Metoo and the effect on my DH

[GurlwiththeCurl]

Before I begin, I must say that I am chronically ill and so may not come back to the thread as often as I would like, but I will try to answer any replies as soon as I can.

My DH and I are in our 60s and have been together for over 30 years. He has been a very supportive husband, including a time when he had to stop work due to his health and I took over the breadwinner role. He became my rock as my career went from strength to strength, taking over all of the “wifework”.

So, his reaction to the recent #Metoo revelations has really shocked me and I don’t know how to deal with him. I told him about all of the sexual assaults that I had suffered over my life and he was angry. Not just that I had suffered them, but that I had not really told him about them in 30 years. I tried to tell him that in the 70s and 80s we tended to normalise behaviour like this and did not think of reporting it because we knew that the police or our bosses would either laugh at us or ignore us.

So, I didn’t really think about telling him - there were too many incidents, varying from the fairly trivial to the much more severe.

Anyway, this morning we had a real argument about the issue. He is now insisting that there have been loads of cases of men being arrested by the police for simply touching women’s arms or similar. That men now don’t know how to behave around women! I have no idea where he has read this nonsense as he is not a tabloid reader.

The daft thing is that he himself knows very well how to behave around women and he has been a wonderful husband.

I wonder if he is reacting to the idea that so many men have behaved and are behaving so badly to women - that figure of over 90% of sexual crimes are committed by men, for example. He might be so shocked that he cannot deal with this?

Can anyone help me find a way of expressing the real situation to him without my biting his head off? He makes me very angry at times, but I love this annoying old grumpy dinosaur.

I don't really have any advice but this is curiously contradictory, isn't it? On the one hand, he's angry about the fact that you have been assaulted and that you haven't reported it or told him about it.

On the other hand, he seems to think that men are the victims because supposedly trivial incidents are being reported to the police and now men don't know how to behave around women.

I don't suppose pointing out the utter illogicality of this will help at all, will it?

Oh gurl
It's cognitive dissonance I think. His values are that men are decent upstanding humans and also that he shpuld be a supportive husband and trust his wife. Because #metoo and what you are saying challenges his values about men he is trying to find a way to balance those contradictions.

He was initially angry to try to put the genie back in the bottle and pretend it had happened but that went against value 2. So now he's trying to justify men's behaviour so he can preserve value 1.

I think it's quite common for a lot of men at the moment, I started a similar thread a while back, will see if I can link

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3083315-How-do-we-help-men-be-sympathetic-to-feminism-metoo-backlash-that-kind-of-thing

So he's (1) angry at you because men have done inappropriate things to you and you didn't feel telling him would change things, and (2) angry at you/other women/the world in general (??) that women accuse men of such things and men suffer?

...... doesn't sound like my definition of a "wonderful husband", OP, he sounds like a victim blamer and a sex assault minimiser and precisely the sort of man no woman would bother telling if they had been assaulted or treated inappropriately.

If my DH reacted this way I'd tell him he's part of the problem and ask if he is protesting too much

Is it perhaps related to the classic behaviour around "possession" of a woman?
He thinks the previous assualts are serious, and is extremely angry, because they happened to his woman; his possession. Whilst still being basically steeped in misognyny and denial.

It's not about him though , is it ?

Does he listen to the Today programme by any chance? John Humphries has been bleating on and on about false accusations and such.

I think it’s a case of extreme logical thinking.
The assaults that happened to you were awful and he wishes that thy hadn’t happened.
He understands why you couldn’t/didn’t report them.
He’s blaming false accusations for causing the result that meant you couldn’t/didn’t report.
Because it’s bettwr than the alternative, that sexual assaults are common, unreported and minimised.
I wish it was the case there were far more false accusations too!

Perhaps the reality, do you know anyone else’s stories you could share without breaching confidence? The more he hears it, the more he hears of it not being reported, the more he hears of charges and prosecutions not happening, perhaps he’ll be a able to understand.
It’s not just him though. Lots of nice men are having a rather large reality shock.

I wonder if his new knowledge of what happened to you has shaken his belief in his own ability to know how the world works? Sorry, that's not very clear. I'll try to explain.

When it was all coming out about Saville and the other UK men using their celebrity to sexually assault with impunity, mostly a man would be outed as a perv and I'd quietly think 'not really surprised'. Until Rolf Harris - I hadn't seen that one coming. I didn't doubt the accusations for one second - what I now doubted was my self - my radar. He had successfully built a public persona that I hadn't doubted. How could I have been so blind? It sort of ramped up my suspicions of every celeb male who had not been accused. The world somehow became darker, because I doubted my ability to see it accurately.

Does that make sense? I hope it does.

I wonder if this is similar to your husband's reaction. He's just found out that he didn't 'see' something he felt he should have seen. His world has become darker, less safe. So maybe he's trying to convince himself that, although what you say happened to you did actually happen, it can't be true of ALL the reports. Surely the world isn't THAT dark? He can't have not seen all of this? Because if he didn't see it - what does that make him? Someone who thinks the same as these predators? Complicit?

In the end, I accepted that my radar was just fine for the common or garden perv, but I shouldn't expect to be able to see past the truly skilled. Just as my home security will deter the opportunist thief but not the determined professional burglar. Hopefully, you husband will get past his shock and self-doubt as I did. He will accept that life was structured in a way that encouraged him to not see it; cultural sleight-of-hand, drawing your attention away from the denigration of women with apparently-more-important other things.

He may also be railing against the future, because let's face it, once you see something you cannot unsee it. He cannot unsee all this shit, and it scares him, scares him that the world he moves in is not what he always thought it was. That is scary. Right now he's in denial, but if he's worth a damn then the denial will pass. And he'll accept the world is darker than he assumed.

"He is now insisting that there have been loads of cases of men being arrested by the police for simply touching women’s arms or similar. That men now don’t know how to behave around women! I have no idea where he has read this nonsense as he is not a tabloid reader."

As for the 'men don't know how to behave' - does he read The Times? Giles Coren has bleated about that. And several others, but can't remember who else off the top of my head.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-couple-of-misplaced-kisses-could-end-my-career-plwzh6n3l

The 'loads of cases' - ask him for details. When he can't find any, maybe it will reassure him that it's just scaremongering from the likes of Coren (and John Humphries}.

Thank you so much for these thoughtful and thorough replies. You have all given me so much to think about and I will post again when my foggy brain works through it all.

Just one point of clarification. Just about all of the sexual harrassment and assault that I suffered happened to me in my teens and twenties, so well before I met DH. If anything really serious had happened after we got together in our thirties, I would not have hesitated to tell him. I know he would have been very supportive and helpful.

I think a lot of his reaction is due to shock. Shock that all of this has been going on and he didn’t realise how extensive it was and still is.

Men are so committed to denial that they fail to recognize the irony of their claims that they don't know any rapists or women who have been raped but they know lots of men who have been falsely accused.
Your husband can't continue to live in his comfy denial, so he is victim blaming. He empathizes with the perps. That is the simple truth and probably the reason you never trusted him enough to tell him what happened to you.