Mums of sons. (Hard hat on for this)

[Daniagainagainagainagain]

Apologies for the grabby title. I've NC'd for this as I have a few running threads currently with very outing and personal details on.

Anyway back to the point.
I see SO many threads on here where the topic about the thread is about a guy. It's not even necessarily bad about the bloke in question, but so many many posters just seem to hate men. Not give them the benefit of the doubt. Tear them a new arsehole for merely posting on MN asking for advice. There was a thread recently about a woman seeing a really nice guy, a gentlemen as she described him where he had been separated for literally YEARS but wasn't divorced. Turns out there were cultural differences meaning divorce in that country is very rare. People kept saying 'throw him back in the sea' 'he's a liar' one poster called him a wanker.. there was no evidence that he was a wanker and the OP seemed happy with the guy. Just more people clutching for their moment to berate men. It's always the guys fault on here no matter what.

It's always the same posters more often than not berating men, shooting them down, and just hating them. I wonder, do these women posters have sons? If so, do you think your sons are exempt from such awful insults because 'my boy would never'? I can't imagine these posters talking about their sons like that. So do you pick and choose, is it one rule for your sons and one for all other men?

Before it labelled being 'cool' I have just got out of a 10 year abusive relationship where ex cheated multiple times to the point of police involvement. I am not naive to think some of these guys deserve what they get.

AIBU? To think there's huge double standards? To call strangers with no reason to, wankers, but to also think the son shines out of your son's arses?

I know I'll probably ruffle some feathers but I'd genuinely like to know. And yes I have DC.

In regards to suicide, that "fact" is often touted to defend men by using mental health to excuse behaviour.

It is also used to say that we don't care enough about men.

It is not the responsibility of women to deal with the mental health of men.

Women are seen to have so much more support for enotional issues, but that is because we are better at forming communities and emotionally intimate connections in friendships.

Men are suffering with their mental health as a direct result of our patriarchal society that has oppressive views of how men and women should act.

But, men benefit more from the patriarchy than they suffer from it... hence no actual motivation to help change things on a systemic level.
(Otherwise they would be standing shoulder to shoulder with feminists).

There's a saying that sums this up well -

"Men are scared women will laugh at them, women are scared men will rape and kill them".

And if you actually look at the research, women attempt suicide just as often as men, but they are less successful.
(This impacts the statistics).

Men choose more violent methods so are more successful in their attempt and less likely to survive.

This is reflective of men's violence in general, they are better at being brutal to themselves and others than women are.

It doesn't matter if the poster personally knows of a woman killed by her partner, statistics are there all the same.

I have known a lot of men as I have been around the block, had lots of jobs and am old and a lot of men are tossers. So are a lot of the women I have known but men behaving badly towards women, impacts women a lot worse than women behaving badly towards women because of the nature of that behaviour (in that is is often far worse) and the nature of the relationship between men and women.

I think this is why you see the imbalance.

The trope that men are afraid women will laugh at them whilst women are afraid men will kill them illustrates this perfectly.

You cannot compare a laugh with a slit throat.

I agree. I wish it was reflected more in society.

Hm. I have some lovely men in my life (no sons though).

I also have many female friends, colleagues, relatives and women I meet in a professional context whose lives have been blighted by men; the behaviour, actions and traits of whom are predominantly seen in males. I don't think it's unfair to point out to a woman who is second-guessing herself, doubting her instincts, or questioning interactions and incidents, wondering whether she is somehow responsible, that chances are that she is not to blame and that the upset she is experiencing is valid in the face of what is a common cluster of entitled, manipulative, aggressive or downright violent behaviours in some of the male population. If it prevents the occasional woman or girl from ploughing time, effort and energy into a relationship with a boy or man who is displaying aforementioned traits, then I'll take that anyday over worrying about whether I have 'generalised' and upset some men or mothers of boys.

I was raised on 'boys will be boys' and internalised an expectation to be kind and patient in the face of blatant (and subtle) piss-taking in the hope that I could somehow change things. Countless men benefited from my conditioning in multiple areas of my life: relatives, bosses, lovers and colleagues, before I learnt it doesn't have to be that way and that there is no harm in pointing this out for the benefit of other women.

No problem.

Honestly of all the things I worry about raising young men, and there's a LOT to worry about, a bit of judgement and stereotyping from women on the internet is not even on my radar. I can assure you it's not on theirs either. They KNOW men can be absolute bastards, they've had first hand experience. You don't need to worry about their feelings, I promise.

“And if you actually look at the research, women attempt suicide just as often as men, but they are less successful.”

Men when commit suicide, they tend to do it in awful ways where they are 99.999 percent likely to succeed.

That’s why.

When a man decides it- he seems to follow through.

It’s awful.

Do you personally know any woman who has been killed by their partner

Yes, two actually. One was my 2nd cousin. No one saw it coming.
The other woman lived locally, was often seen at her job in Tesco with a black eye, or bruising.
I live in a 'naice' area, with a lot of elderly people.

Here's a new perspective. Men (boys) are primarily raised by? Their mothers.

We are, largely speaking, a product of our enviroment.

So when anyone points the finger at men, they are also pointing the finger at the person who reared them most.

And another new perspective (and it relates to america), who historically has instigated much of the racial violence towards black people there? Women. The latest incarnation being "the Karen". Here are a few articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/opinion/racism-white-women.html

How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror

"We often like to make white supremacy a testosterone-fueled masculine expression, but it is just as likely to wear heels as a hood. Indeed, untold numbers of lynchings were executed because white women had claimed that a black man raped, assaulted, talked to or glanced at them. The Tulsa race massacre, the destruction of Black Wall Street, was spurred by an incident between a white female elevator operator and a black man. As the Oklahoma Historical Society points out, the most common explanation is that he stepped on her toe. As many as 300 people were killed because of it. The torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, a lynching actually, occurred because a white woman said that he "grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her". This practice, this exercise in racial extremism has been dragged into the modern era through the weaponizing of 9-1-1, often by white women, to invoke the power and force of the police who they are fully aware are hostile to black men. This was again evident when a white woman in New York's Central Park told a black man, a bird-watcher, that she was going to call the police and tell them that he was threatening her life."

The OP threw in a ‘genuinely’ on the first page!

There'll be the deniers, yet Mumsnet is known globally for being snippy about men. Some half-baked humanities theories are often used to support these ideas to give the rants more veracity.
However, I don't think it's as bad as it once was.

I too have said women raise future men
Children do best in loving, secure environments, so we owe it to children ( adults of the future) to raise them to be good people- be they men or women.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/27/karen-race-white-women-black-americans-racism

"It was through that performance that Amy Cooper took on the mantle of an American archetype: the white woman who weaponizes her vulnerability to exact violence upon a Black man. In history, she is Carolyn Bryant, the adult white woman whose complaint about a 14-year-old Emmett Till led to his torture and murder at the hands of racist white adults. In literature, she is Scarlett O’Hara sending her husband out to join a KKK lynching party or Mayella Ewell testifying under oath that a Black man who had helped her had raped her. In 2020, she is simply Karen."

I only have a son and don't feel like that comes with the need to defend all men at all.

This is all just a bit OTT, imo.

I have read the whole thread. Even if you've suffered your own trauma, this sentence: Perhaps it's like therapy for those posters. It does something to their minds due to their own trauma. I genuinely mean that too with no ill intent. is weaponising of trauma. You're suggesting that because these women have had traumatic experiences with men, they get online to say negative things about men as a whole as a form of therapy. In reality those women are stating their opinions based on facts, including statistics about violence against women.

I don’t tend to post on threads so I’m not one of those you’re talking about, but I admit I hate men, and I no longer will give them the benefit of the doubt. Just because a man is decent to YOU, doesn’t mean he is safe or trustworthy to every other woman out there.
This comes from 40 plus years of men being the ones who have hurt and used me repeatedly, who have taken and taken and taken. And this is the same for pretty much every woman I know; their lives have been made harder and much worse by men. Women have been the friends who have been there to pick up the pieces.
The statistics of the amount of sexual assaults and murders of women and girls speak for themselves, maybe it’s not all men, but always is men isn’t it.

I, and several other female members, had to leave a support forum (not specific to men or women) because an unfortunate number of the male
members were vile to women. Incel and incel-adjacent types. They are everywhere online and MN is one space where it’s a breath of fresh air to escape that.

As for your comment that a man’s career can be damaged by false accusations…this is the very reason given when handing down lax sentences for SA cases, and CSAI cases, because a harsh sentence would affect his career, or that the damage to his career was punishment enough, therefore slap on the wrist. There are instances as well where women are also dissuaded from even pursuing cases and are asked ‘Are you sure you want to proceed, because this will negatively impact his career’.

There are so many examples of this but just one off the top of my head, that soldier who beat a women on the street. His career would be affected if he was given a harsh sentence, therefore, he didn’t get one.

www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2024/06/20/serving-soldier-who-beat-woman-unconscious-and-boasted-about-it-on-social-media-gets-suspended-sentence/

I think most of us are here for parking threads and general entertainment, to be honest.

According to 'reputation' we're all raging terfs and man-haters, but isn't that just what happens to women when they air their opinions openly? Name calling and the usual 'shutting us down' rubbish?

If I think someone's man sounds like a twat, I'm going to say he sounds like a twat. It's frankly insulting to suggest that this means I must have a thing against all men and consider them one big homogenous mass of twatness.

I'd go so far as to wager that most of us here are either married or in a relationship with a man. Doesn't really equate to hating them all, does it?!

I find it odd how comfortable some posters are at admitting they hate roughly half of the world population, yet they'd be the first to jump on any poster who said they hate black people/Muslims/Jews etc.

And if they admitted that anyway, MNHQ would quite rightly ban their arses from this forum.

Black/brown people saying they "hate white people" would get a softer treatment, though. It's a trauma response.

The parallel with women who've been badly treated by men and male society is so glaring. Trauma response.

Also to answer your question, I don't see any tension between loving my sons and thinking that the patriarchy creates conditions that make men dangerous to women. In fact, this belief informs how I raise my sons. It's not like I think they're exempt because they're special. It's that I've worked very hard form when they were young to teach them how to respect women and use their social power to help rather than harm others. Obviously I have no idea if it will work. I've always known though that I'm raising people who at some point will (a) be physically stronger than 50% of the population and (b) enter a culture and society that sends them the message that they and their wishes matter more than that of women. I have done my best.

Many women on MN who "hate men" are women who know that men pose a danger to women, and that we live in a male-centric society that prioritises men. Compatibly with this, there are many good men who won't seek to use their superior physical and social strength to put the women in their lives down. Where is the contradiction? If you've raised a dickhead man who beats his wife, you shouldn't take his side.

And anyway, love is complicated. Sometimes we love people who do bad things. It's not difficult to see how someone who has raised a baby into a boy into a man would carry on loving them, even if they do end up behaving in entitled male ways. That doesn't mean that these women agree that this behaviour is wonderful.

Yes I fucking do. So shove your sanctimonious crap up your butt.

I have adult sons. They are wonderful, caring, emotionally literate people and I’m proud to know them. I think many of us saying LTB are women in healthy relationships with men who can see how very wrong things look from the outside when posters talk about their relationships.

There’s a thread with a woman whose partner won’t introduce her to his friends until she gets a promotion, for example. She deserves to know healthy relationships are not like that.

My sons tell me I underestimate how awful men (especially young men) are as a cohort. (Obviously NAMALT and all that.) Lots of great individuals, obviously but the entitlement, sexism and toxic masculinity of so many have shocked them.

Nope, I've been on MN long enough to know that if a poster said "I hate all black people" for example, they'd quite rightly be banned.

It wouldn't matter what trauma reasons they stated.

ETA: And also if a black poster said they hate all white people.

You’re kind of making her point for her TBH.

Perfectly put.
I have a trans son and had to deactivate my account on here and take a step back for months, because the hatred and the venom just got too much, and Mumsnet themselves did nothing to stop it yet had no problem deleting and censoring my comments defending him and people like him.

I just accept that this is a website full of very bored, very angry and at times very ignorant people and thank feck that I'm not like they are.

Nope, I've been on MN long enough to know that if a poster said "I hate all black people" for example, they'd quite rightly be banned.

It wouldn't matter what trauma reasons they stated.

ETA: And also if a black poster said they hate all white people.

Well you aren't reading the whole site, clearly.