I'm feeling overwhelmed about the world for women right now.

Sir Keir Starmer previously told the BBC no high-risk prisoners will be released, maintaining that risk assessment procedures will be put in place to prevent this.
Despite this, the Prime Minister confessed the risk could not be entirely quashed, saying: 'We have put a threshold on risk, very much bearing in mind the victims in this.'

I would like the threshold calculation to be published, dear PM Starmer.
I would like the Royal Statistical Society and appropriate organisations to pore over it and run those calculations.
Please and thank you.

Labour's prisoner release scheme doesn't care about women - this is shocking -
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13823333/Keir-Starmer-set-free-domestic-abusers-Labour-governments-new-early-release-scheme.html?ito=native_share_article-top

I kind of see their point if they live a blameless life it’s not their fault if other men do these horrific things. What is an individual good man supposed to do?

Dh to be fair does all he can in words and actions and frankly it’s cost him professionally. His face doesn’t fit in the lads club at the top of his firm. He will speak up and walk away - it’s not the easy path for a man.

It's quite difficult to discuss these things even with the nice ones because the automatic reaction is defensiveness

I think that's because it's not a productive conversation unless solutions are being suggested or actions they can take to make things better, although there's a systematic problem I think it has to be addressed through tackling specific cases of injustice.

When I said I could not think of a single instance where a woman had attacked a man because he was a man and having a hatred of men he got cross with me.

Back in the day, the male riposte to that was Solanas' SCUM Manifesto and her attempted murder of Warhol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto

That one case was their thought-terminating cliché for decades…

@INeedAPensieve interesting, I had a similar conversation with my DH about that case. I was saying that VAWG / misogyny needs to be treated as an aggrevating offence in crimes, like race and homophobia and his instinctive reaction was to question whether that offence was truly a VAWG offence rather than just an attack by an unwell person. Then he agreed with me and said only if there was an equivalent male protection. When I said I could not think of a single instance where a woman had attacked a man because he was a man and having a hatred of men he got cross with me.

It's quite difficult to discuss these things even with the nice ones because the automatic reaction is defensiveness.

Why does that industry get a free pass? If you shouted “teen sluts” at school girls you could be arrested yet men merrily make films of similar names which are freely available with no consequence? Aren’t those films all hate speech?

So weird isn't it. Society has come forwards in so many ways but then we have porn and the abuse of women that has got so much worse and is just accepted.

Remember reading a comment by a Jewish feminist years ago - that a young women seeing porn feels the same feelings a Jewish person must have felt on seeing nazi propaganda.

I remember the visceral horror as a teenage girl of seeing my worst nightmares enacted on people that looked like me. But no one seems to care about that.

What I find utterly baffling is the rightful carefulness of speech now how you can be prosecuted for using offensive racist / transphobic terms - rightly so.

Yet a billion dollar industry based on abusing women frequently employing misogynistic slurs (teen slurs etc) is given a free pass?! Don’t the laws of safety at work and hate crime language apply in that industry?

I sometimes wonder how many women need to cultivate cognitive dissonance on some matters to be able to move through the world with any degree of comfort.

Very very many of us, I think.

@FiveFindOutersAndDog I literally said if it could be done in a healthy way so the benefits of the hormone weren't lost but it took away the worst bits. But no-one would ever spend time and money developing something like that

I'm only surprised that it took 8 replies for first NAMALT-adjacent comment and almost 20 before someone chimed in with "pretty awful women".

It's a shame that the posters who make that sort of remark don't seem to notice or admire the courage of women like GP who are prepared to stand up for the rest of women.

I sometimes wonder how many women need to cultivate cognitive dissonance on some matters to be able to move through the world with any degree of comfort.

AIBU thread with some NAMALT

http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/amiibeingunreasonable/5158709-to-wonder-thinking-about-this-awful-french-rape-case-if-humans-are-just-rotten

I think what is so very concerning is the amount of people that make out it's not all men and try to minimise the problem. But the problem isn't just the very worst men in society like Gisele Pelicots husband and the many willing volunteers he seemed to easily recruit.

It's all the men that would be willing to do something like that if they thought that they wouldn't get caught or thought they could do it without repercussions. All the men that commit crimes against women, murder, assault, stalking. Most crimes dont even get reported. The men that watch extreme porn, or many argue porn in general, which is in the millions. And then finally the men that deny that it's a male issue, that seek to suggest it's just someone with mental health or the narrative that both sexes commit crimes, they're not allies. And a lot of men fall into the latter categories.

I have just been reading about the case of Gisèle Pélicot, it is absolutely appalling. That her husband would do that and all these men colluding with him. Even a neighbour of hers. Just horrific. What an incredible woman to waive her anonymity and stand up in court to get justice after going through that. I honestly can't imagine how she is keeping going but she is because that's what women do.

That was when I stopped reading the guardian. They've just got worse and worse.

Sounds a dreadful website and I've no intention of looking at it. Why would you do that??

It's getting beyond repair...

For a bit of downtime, I would go on a website called 9gag. It was a site for Memes and was quite funny. I would hazard a guess it was/is around 95% used by males, majority of them young and from all around the world. A few years ago it was infiltrated by Incels. Slowly but surely the content began to change and now it's just full of women hating propaganda with a few funny things in between. I still go on it, but my time is spent arguing with these lads in the comment section, I don't know why I bother, if anything they just double down on their absolute hatred of women and feminism.

Blocking testosterone does not reduce men's bad behaviour.
It's changes them in a very negative way which I've found out first hand because of my DH serious medical condition.
He's become very irritable and snappy, can now be exceptionally rude to me in public. No sex drive, no affection, very little physical contact. Now has osteoporosis, has lost so much muscle tone and put on weight.
Other health risk he's not had so far:-
Diabetes
Cardiovascular disease
Dementia
Depression and anxiety

Other solutions are needed. Parents need to stop idolising their sons. So many families I know where the son (or one of the sons) is the favourite of the mother (maybe the father too) and they can be spoilt, entitled and damaged. We women also need to be very choosy who we have children with, avoiding the aggressive manipulative men. Know our worth.

Men en masse are not going to lower their testosterone.

Now Rebecca Cheptege too 💔

BBC article

For me, I think the NYE mass sexual assaults in Germany, December 2015 were the early warning sign. I had read about it on Mumsnet in the immediate aftermath (reported by Mumsnetters living in Germany I think) but the UK media coverage was far less than I expected. And then came that Guardian article....

We made many gains, but we are going backwards fast, in my opinion. Largely through sleepwalking, mainly through the last three decades where it was cool to be "post feminist" and pretend those rights are a given.

Never EVER take your rights for granted or be complacent about them, is my view. If your forebears had to fight for them, you can be sure that those whose power over you was loosened will be plotting to take them away as soon as possible. It's true for women's rights, and I'm pretty sure gay people who are currently wedded to the (often heterosexual) TQ+ are going to discover the same over the next few years.

It is overwhelming how constant it is. And what upsets me is just how many people shrug or switch off to it. I peaked about the harms of gender ideology over a year ago now due to two articles; Hadley Freeman's leaving article in The Guardian where a comment underneath led me to her article in Unherd about the real reason she'd left the paper and that BBC article about young lesbians being basically coerced and shamed into having sex with male people claiming a women's identity.

It's funny to me now that I was a lifelong reader of The Guardian and a lifelong viewer of the BBC and it was those two articles that pulled the rug from under my feet and then took me here to this wee corner of the internet and then made me realise actually how awful these media institutions are and how much they have betrayed women and girls.

And of course I didn't believe for a second that JKR had turned into some evil monster so I also went and read her essay explaining why she was fighting for women and girls rights and it all fell into place. I mean, there are days when I feel it would be nice to be still living in ignorance of it all but my hatred of male on female violence was always there and I always believed Germaine Greer (my mum was a fan of hers, same age, same era). It's a bit ironic really that it was a guardian article and a BBC article that pushed me to the truth. They'd be raging!