To think it is actually mostly men?

[Nolpp]

Maybe I didn’t get the memo in the past but in the last year or so I’ve been so bitterly disappointed by make behaviour. I look back and wonder if it was always this way but I’m only just noticing. I think part of it is I recently became a single parent and so I’ve had more dealings with men than I would usually, as I’ve had to speak to insurance companies, take car for MOT etc. Obviously I did some of these things before and I know women also work in these places but overall I am having more interaction with men.

Examples…

Driving. Whenever a car is right up behind me it is ALWAYS a man driving. I drive at the speed limit, not under, so presumably they think speed limits don’t apply to them.

I recently donated to a sponsorship for cancer research, an old school friend, quite literally not spoken in over two decades. He then messaged me to thank me for the donation and followed it up with a question about sex and positions he can do after his surgery. Why would anyone think that’s ok?

A colleague, well respected in his industry, tells me when drunk on a night out that he wishes all women conformed to the way of the 50s and stayed at home. He wasn’t joking.

In Sainsbury’s a week ago, a man grabbed my arse in a queue, I was shocked and stepped to one side, didn’t know what to do and said get the fuck away from me. I was next up for the till and the man behind the till said he does it to everyone !!! What the actual fuck? He did follow up to say they had tried to ban him from the shop. I cried in the car afterwards, it was awful.

Waiting for the baby changing unit in Mc Donnalds. A man eventually emerges, mutters sorry but he couldn’t wait, and looked sheepish. He wasn’t unwell, he was downing a Mc flurry when I came out.

Around 7 years ago I used to date someone who had recently got a job as a Judge in the family courts. He was very young to have got this job and in part it was to do with his father being a judge in the same court. Anyway one day we were talking about how money is worked out in a divorce and he said ‘it’s disgusting, women expect to be paid out after staying at home doing nothing with kids for fifteen years, so rather than getting a job of their own they steal the x husband’s pension.’ I am ashamed to say I laughed and agreed with him. I had a good job with no interest in giving it up so I felt I was compatible with this man who I now see was a bit of a monster.

I honestly feel like men make up the bulk of shit behaviour. It probably sounds dramatic but I actually feel sad about it, genuinely sad. And embarrassed that it’s taken me until this late in life to see it.

Yes, I know it’s not all men.

Rant over.

Yet I suspect the same posters quibbling about the definition of violence would categorise a pinched bum as sexual assault. 😂

Oh piss off. Only a fraction of the number of women as men are murdered. I'd imagine being murdered is pretty scary.

Thankfully 93% of young women don't identify with this type of rhetoric due to their dislike of 'man hating'. Another few decades and you'll all be pretty much gone. 😀

But young women aren't having relationships with young men. An increasing number are childless.

That seems to be growing trend.

Three children. Young adults/teenager all in heterosexual relationships.

Two Grandchildren

Also work with a young woman who likes dating young men and is hoping to have children. Young men who's wives are pregnant. I could go on.

Have you actually looked at the meta analysis of 1700 peer reviewed studies one? It's really interesting. In uni-directional violence, twice as many women were violent than men. It's the biggest study ever done I believe, that is hardly 'cherry picking'! The complete opposite. Try reading with an open mind, it helps.

A lot of this research is based on self report, so women and men reporting their own behaviour, and there aren't stark differences between the two.
I've also attached some data from the study you criticised which talks about physical violence by country.

Men are more likely to hurt women when violence occurs as they are bigger and stronger no-one is doubting that and of course that leads to more police involvement. No-one on here is doubting that violence against women and girls is serious and needs unique attention, 'battering' is mostly a male on female issue for example. But we should look at it within the context of the whole picture and address all forms of violence.

Biggest study on domestic violence ever done (before anyone accuses me of saying it's actually the biggest study ever done).
Caveat, it's possible it was just the biggest study at the time of publishing.

Not having kids doesn't mean not being in a relationship. Not really rocket science.

If this study showed what they want it to show they would be all over it. You know it. I mean, we've already been quoted a study undertaken at a single high school. 😂 A study where it was suggested that lots of the boys just did it for the course credits and gave disingenuous answers.

As studies go you can't get much shonkier than that lol.

But perhaps it is an indication that they are going against convention.

perhaps you’re correct when you say that “you lot” won’t exist any more (or something like that). We’ll all be extinct (including “your lot”) because young women refuse motherhood.

I have a simple question for you @Natalya123: what is the purpose of all your posts? What do you hope to achieve? And please don’t answer with more statistics. I would love to hear an intelligent argument. When I say I don’t hate men but fear them what do you understand that to mean? Have you ever heard or seen evidence of significant groups of men stating that they fear women? Is there a website called counting dead men which records the numbers of men each year who have died at the hands of women?

you or someone else upthread said that male violence against women results in injury because men are physically stronger - as though the injury is accidental and not part of a strategy by which that physical advantage is used to gain control over the mind and body of a woman - hence the fear. That in itself is an indication of why it is called male violence against women and not just violence. Women when they use weapons are just as strong as men yet we do not have statistics of women constantly killing men as part of a pattern of control.

you did not respond to my statement upthread that part of the pattern of male violence is claiming victimhood and reporting a woman who is the victim of abuse as the perpetrator (it is also a well known tactic of workplace bullies).

I know there are other forms of violence - although your statistics seem to show that male violence is actually much wider spread and includes male victims- but I have a special interest in VAWG and would like to see more education around what it looks like so that victims can receive more support and can be confident about receiving that instead of having their experiences denied.

when you are a victim of, say, DV you come to see how the world supports the violence in a myriad of ways, that women are cast as lying bitch-minxes and therefore deserving of their fate - all this conveyed through subtle societal messages. Calling women who have concerns about male violence man haters is one of those - albeit not so subtle - messages.

perhaps for you @Natalya123 it is a question of semantics. You may be right. perhaps we need new terms by which to discuss the violence that results from coercion and control of a partner who is devastated by violent control or its threat.

I have now read (some of) the analysis from that study where the table comes from data. It says:

"The same study that found forty-six men in one thousand being hit also found that
the vast majority of these men were hit because they had initiated the violence and abuse. By and large, women used violence to protect themselves. Victimized women are literally between the proverbial rock and the hard place. If they leave, they stand a good chance of
joining the millions of other women who have feminized poverty in America. If they stay, they are either beaten again or forced to use extreme physical violence to protect themselves."

That isn't really showing that women are more likely to be violent now, is it?

This is what I mean about cherry picking.

In the case of domestic violence against women, all the evidence points to the fact that men kill women, women report being assaulted and injured by their husbands more, womens refuges and charities have demand for their services, research consistently highlights abusive mens attitudes towards women as being part of the problem.

Posters who want to suggest "women do it too" have to scrape the barrel for old, sporadic research, where "violence" includes name calling and disrespect, and quote the data out of context of the analysis.

It might make a certain type of person feel better by shoring up their belief they are right but anyone even half way objective can see the difference in the evidence that abuse is primarily a male issue vs. Women do it too.

This.

I posted very early on this thread and have checked in periodically but not posted because I didn't know how to ask the questions posed in this post.

Those saying, 'it's not all men' or 'women are bad too' what are you actually trying to achieve?

Everyone would agree that not all men are violent, horrible scum bags, but let's all be completely honest. When you read a headline about someone being beaten to death, or spat on, or intimidated on a train or attacked with acid or sexually assaulted.... you know without even reading the story that it was a male who committed that act. On the very rare occasion it's a woman you're shocked.

The premise of this thread is that it is MOSTLY men, and it is.

I was 13 when we had a special girls only PE class, the boys went off to play rugby and the girls stayed in the sports hall and learned self defence. We learned that if a man grabs us by the wrist we should pull in the direction of his thumb because it's the weak point of his grab, we learned if he grabs us from the back round our throats we should go dead weight and fall down, we learned to carry our keys in our hands, walk purposefully and make sure someone knew where we were if we were out in the dark by ourselves.

The majority of men are nice people who wouldn't hurt women, but it's a simple fact of our society and physical truth that if a violent act is committed it is MOSTLY the case that tha violent act was committed by a male.

you or someone else upthread said that male violence against women results in injury because men are physically stronger - as though the injury is accidental and not part of a strategy by which that physical advantage is used to gain control over the mind and body of a woman

It was me that said that. I was referring to the fact that (given that most DV is bidirectional) when two people engage in a physical altercation the one who is significantly weaker and less robust is most likely the one that gets injured. Most women couldn't kill a man with a punch but the reverse isn't true.

Do you have anything to say about the quote above, from one of your sources, that shows that most "bidirectional" violence is in fact women defending themselves from men?

Maybe if men stopped attacking their partners rates of violence would fall?

Think about that for a minute. Men start the fights and women continue them. Whatever the statistics say, does that sound credible to you?

Stronger men start the violence, but weaker women fight them off. I'm struggling to see that as a common theme.

100% agree

“Most DV is bidirectional”.

This statement makes me want to throw up, but it allows me to understand just how much work needs to be done to educate people about VAWG.

I suggest that everyone starts with a groundbreaking book by Prof Jane Monckton Smith called Control: Dangerous Relationships and How they End in Murder.

She also makes the point that many murders of women by men in DV situations go unrecognised and concludes that you could probably double the figures and if you include suicide as a result of DV, multiply them by 6 or 7 times.

Young women deciding not to have kids (yet) can be for a number of reasons though.
They might want to establish a career first, or go traveling, they might think it’s the right thing to do for environmental reasons. They might feel like they can’t afford it or that they don’t want to give up their lifestyle. Not having/ wanting kids doesn’t mean they avoid relationships with men, those are two separate things.
‘Going against convention’ is also not a new thing here, I know several women in their fifties who decided against having kids, for different reasons.

@Datanerd wrote: ”it's what I notice anecdotally in my life, amongst stories from friends family and what I've witnessed. Most violence in relationships is two way, and actually men are far less likely in my experience to hit out in a relationship as it's considered completely unacceptable, practically social suicide, whereas it's not unacceptable in reverse.
I recognise there is huge variation across cultures but it fits with my experience.”

Except by your own admission it is not your experience, is it? You refer to anecdotal “evidence”. Do you really believe that a man will tell you or anybody that he beat his wife up? Do you really?

i can’t speak for all victims but I would have been mortified to be seen as a victim of DV so I wouldn’t have told you either. This is a huge problem with reporting DV. And especially when we live in such an anti woman society where people want to believe that DV is just heated row.

I can absolutely believe that there are women who mutually engage in fights with their partners but this isn’t what we are discussing here, is it? It is something that is being brought in as evidence that DV is currently a problem of (to put it simply) toxic masculinity.

You’re not asking me this question but I want to answer on my own behalf, because I was disagreeing with people earlier on in the thread.

I agree that the worst damage done in society - violent damage - is mostly done by men. Men are, on average, more violent than women. They also have more power, due to the residual patriarchy, which they can exert over women, deliberately or inadvertently. These issues should be called out and addressed.

However, this thread quickly turned into a litany of people saying they disliked and distrusted all men. That’s no doubt true for those individuals and based on bad experiences. (You made the point early about how hard it is for people who’ve been traumatised by early bad experiences and gone on to have further bad experiences to believe people who’ve only ever had good experiences, and vice versa. I thought that was such an excellent point.)

My goal is to persuade people not to dislike and distrust all men. To keep an open mind and address the specific issues, rather than simply dismissing the whole group (hence the analogies with racism that have been going around). Because if we all persuade each other that’s it’s fine to view all men as the enemy, that will prevent us understanding and addressing the actual issues. It will turn us into enemies and we will be at war, each side justifying its own revenges against the other.

Personally, I’ve only ever had good experiences with men. Never a hint of violence. People ridicule the phrase “not all men” but it’s literally true. Also, a lot of stuff has been lumped into this category of why men are worse than women. Cheating, for example. Lots of women cheat, they probably just haven’t told you about it. So just to list bad things that men have done to you as a reason why they’re worse than women seems skewed. The violence and sexual abuse of power I get but if you’ve decided to dislike all men, it’s easy to drag in other things that have annoyed you.

Women aren’t perfect. And some men are causing terrible problems. But I would love to persuade people that everybody makes mistakes and the most effective way to prevent more violence is to understand and try to heal the damaged men who are damaging other people around them, rather than demonise the whole gender.

So you see DV as a kind of boxing match between a heavy weight and a bantam weight?

This sounds a bit like women bring it on themselves by not just accepting a slap from their partner when they get a bit uppity.