I'm starting to hate men

[Mamaka]

I posted this on relationships but didn't get any response:

I've noticed recently that I've become more and more anti men - I think since having my first child. So many factors that I could mention and probably many deep rooted issues contributing to this but the long and short of it is why do women have to suffer and sacrifice at every turn?!

I don't really want to feel like this. I have a son who I want to bring up/am bringing up to be a feminist but I'm worried about how my hateful feelings towards men are going to rub off on my dc.

I suppose I am asking if there is a way I can combat these feelings and start to feel more positively towards them.

I agree that a focus on sex education is a good thing, obviously, and completely agree with Bates on that. It might do some good. But really, it will ultimately it will be powerless against the onslaught of pornography if there is no regulation. Sexual desire is one of the most powerful forces in the world, particularly for young eople; if their plastic minds are subjected to infinite varieties of pornography from the age of 8 then some PSE lessons will not make a great deal of difference.

And if there is to be sex ed it should not be of this wooly, 'don't do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable but it's up to you' variety. It should be: don't sext ever, it could ruin your life. Don't send pictures of your penis to girls. Don't proposition girls for sex. There should, in short, be some sort of moral instruction: not just advice. Young people require clear moral guidelines.

No-one ever asked for the print Sun to he censored

Oh and millenials might not be reading the Sun but:

It had an average daily circulation of 2.2 million copies in March 2014.[4] Between July and December 2013 the paper had an average daily readership of approximately 5.5 million, with approximately 31% of those falling into the ABC1 demographic and 68% in the C2DE demographic.

Fair point, Polidori. Okay should the Sun be petitioned to take down page3.com?

I disagree with your use of the word moral. Let's go with respectful.

PHSE needs to start early and be continuously reinforced. Lessons on consent in general can also start early - you can't make anyone play with you, you don't have to kiss auntie Anne if you don't want to etc

Respecting others and their bodies as autonomous with as much right as you to enjoyment isn't hard.

This doesn't negate sexual drive, just frames it as something that needs to be mutually consensual and enjoyable. Few people would force a mate to come for a Chinese if he didn't fancy Chinese food; they'd look for something both parties liked. No one would expect to keep a friendship if they pushed the other person into doing things they didn't like. Kids can grasp this message. Seriously.

Jacquetta: indeed, but I still don't imagine many people who enjoy dehumanising women look at Page 3 much anymore. Really, I am not defending P3. I welcome its demise and would have signed a NMP3 petition. It's just that far more insidious and damaging issues don't seem to be receiving the same level of focus: that seems odd.

It depends what you mean by focus john. Is it massively surprising that a campaign against a long established newspaper got a fair bit of media coverage? Nope. Does that mean more people were more involved in NMP3 than other less publicised campaigns? Couldn't say, but I doubt it.

People and their bodies are not completely autonomous. Neither is a consent a transparent, mutually beneficial transaction. That's just free market ideology transposed to the sexual sphere. People verbally consent to things because of social pressure, because they've been told it's enjoyable, because they've been abused, because they think it might make someone love them - and for a million complex reasons besides. Because people are infinitely complex psyco-emotional entities responding to complex cultural environments; not mere sexual consumers who engage in mutually enjoyable transactions.

Respect does imply moral values. Respect means not seeing someone as an instrument of pleasure but a whole complex person who requires a deeper level of understanding.

Young people should be morally instructed that sex should be contextualised by some form of empathetic understanding; that they should CARE about the PERSON they are engaging in the most intimate of acts without. Without that instruction you will not have sexually and emotionally well-adjusted people.

So John wants feminists to tell young people to not have sex, presumably until they are ready to procreate.

However given the failings of the wider economic system any such children would be born into (), reproducing is probably a bad idea and would just encourage those bad capitalists to exploit us all. So hey, just don't have sex ever.

There we have it ladies! Why bother with silly ideas of choice and freedom. Let's just tell everyone ever to stop shagging because that is apparently the big issue.

Fair point about media coverage: I hadn't thought it about it like that.

I think the kind of feminism that rises to prominence is the media is VERY poorly representative of feminism as a whole. But the fact remains that some very popular feminists do seem to be sending out mixed, confused messages.

Batteries: sorry, where did I say that??

"Fair point about media coverage: I hadn't thought it about it like that."

Really? Ok.

Yes, I'm aware people can be pressured into consent. Hence we go full circle: treat women as equal human beings and sex as something both parties should enjoy and you're done.

And I'm done with you, John. You've continued to insult many feminists simply because they do not 100% agree with both your ideas and your methodology. When called on incorrect posts, you've rarely apologised, just moved on to your next transaction. You weary me. If you actually want to be a feminist ally, listen more than you talk.

Mamaka, I'm sorry about your thread. Happy to chat further otherwhere, any time!

Okay, but if I meet a woman at a party, she says she wants sex and I say I want sex. We have sex. Because we are both a bit tiddly and the music is loud we don't really get to know each other. The next morning as I take my leave she looks sad and says: 'don't you want to see me again?'. It turns out she didn't just want casual sex. I just say: 'sorry, no I just wanted to get my end away. You seemed happy enough about it last night. Byeee'.

Reverse the genders if you like. Or perhaps the interaction could have been online where no one knows one another at all. All very 'consensual' though.

You need more than consent. You need empathy and care.

John I thought we were all just interpreting each other's posts however we like whilst also addressing feminists as one homogenous group (with a treehouse )

...No?

Batteries. I am not interpreting feminists as a homogenous group. I've said this over and over and over again.

And yet your posts continuously give lie to your assertions.

Words eh?

Bastards, the lot of them.

Oh dear dog, are you STILL going on? Your keyboard must be worn out by now.

What is that story supposed to illustrate, because I half expected the punchline to be "and then she cries rape"

I meet a new friend for coffee. She's ok but talks/lectures a lot. We leave on good terms but I politely decline seeing her again. She bumps into me outside a shop and says 'oh don't you want to meet up again?'

Now admittedly I'm unlikely to outright say 'no, you were boring'. But the idea of one party being more into the other is a fact of life/social relationships, it's not special to sex.

I would argue we need to stop treating sex as this special platform that gives you a right to make demands on others. Instead, if everyone was confident of their own bodies and choices, they would be able to say before any sexual interaction what it means/what they want from it.

I have refused to sleep with men before where I've made it clear I'm looking for a relationship and discovered they aren't; I've also slept with men before on the condition that this is a short term thing and I have established I am under no obligation to enter a relationship. It's perfectly possible to navigate those kind of discussions and explore consent BEFORE sex, not after.

I approached those situations with my history as a rape victim and consent being my absolute watchword; I took any sign of reluctance to discuss the repercussions of sex as a sign of A) immaturity or B) rapist tendencies.

I believe young people should be taught how to have those kind of conversations, NOT some bizarre moral framework decided on by A Bloke.

Which ones? My objections have been specifically to a fairly recent, but very popular branch of liberal feminism that celebrates a culture of sexual consumerism while bemoaning the female objectification that is being made worse by that culture. I'm not telling feminists what they should do, just observing that such a philosophy will blow up in their faces. If you insist on umooring sexual relations from any concept of emotional commitment (even a more equitable and reformed one) then you COMMODIFY them. And therefore women will be further commodified, instrumentalized, dehumanised. I don't need to be a woman to see this, just sentient.

Hi Mamaka, about to have a read, thanks for recommendation. I've been posting on relationships as myownperson. My personal details are quite identifiable there however so name changed for here.

I don't know if you are still reading here but if you do continue with your "education" process it'd be great to catch up with your posts while I do the same thing. Unfortunately for getting out of my situation I now have a lot of child free time and not a lot to fill it.

I would quite like to study something women's issues related but I live in a very "right on" place and don't have the confidence for that quite yet.

Clearly I could do with exercising my brain so I dont need to resort to implying posters should fuck off

"instead, if everyone was confident of their own bodies and choices, they would be able to say before any sexual interaction what it means/what they want from it.

Yes, but people will never be necessarily confident with their own bodies snd choices - especially where complex emotions come into play. There will never be a world where everyone has total confidence in their own bodies. And what does that even mean? They often don't know what they want, especially when they are young. How can you know what someone really wants until you have got to know them?

Terribly sorry to hear about your history. I am a victim of sexual abuse myself.

I'm sorry to hear about your history, John

Going to have to disagree with you though:
And if there is to be sex ed it should not be of this wooly, 'don't do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable but it's up to you' variety. It should be: don't sext ever, it could ruin your life. Don't send pictures of your penis to girls. Don't proposition girls for sex. There should, in short, be some sort of moral instruction: not just advice. Young people require clear moral guidelines.

Nope. I was raised in a religious family. This meant no sex outside marriage. Which meant as soon as one was considering anything beyond kissing, it was "wrong". (Which incidentally made it a bit more exciting! Remember that most teens will rebel against or at least disagree with parents). So once you'd crossed over into "wrong" territory there was no advice, no guidance, beyond that provided by magazines (they were actually quite sound!), peers, and anything from school (I don't remember covering consent and relationships and stuff, only biological side). I was encouraged to see the predatory side of men - but without discussion, so the apprently nice men I fell for didn't seem to be the "bad type", so I didn't realise the things they'd say and do for sex...

(One sibling (25%!) did stick to the no sex outside marriage rule, and seems fine with that. However, he also is on the ASD spectrum, and as you well know one of the traits of this type of mind is a rule-based reasoning, so perhaps that explains your similar viewpoints. And reminds us that people ae all different so a variety of approaches may be most useful).

I think "case studies" of different scenarios, really hammering home potential consequences, especially regarding sharing of images/video and the permanancy of digitial images, is a good idea. I don't know what current sex/relationships ed is like though.

Hi Once: I am certainly not arguing for a prohibition of sex outside of marriage. Not at all. Or any religious dimension to sexual morality. I'm not even a huge believer in marriage as an institution and have no burning desire to get married myself.

I am saying sexual relations should be founded on humanist values of empathy and trust; not seeing someone as a utility to satisfy your sexual desires.

Far be it for me to tell anyone to tell anyone how to do feminism John. I am not a feminist, but you puport to be. How does it scan in your mind that as your involvement in this thread has gone up fewer and fewer women are engaging and more and more are frustrated at you. I'm a bit confused how any brand of feminism that disinclines women's participation and privileges men's voices is anything other than a complete fuck-up whichever way I squint to look at it.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced John you wouldn't be able to find your own arse with an atlas. You keep alluding to objective standards of secular ethics and how this or that brand of feminism fails to measure up to these. However you offer up no rational proofs of these same secular ethics (beyond maybe vague indications that a nanny state can magically fix it all without applying the same rigorous critique to your own views that you do feminism).

You take a ponderously long time, with the most complicated words you can marshal to say actually very little of substantive value. Please for the love of all that is sacred stop!