Was Greer Right When She Said Men Hate Women?

I don't really understand the idea about using looks to get what you want, I'm not sure how that works.
It works in pretty small and innocuous ways, really, not saying women actively sleep their way to the top-I do think that's a myth. But I did a lot of travelling when younger, and I was given various job opportunities and access to people who could help me out, and I had no qualifications or experience, just a winning smile, so I can't say that I wasn't trading on my looks-because you use whatever currency you have I guess.

I find the idea that all attractive / young women somehow have this knowledge and what's more than that they use it to be really dodgy.

Yes, it's a dodgy idea to verbalise, because men will, on the whole, jump on that and say "ha!see! I knew it!".
But it does happen, although I'm not sure how much young women actually realise that is why men are nice to them, or let them get away with stuff, or give them preferential treatment.

I used to work with a lovely young woman who happened to be blonde and beautiful. She was in the "not a feminist" camp. Her immediate boss was always inviting her and other young colleagues out for drinks (on him) and she would go, and have fun, and say what a lovey man he was. I told her that however lovely she thought he was, he noticeably wasn't inviting out the 58 year old secretary and buying her drinks, and that he probably went home and had a good old tug thinking about my young colleague, and the faint possibility that she might get drunk enough to...
She laughed in horror, but she didn't really believe me. I do worry that I am too cynical about men these days to be able to have a functional relationship!

My point was even the really really nice men have some misogyny in them.

Yes, and women.

I've caught my mother saying "well what did she think she was doing walking home alone?" - it's like ingrained or something - she's usually quite feministy. She loves to tell the story of how at school in the 50s she said she wanted to be a doctor, and was told to go into nursing or social work - and pissed off she's always been about it.

Rape culture is very real. This ingrained idea that some women deserve rape, if they dress 'slutty' or get too drunk...it's very pervasive in society.

Sorry I posted too soon and then got distracted.

My point was even the really really nice men have some misogyny in them.

☆So you know all men?? Shock horror, there are some nice men☆

I live with a lovely man, yet he can spout some shite at times that really raises my hackles. Only recently when told of an elderly female friend being mugged and her entire bag being forcefully taken from her, he actually said 'what does she think will happen if she is outside so late at night'
ok I managed to not rip him a new one, not sure how tbh.
but without knowing what time she was mugged or where, despite knowing she is elderly and lives alone in a secluded area, he still managed to victim blame.
I said something along the lines of women are allowed out from the kitchen sink these days and it was half 4 in the afternoon outside her house dear.
He did look shamefaced. didn't make me any less livid. Wonder what he would think of me if I was mugged at half9 in the evening.

"We are there to decorate, and if we can't do that we can facillitate, and if we won't do that, well what's the point of us, really? "

To do the shitwork and look after children.

I don't really understand the idea about using looks to get what you want, I'm not sure how that works. I find the idea that all attractive / young women somehow have this knowledge and what's more than that they use it to be really dodgy. Is this why so many men think that when a woman is friendly to them there is something else going on?

I may have got stuff because of what i looked like (?) but how would I know?

I have to say as well that now I am over 4o and into age of invisibility I feel much more comfortable going out and about, and in my work people listen to what I say more.

I wonder what this stuff is about looks getting you stuff? - Men dont' give real money and power to things they consider to be ornaments.

I believe Greer

I know, it is a double edged sword, being young and attractive to men. Aside from the abuse angle (and I had my fair share, although luckily fewer aggressive incidents than most it seems) when you are favoured by men in the workplace because of your looks, it's still because they are not seeing you as a person first and foremost. It's all about feeding their ego, or the possibility that you might reciprocate with some kind of sexual favour.
Having said that, I was definitely someone who used my pretty face to wrap men round my little finger in the past-probably because I really felt I didn't have much else going for me! (I know different now).
I have come to the conclusion that the whole of society is set up in a way that makes both men AND women value looks in women over and above anything else.
We are there to decorate, and if we can't do that we can facillitate, and if we won't do that, well what's the point of us, really?
It is useful, getting older, to be able to efficiently detect the misogynists because they don't bother being fake-nice (nothing in it for them).
Although, objectively, on a good day, I am still quite attractive so I imagine I won't really see the full picture until I'm post menopausal.
By then I could well be living in a remote cottage with several dogs and a shotgun .

young pretty women had privilege because men want to fuck them

Of course, because being a member of a group that is seen as a resource to be exploited by a more powerful group is the very definition of 'privilege'

IfNot I have become much ,better over years and experience (I hope) of telling quite quickly which men see women as people first and which men see women as women first.

The former group are very very very rare.

For stories read fantasies, lies, projection, whatever.

This is all the rape myths stuff, even if the result isn't rape. It makes life very difficult for women and girls who have the temerity to go outside while looking young and / or having a reasonable body and / or large breasts and / or noticable (esp blonde or red) hair and / or ... add as many as you want.

The "privilege" of all sorts of random men wanting to fuck you when you're young is double edged at very very best.

I think men who see having random men want to fuck you as a "privilege" have very little imagination. They usually seem to equate it to having pretty women coming up to them and asking if they want to have a drink or sex.
Never men who are twice their size coming up to them when they are 14 and asking in obsenities if they want to get fucked, or groups of men much larger than them shouting explicit things and looking like they're following you.
Or indeed, a nice seeming chap in the pub whose twice your size asking nicely to have a dirnk and then getting aggressive / verbally abusive / possibly physically abusive when the answer is no..
And so on.

Men who say that women have some kind of power if they are "fuckable" are deluded. They watch too much TV. They believe the lies that men like to tell each other about conventionally attractive women - that they are knowing, up for it, manipulative etc. This lie is dangerous for young women who are conventionally attractive, to be honest. This is why men approach you in the pub and then call you a bitch when you say no. Because of these stories. These are not the stories women tell, on the whole.

Well, yeah. One of my male friends (VERY well paid) got very upset when I said that it's difficult for women to rise to the top in industry (due to the expectation that we take on the majority of the domestic tasks).
He basically said that young pretty women had privilege because men want to fuck them, and other women have privilege because we can just choose to have babies and don't have the pressure to succeed that men have. (I have heard women say this too though.)

BTW When I say Beta males, I don't mean wimps, or inadequate types. Just men who maybe didn't have the drive to be Billy Big Bollocks in their work-life. Why would MRA's have a problem with that? Is it all our fault for emasculating them or something?

Why would you acknowledge your privilege when you can pretend all your success is down to you being awesome?

And guess what many men, especially MRAs, think about ‘betas’.

I have a couple of male friends-maybe 5 or 6 actually, that I don't find boring at all. I'm talking really old friends, some gay some straight.
But, they tend to be the sort of "Beta" males who haven't become senior managers in IT, or creative directors blah blah.
They are social workers, or carpenters, or NHS workers-not overly well paid.
The middle aged men I know who have become wealthy and successful are frankly unbearable for their arrogance, boorishness and total inability to accept that they are deeply privileged.

Ah yes... I was once greeted my a senior male colleague at a meeting. I’d only spoken to the guy on the phone, where he was polite and charming.

He looked me up and down and was clearly disappointed. His attitude to me was very different after that. I was professionally and stylishly dressed.
I later heard him berating a female delegate for not wearing towering heels. I told him that the day he chose to wear stilettos when he was on his feet for 18 hours was the day I would. Of course charmingly put and with a smile. But with the look of death.

Disgraceful.

It's shocking to realise that rape within marriage only became a crime in the 1990s - in my lifetime.

It's shocking to realise that so many men will coerce and bully women into sex - but it's not rape because rape is when you jump a woman in a dark alleyway.

It's shocking that some men even write books about this shit, and make money of it (PUAs) - one of whom has said on record "it shouldn't be rape if it happens on private property".

It's shocking the disregard and ignorance so many men show around consent, and women's choices.

It's shocking to see how abusive towards women online mainstream porn is. There's a thread right now about choking and strangulation - and how young men all seem to want to do this. When did this happen? That was never a thing when I was young.

Another great quote:

"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
-Rebecca West

There was a really interesting thread on this a while back hairy ..I think it was something like "have you got more feminist as you have got older". A lot of us realised that we were treated much better at work when still universally fuckable. I worked with a lot of lovely 20 something women who would describe themselves as "not feminist" and the older men at work as "really nice"..they were not always so "really nice" to 39 year old me!

The comment upthread about the workplace and mistaking thinking your colleagues respect you for them thinking you're fuckable is definitely a thing!

Back when I was in my late 20s early 30s I spent a few years in the groves of academe. I was eminently qualified and bright enough for the job, so naive lib fem that I was I thought that was why I'd got the job. I carried the highest teaching load in the department, shit loads of the admin jobs (the wifework), managed to get half a dozen papers out, and still got made redundant when they realised I was getting too expensive and too upity (wanting a permant job instead of a never ending series of one year contracts).

Recently I checked the department's website out of curiousity - and was hit like a hammer by the realisation that their male-female ratio was still shit, and that (bar one, much older female member of staff with a permanent job) they only ever employed young pretty women in their twenties, then got rid of them. The bright young men in their twenties had about a 50-50 chance of going on to a permanent job.

Mercifully where I work now, there are about 40% female staff these days (big science R&D outfit), with slowly but steadily increasing numbers of women at all levels of management, and I'd say it was a case of employing and respecting women because they can do the job.

I'm a wrinkly old prune in my 50s now so know I'm definitely not employed for my fuckability any more. But oh, how naive I was when I was twenty something.

Even the really nice ones unconsciously expect things from women that are not reciprocal.

And this betrays their sense, even if they don't realise it, that we are there for their use, in a way they don't expect to be there for ours.

But yes some men are nicer than others and are total, sexist pigs.
It very much depends where you set the bar....

So you know all men?? Shock horror, there are some nice men.

Yes some nice men.
My problem is that even nice men are living a life of privilege and they don’t even know about it or recognise it. By which they also act in ways that aren’t nice to women but don’t recognise it.

It’s, for example, the fact that many men have actually raped a woman but aren’t aware of it. Why? Because they are thinking they had sex with a woman who was badly drunk whereas it was rare because there couldn’t be any consent.
Or they insisted on having sex with a girlfriend and pushed until she said yes and thought ‘well actually she did want to have sex with me’ wo realising that the reason that woman said yes s the whole conditioning of women about sex and ‘what you need to do to keep a man, incl the fact he has the right to have sex with you’.
Read some relationship threads about women who don’t (or rarely) have sex with their DH and the ‘advice’ going round such as ‘well if you push yourself and have sex more often, you’ll find you will enjoy it more’ or ‘if you don’t want to have sex with him, then set him free (why on Earth is it the woman’s responsibility when she doesn’t have a problem with the no sex??) so he can find someone who will satisfy him’ etc... and often said to the women who have very good reasons for not having sex with said man (eg still recovering from birth, illness, the man being a twat etc etc).
It’s seen in the general organisation of the family - it’s normal that your DH is going away for one while day every weekend for his football/cycling/whatever p. He is entitled to have a break and relax afetr a hard week at work!!
The number if women who still shoulder the whole of the HW an dparenting, get up at night (poor man is tired from work and needs to be in tip top condition the day after!).

None of those people are nice men. They are putting systematically themselves before their partners. They aren’t even aware that they have been raping a woman or have put unacceptable pressure on said woman to have sex with them.
But I’m sure these are also men who will look like involved fathers (eg taking their dcs to do their activities at the weekend), will do the washing up and push the hoover around. On the outside they look great but scratch the surface a bit and the cracks appear very quickly.

Unfortunately I Serioulsy do not believe that there is any man who has actually taken himself out of our patriarchal system so that they have and are always treating women with the same respect they would give to men. :(:(
That’s part of the conditioning they have received in our society.

They pretty much are

No they aren’t. Most of us have husbands, brother, parenterns and sons. We are not saying that every Male on the planet is a homicidal rapist. We are saying that the culture of masculinity is toxic.

How can you deny this? How can you deny thousands of years of slavery, chattel, women being treated like less than domestic animals? Women being murdered en masse in places like cuidad Juarez? Mass rape as a weapon of war? Purdah? Harems? Women only having had the vote for a brief sniff of time? Honour killings? Relatiatory rape handed down as a sentence? Women in Saudi only just starting to be able to drive, still unable to access medical care without a male guardian?

In he west it’s very easy to say there’s no more need for feminism. Just like it’s easyto be blasé about infectious disease. Look outwards atcthe rest of the world and you see visceral hatred of an opporession of women. Look inwards at our societies and it’s not far beneath. You are being naive.

They’re even!