Women competing for men

[exhaustedandannoyed]

I haven't posted on feminism before but I am really bothered with what is going on in the country that I live in and will most probably be living in for a long time/forever. It is an Eastern European country and apparently (according to dh who is from here) there are many more women than men in the population. This has the effect that women are pretty much competing with one another to find a 'mate'. This means that they put a lot of effort into the way they look, dress in a 'sexy' way and according to him generally put up with being treated badly by men as they are just grateful to be with one.

I find this really disturbing and it is very sad to think that so many of these men are not been brought up to respect women more. He also says that the reason many women are not very friendly to me is because in their eyes I have stolen one of their men! I tell him he is just being conceited but he says sadly this is the reality of how things are here. I asked him why he isn't more angry with the way that women are being treated and he said he is but there is really nothing you can do to change it. He says he was attracted to me because I saw him as an equal and didn't effectively try to make myself into doormat for him. We have 2 small dds, I don't want them to see this as normal. I know I can try to show them through my relationship with dh how it should be (well as best we can) but is there anything more I can do?

Also I know I can't change a whole culture but is this kind of behaviour inevitable when you have an imbalance of men/women? Another thing that worries me is that apparently domestic violence is very common and is not at all taken seriously by the police. Apparently normally the only way that this violence comes to an end is by one of the couple killing the other. There really needs to be more support in place for women, but I don't have clue how or if I could try to set something up.

You have to think about your audience when telling a joke. Suggest that some group of women might have questionable motives, and it's a good bet that feminists aren't exactly going to be ROTFL.

But I wonder what it does to people's outlook where you have a country which sends men away to be soldiers for some number of years when they could be getting an education and/or finding trouble to get into (oops, sexist joke, sorry). And the women aren't being required to do anything, and aren't declared to have anything to offer to their society. If men are useful as cannon fodder in some future war, then what are women good for, and which gender is being made to feel most worthless? Here's something that imposes total inequality between young women and young men and I'd say isn't good for either. Everyone's able to know what life is like in the more prosperous countries, so maybe a lot of people think about their lives and their country, and end up so disillusioned that they either emigrate or sink into despair.

"askbasil it is the only end game - no other set of pairs other than man/woman can survive on their own"

Er, lots of people are surviving on their own and with people of the same sex.

If you mean they can't reproduce (rather than survive) then you're out of date. We don't live in the middle ages anymore, nobody needs to live with a person of the opposite sex in order to reproduce.

I knew you'd turn up for that one.

I do try.

But it is telling, isn't it? I am pretty sure that as far back as we can imagine, we've had men and women who had children but did not have social relationships with the child's other biological parent. It is perfectly normal.