Right, on the subject of partners and menfolk in general, I was very mean this week to an academic who started a thread seeking information about men on mn, and I felt guilty later and apologised and she quite reasonably ignored me. But it really stirred up a lot of stuff in me that, despite my meanness, I really did not fully express, and I really want to, so I am going to put it here, and it is related to the stuff that some of you lot are talking about wrt to your partners.
It actually made me so angry I still feel slightly bonkers about it.
The questions she was asking were about male users of mn. Apparently research shows that men have a strong desire for parenting information; they are treated as secondary parents by hcps, etc; so are sites like mn good places for them to express their parental identities? And how do they find posting here, given that they sometimes get a rough ride?
I queried whether this was likely to yield interesting or useful results, given that there are so few men on mn that the main conclusion you could reasonably draw is that they don't, on the whole, want to be here. And I was told that the research is a continuation from other papers that have explored how women are treated in male online spaces. This in itself made me foam at the mouth: a. as if there is ANY equivalence, as if it makes any sense to ask the same sorts of questions; and b. what a useless, lazy, fucking boring jumping off point for anything like this. Sometimes I just loathe social "scientists" and their mindless jumping through hoops, the next one along and very similar to the one they got funding for last time. It just reinforces lazy, unanalytic thinking. No vision, no creativity, no point of view. Just a bunch of pointless questions and their boring answers that always serve to promote the status quo.
There is a sort of knee-jerk "balance" or "kindness" which is completely inappropriate here. I mean if you sit down with some men and interview them, kindly, with a head-tilt, about how they feel about being treated as a secondary parent by the GP or the HV, of course they will moan and whine and say they wish their parenting was taken seriously. Well who the fuck made the world like this? If they want to keep all the appointments and remember where the red book is and deal with constipation and potty training and diarrhoea, they bloody well can. Women don't sit in business and parliament decreeing that they INSIST on dealing with all the child-shit while their husbands go to nice business lunches.
Also, the implication that men don't post on mn much because there is some sort of exclusionary mafia really fucked me off. When men post reasonably, they get treated reasonably. When dickheads like our chum upthread barge into a support thread, and talk crap, they get short shrift. Only here. only here does ANYONE get it. And I really fucking resent the implication that we are being somehow unkind in having this female space.
And when I pointed out one motivation for men to come to mn - to annoy women - the researcher treated it as a side issue (which it is not on the fwr threads) - and all the men got very angry that I had even mentioned it. As if you you can't point out that some men are arseholes without all of them putting you in your place.
Finally, the thing that really interests me about the mn view of male / female relationships, will never be explored, while clod-hopping eejits like this hold jobs that allow them to do this sort of pointless guff. I resent this, I resent the fact that this pedestrian, data-entry approach is all that there is about some issues that are very important, and I resent that fact that STUPID people are ALLOWED to be academics.
The thing - the thing that really interests me - I won't write now as I have posted too long already
But anyway thanks for letting me rant. It is tenuously relevant I suppose because it is about a self-serving "oh but I am a parent too" attitude that has NOTHING to do with being at the shit-face