Men are twats.

[Truckulentagain]

Here's one.

I watched QI the other day and Jo Brand called Rob Brydon a knobhead, and it was commented on that it wouldn't be acceptable for him to insult her.
(or something like that)

So why on MN is it acceptable and common to call male partners and ex's cunts, dickheads, wankers, knobheads, tossers and twats etc. and other posters either start the insults or call them the same without any comment. I've noticed this in real-life as well.

Also Dad's are dead-beat, absent, Disney and feckless. Probably not at the same time though. But any criticism of a Mother (own Mum and MIL are allowed) is frowned upon (to put it mildly)

If I wrote a post and called my ex these things it wouldn't go down very well and no one would join in with the insults.

Is it something anyone else notices happening?

I think it's one of those things that's so ingrained it is accepted.

Yup, definitely very little tolerance for venting by men if it is at the expense of a woman (I think they just immediately put themselves in the place of the woman, feel affronted and go on the attack!).

Similarly very few people raise an eyebrow at violent language (I want to stab him) or sexual violence (if he said that to me I would chop his balls/dick off and feed it to him) but any equivalent language from a guy would draw a sharp intake of disbelief and an immediate lynching!

I find it quite fascinating really. I guess male posters notice it a lot more, I wonder if many of the women ever really see it, or think it is unusual. It certainly isn't anything like the way my male friends and I talk about women when we are all male groups (although clearly some blokes do so I don't suppose that reveals anything).

You're right. Sometimes it's irritating, sometimes it pisses me right off, usually I ignore it. And I absolutely agree that my male friends wouldn't talk about women in this way.

But, and this is a very big "but", this is one of the relatively few websites where men are in the significant minority. If you look on many of the thousands of websites where men are in the majority then it is incredibly common to find deeply sexist and often flat-out misogynistic comments, jokes and pictures that make the occasional anti-man comment on mumsnet seem positively fluffy.

Moreover, when there is a blanket "all men are twats" thing on mumsnet then quite often there'll then be a significant number of women making comments about how bad a generalisation it is. You don't often see things like that when some bloke cracks (for example) a rape joke on a male-dominated site.

You've just dismissed threats of violence and physical abuse on the grounds that other sites are as bad but in reverse. I'm not sure that "an eye for an eye" is really the answer here. I saw a post yesterday where a female supremacist was calling for men to be castrated.

I've only been here a day, but from what I've seen I think that the Dadsnet section would be far better if it were moderated to exclude women entirely. The same sort of rank female supremacists who infest other sites seem to have polluted mumsnet. No wonder men feel so unwelcome and so villified.

I wouldn't want that, I like women, my Mum was one.

Plus it's pretty bloody boring in here anyway. Not much traffic.

Sorry, that should say 'My Mum is one'

Sorry Mum.

Calm down dear

Try having a look at some of the forums frequented by your noble British male, before you come on here bleating.

i agree. i have seen the sort of comments you mentioned on MN and i wince when i see them. i do challenge generalisations about men when i see them. have you considered speaking with MNHQ about this?

not sure i think women should be excluded from the dadsnet section, just the same as i dont think men should be excluded from the whole of mumsnet, or non-grans from gransnet.

Ther clue is in the title "mums" net,yes men are on here but it is pretty dominated by women and lots of us have good reason to call men names.
I get what you are saying but you are always going to notice what women post as they are the majority on here and we can be pretty scathing about women too,and kids and grannies on buses and people who park in p and c or disabled spaces

I don't go on many other forums apart from an xbox one and a Divorce one.
I'm on this one as it's a parenting site.

'Bleating' !!
You're being hysterical.

This is Dadsnet, I'm commenting.

And possibly lifting a pipe to the corner of my mouth occasionally and having a contemplative puff and watching the smoke stream away as I wonder what it's all about.

"You've just dismissed threats of violence and physical abuse on the grounds that other sites are as bad but in reverse."

No I didn't. A slightly more accurate view might be that what I did was to dismiss threats of violence and physical abuse here on the grounds that other sites are a fuck of a lot worse.

In some ways I find it eye-opening; I go on websites like reddit or barryboys and a lot of the anti-women sexism and stereotyping passes me by as it's so pervasive in our society. The wife-beating jokes, the rape jokes, the paedo jokes, the dismissing of women as either sluts, lesbos or ugly bitches... It's so commonplace it is easy to not see it.

Come here to a website where you occasionally, occasionally see uncomplimentary sweeping generalisations about men and suddenly they stand out. Simply because you don't see them that often. And then you think "Blimey, this must be how women feel on the 95-odd percent of the web which is male dominated..."

As I said, sometimes someone makes a comment here that really does rankle in which case I point out the sexism. You can even do it quite forcefully if you wish although I find that humour generally works better. You are free to do so as well. If someone makes a very offensive comment then you are entirely free to report that post and then one of the mumsnet team will see if it needs to be deleted. Mumsnet isn't perfect by a very long chalk but given the limitations of the medium and the differences in social discourse as found on the web compared to real life, it's pretty good IMO.

I absolutely do not agree with making dadsnet a male-only bit of mumsnet. It's unnecessarily divisive while also being impossible to police and pointless. If you want a male-only website then there are thousands out there for you to choose from.

I'm trying to think of other forums I read, but the only ones I look at tend to be about specific interests so there isn't much call to discuss men, women or the relationships between them. In fact thinking about it the men and women on them all seem to get on very harmoniously. I suppose the nature of a lot of the topics just brings out a lot of conflict and negative feelings on MN (and not just between the genders).

I will try to keep a deliberate eye out for guys being tossers on other forums iuise and if I notice anyone being unpleasant about women on them I'll make a point of objecting to it loudly.

@Snorbs - So you did dismiss it, but you dismissed it for reasons that you think are acceptable. I disagree with your reasoning. Probably best we leave it there.

I also disagree that it's hard to moderate such a thing. I've moderated fora in the past, and it's easy to weed out the trolling. Here, it would be pretty straightforward, and the interesting thing is that, just a garden grows better when it's weeded, fora work better when they're tightly and efficiently moderated. A good example is the Guardian's 'Comment is Free', which has gone, through poor moderating and a tolerance of extremist views, from an interesting debating platform to a hatefest crammed with far-left misanthropes. I'd even be prepared to offer my extensive skills in moderating the Dadsnet forum.

The point about mumsnet is that it is a site with a particular topic. There's no point in me going to a forum for gearboxes and wanting to seek other parents' point of view. And the weakness of mumsnet, IMO, is that it really is almost only mums talking about mum-stuff. Women still do the majority of the caring, but I think that one way to change that is to get men talking about this kind of stuff more.

flatpackhamster, let me gently suggest you hang around on mumsnet for a bit longer than a day before trying to tell mumsnetHQ how they should run their site.

I agree whole-heartedly with Snorbs and had taken exactly the same view after reading Trucky's OP. fwiw I do see where Trucks is coming from, but there is something else as well - men have a long and undistinguished history of assaulting women in a variety of ways (whilst also not undermining female-on-make violence) and so when a man expresses a deisre to do a woman damage it reads a whole lot differently than when a woman does the same. Beause htye are far more likely to do it.
flat can you point to where a woman promoted castration today on MN?

I am on one other forum - the Vauxhall Astra Mk3 Owners Club ( as I have just bought one excellent example of this classic car). We never discuss the patriarchy, or female supremacists. I'll make that suggestion perhaps.

Apart from on MN I've never heard of lots of things discussed in RL breast/bottle, sahm/wohm, feminism, it's actually like eavesdropping on conversations you wouldn't normally be privy too.

On an aside my Ex called me a cunt once, probably a fair comment at the time though.

yes but some of the posts on here are put up by women in times of stress, or looking for support, and quite obviosuly they mainly female audience can join in with their opinions from a womans point of view, beacuse they have been on the recieving end of the same sort of treatment.

My DH is a wonderful man, in a wonderful relationship, but i can understand women who say... this that and the other.

not all men are like that, but some are.

I'd say the type of man being insulted isn't the type who would be on mumsnet, so suggest dads net group should not be offended, but congratulated

And usually, to be fair, when someone makes a sweeping "all men are....." type generalisation, there are always "well, not the grown ones......" type comments.

" And the weakness of mumsnet, IMO, is that it really is almost only mums talking about mum-stuff."

I know. The weakness of that Astra owners forum is that it really is almost only people talking about owning Astras..........

FWIW, I hate sweeping generalisations o any sort, and I haven't often seen it stated that "all men are"... But rather a specific man is. Sometimes this is as serious as violence, sometimes it's silly, as in things that DH does that winds posters up etc.
If you had cause to come on here to discuss vile behaviour from your ex, I'm pretty sure that unless you posted on feminism, you wouldn't be vilified yourself... It's a measure of the situation rather than the sex of the poster IMO.

flatpack

I'd even be prepared to offer my extensive skills in moderating the Dadsnet forum.

Really dry subtle humour. I suspect some people won't get it but you have got to be joking right?

I thought he was being utterly serious.

Such a waste of talent.(now that is subtle...)

Except for comments which are usually immediately picked up on, I've not seen what you describe. People describing one man as a twat, cunt, etc, sure. But not men as a whole.

Plus you must realise that "deadbeat dads" "disney dads" etc are referring to a (hopefully) small group of dads who behave in a certain way, not saying that ALL dads are deadbeats.