To think that women being unpleasant to other women is not automatically internalised misogyny?

[Carla786]

I see this a lot on FWR and in other places.
It certainly can be, but it seems a cop-out to say it is always the cause. It's not anti-feminist to say that women can be cruel to each other for other reasons, just as men can : intrasexual competition, insecurity, narcissism etc

AIBU?

To be fair, I do write off most men as casual conversation partners - they just don't tend to be very rewarding conversationalists. Although I do always give them a chance, the majority live up to my low expectations, and are dull, assume I'm an idiot, dominate the conversation, don't listen properly, and treat me in a way that makes me feel like they're objectifying me - more interested in looking at me than listening to me. Some are grand, though.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say that all nasty behaviour enacted by women is due to misogyny?

Additionally, men are just as nasty as women verbally and socially, except much of the time their nastier behaviour is framed in such a way as to excuse it - it's viewed more positively.

Men are assertive, not bossy; confident, not controlling; take-no-shit, not sensitive; call it as they see it, not bitchy; having strong boundaries, not being selfish. Many of the exact same behaviours exhibited by men and women are viewed through a different lens, with women being critiqued for it while men are either praised, or just not scolded.

On top of that, men aren't just verbally or socially nasty, they're also physically and sexually intimidating and violent. It always seems strange to me when people try to paint women as 'worse than men' when men literally rape, beat, and emotionally, financially, and verbally abuse women.

I know some people have differing anecdotal experiences, but anecdotes aren't data - I can just as easily say that for my bullied child, it's been boys who are the verbally nasty ones, going out of their way to say horrible things in addition to threatening sexual violence, while girls have been standoffish at times but never nasty in the ways the boys have been.

Looking it up, I found this, which was interesting:

"Relationally aggressive behavior is the stuff that Mean Girls is made of — malicious rumors, social exclusion and rejection — and it turns out that boys are pretty good at it too.
[...]
In fact, as researchers followed a group of boys and girls from middle school to high school, they found that, at every grade level, boys engaged in so-called relationally aggressive behavior more often than girls. The boys were also more physically aggressive than the girls[...]"

So, boys are according to this one study, both more physically aggressive, and more likely to engage in verbally aggressive behaviour, of the sort usually attributed to girls. Perhaps the stereotype of girls as 'bitchy' is in fact just that - an unfounded stereotype that's come about thanks to sexist notions.

This 'free will' people talk about is a bit misleading, the thing about something that has been instilled in you from before you can even remember, is not something you're aware of . That's the point of gendered behaviour, you don't even know you're doing it and that upholds the patriarchy

@OtterlyAstounding I don't think I've ever seen anyone say that all nasty behaviour enacted by women is due to misogyny?

The thread title suggests that the OP has and I've seem posts on this thread and elsewhere that imply it.

I think where the agency comes in is that somewhere there will be two people whose upbringing was equal in terms of instilling gendered behaviour upholding the patriarchy, and one will allow it to mould their behaviour and the other will fight it.

I know some really good, warm women who aren't nasty or bitchy at all. It's a shame there aren't more of them around but it certainly isn't a given that women will be bitchy because the patriarchy trains them to be.

I haven't seen that on this thread, but maybe I've missed something.

I can see that...but girls and women do still have a choice.

Additionally, how much does society encourage internalised misogyny and cruelty in girls? Society's not monolithic. Lots of books & films include female friendship & cooperation. And surely plenty of families, schools etc encourage this?

What things do you think tend to instill internalised misogyny?

I think what this actually means is that women are more likely to restrict their abuse to the emotional and mental without also indulging in the physically violent.
It tends to be framed by apologists for male violence as women do the one, men do the other and the emotional/mental one done by women is just as traumatic if not more so than the physical.
Yet in reality, where there is physical bullying there will almost always be a deep emotional and mental effect on the victim as well as the bruises and broken bones, because physically violent men are mentally and emotionally abusive as well, not instead.

Think about most movie/tv female friendships, even the really nice/aspirational ones. How many of them have friends on an equal(ish) level? Equally attractive, smart, successful, charismatic etc.

As for choice, it is really hard to, especially when younger. You reject the popular/mean girls and you have no friends, you join other alternative groups and you might end up being bullied or ridiculed yourself, you hang out with the boys , you become a “pick me”. Loneliness or ostracism is NOT an easy choice.

Mardy feminist alert. 🤣

Did you actually grow up in a particularly dimwitted US high school comedy?

You'll be told you're wrong because five men in every million murder a woman. Meanwhile I'd say it's at least five women in every 100 that are nasty pieces of work. Probably a much higher % tbh.

And men are just adorable, benign big old Labradors, even when they’re actually committing acts of violence towards women?

I'd rather risk being in a room with a 100 women 5 of whom might be 'nasty' then in a room with 100 men 5 of whom might be killers. Wouldn't you?

And which sex abuses children the most? 🤔

This is IMO even worse than DV. The most common pattern of DV is bidirectional so typically both partners would qualify as abusers. But you can't really say it's a two way thing when abusing a child.

And despite men killing more, the biggest DV study to date found that women actually perpetrate DV more often than men.

This was a study conducted by over 100 academics from 20 universities in UK/US/Canada, working alongside DV organisations. They analysed the data from over 10,000 peer reviewed studies previously conducted. It was called the 'Partner Abuse State of Knowledge' if you want to google it.

I'll await your reasons for dismissing it (because that's what happens every single time with 'inconvenient' data, even when it's much more robust than many of the dodgy studies we see referenced on here).

But it's such a whataboutist argument. It's like responding to every criticism with "well, I'm not Hitler am I?"

I mean, how can anybody worry about things like the pay gap when women are literally dying?

For a certain sort of feminist there is nothing, and I mean nothing awful that any woman can do or say, for which the blame cannot be laid squarely at the feet of men, somehow. It's quite something listening to them try to explain and justify exactly how this awful behaviour by a woman is actually the fault of men, but they do it with a straight face anyway.

The first rule of misandry is that men are always responsible for women's misdeeds.

I think if you're going to argue that OK, men can be killers and rapists, but women can be 'nasty'. Then it's not unreasonable to point out that not only is being a killer or a rapist worse than being 'nasty', but by sheer virtue of being a killer or a rapist, you are also nasty. Therefore demonstrating that the 'nastiness' you see as the female equivalent of rape and murder, isn't just a female trait, so cannot be held up as an example of what's wrong with women.

I'd rather risk being in a room with a 100 women 5 of whom might be 'nasty' then in a room with 100 men 5 of whom might be killers. Wouldn't you?

But the above is a false equivalence, unless you're suggesting that only five women in a million are nasty.

A more appropriate comparison would be asking something like if you'd rather a one in ten chance of being made homeless or a one in a million chance of being murdered.

But really I just don't think they're related. A vanishingly small number of men murder women. I just don't see how that's some kind of gotcha that can be wheeled out to defend any negative behavior women ever exhibit.

Like, the number of people who die by choking on their food is almost 3.5x the number of women murdered by men. You'd probs save more female lives with a campaign educating people on chewing correctly. But that wouldn't facilitate any man bashing.

I often see these arguments about 'what if we lived in a female only society' etc.

The reality is that even more women would die than they do now because men save far more female lives than they take.

The female homicide statistic for last year was the lowest annual total since electronic records began in 1977. There were 75 domestic homicides where women were the victim.

If we look at firefighters alone, 92% of those currently in service are male. The figure is approx 31k. If each of them saves just one woman a year then that's 31,000 female Iives saved by men vs 75 women murdered in domestic homicides.

And that's without counting all the other emergency services. Many terrorist plots are foiled each year and just 1-2 successful attacks could easily equal more than 75 deaths. It's telling IMO that feminists always ignore this and focus on the tiny number of female murders.

When are women going to step up and start risking their lives rescuing men from burning buildings/cars? Or even start rescuing other women rather than leaving it to the men they love to denigrate.

@GaIadriel re counter-terrorism, have a look at
https://www.counterterrorism.police.uk/our-people/
and
https://www.counterterrorism.police.uk/our-people/women-in-counter-terrorism-policing-network/