Women don't make good leaders....

[BantyCustards]

...because the Egyptian empire fell under Cleopatra's rule.

Help me respond to this - it's been bugging me for weeks now. I'm not very good at 'arguing' with someone - have been conditioned to keep my mouth shut or suffer the consequences over the years.

This little gem has come from a man I've been dating for several weeks now and all in all he seems to tick all the boxes but this comment - I just can't let it go and want to discuss it with him.

Ironic really isn't it? It was the intervention of men around Cleopatra who caused the fall of Egypt.

SOrry if I've missed something but are you going to keep seeing him?

I'm intending on bringing the subject up and seeing what he has to say

I couldn't possibly be with a man who so willingly vocalises his ignorance with regards to history. I mean why, just why would he say that out loud to anyone?

Blimey. What could he possibly say to justify such casual misogyny? Your call tho, obviously.

My initial reaction (in my head) was that it was a ridiculous blanket statement given that even the most historically challenged person (a category which I fall into) could identify at least one male leader who fucked up.

I don't know why he would say something so ridiculous - he was sober for a start.

I'm going to challenge him on it and I'm going to do it via text so I cannot be gaslighted into believing something entirely different (which experience tells me can happen within seconds in a conversation where an individual's perceptions are challenged)

I think (and you seem to have recognised this now) you need to set the bar higher!

Struggling to imagine how anyone could have said this in sincerity? like - not as a joke - or some attempt at ironic humour? (Like saying something ridiculous to say the opposite- like - or like 'course can't be considered a proper dictator unless you have a mustach' type comment.) Because it doesn't even make sense to assess everything that happened under a single ruler as down to the gender of the ruler - or that this can say anything about the rulers in general. Just seems absurd to me.

Yes, it seemed utterly absurd to me too. My conditioning (I think) left me tongue tied.

Please end the discussion by dumping him using Her's reason of:

You might tell him that he's just never going to stimulate you intellectually and you see no future together.

Because its just perfect for this situation

I spend a fair amount of time on MN - good company for much of the time, I feel. The fact that I've been ruminating on this for weeks and only now am posting for opinions speaks volumes about exactly how affected I've been by my upbringing and subsequent relationships, doesn't if?

I feel quite pathetic, to be honest

You are not pathetic at all OP. It's one of those situations where you are blindsided and unprepared to answer back.

I remember years ago this guy I had been dating for a month said that "women in the past let men do all the work whilst they stayed at home and did nothing".

I was gobsmacked just like you (and I didn't have Mumsnet then to help me!). I did try to argue back but whilst doing so I realised that I didn't have much of a clue myself of what women in the last did, courtesy of our crappy male dominated history education.

So I started reading books to find out more about Women's history and it was fascinating. Why don't you take this as a learning opportunity to read up on the many Women leaders that have existed and the changes they've made. So next time you'll be prepared.

That way you can say that even misogynistic a-holes have a silver lining

The argument is crap: even if Cleopatra was a bad leader, you cannot generalise from a single example. There have been plenty of terrible leaders who were men - that doesn't mean that men don't make good leaders.

In any case, "The Egyptian empire" had not been an empire for a very long time by the time Cleopatra ruled Egypt. She was a Ptolemy, a member of a dynasty of Greek rules descended from one of Alexander's generals, who spoke Greek because they couldn't be arsed to learn Egyptian (Cleopatra was the only one who did: she was a polyglot and a polymath). The world had been dominated by the Roman empire for quite some time.

So this man's not only an idiot, he is badly informed. Tell him to stuff his mansplaining where the Sun doesn't shine.

Tell him that you're leading your life in a different direction to his.