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?

4% of men are sexually attracted to children under the age of 10, and would rape them if they could without being caught, and based on time spent with children, men actually commit more physical and verbal abuse, and are more likely to murder their children past infancy.

35% of men admit to using any type of abuse against a partner, while 9% admit to physical abuse, with "The ABS estimates that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 14 men are victim-survivors of intimate partner violence", with 1.8% admitting to rape within the last 12 months in 2024.

But yes, women are the real Nasty Pieces of Work.

Honestly, sometimes I despair at the dick pandering.

Ask a single mum who’s struggling to put food on the table for her kids. I’d say the pay gap would be a pretty big factor for her.

But don't you see?

Clearly 50% of women (at least!!) are Nasty Bitches, while 99% of men are Absolute Angels all the time (except for that 1% who do all the rapin' and killin' - we don't like to talk about them).

Because that makes perfect sense, is totally plausible, and definitely supported by statistics

But boys at boarding school bully each other just as much (with bonus buggery!)

Bullying is a human thing, not a female thing, and as a study I linked on a previous page seems to show, boys are actually more likely to engage in both social/verbal and physical bullying.

I don't think anyone has denied that, though? Women are human. All humans are imperfect, or mean, or selfish etc.

I'm not sure anyone on this thread has said all bad female behaviour is driven by men, or caused by misogyny. Some bad behaviour is motivated by an internalisation of patriarchal norms, but much of the time, people are just...being people.

I'm just not sure I've seen that done on this thread.

As you say, sometimes it is valid. For instance, an abused woman may be coerced into doing illegal things by her boyfriend, or a child sexually abused by a male family member may grow up to have terrible boundaries around sex.

But blaming men for a woman's bad behaviour is both not something I see often on Mumsnet, and if an OP does try to do it, she usually gets told she's an adult, and is responsible for her own actions. So it's not something I see often.

Of course, people view the world through the lens of their socialisation, and we have all been socialised into patriarchal social norms, so there's that confounding factor too. And sometimes internalised misogyny will show through when women express or support patriarchal norms at the expense of themselves or other women.

Would you mind highlighting which ones say all women's behaviour is men's fault?

So nothing on this thread, then. And only mention of a couple of people apparently saying it on another thread? So clearly it's not exactly a popular opinion. You get far, far, far more posters insisting women are much nastier than men, and minimising men's crimes, than you do posters saying 'women are only bad thanks to men'.

Does bullying others not come from internal insecurity? Boarding schools might not be a good reference point but I know what you mean about same sex environments, but most children there could be coping with abandonment issues. But I wonder if bullying is not a way to fit in at the expense of another

Regarding aggression, the data are exactly what you'd expect. Boys are more physically aggressive; girls engage in more indirect aggression.

Cross‐cultural evidence of female indirect aggression

Bidirectional is it? So the most common pattern in DVAWG is for the victim to herself be an abuser? Typically, is it?
A bold claim, presumably backed by robust evidence. And presumably supported by beyond the number studies that clearly sets out what we are considering 'abuse' and that we are comparing like for like.
So, that would mean excluding the cases where the defence argued she called him a lazy bastard and he snapped and threw her down the stairs. And the cases where female criticism, defiance or 'nagging' of a man were lumped in with black eyes, broken bones and femecide under the very broad definition of domestic abuse.

But that data is from '98, while the 2024 data I shared showed that boys engaged more in all kinds of aggression across the board.

I also can't access the actual study, but all it said in the abstract was that girls used indirect aggression the most, and boys used it the least - it didn't say what the rates of indirect aggression in boys versus in girls was.

Because boys might be indirectly aggressive less often than physically aggressive, but still have similar or higher rates of indirect aggression as girls.

This meta study from 2018 found:

"Card et al. [9•] conducted a meta-analytic review of 148 studies on gender differences in child and adolescent direct and indirect aggression. They found, as expected, a gender difference favoring boys in regard to direct aggression, but only a trivial gender difference favoring girls in regard to indirect aggression. They concluded that boys and girls used indirect aggression to more or less the same extent, and asked themselves why the misperception that girls are more indirectly aggressive..."

So it seems as though the belief that girls are more indirectly aggressive is in fact an inaccurate sexist stereotype, and not true.

EwwPeople · Yesterday 21:47
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.

Thinking about friendship groups in school...

I find this area fascinating, if rather depressing. I hear a lot about 'mean girls', 'cool girls', 'nerdy/geeky girls' etc nowadays. My daughter would talk about 'the plastics' - the very pretty, popular (but see below) girls in here class.

I went to a state girls' grammar school in the 70s. It was a good social mix in the north of England. There were roughly 6 friendship groups in my class and I suppose we were very, very slightly aware of a hierarchy, but really hardly at all. I'd say I was in the 2nd or 3rd group, but I've only learned to think in those terms in retrospect. We all got on pretty well and there was minimal nastiness. The status of these groups was based on academic prowess, if anything - but it was more nuanced as well. There was honestly no concept of 'cool girls' or 'the pretty ones' at my school in those days. I can only speak for my experience.

I think our current toxic way of categorising girls (particularly) has come from the US where High School culture and hierarchies were much more of a thing than here and is very much a post-11 plus phenomenon (could explain that but might be boring...) and, hugely, the influence of social media.

There's so much more I want to say on this subject but I'll stop there...

Just to say that my daughter made me laugh once by saying,quite unaware of the irony, "You know - she's one of the popular girls nobody likes!" Quite!

The discussion wasn't about whether men can be nasty, it was about whether women can be nasty to other women without it being mens fault somehow.

I read that report a while back and remember thinking at the time that there was a whole raft of behaviour where I believe girls are much more adept than boys that they weren't measuring. The subtle shifts in facial expression, tone of voice, positioning of body, the careful choice of one seemingly innocuous word over another, that females use to control other females and men.

I haven't looked, but I wonder if anyone has analysed that.

This, on the other hand, is internalised misogyny.

There was a thread a while back with a lot of beautiful young women whining about older women in the workforce being mean to them because they were jealous of their youth and beauty. How I laughed, knowing it was in fact because they were incompetent airheads.

Not that good-looking women are airheads. More that if your seniors are constantly giving out to you, them it is most likely due to incompetence.