To think the majority of MN'ers are very hypocritical?

[BobbyElvis]

Do you agree? For example, please compare and contrast these two threads I have read on this forum today...

Post 1.
A woman found out her husband had been to a strip club. 12 years ago, before they were married, on a drunken stag do. All fairly normal behaviour for most stag parties. No cheating, just a strip club. The reaction to this was unbelievable - almost all posters urging this woman to leave a happy marriage. This woman reiterated that she was very happy in her marriage but the consensus was STILL - LTB.

Post 2.
A woman kisses a man on holiday and lies to her husband. All of the replies apart from one tell her to sweep it under the rug and not hurt a happy relationship.

The double standards here are absolutely disgusting. I can guarantee if the thread was started by a woman asking for advice after her partner had kissed a woman on holiday the replies would be LTB.

Why is it okay for a man to be kept in the dark but not a woman? Do the women on Mumsnet have such low self esteem that they can't handle their "DH" looking at another woman on a drunken stag do but will happily have a drunken fumble in Spain for a quick confidence boost then laugh about it with their friends for years to come?

eekaman
If a man had posted his wife had snogged lots of blokes, the advice would have been LTB.

It is different if the OP is the bastard - what should the equivalent be:

You have been unfaithful, fess up and kick yourself out of the house?

I've been on threads where the advice was to stop being a bastard and leave the poor partner. For both sexes.
But there are never threads complaining about those.

I think much of the advice on relationships is informed from a place of pain and from people who have often been treated badly and had their trust and patience diminished as a result

That makes it the opposite of hypocritical

Yabu

Eekaman - as you appear to know the threads the OP mentioned, can you link to the actual threads? Because it's hard to comment on threads that are so badly summarised that virtually nobody recognises them. You might as well be commenting on total fiction.

And in what way is it hypocrisy if different people are attracted to different threads?

Any chance of a link to the threads concerned, OP? Impossible to comment otherwise.

Link to threads by all means but what we really need to prove that Mumsnetters are hypocrites with low self esteem is someone to go through both to find posters who said one thing on one and not on the other when the circumstances were exactly the same.

"
Link to threads by all means but what we really need to prove that Mumsnetters are hypocrites with low self esteem is someone to go through both to find posters who said one thing on one and not on the other when the circumstances were exactly the same."

But that's not what this thread is really about, is it? It's about Mumsnetters all being man hating hairy legged dungaree wearing feminists.

I agree.

Isn't some of the contradiction explained by the different realities of male and female lives ?

Being female, especially if you have children, turns the world into a sometimes vastly different landscape to that of a male ... in terms of social expectations + unequal earning opportunities which impacts economic reality.

As long as the female sex is considered to be where the buck stops where parental responsibility is concerned + a disparity in potential earnings exists + a power imbalance (physical, economic etc.) remains ..... the advice is probably going to be tailored to how life is, rather than the "equality utopia" most would prefer.

I don't hate men. I've been willingly, happily married to one for 20 years (and very much wish things to remain that way till one of us drops dead).

My love and like of the young one I made with my very own body knows no bounds. I very much like most of DS's young friends.

I have as many males students I have great affection for as I do female (mini ones and big ones) I have friends of both sexes.

But all that love, like, affection, cannot and will not magic away that in a fair old number of scenarios the playing field is not just uneven, it is in entirely different climate zones. And that does impact how I would approach giving advice, because I think "cookie cutter fair" advice often fails to be useful on an individual level.

I've read some threads where mumsnetters said how much they love their cat but then I found some where they were talking about loving their dog. I've heard some of the sick hypocrites even love horses and small furries (whatever the hell those are). Hypocritical mumsnet again.

Some even claim to love marmite and others to hate it.

YANBU

Atomic said it better than I was going to - "fair" is a slightly flat concept in a society which is massively skewed towards one gender. If I get yelled at by young women outside a pub at closing time, its not pleasant, but I don't have to worry they'll assault me, or rethink my way home via how well-lit the streets are, or be concerned that if I did get attacked people would assume I'd done something to provoke it. Until there's a culture in which men are continually sexually degraded, commodified and threatened, people's opinions on sexual "misconduct" (crap phrase for want of a better) is going to differ.

(I'm taking it as read that by "hypocritical", the OP means "unfair to men".)

I think there is a lot of hypocrisy on MN but I wouldn't single out the double standards for ale and female behaviour as particular examples of this. The hypocrisy that bugs me is the competition to see who can be most compassionate and non-judgemental about behaviour that you can guarantee would have people merrily judging away if they saw it themselves. Hypocrisy to me is less about having standards that are inconsistently applied; plenty of PPs have explained why this might be the case when judging the sexual morality of men as opposed to women. It's more about claiming an elevated moral stance as a way of making yourself look virtuous when in reality it's skin deep and only for show. I see that on MN all the time in all kinds of contexts - like all the posters who I'd seen on endless 'we must not judge and all must hug a hoodie' threads, who then were practically calling to bring back hanging the moment the London riots kicked off.

threads about women needing to fight for independence, not rely on a man, don't conform to the stereotypes of 'being a woman'. Except when you state you have no plans to marry. Then you're a silly girl, and what will happen if you split? You won't have full access to his money or house

except it's perfectly possible to be both married and retain independence, both personal and financial. Being married doesn't mean you are reliant on a man - surely marriage is aboutsharing your life with someone, not being reliant and dependent on them?

There are legal reasons that make marriage desireable for any woman who makes a decision to go part-time or become a SAHM following having children. But even then, it should surely be seen as partnership/joint decisions rather than be about dependence and reliance on another person? After all, few husbands could manage leaving the house at 7am and returning at 7pm without a wife there to look after their children for them - dependence is a two way thing, surely?! Having had a marriage breakdown, I am very, very grateful that I had that legal piece of paper to protect me - because without it (and I was never bothered about getting married, it was something my ex husband wanted), my children and I would have lost everything my husband and I had worked towards in marriage. There is nothing the Law could have done to protect us otherwise.

I find it very sad that people see marriage and children as something that automatically means you lose your independence and become reliant on the other person. It doesn't have to be that way and certainly wasn't for me.

I think its.important to remember.that we only ever get one side of the story on here, and that given most OPs on here are women, men do end looking pretty terrible.

I have also seen huge assumptions (they are abusive/selfish/a narc/have a personality disorder blah blah blah) being made about a male partner, or MIL or SIL etc. based on just a few lines of OP, often culminating in a LTB/cut contact. It's crazy really!

I'll apologise in advance for having not read the whole thread but I did read a thread once about a man whose wife used abusive language towards him and hit him. He was genuinely asked by at least three posters to consider what he had done to deserve it. If anyone remembers it they had fought about a game of twenty questions at one point. The victim blaming and attacking was frightening.

There is often victim blaming on female threads. And minimising too.

In fact, and by the op's definition, single threads can be highly hypocritical as there is often conflicting advice.

Why do people start threads like this and not return? What is the aim? Is it to get mumsnetters to say why they think mumsnet is crap and women to say why they think women are crap? If you do think mumsnet is full of man-hating, hairy-legged harpies, why stick around? Maybe that's why the op hasn't come back actually. Good on them for sticking to their principles. No hypocrites in that bush.

Atomik has put it very well.
Sometimes in life, we need to have people who are on our side. If a friend is confiding in me about something, I am likely to see it from her point of view.

If she is being completely unreasonable, I might point that out gently but there is no doubt that I am on her team, and MN is a bit like that.

Threads are very rarely unanimous, and so the opposite point of view will always be represented.

The male perspective is still the default in our society and MN is a very welcome respite from that.

Absolutely TheVeryThing. That's what I love about MN, the female perspective which is so rare.

Atomilk one of the best posts I have read in 7 years mumsnetting on aibu. Spot on

I think sometimes Mumsnetters think it's Ok for a woman to be a bit protective about her finances because she's not doing it for herself but for her children, therefore she's not being selfish, it's understandable to be protective in this case.

I think the problem with the LTB posters is that they can be a bit class biased, like sometimes a poster might have a DP who's still quite young and goes out with his friends a lot but works hard and is a good Dad when he's around. I think in those cases richer women with older DH's can goad them into leaving when I think they would be better off staying but setting a few "grown up rules" rather than leaving given how tough life is for (poor) single mothers in the UK at the moment.

I so agree! There's very much a "LTB" Attitude here, which is why I would never ever ask for relationship advice on mumsnet. People seem to think it's as easy as "it's over". And for the stupidest reasons too. Pffft.