Is MN feeding unhealthy attitudes towards men?

[Grtscott]

Some threads I've read this morning have helped me to realise that my thinking about men has changed since joining MN. And not in a good way.

There's an undertone that men need to do things the woman's way, or it's wrong. That men should be grateful for any sex that women are willing to give in a long term relationship, even if that peters out to no sex at all.

Men are seen to be babies who can't do anything for themselves, and need to have someone pre plan and organise their lives, but god forbid they fall into the pattern of behaviour of expecting their female partner to do these things for them, as that's what they've always done.

This thinking is observable to a greater or lesser extent across the boards.

I've also recognised where this thinking has affected the way I think about my wonderful man, and sometimes in things I've said to him or actions towards him. I need to watch this in future.

I'm concerned that the general thinking about men on this website can't be good for society if this is the way women think, and are encouraged to think by others.

If women treat men this way collectively and have low expectations around them, no wonder the bar is getting lower.

I remember that thread too.

Another one I couldn't post on. as I couldn't get on the bandwagon of "yay, amazing", and didn't have time to argue my pov from all the posters I'd have expected to leap on it.

Maybe MN is the middle class British version of grown up Mean Girls?

Seems to be a few categories on here.

Absolute saints who earn a great salary do loads of housework and child care.and good looking and great in bed. (this is a miniscule percentage)

Other end of scale absolute swines

Others pretty useless at nearly everything and just a general nuisance who should pack his bags. (Seems to be quite a lot of these.)

You will have not seen posts maligning ALL women in responses to the actions of women in an OP no. Of course you wouldn't, when most of the posters will be women themselves and are not going to generalise in a way that includes them.
What you will see is strong attacks made against subsets of women based on generalisations and stereotypes. Older women (rude), Mothers in law (needy, interfering), school gate mums (cliquey), teenage girls (mean, worse than boys) female colleagues (back stabbing) etc.
Ime this is equally as prevalent as any generalisations made about men on the site.

Yes, I mean that IS a kind of 'girls are always in the right' attitude which could ironically reinforce Andrew Tate's message that the world is against men.

Yes I had post natal depression at the time.

The findings of the study are published in the Scientific Reports journal.

That's true. To be fair there's lots of threads about awful FILs too, but MILs may get criticised more as they may be more likely to be intervening in his grandkids should be brought up, so more likely to clash.

A long time ago I knew a man who had been a nurse in a lunatic asylum. He told me the there were certain trigger words that would get the patients jumping around screaming, shouting and frothing at the mouth. To amuse themselves on otherwise boring night shifts the nurses would shout the trigger words into the wards, then stand back and watch the resulting pandemonium.

This thread is the MN equivalent.

Yes, but it is worth remembering that the way women think about men is entirely informed by the way they have been treated by men.

Women do not have equality in many areas

• I agree with this : which areas do you think are the worst equality-wise?

I agree with that - my FIL is 86 and on his own now- he’s a very lovely man but when he comes to our house or we go to his he never once offers to put the kettle on or take his pots to the sink after a meal - it very much seems that it’s woman’s job to run around after him ‘if ‘ one is present - yet on his own he has nice meals and a lovely clean house , does all his washing etc - it’s if once a woman is present then she will do the donkey work

This made me burst out laughing. Thanks for relieving a little tension in here!

If you've been saving that anecdote since the 1930s (lunatic asylum..?) then I think you've chosen a poor place to unveil it. The posts on here are almost all a calm and measured exchange of views on the topic. In fact yours is probably the most hyperbolic I've seen.

Absolutely, you got in before me. What a load of bullshit!!

Are you talking women in generic or specific terms?

Some women on this thread have had wholly positive experiences with the men in their lives.

someone else referenced it but the cashmere jumper thread, someone suggested the hubby might be ND rather than just utterly incompetent.

strange thread anyway, justifiably annoyed he keeps doing it but he offers to replace & she says np cos he wants to buy a new one and its not his money its family money & she isn’t wasting family money. I’m not sure what she wanted other than for people to agree he is useless

This is true, actually. I hate those kinds of threads as well.

Maybe it's just a wider narrow-minded attitude that some people have of 'People like me are great, but people who are different from me are bad'?

I'm a man, and the OP seem to have it back to front for me.

As an extreme far-left feminist, MN surprised me in that it is one of the only places I've ever felt the need to defend men. It's not because I care that MNers hate men - misandry doesn't exist and wouldn't matter anyway because misogyny is about power structures, not personal prejudices. There isn't going to be a wave of violence against men because of this site. I do not care whether men feel hurt by it.

It's because I find the general type of feminism prevalent on MN to be inane, essentialist and based on generalisations and stereotypes rather than nuanced analysis. Everything is seen through the prism of sex and sexuality. Absolutely everything. It does my head in. If a man does something, it's because he's a man. If a woman does something, it's because she's a woman. Posters bang on about "men as a sex class" but never once acknowledge any other type of social class (wealth, education, sexuality, race). There's a weird horseshoe effect where, in the name of feminism, posters advocate attitudes that I last encountered in the fundamentalist Christian church I spent my teenage years escaping from - women and men can't be friends etc, women and men are essentially different species etc. And then you get into the dating threads where - again in the name of feminism - you'll see posters telling other women that we are not, and never will be, equal to men. And then the insane competitiveness that's taken as granted among female friendships - so many threads where hackles go up at the mere mention of a "stunning woman".

Biology seems to be everything to many MN posters, which also feeds into the site's batshit transphobia (I'm not going to argue with any of you about that). Someone should write a thesis on why that means so many of you hate your husbands, and maybe your friends as well.

Also younger single woman: femmes fatales and hussies out to steal your Nigel. Especially in the workplace!

But yes - that's the thing. It's all about generalisations and stereotypes - posters seem to think that if their husband or their MIL behaves in a certain way, then so will everyone else's. Which obviously completely undercuts any attempt at serious feminist analysis here.

I mean go on Reddit if you want to see the reverse haha, although MN is still not that extreme.

Exactly MN reflects women who have had positive and negative experiences with men- but this is social media so negative will tend to predominate.

I don’t have an unhealthy attitude towards men but any negativity, like you, is absolutely inspired by real life and especially how one-sided so many relationships appear to be.

Also male comments on news articles.

Why do you assume those attitudes are being expressed “in the name of feminism”?

I think the key thing is to not base your whole view of men on anecdotes from MN, which are bound to skew to the negative.

I've read all sorts of awful MRA and incel boards for years and while I wouldn't call it an exact flipside of MN, the key similarity is that MNers, like MRAs, seem to have taken their handful of personal interactions with the opposite sex and extrapolated them out into universal rules.