two of them held her legs open whilst the friend with the phone zoomed in and out. The victim was screaming and crying and it was honestly one of the most unsettling things I've ever seen. And it went on for well over five minutes.

The video was about 6-7 years old at the time and the victim appeared about 15yo. I remember thinking that she probably went through the rest of secondary school, sixth form, and most of uni knowing that video was online and accessible by anyone. It was posted on one of those 'reality' sites that are uncensored and feature crashes/murders/terrorist attacks/etc.

I've never seen boys doing anything close to this cruel, and I'd personally much rather be beaten up than have an explicit naked video of me watched by all my acquaintances and accessible online for almost a decade. It was chilling how the bullies were all laughing and how they all shrieked with excitement when they managed to get her pants off (a separate girl had to hold each arm whilst another pulled the pants down).

I defy anybody to watch this video and nearly ten similar ones without concluding that girls can be cruel in a calculated way that boys usually aren't. It's basically psychological torture.