AIBU or is mumsnet slowly being infiltrated by women hating men.

[NotSuchASmugMarried]

Am I imagining things or is it getting worse here. Every single time we post something a poster will immediately pop up and hijack the thread with a pro-men agenda instead of actually contributing to the thread.

Please tell me if you agree. I can't possibly be the only one who thinks this.

Why does it never occur to men like this that it's not for you to say whether or not women want you - here or anywhere?

Don't we just...

The poster was just asking questions. Not their fault people can’t take it.

Jesus.

@MNHQ any chance you were able to report to the plod for malicious communications, or whatever other offence works on flashers of the digital kind ?

Done digitally it might not have exactly the same emotional impact as some grotty creature jumping out at you in a sparsely populated park and waggling his penis at you. However I’m of the opinion that it’s just as much an indication of a man’s potential future to escalate as a sex offender. Most offenders work their way up to the worst they can do. Reporting this shit could go some way towards marking some men’s cards long before a woman walks into a police station to report him for doing worse. She could do with his notable history helping her word against his.

Think we need a glossary here.

”Women with strong internalised misogyny” - women with different opinions from me.

Not really.

There's a LOT of different opinions on Mumsnet and women regularly disagree. On the whole the posts that get challenged for internalised misogyny usually do have misogyny running through them.

Eg. When women assume that a poster criticising something another woman does, they must be jealous. (Internalised misogyny because it's a knee jerk response that assumes women are in permanent competition with each other, usually for male approval or on male defined beauty standards etc, rather than the more straight forward idea that someone was objecting to a particularly crappy behaviour)

Eg. Another woman stole a man/led him astray/I trust my DH but I don't trust Claire at work/my Nigel is a good man and never wanted an affair but when Sally laughed at his jokes he's just a poor flawed man who had his head turned by her etc. (Internalised misogyny because if another woman gets into your DH's pants it's because he has chosen to be shit and cheat, not because another woman made him, so kindly stop blaming women for male behaviour)

Eg. Maybe you should make a list/stop expecting him to do it your way (aka stop expecting him to load the dishwasher when he'd rather sit gaming)/offer to sit with him and explain to him that children shouldn't be ignored and that bins need emptying (internalised misogyny because it is based on the idea that domestic work is all women's work and those with the holy penis shouldn't be expected to lift a finger unless a woman takes on all the load and makes his life easy)

The bar some people set for men (as a class) is so low, and what's depressing is that not only do some women excuse such a pathetically low bar but they then have a go at women who dare to have higher standards.

Its not a question of not being able to take it. The people responding were clearly doing so from a position of greater knowledge and intellectual capability and refuted the arguments extremely well. My point is that the man used the technique in the first place to divert the discussion the women were having, to mask the issues being discussed.
As you're doing now, when you fail to acknowledge the poster was talking nonsense and instead pretend the issue was with the women's inability to cope with the debate.

I sadly lolled at that as fellow surname keeper (marriage to muslim means half family doesn't flinch while other half can't their hads around it). So many people don't get it. I had delivery people questioning me when i was taking package in for DH. GP, some colleagues etc. It's fucking 2023. Women are the most baffled (i guess since most of them did it), though men do not limp far behind!
Us and our made up husbands, eh

You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses. I was first on MN in 2010 and it wasn't dissimilar to how it is now.

And in 2010 there were threads like this and people saying 'MN used to full of intelligent and very witty posters'. That sentence has become a trope which you will see time and again.

And whenever these threads came up, and the "why is MN so nasty?" which they did then and have done for over a decade I've been here under numerous accounts, it was always said "it used to be full of intelligent and witty posters". Seriously, it's been said for over a decade and can't possibly be true if there are threads multiple times a year.

How could it be true that someone who joined in 2010 said by 2011 that MN used to be full of intelligent and witty posters but no longer, but someone who joined in 2014/14/15 and every year till now says the same?

It was just new to them so the good stood out more. And what happens to 80% of posters is they join, see all the amazing posts and love it but once you've been here for a while, you notice all the other not so good things.

That happened REALLY early on with the moldies leaving the site or staying and being pissed off about 'MN royalty' and the direction the site was taking.

MN was never as awesome as long-term posters think it was, it always was great but also problematic in lots of ways

Pre PB it was a whole different demographic.

Though I do agree with some of what you say.

Regarding men, I can think of several back then who didn't feel the need to do the "man here" "I am a man" thing.

As I said, I defend men when the "men shouldn't be here" stuff starts. Rather an intelligent chinwag with MayorQuimby, Dadx3, or even Pan 😂 than some of the vapid nonsense the post PB era has brought with it.

Likewise those people who don't want the childless on here. They can fuck off as well.

@TheLongGloriesOfTheWinterMoon what is PB?

PB is penis beaker, aka the beginnings of the MN End Times.

Thanks. I've heard of it but I wasn't on here then. I missed the better MN.

I'm astonished at the difficulties you've experienced. I kept my own name when I married in the 1980's & it's never been a problem. Maybe society really is going backwards. (Narrator: It is indeed rushing backwards, for women.)

So can anybody tell me, was AIBU always so vicious, or has that behaviour got a start-date too?

I read it as 'Women who hate Men' then was very confused by the OP (because I think they must mean Men who hate Women) but it made my brain hurt for a wee while until I figured it out.

I've not noticed either, FWIW, but given my performance in comprehending this thread, perhaps that's not surprising.

I think i'll go get another cup of tea.

@AlienatedChildGrown If you need more info I can find the page with the original posts on. The posts have now been deleted.

I know! Thought it's not anything unusual! As pp shows it's still thought of by some as 😱

It's just a name though. One of my friends kept her own surname and one of my other friend's DH's took her name because he liked it better.

I fear for my son but for different reasons. I fear knife and gang violence, drugs, the fact that suicide rates are so high among young men. I don't fear for him because of feminism because hopefully I will raise him to be respectful of women and to view them as his equals both in the workplace and in the world at large.

I was around for PB and I do think it brought members in, but most of them didn't stay and post in other topics I don't think. The MN published numbers of members and the number of people who actively post is vastly different.

Everyone always says 'before X, Y or Z it was different and it never really was that amazing, it was just that it was smaller and more people knew each other and some posters became 'Royalty' who were quite often nasty bullies but they got a pass because of their usernames and the fact they'd been on MN for a long time

And your last paragraph. That was going on in 2010, probably before that, and has been a reoccurring thread every week or few weeks since forever basically.

"This site is being infiltrated by men who hate women/are MRAs"

"Why are people who aren't Mums posting on Mumsnet?, it says Mums in the title"

"Mumsnet is going to the dogs, everyone is horrible and it didn't used to be like this"

Dozens of threads like that every year and people always saying 'AIBU gives robust answers but the whole site isn't like that' and people saying 'yes, it used to be great and full of intelligent and witty posters'

It was never that awesome, it's just that a lot of people really loved it at first because that's what happens when you join something, it's cognitive bias. But after the honeymoon wore off and they paid to attention to the shitty bits, they think the site and not their perception had changed.

And on and on and on.

Exactly this.

There is no need for anyone to let their piss boil.

That would be great, can you PM me ? Whenever it’s convenient for you. This digital flashing shit has riled me from the get go. And unlike the real life version I think there’s a much better chance of tracking the fuckers down and leaving them with a papertrail that comes back to haunt them if/when they escalate.

You didn't.

It's just that some posters will say 'before whatever..it was fabulous'

It wasn't really. It was very similar to now, some great stuff and a lot of crap but in the past, there were certain posters that got away with lots of things that most posters know would be banned for.

They have less influence now which is good but the 'I was here when it was all fields and it was fantastic' posters are just looking at it from a time that they loved it, not necessarily a time when it was much better than it is now.

In the 13 years I've been here on an off It's been the same.

I'm more concerned by a lot of the misandry and man hating that I see on here. Condemn men for bad behaviour, but I have seen so many examples that as soon as some posters see a man posting they lose their reasoning and the hypocrisy is sickening.

Always

DS was about 4 when I saw Mumsnet on the TV (they had like a little show, or a segment on a show, and came in for a gander. That was nearly 20 years ago.

“AIBU that AIBU is an unreasonable place populated by unreasonably “bear pit” like people” was a recurring thread.