Are the majority of men assholes?

[chocolatesaltyballs22]

Firstly I'm not a man hater - I've been married twice and am still married. But increasingly I'm starting to think that the vast majority of men are arseholes or display some kind of arsehole behaviour. Example this morning, but there are lots more.

Swimming at the gym, all lanes empty except the one I'm swimming in. Bloke gets into my lane and does splashy front crawl, almost whacking me in the face with his big meaty arm every time he passes me. So I move lanes, because obvs he's more important than me and should have his favourite lane to himself. 🙄

After my swim I go for a quick jacuzzi - this is a 10 person jacuzzi with three men already in there taking up every available space with their arms stretched across the back of the jacuzzi as far as possible. So I approach thinking one of them will make space for me. Erm no - I have to force myself in and get dirty looks for daring to go into their 'man space.'

Contrast this with the very polite behaviour of MOST of the women who use my gym.

I'm happy to say my DH is in the small minority of men who aren't aresholes (although he's by no means perfect - who is?) But if anything happens to him I will happily remain single and sexless for the rest of my days rather than try to find another decent man. (Also worth saying my first husband was a narcissist and I wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire!)

Yeah, I'm not convinced that extra strength is THAT compelling an argument for men apparently doing more hunting. It's a bit like that section in Invisible Women where she's talking about people saying things like, "Well, it's harder for women to be builders or firefighters because there's a lot of heavy lifting" and she points out that we've created standard sizing and weights etc to meet men's strengths. That bricks didn't HAVE to be that size. That equipment was made a certain size but that doesn't mean it's the ONLY size it could be made etc.

If a spear was smaller/lighter, would the difference in distance be the same? if a bunch of people are hunting would there be any intrinsic issue in say 3 people working together to bring it down/haul it home than 4?

Re the victorian times assumptions, so true. It was interesting at the Natural History Museum a little while ago to see how they're trying to highlight some women's efforts more where before they were ignored. I think it's newish anyway.

A similar, but different issue for our own times is how often we're now seeing historical women being pitched as trans. The assumption being that the roles of men and women were so defined that if a woman did it, it was because she thought she was a man.

As for men being arseholes, people that genuinely believe this must walk around with their eyes shut.

Every day I see examples of both genders behaving awfully, depressing but that’s the world we live in.

Some feckless woman had a go at me for holding the door open for her ‘because it isn’t 1950 anymore and I can do it myself‘ 🙄

YABU.

"Some" people of both sexes are assholes, they're just assholes in different ways.

Men are more likely to be neanderthal, knuckle-draggers, taking up too much space, being deliberately clumsy, loud, untidy, etc. Take workmen, why put down their toolbox or materials slowly, carefully and quietly, when they can just drop them on the floor, causing the entire house to shake? Instead of wearing earbuds to listen to music/radio, they have to bring a huge ghetto blaster so that the entire neighbourhood can hear it! Too important to wear shoe covers or wipe their feet, so they just trample dog shit all over your new carpet!

But women can be pretty inconsiderate too. I.e. on my daily canal side walks, it's more likely to be women walking/jogging side by side who don't pull into single file to pass other people. It's mostly women with dogs on extendable leads who have no control whatsoever as their dogs zig zag from side to side tripping people up. It's mostly women who park on double yellows, zig zags, over junctions, etc., when dropping off or picking up their little lazy darlings from school, etc., causing traffic chaos.

As for swimming, at least men usually actually make progress and swim. When I was a member of gyms, there always seemed to be a couple of huge women doing a single length at a snail's pace and then talked blocking the lane end for half an hour, before they did another length!

So, no, it's "people" of both sexes that can be inconsiderate assholes.

Are you a man or a woman? I think this might impact things here. DH probably sees men and women being dickheads about equal amounts of the time. But lots of men are only dickheads around women, so women probably tend to see men being dicks more often than they see women being dicks.

As for the door holding thing - I am a woman. I hold doors for other women and politely thank someone (man or woman) who hold doors for me.

Dunno about you but I would rather not be hit by spear thrown from 30m away or 50m away! In both instances the spear is going to carry enough force to fuck you up. I agree that one spear, unless you are very lucky, is not going to take down some bison or mammoth but as I alluded to above I imagine hunting such sized prey would require a group effort where lobbing multiple spears at range would increase your chances of mortally injuring the animal while keeping the risks to your self at minimum. I am not trying to frame this as a 'men are better hunters' narrative, more a case that within a group of hunters there will be a raft of different skill sets at their disposal that are used as when the situation demands it. Some people can throw further (mostly men) and others can throw more accurately at shorter distances (men and women).

Have to confess I did not expect to be debating spear chucking ranges / accuracy of Mesolithic period hunter gathers when I work up this morning.

@user1497207191 woah, you're saying that women who swim are usually fat and slow??

Sure, I can see what you’re saying. I think my point is that in general numbers are more important than distances. So the extra 10 spears of taking the women are likely to be more valuable going out hunting than the extra 20 yards a man might throw his spear. So there isn’t a lot of value in a “male only” hunting party.

Personally I find the tactics and concepts of successful hunting fascinating. Which is odd for someone who else wouldn’t hunt by choice 😂

Every time I have to stop myself from pausing and telling them that the only thing they are showing off, while making everyone else life difficult, is lack of skills.

Pools and gyms are like magnet for this kind of men.

If WW3 starts we will rapidly achieve equality of opportunity AND equality of outcome for all but the uppermost echelons

Personally I find the tactics and concepts of successful hunting fascinating. Which is odd for someone who else wouldn’t hunt by choice 😂

You should have been born 12,000 years ago, you would have been good at project managing the hunting of a wooly mamouth.

The thing about hunting is that almost all animals (including mammals) show some difference in behaviour between the males and females. Sometimes its very drastic sometimes subtle. But I can't find ANY examples where only the males hunted. Including animals that live in packs of males/females (even were the strength/size differences are much larger than in humans). There might sometimes be a difference in the tactics used/prey hunted and in some cased male chimpanzees tend to do more hunting than females (who are much better at using tools and therefore do more termite gathering). But not one example where the females don't hunt at all.
So its weird that people assume that humans were the only species ever to exist were the males did all/the vast majority of hunting. You would think there was some really compelling evidence for this but there isn't. Its just what people reckon must have been the case.

Yes TicToc, that is a great way to judge the world…

A similar, but different issue for our own times is how often we're now seeing historical women being pitched as trans. The assumption being that the roles of men and women were so defined that if a woman did it, it was because she thought she was a man.

Have you got specific examples of this? Its not something I’ve come across myself.

I remember seeing a tweet from a female archeologiest about this once.

Male archeologist "The knive/sword is on a shelf in the one room of the house. This is an alter, the knife/sword is a sacred object"
Female archeologist "The knife/sword is extemely sharp. Possibly it was put high up to keep it out of small hands"
Male archeologist "The hands in spray paintings in caves are small. This means their creation was part of the initiation ritual of young hunters"
Female archeologist "Womens hands are smaller than males. Could this be part of a female ritual?"

I don't follow this closely, but for example, I have seen reports where a female body (identified by female characteristics/bones etc) is buried with what is assumed to be "male" items. There is some speculation now that this means the woman was non binary. Instead of, you know, a woman who had weapons. Or that the society may not have had any issues with female warriers and so on. This idea that anyone who does not conform to modern gender expectations must therefore be non binary is bizarre. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/non-binary-medieval-warrior-burial-b1899832.html

There's also been quite a lot of talk about Joan of Arc off the back of a theatre performance last year or the year before?

There's also a Dr James Barry. As I understand it - she presented as a man in order to be a doctor. It's not clear that whether she truly believed she was a man or whether it was just a woman trying to be more than her society would allow her to be at that time. But many people now claim she was trans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)

Women are taught to drive as well as men. The tests are the same.
I do think that many women are worse drivers ( risk of getting flammed). More likely to block off a junction, rarely say thank you and still tailgate. Not sure why maybe more going on in our minds..

Thanks for your reply.
Re Dr James Barry, I know there’s been debate about this, and of course we can’t know for sure, but the argument that this was a historical trans person seems pretty strong to me. Compare that with someone like Florence Nightingale who was also doing things that hadn’t really been done before by women in her society, but she didn’t present herself as male in order to do that. How many women who identified as women would really be willing to live their whole life as the other sex, no matter how much you wanted to be a doctor? They would want to be visible as women to make the point that women could do it as well. When you’ve got someone presenting their whole life as male, including wanting to be buried at death under a male name, it’s not just about career opportunities imo.

@MNUse that independent article is just one article - there were loads. It's also very clearly stated the amount of DNA is tiny. As for Dr Barry vs Florence Nightingale, there are a million differences, not least being the time periods in which they were alive. As for How many women who identified as women would really be willing to live their whole life as the other sex, no matter how much you wanted to be a doctor? They would want to be visible as women to make the point that women could do it as well.

I'm amazed you can write this about a woman in the 18th century. for a start, you're right, most would NOT be willing to do it, which is probably why female doctors were pretty rare. As for wanting to be "visible?... at that time, in that place when women weren't allowed to do these things and, one assumes, in an army camp filled with men would NOT have been safe? Come on.

Either way, my point is that a historical character presenting as a man/woman or having artefacts we consider to be linked to the other sex doesn't mean they're transgender. we shouldn't be applying our standards to history. I am sure there WERE trans people in history, of course, but that doesn't mean that every female body buried with weapons was transgender or that every woman who pretended to be a man to do things or have a life that women weren't allowed was transgender. ie we shouldn't assume they believed they'd been born in the "wrong body."

Yeah re independent article I edited my post because actually the academic article that was the source seemingly did use the term non-binary, so my bad, the journalist didn’t just pull it out of nowhere.

i don’t think we’re particularly in disagreement for the most part, I also think there were trans people in history and I also don’t think ‘woman with a sword’ automatically equals trans. Re Dr James Barry I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Sandi Toksvig has a book about women doing unusual things throughout history and she discusses exactly this in the introduction - that it’s not really possible to know which of the women pretending to be men were doing so because the cultural norms for women were so restrictive, or because they actually identified as male. It’s quiet a nice, light and humorous general interest book.

@JadziaD Re Dr James Barry, I know there’s been debate about this, and of course we can’t know for sure, but the argument that this was a historical trans person seems pretty strong to me. Compare that with someone like Florence Nightingale who was also doing things that hadn’t really been done before by women in her society, but she didn’t present herself as male in order to do that".

She didn't need to present herself as a man. She was a nurse-women were allowed to be nurses. In fact, it would have been incredibly unusual (I don't say impossible because I'm not sure) for a man to do what she did. She took her nursing in unprecedented directions- but her being a nurse was unremarkable. James Barry could ONLY have been a doctor by pretending to be a man. It would have been impossible as a woman. So I think we have no evidence to suggest that she was trans. Ditto Jean d'Arc.

And the suggestion that if she had been a woman she would have wanted to be a trail blazer for other women shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical context. She wanted to be a doctor. And she wanted the freedoms that being a man gave her. Simple as that.

A full 100 years later than Dr Barry, Laura Ingalls Wilder was bemoaning the restrictions of being a girl. And she was talking about riding horses, and not having to do the sewing. So yes, as @CurlewKate points out, thinking that Dr Barry might have wanted to be a trailblazer completely misses the historical context and the reality of women's lives in that time.

In my experience women are crap at saying thank you, reverse parking and are more responsible general low level road based annoying fuckwittery. Men on the other hand are way more likely to drive at speed, drive aggressively, more prone to road rage and are responsible for way more fatal catastrophic accidents. On that basis give me the minor inconvenience of someone not saying thank you or waiting a bit longer for someone to complete a parking manoeuvre every day of the week.

Not only am I the dog’s bollocks at reverse parking, I can reverse trailers (big agricultural trailers and tiny, annoying ones you can’t see behind you) like an absolute pro.

But, I really struggled with this stuff when learning / under test conditions because, like a lot of women, I was conditioned to be insecure and not confident with practical tasks, and I had been taught that mistakes were a sign you were no good at something, not a learning experience.

This wasn’t something wrong with my driving tuition (although it probably could’ve been better), but more to do with how I was treated in schools, by family, and society at large, and how women were generally portrayed in the media at the time. I’d like to think this is changing, but it’s slow progress for sure.

I just think a huge proportion of the population are very selfish and couldn't care less about anyone but immediate family. It's just that males are more aggressive and obvious about it.

But you can spot these people a mile off and avoid them. A huge proportion are also lovely.