Could this be why 'men hate us'?

[Floatyoatcake]

When I was young I was in denial about the fact that men hate women (not all men ofc) but now in my 50s I've come to the firm conclusion that a lot of men hate women.

I also know that most men I've been in relationships with over the last 40 years have started off proclaiming that they have a high sex drive and that sex is important to them etc. However ime men's sex drive is often about novelty, power and control, and not always about intimate sex explored in a relationship. Almost all relationships I've been in, after a while the man has stopped being so bothered about sex, although still keen on the relationship. In the vast majority of relationships I've had, after a year or two, I've been the more sexually driven, while they've often been content to be a bit more of a passenger. I think this fear, of women actually having higher sex drives than men is the reason they hate us. It's fundamental to their beings, that they see themselves as the ones with high sex drives and loathe the thought it might not be true.

Men hold themselves up to be these highly sexually driven creatures and yet the lived experience of myself and friends is otherwise. I guess we don't always know how strong women's sex drives are due to being contstrained by the fear of male violence, but I wonder if men are scared of being exposed as only moderately sexually driven, which is what sits behind their hatred of women.

What do you think - is it a possibility?

username, I agree w most of your post. But a lot of the extremist suffragettes' actions did intend death :eg. the theatre arson, letter bombs. It wasn't just 'this may cause death but that's not our aim,' which would be bad enough, but often, 'We intend to cause death.'

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign

Sidhu, this link is an example of the sort of misogyny that makes women suspicious. Ofc there are plenty of decent men who don't behave this way, but it's really scary that sub has so many members. & look at the Gisele Pelicot case, how many men in a random village were happy to rape her. Or the stat that 1 in 6 Australian men are attracted to children. Ofc these people aren't typical, but the Internet is really scary as it allows them to congregate & feed off each other,
I think the Internet has indoctrinated so many young men into misogyny. Lots of my friends have stories of bfs choking them without permission. It's disgusting. Men have just the same potential to protect & nurture as women do if it's developed properly, but instead lots are being taught via porn at sexual imprinting stage that women want to be dominated & brutalised.
I think a lot of women's anti-male talk comes down to the basic fear, not that all men are bad, but that the good ones can seem just the same as the bad. Bc straight & most bi women rely on men for romantic partnerships, this is quite a worrying thought, esp as most women physically couldn't fight a man off. I can understand that good men are unhappy to feel lumped in w bad men, but they need to understand that women are the ones at most physical risk. Women shouldn't lose hope & claim all men are bad, but men should understand where a lot of the generalising claims come from. There are women who ally w men to change things, & have always been. A lot of the anger comes from trauma.

Sorry, here's the link ti this petition about a really gross reddit sub, sadly one of many. https://www.change.org/p/ban-r-dykeconversion?redirect_reason=guest_user

That's the first I've read of that case. It's pretty horrific. I defo agree that the internet has enabled certain unsavoury demographics to rally together has likely emboldened them.

Yes definitely. Ofc they aren't representative of most men. But it makes it more scary that normal looking men w evil urges can band together & egg each other on..to, God forbid, actually do something? Hopefully not in most cases, but criminals obvs come from somewhere. I suppose in the past perverts circulated Marquis de Sade type books, but now it's so much easier..
R/dykeconversion has 60,000 members. That's a lot of men & a number of vile handmaidens who get off on imagining violating a woman.
Sue Lloyd-Roberts' The War On Women is a really excellent video journalist account of misogyny in different countries. The chapter on India is v scary in that it speaks about the normalisation of rape in certain parts. A police psychiatrist is quoted as saying, ' For them rape is a pleasure. For them it is normal. We get people in jail who have done 200 rapes. They can do it as many times as they like because no-one and nothing is stopping them.' That's the situation in too many places, in the West, that's mainly online, w the danger of spillover into the real world...
Everyone has the human potential for evil. If we women suddenly got stronger, like in Naomi Alderman's The Power, plenty of women would use that for evil. But in the world we live in, it's men who have the physical advantage & too often embrace the view that women, or at least some women, are there to be made to suffer for their gratification.
I'm a history student, & some of the most awful material I've covered was to do w the sexual violence in Europe & Asia post WW2. Thousands of ordinary soldiers took part. Why? Well, the society they lived in fostered the belief that taking violent sexual revenge on enemy women was alright. Obvs the particular situation of war played a part, & there were good soldiers who opposed the rapes, & women who facilitated them : the situation had nuances. But overall it was seen as a norm of war.
It does make the skin creep to think of the many soldier rapists who returned home to their families, w no idea of what their father/grandfather had done.
TRIGGER: Attached below is a pic of the titles of the truly horrible subreddits, some now banned, but many still not, whose users overlap w r/dykeconversion. It's really horrible, but I think people need to be aware of the extremity of the stuff that's on a mainstream social media platform like Reddit, whose bosses don't care enough to ban it. It's misogynistic radicalisation in plain sight. We all need to fight it, men & women. Not just misogyny either : a strong overlap w lesbophobia & racism. Note also the correlation w trans porn & so-called CNC.

The overlapping subreddits :

Totally agree.

I think that some men also despise themselves and women for want to have a relationship or sex with a woman and see us as being 'stupid' to 'fall' for their chat up and the disrespect starts there.

So does that mean that it can be mens self hatred as per your comments @Spooky2000- which then infects their relationships with women. Or their anger at not being needed sufficiently by women which would have previously enabled men to keep women downtrodden more easily?

I still quite like my theory that men like to feel like the 'highly sexed' ones and that they feel fear and therefore anger when they realise that not only do women have sexual agency (in real life not porn), independent of men, but that women often out strip male sex drives once they are no longer afraid of violence/being abandoned with no ability to be independent. Fully appreciate it didnt turn out to be a popular viewpoint on this thread though!

@Floatyoatcake
I guess we don't always know how strong women's sex drives are due to being contstrained by the fear of male violence, but I wonder if men are scared of being exposed as only moderately sexually driven, which is what sits behind their hatred of women.

If you want to know what men's sex drives look like, leave women out of the picture for a moment and consider what gay men are doing. That offers an insight into how men think and behave sexually without having to worry about how misogyny may be influencing men.

So sexually speaking, what do men do when women aren't involved?

Well... every city in the UK has at least one gay sauna. Does that not speak for itself?

@Floatyoatcake I still quite like my theory that men like to feel like the 'highly sexed' ones and that they feel fear and therefore anger when they realise that not only do women have sexual agency (in real life not porn), independent of men, but that women often out strip male sex drives once they are no longer afraid of violence/being abandoned with no ability to be independent.

I'm not being rude, but have you ever spoken to any men?

As a lesbian, my theory is that OP may be right in the sense that women can have multiple orgasms, but usually can't come from PIV alone, unlike men. So men can't have multiples & then have to do oral & foreplay to ensure their partner orgasms. I've been doing some lurking on MRA forums & this idea came up several times : that men get the short end of the straw in sex. (They naturally also complained that they have to buy flowers & woo women to 'hit it' , whereas women can just stroll down to a bar) I don't agree, men are guaranteed an easy orgasm & don't have to risk pregnancy, & most women give oral likewise. But I think this a view some def hold, which adds to their sexualised hatred of women, needing them for sex but hating them otherwise & hating this dependency.

This idea of women enjoying sex more is quite old: in the myth of Tiresias, Zeus & Hera ask Tiresias, who was once transformed into a woman, whether he enjoyed sex more as a man or woman. He says he enjoyed it 10 times as much as a woman!
The stereotype that gay men are highly promiscuous & lesbians are undersexed & only hold hands like a yuri anime deserves some unpacking. It's true that bc women often have a lessened sex drive in a ltr, there can be a reduce in sex as there isn't pressure. If it's mutual this can be OK, I've read studies that examine the overblown lesbian bed death chestnut, & they report that some established couples have sex maybe once a month, but it's a long session w lots of orgasms & they're happy. Otoh, often there may be a higher libido partner who is unhappy but doesn't want to push for more or leave, partly bc of female conditioning to be less intitiative, & partly bc of not wanting to be like an uncaring man who pressures his gf to have sex.
Similarly, though a lot of gay men enjoy sowing wild oats, I suspect more than you might think feel pressured to go along w the extremities of hookup culture. I've heard from friends to that effect, & seen several articles.

So in a nutshell, there's pros & cons to both male & female sexual pleasure. It's not a competition, they're just different, but imo one isn't less than the other. Female libido I generally somewhat lower, but pleasure capacity itself is equal. I think OP is onto something here, but more that men feel they have to do more for less sexually, not that simply feel jealous of women's libido.
Sorry for the TED talk! I'm studying history & the women's modules have included some sexuality stuff that was though provoking.

@shuggles

Yes loads of them! And that's kind of my point, what they say about sex is quite different from my experience of men, and that of other women I know. They big themselves up by talking about how up for it they are, but once you strip away the power and control, the ego boost and external validation that men get from sex. When you strip away the socialisation that men have to appear highly sexed and do all that bravado willy waving plus take away the social pressure that is exerted on women to behave in certain ways plus the ever present fear of male violence. Once all that stuff is ignored then I think that women have a higher libido and men know that somewhere. However having read @AliasGrace47 and given its not possible to like in a misogyny free society rn, I do wonder whether that's closer to the truth: that women have the capacity to enjoy sex more than men.

"Men hold themselves up to be these highly sexually driven creatures"

Never once have I thought this of myself or had my friends say something along these lines.

I would also say those that this may apply to, they are more jealous of the ease at which women can get sex (in their eyes, doesn't matter if it's true in reality) than the fact that the woman in question has a higher sex drive. Certainly that seems to be a big role with incels.

Also, the idea of owning the woman likely plays a bigger role, too (than jealousy of a higher sex drive). Hence all the virgin fetishization or calling women whores/sluts.

Oh I thought the virgin fetishising and slut/whore stuff was about not wanting women to be able to compare men's sexual performance with others. (And possibly find their performance sub optimal) - so an ego/pride thing rather than ownership. Maybe it's both

Mother issues, a deep envy of our capacity to create life and also a hatred of that (consciousness is a burden). Plus a tendency for competition, hierarchy and a transactional approach to interactions.

It's surprised me in intimate relationships, that I thought was a partnership, how obsessed with point scoring and keeping control the man was. It's bizarre when you split up and your ex has a list, an actual list of all the things they've done for you. What was quite funny in that case, was there where things on the list I did for him!

Much happier without a man in my life.

Well, sure it's a possibility, but so is (a) men don't hate you and have a higher sex drive, or (b) men hate you and have a higher sex driver, or (c) men don't hate you and have a lower sex drive, or (d) you hate men because they have a higher sex drive or (e) you don't hate men because they have a higher sex drive or (f) you hate men because they have a lower sex drive or (g) you don't hate men because they have a lower sex drive.

My ex partner of 4+ years let his mask slip on a European city weekend break when he impatiently pointed to his watch and then pointed out that we’d been in said foreign City for a whole 12 hours and had not yet had sex. I kid you not. When I pointed out to him that I was exhausted (full time job, four kids) having flown from London that morning, spent all day sightseeing with him, while he had his parents at his home to care for his only child, he actually said:” it’s not my fault your life’s a mess”. Needless to say I told him to get lost. And stay lost. End of. I didn’t cry a single tear over him. He was a controlling arse and I pity any woman who has the misfortune to cross his path. Charming as you like to start with, of course, like lots of them but showed his true colours in the end. Some men are just transactional , toxic, takers and as soon as they hear the word “no” , they flip. Like toddlers. Good riddance to bad rubbish. It’s good to get this off my chest today as the Gisele Pelicot case in France has got me boiling with rage. And to think that Time magazine has put Donald Trump on the cover as their Person of the Year? I rest my case.

@Floatyoatcake they big themselves up by talking about how up for it they are, but once you strip away the power and control, the ego boost and external validation that men get from sex.

Are you sure this isn't projection? If you have "power" (whatever that's supposed to mean) at the forefront of your mind, and if you experience an "ego boost" from having sex, then is this the reason why you assume that men think the same way?

I've never had sex for "power and control," the "ego boost," or "external validation." I am a simple creature who has sex to enjoy the feeling of sexual arousal.

When you strip away the socialisation that men have to appear highly sexed

I think you must live on a different planet. Social pressures act to make men less sexual, not moreso.

• Men will pressure other men not to express an interest in women to try to suppress competition.
• Many men adhere to religions which discourage promiscuity and lust.
• Society and the media are now overwhelmingly clear that it is not socially acceptable for men to act sexually towards women, unless there is communicated consent from the woman beforehand.
• Stresses and pressures of everyday life typically reduce libido in men.

shuggles, while I agree that there are def social pressures for men to be less sexual, & it's true mores have changed a lot recently, wouldn't you still say that sowing wild oats carries some social cachet w other men? Or would you argue that men are jealous or indifferent to men who have a lot of casual sex?
And vice versa, would you say that, generalising, the majority of men wouldn't be bothered if a friend were strictly religious or for some other reason didn't want to have sex until marriage? I've always thought that being a virgin for longer is harder for men bc traditionally they are supposed to be the more sexually aggressive & promiscuous ones, whereas girls might face some teasing for being a virgin, but are still more likely to be slut-shamed than the reverse. Porn & strip clubs are likewise much less a thing for women, so women are less likely than men to be placed in an awkward situation if they wanted to avoid this.

As to stresses of everyday life, I def agree this can affect male libido. But if this is common, why do we always hear about women's stress causing a lower libido & affecting their marriages, rather than the reverse? Is it that bc men are starting from a generally higher libido level, there's more scope for it to drop without becoming a problem?

As to stresses of everyday life, I def agree this can affect male libido. But if this is common, why do we always hear about women's stress causing a lower libido & affecting their marriages, rather than the reverse? Is it that bc men are starting from a generally higher libido level, there's more scope for it to drop without becoming a problem?

Because a lot of men would rather scoop their eyes out with a spoon than ever admit they struggle to get it up/have sexual issues.

And it seems more common for insults to be aimed at men's sexual prowess than it does women's. Whilst men might call a woman a 'slut' as an insult there doesn't seem to be so much an equivalent to things like calling a man a 'limp dick', or insinuating he has a small manhood/is 'compensating' etc (because nothing could be worse than not having a big penis). I even see the small dick insults on here sometimes.

It seems like women are 'slut shamed' more often but men are body shamed. I'm mainly talking here about comments from the opposite sex. We do also get body shamed but usually this comes from other women rather than men - e.g. we see a lot of nasty comments about thin women looking 'unhealthy' or needing to eat a sandwich etc.

A man that beds a lot of women is often respected while a female would be derided in the same situation. The obvious outcome is that a lot of men won't want to be the one that fails in this area.

Well. Consider how quickly a man can become aggressive towards a girl or woman who rejects his advances. I’m sure there’s an element of resentment there.

BTW, shuggles,in op's post she explains what she means re power & ego validation.

Yes,Sidhu, I was thinking of the shaming of men who have sexual problems but didn't join the dots- ofc this would likely affect reporting rates.

I think it's hard to argue that sex doesn't often act as an ego boost for men to a greater degree than women, (obvs not applying to all men or women).Being attractive & desired is ofc an ego boost for women, sometimes a v big one, & can give them power & validation.But I would argue that, as Sidhu says, men's sense of masculinity is more tied to sex than women's of their femininity, & thus sexual problems can be more difficult to solve. A man w sexual problems, mental or physical, may often be perceived as emasculated & lacking in potency in a way that a woman w similar problems wouldn't be (not that they wouldn't still face other prejudice). Countries that regulate prostitution do so partly to cater to men's needs.

 This is probs partly evolutionary :  being promiscuous  helps a man spread his genes, whereas a woman needed to be more picky about her child's potential father. (Quite a lot of female animals do mate w multiple males to maximise chances, but this is normally not that many). Later, promiscuous women could  cause paternity doubts, whereas promiscuous men wouldn't, so they faced fewer restrictions (though could threaten other men & spread stds, so we're also restrained to some degree) 

I guess an equivalent to limp dick for women could be frigid, but this is luckily used much less now. Limp/small dick insults are horrible & shouldn't be used either.

So does that mean that it can be mens self hatred as per your comments - which then infects their relationships with women. Or their anger at not being needed sufficiently by women which would have previously enabled men to keep women downtrodden more easily

@Floatyoatcake - a bit of both, when you word it that way 🤔 I think for some men, there is self hatred at wanting sex with women and the control they 'believe/feel' they are handing over indirectly, as after all - without the consent of the woman, it is rape: We hold the power.

I also theorise that some men want/use sex purely to assert power: "look at you, stupid woman. You believed all this crap that I've fed you and I've got you into bed. You believed me, hahaha! Who's in charge NOW!?" So, the baseline there is a large level of disrespect in the first instance towards women, followed by an abuse of that woman - all without her knowledge. Would certainly explain why some blokes disappear never to be heard or seen from again. Or more simplistically, they just wanted a no-strings shag and didn't feel that asking directly would get them that.