How to restore my faith and respect in men?

[PotentialMisandrist]

Have NC'd for this as I'm not really sure how this is going to go down.

I’ve reached a point in my life where I have absolutely no respect for men and believe they are completely the inferior sex and bring so very little to the table.

I’m thinking about this as I spent last night with a girlfriend and she was asking about any recent dates etc. I explained I had been on a date recently and threw him back in the pool as he failed to make plans for a 2nd date in time. She felt this was impatient on my part. I told her I’d been chatting to a guy who seems nice but that my only intention with him would just be a FWB arrangement. I could tell she was disappointed and she said she would really love to see me with someone special in my life. I explained that the only thing I really want and need from a man would be sex and potentially someone to look after my recycling and car maintenance as I truly believe men are just useless, bring more hassle than they’re worth and are completely inferior to women in every single way. She was not happy with this ‘sweeping statement’ and it sullied the conversation somewhat.

For context, I’m a 34yr old single Mum of 1. Have a beautiful child, great job, nice house, close with family and generally happy with my lot. Sex is the only thing lacking really.

But today I am thinking about this a bit more. Unfortunately, every single man who has every been in my life, bar absolutely none, has hurt, abandoned or disappointed me from the moment of my birth. I’ve watched my girlfriends be hurt and abused by men and have read so many horrendous threads on here about the behaviour and treatment of men. Ive been raped and assaulted by men in my younger years. On top of that, the rate of sexual assaults in my area has increased exponentially in the last year and just watching what is happening in Iran, Afghanistan etc makes my blood boil and my heart beak for my global sisters.

However, I am the mother of a son, an amazing 13yr old who I love with all my being. A son who I have so far raised to be a wonderful little human who values and respects his female counterparts and has girls as 2 of his best friends. I like to believe that my generation will raise a new generation of men who are by and large far more emotionally mature, respectful and view women as their equals.

But… it can’t be healthy for me the have this view of men surely? Particularly when I am raising one. It amounts to blatant sexism and misandry I guess. Am I a terrible person? How do I restore my faith in men?

I’m with you on this & don’t worry about your status or thoughts on the matter.

I do have a very long term partner but we don’t live together. This for me is the answer having been terribly hurt in the past.

You’re brave to “out” your thoughts & so I’m hiding behind the sofa with my tin hat on preparing for the flak we’ll get.

I’m sure there are some wonderful, amazing, fabulous men out there but ….
in my experience they all come with faults or issues, capacity to cheat and lie, selfish and self centred, and I don’t have time to be their crutch or mother figure. Been there, dine thst.

It’s a huge and interesting topic, so let’s see what others say.

Ah, thank you for your thoughts @Warspite and I agree with you that it is an interesting topic and one that I hope some conversation on might mellow my negative feelings towards the male population. And I also agree that there MUST be some decent men out there, but my lived experience is that there is just not, they are all deeply flawed in one way or another. And I feel it can't just be bad luck on my part when it has quite literally been every single man I've ever been close to.

And hear, hear to never living together. My last relationship started going down hill when he realised I would never live with him. I gave so much of myself, my energy, my time AND my bloody money to that relationship and living together would have been far too much. With my help, he grew as a person so much, I gave him the safe space and support to acknowledge and tackle some really difficult trauma in his life which I know wouldn't have happened without me. I helped him start a business. He was a much stronger person when our relationship ended and I got so very little from the relationship and was left feeling totally sucked of energy and love and feeling so unappreciated. Just one of my many experiences of men bringing fuck all to the table and women being the rock and foundation that holds everything together.

I'll go hide behind the sofa as well just in case I think! X

Am I a terrible person?

No-one here can possibly answer that but you are at least an honest person.

I’ve had one ex who was a twat, every other man I have known has been or is lovely.

Everyone has heir own person experienced but for me, men have always been the ones to help me if I’ve been on my own or with my daughter or children when they were young.

Examples that immediately spring to mind are breaking down in the car in the middle of a busy road and lots of men coming to mine and my daughters rescue, helping get the car off the road, staying with us, helping to arrange car being towed away and fixed and giving us and the dogs a lift home.

A man seeing me standing like a lemon when the wheel came off my pram and stopping to help me and getting the pram and me and my baby and toddler son into his car and taking us home.

Both instances women driving and walking past and not offering any help.

As a young woman, men from British Air Ferries giving us a lift home when my friends and I used to hitch hike home from Zero 6 disco, all family men scolding us for doing so!

My daughter tripping up on the pavement on the way home from taking my son to school and cutting her lip, blood everywhere and again a man stopping to help us and I didn’t have my purse on me (before mobile phones) so he went in a shop and called a taxi and gave me £10 to get her home quickly.

Coming a cropper and being nicked off a nervous pony who reacted to seeing a humongous grain lorry and a man stopping his car and coming to my aid and then driving to follow pony and help me capture her.

Many more occasions where men have gone out of their way to help me.

My daughter, mother and my sisters all have similar stories.

I also have stories of my husband and my son helping women/people in need.

Its was your experiences are bad but I have gone through life with men being a positive.

Op i am in the same place as you

Possibly too honest @VyeBrator ? I'm sure someone will come along and say that I am a terrible person and that my views and feelings are awful... but maybe that's what I need. I'd like to overcome these feelings but it feels almost impossible given my experience of the male population.

When you write a whole race off it’s racism and prejudice, but you can tar a whole sex with one brush and that’s okay?

No-one here will be able to force you to overcome the prejudice you feel towards approximately half the world's population. That's never going to happen on an online forum.

If you're serious about wanting to feel differently, perhaps seeking some sort of therapy might help.

I sometimes wonder this. Even some of the "good" men in my life have huge huge blind spots (my Dad and my DH) where they will be staggeringly lacking in empathy, utterly and appallingly ignorant or to be frank, downright mean. I have at least monthly nights where I cry in frustration and plan to leave. And these are the good ones. But the bar is so so low.
Having said that, I know women who are like this too, so maybe I'm just disappointed with people in general?!

There definitely ARE good decent men, and I think they form the majority of men. However the bad men cause a lot of damage and are very problematic for women and for other men.
There are also bad women who cause damage but they tend to have less power to do damage than men do, I feel the problem is that men go bad more easily than women do and when they go bad they do a lot more damage.
I have no idea what the solution is.
I can see that when we lived in more primitive times we needed men who are wild and aggressive, we needed berserkers, possibly the people in charge cultivated this in men so they could be used as disposable cannon fodder?
I can see that often we expect men to do the difficult and dangerous work that no one else can cope with but we do not acknowledge the damage that is caused to them because of this.

Don't gaslight yourself. You have a reality-based view that's based on your own lived experience and backed by hard empirical evidence.

It's not misandry to prefer to live without male companionship.

@Tamarindtree thanks so much for sharing x It's lovely to read that you've had men come to your aid on so many occasions. I'm sure the men I have known, many would have done the same for strangers in need. But unfortunately the same men hurt and abused those closest to them. I wish I had your positive experiences and relationships with men, I really do x

@DuplicateUserName I've been in therapy off and on for all of my adult life... mostly as a result of the treatment of men in my life! I'm quite a strong person with the help of that therapy though so maybe I should be thankful to the useless men that got me there! 😅

@PortiasBiscuit See, I realise it's NOT okay, that's why I'd like to explore what I can do to change these feelings

@Soothsayer1 such an interesting post, thanks so much for sharing, that's given me something to mull over x

I think you're the one doing the gaslighting here.

The OP has clearly stated she has no respect for men and that she believes they're the inferior sex.

That's got nothing to do with her preferring to live without male companionship.

If she'd stated "I have no respect for black/Asian people and I believe they're inferior to white people", this thread would've been deleted (quite rightly) in a flash.

@Tamarindtree
Indeed you have been very lucky with men who’ve popped into your life. The narc’ I was married to was wonderful to his staff and friends. He would help anyone esp a woman!

He was a cheating lying bad person who just wanted a 1950’s wife at home.
He used to say “my staff love me.” My response was always “be that as it may, but they don’t live with you!”

No seriously, not all men are the same it’s just that in my experience they are flawed and I’ve spent a long time post my husband’ s untimely death being a crutch to a very small cohort of men. It’s not always obvious at first but it soon comes out of the woodwork.

Handmaid and helper, planner and grunt worker! All the adjectives of service you can think of.

Now my front door is my drawbridge. As much as possible I go to my partners place albeit he does come here too of course. Going to his place means I can leave if I start feeling too constrained by implicit expectations of housewifely behaviour.
We’ve been together years. Suits us!

@VyeBrator I agree with you, it's total sexism and misandry as I noted in my OP. But how do I get over these feelings when my lived experience has so deeply rooted them in me? I'm actually not here to bash men per se, and maybe I would eventually like male companionship, but the thought of choosing a partner from a pool of people I've experienced only as abusive, selfish, narcissistic etc. is so unappealing.

I am in a long term relationship where we used to live together but we now live separately, living together was very very stressful for me because he was very dominant, I am constitutionally unable to be submissive so we were constantly struggling with each other.
Now that we live separately I am much happier much less stressed, he's also nicer but it feels like he's just biding his time until he can get his feet back under my table.
I can't see this ever happening because I love living alone so very much.

I won’t get into another relationship as the ending of my last one left me close to suicidal. (Many issues were involved). So I guess I no longer trust men with my heart. Time heals to a degree but I think you get left with scars and I have too many! My dad was awful, an abusive bully. I think that set the tone for my adult relationships with men. The time for therapy would have been in my teens/early 20s, if it was going to do any good. I’m in my 50s now and I can no longer be bothered to pick apart everything just to try and have a relationship in the future. I don’t think it would improve my life in any way. I know some nice, decent men. They do exist. But I don’t trust letting any into my life on a deeper level.

If you think therapy isn't going to help/hasn't helped, what do you want anyone else here to say?

You'll just have to carry on thinking you're superior to half the world's population, and live with it.

I think in large part the reason that women in the past stayed in relationships with men was that they didn't have access to jobs where they could financially support themselves.
Men were able to capture and keep women because they could financially dominate them.
Now that we can leave we do, or we just don't go there in the first place.

Well to be clear @VyeBrator I don't think that I alone am superior to men, I think that women in the whole are superior to men. Obviously there is also some terrible women out there but it's so much more prominent and as a PP said, damaging, in the male population.

Watching with interest. I'm a single mum with a ds too. I have similar issues OP.

I've had one manfriend since ds's dad. He came out with the classic line that I needed to 'get rid of my ds at least every other weekend if I wanted our relationship to develop.' He had a nasty habit of helping himself to my stuff without asking as well. So I dumped him.

Before that DS' dad morphed into 1950s man when ds was born, expected me to cook & clean, and tried to relieve me of the proceeds of the sale of my house. So DS & I left, I went back to work etc. He tried to starve us back. Charming !

The few before that (going back 20 years) either slept around, freeloaded off me or (one of them) started checking on me every hour and got nasty if he couldn't contact me. Used to get hysterical if I went for a swim. Weird.

So to say I have trust issues is putting it mildly. I retreated from dating in 2017. Unlike you OP, I don't think men are inferior, but on the evidence of my own eyes, an awful lot of them are nasty selfish immoral creeps. Which does rather lead me nowhere. And I'm trying to raise my ds to be decent and kind as well, so they must exist.

I have a professional job, nice house, I'm solvent but that seems to make me a target. I now tell anyone new that I'm house sitting so no man gets his beady eyes on my home.

It would be nice to meet an honest kind normal one, but where?

And I don't really know what I want people to say @VyeBrator, was genuinely hoping for a conversation that might inspire some hope and faith again, there's lots of very intelligent women on here with very interesting views that could help me overcome my feelings.