To feel hopeless about male violence

[brujarosada]

Everywhere I turn I see news stories where it's implicitly understood that a man harmed a woman. An obvious family annhilator? Definitely the husband. Woman disappears while out? Obviously a man.

I know that this is nothing new, but it feels so inevitable and hopeless. Women getting angry gets some attention sometimes (like with Sarah Everard). But there's no real change and toxic masculinity seems to be ever more celebrated - for example, there's currently a story in The Guardian about an influencer who is capturing the imagination of secondary school boys everywhere.

Am I wrong to feel so hopeless? Is there some sort of inspiring change that I am missing?

YANBU at all OP. It’s exhausting

I have this really strange feeling (altho maybe naively of me) that the next 10 or so years will see a lot of women really standing up for their rights and things

many of the disrespectful and abusive men will be left behind and I hope so many women will embrace the change too

i don’t know why I feel that but I really do think the day of men routinely mistreating us is coming to a close
agaun I’m probably stupidly naive tho!

Yes, already in my mind I'm thinking of that headteacher at Epsom found dead with her husband and their seven year old daughter. No one else suspected to be involved.

I don't want to say it's him for sure, but in too many cases, it seems to be the husband murdering his family.

I really hope so. Maybe this new generation of young women will see the problem more clearly.

When I was in my teens/twenties, I bought the line that women are equal and empowered. All of that changed as I got older, had a child, and saw more of the world. But if more voices had risen up in my youth, maybe I would have become angry at a younger age.

I am certainly trying to raise my daughter to understand these things and to stand up for herself, at least.

This is what inspired this thread/feeling on this particular day. I'm so angry on behalf of that poor woman. I think it's quite obvious what happened there.

Yeah I ynderstand

i was raised to be like super accommodating to men and to be polite and not too much trouble

I now realise that “too much trouble” usually translates to “saying no when I don’t want to do what someone else wants”

kind of over it and ive realised a few friends are naturally doing the same thing
like an energy shift

YANBU

what I find particularly chilling is the minimising language used “isolated incident” and so on… when in fact hundreds of women die Counting Dead Women

and being parent to a daughter I worry a lot about the world she’s growing up in 😥

Yes! That's exactly it! Just another isolated incident...soon to be followed with another one that follows almost precisely the same fact pattern

I agree how depressing it feels to have the likes of Andrew Tate influencing teenage boys with their misogynistic and offensive views on women. And the Emily Atack programme where she documents how many dick pics and disgusting messages she gets daily (and the men that she confided in - despite not being implicated themselves - either found it funny or were pretty nonchalant about the whole thing)

However I don't think its right to speculate on a new story that's just broken and of which very few details have been released.

It’s exhausting being a man and seeing everything pinned on us these days - there needs to be some kind of balance.
I’ve come to the conclusion that humans as a species are generally toxic, so avoid most of them on principle 😁

This thread isn't for speculating about any particular news story. There are countless stories of family annhilators. I even attended secondary school with one, though he killed his stepmother and father and didn't have children.

The tide is turning. Slowly, but definitely. Powerful men that used to be able to get away with anything they liked are being brought to account. Coercive control is now a crime. Young women are learning about red flags and not accepting sexual assault or the trampling of boundaries. We're getting there.

Maybe you can start a thread where you enumerate the many horrific stories of female-on-male violence. That sounds balanced.

I would like to believe this to be true but I think women standing up to men and the fact ‘women are deciding they don’t need men’ will only fuel anger. I know many men who feel angry because women are more independent, women no longer need men in the way they used to (or they believed they did). As a female who has been single for 8 years I get a lot of abuse from men because I don’t want the kind of relationship they want, I don’t need a man for anything so it would take a special kind of man for me to want to be in a relationship.

ugh

Everything being pinned on men these days?

two women a week in the U.K. are killed by the male partners or ex partners.

I was terrifyingly close to being part of that statistic and have lost more than 1 friend to it.

the statistics are undeniable.

if you want it to get better then publicly call out your fellow men and teach your sons to do the same.

This is what I really think, unfortunately. There is this entitlement to female attention that men feel, probably because this is what they are socialised to feel. Again, like the Andrew Tate indoctrination that's going on

Well, it starts with data. Police forces don't bother to count the number of women and children killed by men. You can't ask a police force how many women were killed by men in your authorities area because they don't fucking know.

Karen IS and Jess Phillips appear to be the only people doing it.

Sadly I don't think young women will, because they all think like you say you did when you were younger - they believe that it isn't a problem. We only start to see the cracks appearing as we get older and can see with hindsight what it was like the whole time. You only have to look at how fiercely many young women defend self ID, thinking that they are being liberal and open-minded (and that older women who object to it are 'TERFS' and 'Karens'), whilst allowing their own rights to be trashed.

They don’t mean isolated as in ‘rare’. They mean isolated as in ‘don’t worry locals there isn’t a killer on the loose’. I thought this was obvious.

I was in a walk in centre at the weekend and there was an older man there. He was very loudly and proudly telling his tale of the fight he'd had (and won!) With a bouncer the previous night.

There was a young lady on her own and he made a beeline for her, sat next to her and continued to rehash his tale.

You could see she was uncomfortable but didn't seem to know how to get out of the situation. Thankfully he left her after a little while and went wandering.

I was also on my own and very on edge in case he tried to engage me.

We shouldn't be made to feel this way because we're too afraid of what might happen if we don't engage with them.

It has always been.
It’s entirely wrong but it will not change. I think I am resigned to it.

I spent many years researching very old court documents once, as in centuries old (not for a laugh-paid researcher). Violence against women, sexual offences against women and children, murder of women and children by fathers all rife as far back as records go. It was horrific.

I don’t believe it will ever change.

It’s exhausting being a man and seeing everything pinned on us these days - there needs to be some kind of balance.

what are you doing about it? or are you just whining because so many men are giving the rest of you a bad rep?

🙄 Blah, blah not all men, blah blah.

I have a couple of the good men in my life, they don’t say shit like this.

I’ve tried explaining to DH how mentally exhausting going through life as a woman is. 99.9% of the misery in the world is caused by men, either at the very top end - dictators, warmongerers, corrupt leaders - right down to unpleasant interactions the moment you step out your front door. Men themselves are spared a lot of the lower level stuff, of course - they don’t get cat called or followed or have random nutters approaching them in the streets leaving them feeling intimidated.

But YANBU, it’s completely draining.