So angry at all these threads on useless and selfish men

[Winterday1991]

Off the back of the thread where the H refuses to care for his sick child so the OP can get some much needed rest as he is on annual leave from work 😡. I am seriously fed up of reading threads like this, why are so many men so selfish?

Why is it always women who have to do the lions share of caring, pulling themselves in all direction whilst their male counterparts glide through life uninterrupted? Why is it always women who carry the mental load for family life and the men just show up. Why is always women responsible for maintaining the household?

Even in the 21st century, why do so many men get such a bloody easy ride, whilst often their poor wives/partners are running around like headless chickens keeping on top of everything.

No.

It also didn’t enjoy mine.

Of course it's a different perspective from being a mother.

I'm really starting to think that you're a troll now. Or so ego-centric that you can't imagine anyone feeling anything different from what you feel.

As does being a mother? Unless you are one of the mothers who puts up with having a partner who is useless … which cycles back round to the fact we need to involve males in all aspects of parenting as equal parents. So they can’t get away with being useless …

Then so does mother Hood

No need for mumsnet

Should be parents net

Jesus, you don’t even respect the women who fit with your view of the world, and you claim not to be a misogynist?

You clearly misunderstand what I am saying.

A self selecting sample does not mean there's no issue, it means it most likely overestimates the true scale. Reading aibu threads would lead one to believe that 90% of women with kids are in unequal partnerships, when maybe it's 60-70% for all women.

I am going to give up at this point as you seem to want to remain ignorant about extremely basic statistical concepts.

Oh Gosh OK it’s been discussed before. That’s OK then. Nothing to see here then. Not like it’s something which the vast majority of women are affected by and which continues to disadvantage us is it?

Where is the lack of respect?

Are you taking offence at the term tradwife? A) It's not a slur in the first place; and B) it wasn't used in a derogatory manner.

I respect anyone who is open, compassionate, tolerant, and engaging. Their political or social views don't influence things one bit. I love diverse opinions. You should try it sometime.

@StressedSquirrel

Sigh.

Maybe it's because I don't presume people are idiots?

Your premise is a flawed one because no one thinks aibu is totally representative of all relationships and the initial posts even seemed to be suggesting that aibu was massively overstating the problem

Not just by 20 to 30 %

It’s not actually compulsory to have a husband/spouse/partner/boyfriend/girlfriend. The real question is why do so many women continue to choose to spend their lives with partners who do absolutely nothing for them, particularly now when both are likely working. Also, women and men need to be bringing up all their children to be able to look after themselves and especially to take care of their partners, respect and love them. If children see their father doing sweet f a and their mother running themselves in to the ground, that becomes their benchmark.

The truth is clearly that not all men are useless lumps. I feel the difficulty arises for men when they feel an imbalance of power.

A lot of men aren't comfortable with a woman earning more than them and I've seen abuse happen a lot in relationships where there is a big discrepancy in income - usually it is the men who are abusive. However, I've also seen women be abusive and controlling - I had a friend once who shouted at her husband for buying the wrong fridge after he had made a special effort to go and get it after a week of night shifts. After that he stopped trying. I think he never felt he was good enough.

Sometimes it’s hard to know why someone is the way they are and what the other side of the story is in any post. Sometimes it's clear other times I refuse to comment.

@Stillcountingbeans - your little story is spot on. Exactly how it ususally goes. And probably always will. Sad as that is.

@Mark19735 - I also think this happens more often than we like to think. There are a lot of women who just want to shift the financial load onto the man and are happy to have the house, the car the holidays "he's a high earner" Smug.

And they still want him to share the load. I worked and the pressure was huge. And when I got in from a really tough day there's no way I wanted to talk to anyone or start on the house work. I've had a long day in the office today so DS and I had a pizza and will leave the washing up til the morning. And thank goodness I've got nobody judging me.

It works both ways.

Maybe because we are all on the same page in terms of equality but amongst my UK peer group and all my previous boyfriends and indeed my STBXDH (this might be because I am shit at cooking and not great at all the house stuff!) have all seen men doing as much and often more than the women. Not denying there aren’t feckless gits out there but just for my group of friends and also family it hasn’t been the case. I see people on here talking about DH ‘helping’ around the house and I am so grateful that I’ve never been in a relationship like that.

BUT what surprised me was how my DH reacted when we had children and how things changed. I was at home more so began to take more of the housework and cooking (badly, admittedly) and whereas he continued to be great with the cooking and cleaning etc when he was at home he wasn’t nearly as good at the parenting stuff as I imagined he would be. Said he found it ‘difficult’ (so do I!) and clearly didn’t have my patience. This was an absolute surprise because it never occurred to me that this capable man who had much more experience with kids than I had would be like this. So much so that now we are separated he only has them 20% of the time. So whereas we never had issues with the domestic load I have ended up in the same place anyway; doing all of my own household chores as well as for the kids as a single parent AND all the child care stuff, whilst his career path can continue unfettered by the demands of child care.

In fact going back to the many women in my social circle who are with men who cook, clean and take on an equal role in that sense because that’s all they know, even in the cases where the woman works longer hours and is better paid, the mental load of the children STILL falls onto the mother. One way or another we seem to take on more.

I'm going to cite this article again because I think it makes such a good point. amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jan/24/mum-watched-me-correct-my-husband-then-sagely-warned-me-dont-become-the-expert-in-the-baby

But my mum told me, don’t become the expert.

Don’t correct your partner on how they change the baby or feed the baby, or whatever with the baby, because if you correct them then they will lose confidence and you both will become convinced that your way is the correct way.

Then you will go back to work and still be the expert. And the baby will go to school and you will still be the expert, the one who does everything for them, knows what foods they should eat, what the routines are, how everything should be done. The person who is always turned to.

You may look at them bathing the baby and think it’s the most ridiculous method you’ve ever seen, but walk away, don’t be the expert in the baby.

My dad was never like this and neither is my husband, it's been a real eye opener since having children.

I find it astounding that some of my friends can't pop out for a dinner date because their husband "doesn't even know where to start" when it comes to putting the kids to bed.

I would also say though I feel women sometimes don't help this issue. I popped into my friends to pick something up when my first child was around two weeks old. My friend was astounded that I had left said child with their dad, you know the other parent. Was absolutely mind blown that that was considered really bad.

The common denominator in all those threads about useless and selfish men is women who have made appalling relationship choices. Who have rock bottom standards, poor boundaries, low self-esteem. Who are so desperate to conform to conventional milestones of man, house, engagement, wedding, babies that they will settle for absolutely anything.

I swear, if an alien species were to study homo sapiens, and their only source for women was Mumsnet threads, they could fairly conclude that women's brains fall out of our vaginas when we spread our legs to have unprotected sex with the first abusive lout who comes along.

Mumsnet threads typically seek advice and support, so they are heavily weighted towards the dysfunctional. We rarely ever hear about the relationships built on mutual respect and equal contribution, nor about the parenting of children so they are not indoctrinated with sexist stereotypes. But they do exist, more so than in any previous era. (Please gods, let this be true).

The problem is that we are still raising women to think that their primary function in life is to be pleasing to men and to fulfil the biological destiny of their uterus. Change that, and we change the world.

Seriously don't put up with shit. Then they don't take the piss.

I think that, as a woman, once you have a baby you are truly stuck. You can't walk away. You have to care for this human that you gave birth to and are tied to in such a close way. Whereas men get to leave if they want. They get to go back to work after 2 days too. They don't have the same bond in the first few months and slowly the inequality becomes bigger and bigger and there is no way to turn it around. And before you know it, your choice is to 1) break up your family in the vague hope that your kids will be ok and the most amazing man is out there waiting for you or 2) continue to just plough on, accept your fate, do everything, keep the family together and hope the best for your kids.

Another point. I'm 35. My DP is lovely, fun and generally OK around the house. I make more money, work longer hours and still do 50% at home or maybe more. I have no doubt that when we have a baby I will do more, work more, and still have to earn more. But what am I supposed to do? I want a family. I want children. My ex husband turned into an abusive prick after we got married and I had no choice but to leave. It then took me years of dating to find a decent man. Should I leave him because he doesn't do enough chores? Maybe, I thought of it. But then I also eliminate my chances of ever having a family. Am I selling myself short? Yes, probably. I don't have another 10 yrs to play around with and find out though.

So go ahead, blame me for all of woman kind's problems. Because it's all obviously women's fault for doing too much.

Obviously there is value in listening to the father of your own children.
But, genuinely what have you as a woman learned about parenting from the men jumping on this thread to tell women off, take offence, explain how hard done to they are, call women bitter, tell them they'll have miserable lives, praise 'trad wives' and push the agenda women are to blame and men are victims?
And equally I wonder if the men we're supposedly learning from have learned anything themselves from the women on here?

Forcing men to become sole carers often means dead children. I've stopped scrolling through all of the newspapers on my phone of a morning because I'm sick of reading about babies shaken to death and toddlers kicked to death. Housework is one aspects, the care of children another. More children are taken to A&E after having accidents in the care of men. You can go into a stand off over mopping a floor, but do we neglect our children in the hope that men step up?
All most women want is that their partner realises his role as an adult in the house. There's a lot of men who just don't want to be the adult. It's the joking about that, that's got to stop.

I don’t know a single father that has gone back to work after two days. Shared parental leave is an option, and most fathers are eligible for paternity leave too.

Every father in my circle banked their holidays and took the maximum leave available to them - my own partner had four months off, a mixture of his own maternity pay, holiday entitlement, and some of my maternity leave. This is probably more than most of our other peers but certainly not unusual or dramatically more.

You have just admitted that you are willing to put up with a shit man to have kids, which is the root of the problem. Get your standards out the gutter and don’t perpetuate the problem - your kids will be brought up to think this is okay. And it’s not.

You can become a parent without a father. You’d be far better off doing that than carrying a deadbeat.

The vast majority of fathers don’t murder their children, and the vast majority of children murdered by a parent are not murdered by a single father with no mother involved.

Are you suggesting that women shouldn’t let their children’s fathers have access to them without the mother present, just incase they murder them?

I don’t just want my partner to do some washing. He’s equally as involved in every aspect of being part of this family as I am. And he’s not unusual. He knew early on in the relationship that I wasn’t a doormat, and he knew I’d leave the second he treated me like one.