Am I turning into a misandrist?

[MyRareBear]

I'm straight. I've always been attracted to men. After a lot of back and forth, I even dated one (for a godawful amount of time, too, by the way). Except that relationship has completely screwed me over. It's been years and I haven't dated anyone else.

My understanding of consent is gone. I might even be asexual now. I swing between extremes of repulsion towards the male species versus an intense kind of hate towards them because I'm convinced I'll never get the love I wanted. Every women I know in a relationship is compromising. Every man to me has either assaulted a woman, has continued to associate with an assaulter or the secret third option, done something against women that people are not aware of yet. (Hell, have you ever opened a p"rn site and seen the kind of views the most degenerate videos get? And if poor middle school me can stumble across someone's r"pe fantasy, what's to say my future husband hasn't?)

Maybe, I do ever date a man again, and hell, I get married to one. How do I know he's not like my ex and won't change colours years down the line when I've let go of my job and am raising kids? Screw assault, what if he harms me? The stats speak volumes. What if I end up as a case on the paper, too?

Somewhere along the way, my fear of men combined with my desire for love has melded into this soup where I can barely talk to a man without being curt for no apparent reason. I feel intense dislike like "this is a male and this male has sexual desires and is hence, disgusting. There's something wrong with him, I just don't know it yet".

The idea of dying alone is simultaneously terrifyingly lonely and also a relief. Not to mention the repercussions of living with all this hate in me. I've already somehow begun to drift from my male friends. What do I do?
[And no, therapy isn't an option, thanks]

Wow, that's no way to live. It's so far away from my experience of men too. Not sure I can be constructive but I'm sorry you feel that way.

[And no, therapy isn't an option, thanks]

And yet, it's really your only option, AFAICT.

That seems a very extreme and irrational level of hatred and fear towards men.

Do you constantly try to convince yourself that they’re all monsters by looking at the stuff you mention online?

Did you not have a kind and good father?

Your energy makes me suspect that the men are not the problem

Paranoia springs to mind.

@MyRareBear I'm male. It sounds like you've had several extremely traumatic experiences with men and I don't think you should be ashamed of your feelings even knowing they're sometimes directed at men who don't deserve them. Is there a women's support group you could join, maybe. Perhaps try to forget about the long-term future for a while and just allow other parts of your character to flourish.

You’re not alone. I feel exactly the same. Every man I’ve encountered has shown their true colours over time. The more I’ve experienced, read and seen I’ve been more convinced. I just don’t feel like they actually love, they just use it as a transaction/con to get sex and what they want and are inherently selfish. Even male friends I was certain were great family guys have eventually let me down with their opinions/actions regarding women. The thought of trusting a man now seems impossible and also a huge risk. I’m actually mildly scared of them. I used to work in a bar where I was one of the scantily clad women and most married men wouldn’t think twice given the opportunity to get with one of the women there. Think that definitely changed my opinion.

I feel the same way.

You speak a lot of sense.

I used to work in a bar where I was one of the scantily clad women and most married men wouldn’t think twice given the opportunity to get with one of the women there.

Was it actually most, though? Did you carefully count the number of married men passing through who didn’t hit on you and measure the ratio? Did you count the number of married men who preferred bars where the women weren’t scantily clad?

Id say you have been traumatised
And need help untangling these extreme feelings !
That's quiet intense way to feel there are some horrible.men but equally there are some good men in the world

Blimey. I think that actually you DO need therapy - this isn’t a normal way to interact with the world. Yes there are some awful men, but the majority of men I know are decent people. My DH is absolutely wonderful, as is my brother and my father. They are normal, kind, flawed humans!

I pretty much agree.

Of all the men I know there are only two who seem to be genuine decent people.

The rest are on a sliding scale of shite.

I never want another relationship.

Not normal, and gives off massive incel energy.
I wonder how many of those incels/mgtow types have been traumatised by their experiences with women?

I know a few good guys but overall I don't think you are far wrong.

“Men are so misogynistic, the only use i have for them is sex”.

I think there is a whole generation of women who have had similar experiences with men and avoid them completely. Personally I have had abusive messages, kept trying, kept giving love but hit 43 and thought, no more!

Trauma will shape how you feel about certain groups. Often men don't think about others and their impact on the world because they have been socialised not to care. It becomes a circle where neither is trying to impress the other, which is actually fine. Stay away.

It isn't as if groups of women are banding together to drug, rape and kill men, is it? Men do actually do this and there are plenty of online places set up purely for them to mentally and physically abuse women, film it, pass on tips and tricks to get around the law and detection.

So no, I don't think it is a problem. Stay away if you need to for your own recovery and have a happy life! No need for a label.

Yes and “any woman that has an opinion that differs to mine I am going to be derogatory and dismissive of because their opinion doesn’t count” The irony!

You're not alone, you had a bad experience and that will have had a negative effect on you and how you perceive men and relationships, we're not all the same contrary to popular belief but i will admit that if you search around on here there does seem to be a lot of a.holes out there, i think we're all the same in some ways as far as to say we all have a deck of cards it's just that some choose to show their hand at the beginning and some leave it until much later, people also change during long relationships, the pressures of life, peers and other external influences can have an effect on you and make you question whether what you have is really what you want, the problem is these thoughts rarely surface during the honeymoon period.

There are no easy answers and dating these days sounds like a nightmare but you will rarely get a true picture of what someone is really like until a certain amount of time has passed. I'm finding this out 20 years down the line and i don't think i have the energy to fight it.

Yes exactly. Aren't you clever?!

I think it's probably that it's very easy to look at your own partner/husband and believe he isn't one of those men and, of course, you should be able to believe that and wouldnt have married him/be with him if you didn't.

And then you read about Giselle Pelicot and the similar cases that have emerged since and the truth is that Giselle and the other women this has happened to also believed their husbands weren't one of those men. And the wives of the men who participated also believed their husbands weren't one of those men.

And women who post on here having discovered their husband has been seeing prostitutes for years also believed he wasn't one of those men.

Generally, women whose husbands are arrested for sexual assault, or those with images on their computers, or those who face sexual.misconduct procedures are work etc also believed their husband wasn't one of those men.

The women who post on here because their husbands of 20 years, who had always held strong views about men who cheat, had had forgotten that his phone automatically synced with the family ipad and now she (or, in some cases, their child) has now uncovered an affair also believed their husband wasn't one of those men.

The women who married a seemingly independent, educated and a capable adult who then finds that everything is her responsibility also believed, at one point, that her husband wasn't one of those men.

The women who discover their husbands and partners sexting random women also believed their husbands weren't one of those men.

The vets who are called out to animals who have been abused by men whose wives also believed their husbands weren't one of those men.

Statistically, in the UK, a woman is killed by a man, on average, every 3 days. Some of those murders will have been committed by men whose wives believed they were not one of those men.

I have a partner and a couple of male friends and I, too, believe that they are not those men. But the truth is that I don't actually know that. None of us do.

Not especially, but clearly it’s all relative.

I think there's a massive vulnerability and fear there and the hatred is self protection at the moment.
I think that with everything we know about the paedophile rapist class that run the world now, and the blatant contempt that is shown for women and girls, which was always suspected but now we know, and we know it's worse than we could have imagined.
I don't know how we aren't all burning everything to the fckn ground.

Try to ignore the water carriers/handmaidens your question predictably brought here.

"handmaiden" is a misogynistic term of abuse.