Was Greer Right When She Said Men Hate Women?

[LastGirlOnTheLeft]

I have just skim read The Female Eunuch and like everyone else, the stand out line to me was that men hate us but we aren't aware of the extent, and neither are they!!

Do you think this is true?? My DH, my late father and my brother, all immensely like/d and love/d the women in their lives. I hate to think it is true, but if it is, I want to know! I want to know my enemy.

Patriarchy pyramids

My take on that is that men get the most done (in both directions) because they have the most power and the most freedom.

This ^^. Imagine what you could get done if you had a wife at home looking after your family and cooking your meals!

Thank you, that makes perfect sense. Am learning lots, thank you.

Posting as a 60yr old lesbian who finds 90% of men utterly boring, and the other 10% including men I really love, boring after a couple of hours or so. You might ask why I find men boring? 1. Because they live on a much more privileged planet than I do and are blissfully unaware of that fact. 2. They talk too much too loudly. 3. Mansplaining. 4. Mansplaining. 5. Etc. I inhabit a female world in which women take each other seriously and are in control of their lives. We have all been around the block a few times. When men come into my space that is an honour I don't bestow lightly and it isn't for long. My tolerance for them is low, even the ones I dearly love.

Oh, and I generally find men have an expectation that I will, must, nurture them, which I find draining. One of our dear friends doesn't do that, but he expects us to be his audience, which is also draining. At least he is a servant rather than master in his lovely family! I find most men dislike women (fear them) quite a lot. It is a tremendous relief and comfort at 60 not to have them around me much. I am at 60 with short grey hair free of the male gaze. I get addressed as sir in shops, followed by a hasty apology when they see beyond my hair. Hallelujah! The male gaze haunted me for years, and I was abused and harassed because I was female. Enough.

overnightangel

Yep you definitely are very young, probably have lots of trans and non binary friends too in your hipster cool girl group 😉

“Nobody is saying that every Male on the planet is in a state of raging hatred towards women. “

They pretty much are

Joy, you sound fantastic!! I wonder if I find men boring but just haven't fully realized it...I can't be bothered with them and all my friends are female - I adore my friends. It feels strange saying that I find men dull - like my position should be one of awe whenever one of them deigns to speak to me. I notice one thing in my behaviour- if a man and woman are next to each other, I automatically try to connect with the woman and pretty much instinctively ignore the man. I have no interest in him. That makes me feel odd and like I must have men issues....maybe it is just because I find them boring.

I'm learning so much from this thread - thank you all for explaining everything so well!!

LastGirlOnTheLeft I think it is natural to find men somewhat dull unless they are savvy enough to understand that women are human beings. There is a famous quote : 'feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings'

I really don't think I have met too many men like that! The older I get the more I'm just bored and tired of them.

I love that quote!! It reminds me of another quote I liked when I read it once, that feminism is human rights for men, nothing more, and human rights for women, nothing less.

There really good quotes

They’re even!

They pretty much are

No they aren’t. Most of us have husbands, brother, parenterns and sons. We are not saying that every Male on the planet is a homicidal rapist. We are saying that the culture of masculinity is toxic.

How can you deny this? How can you deny thousands of years of slavery, chattel, women being treated like less than domestic animals? Women being murdered en masse in places like cuidad Juarez? Mass rape as a weapon of war? Purdah? Harems? Women only having had the vote for a brief sniff of time? Honour killings? Relatiatory rape handed down as a sentence? Women in Saudi only just starting to be able to drive, still unable to access medical care without a male guardian?

In he west it’s very easy to say there’s no more need for feminism. Just like it’s easyto be blasé about infectious disease. Look outwards atcthe rest of the world and you see visceral hatred of an opporession of women. Look inwards at our societies and it’s not far beneath. You are being naive.

So you know all men?? Shock horror, there are some nice men.

Yes some nice men.
My problem is that even nice men are living a life of privilege and they don’t even know about it or recognise it. By which they also act in ways that aren’t nice to women but don’t recognise it.

It’s, for example, the fact that many men have actually raped a woman but aren’t aware of it. Why? Because they are thinking they had sex with a woman who was badly drunk whereas it was rare because there couldn’t be any consent.
Or they insisted on having sex with a girlfriend and pushed until she said yes and thought ‘well actually she did want to have sex with me’ wo realising that the reason that woman said yes s the whole conditioning of women about sex and ‘what you need to do to keep a man, incl the fact he has the right to have sex with you’.
Read some relationship threads about women who don’t (or rarely) have sex with their DH and the ‘advice’ going round such as ‘well if you push yourself and have sex more often, you’ll find you will enjoy it more’ or ‘if you don’t want to have sex with him, then set him free (why on Earth is it the woman’s responsibility when she doesn’t have a problem with the no sex??) so he can find someone who will satisfy him’ etc... and often said to the women who have very good reasons for not having sex with said man (eg still recovering from birth, illness, the man being a twat etc etc).
It’s seen in the general organisation of the family - it’s normal that your DH is going away for one while day every weekend for his football/cycling/whatever p. He is entitled to have a break and relax afetr a hard week at work!!
The number if women who still shoulder the whole of the HW an dparenting, get up at night (poor man is tired from work and needs to be in tip top condition the day after!).

None of those people are nice men. They are putting systematically themselves before their partners. They aren’t even aware that they have been raping a woman or have put unacceptable pressure on said woman to have sex with them.
But I’m sure these are also men who will look like involved fathers (eg taking their dcs to do their activities at the weekend), will do the washing up and push the hoover around. On the outside they look great but scratch the surface a bit and the cracks appear very quickly.

Unfortunately I Serioulsy do not believe that there is any man who has actually taken himself out of our patriarchal system so that they have and are always treating women with the same respect they would give to men. :(:(
That’s part of the conditioning they have received in our society.

But yes some men are nicer than others and are total, sexist pigs.
It very much depends where you set the bar....

Even the really nice ones unconsciously expect things from women that are not reciprocal.

And this betrays their sense, even if they don't realise it, that we are there for their use, in a way they don't expect to be there for ours.

The comment upthread about the workplace and mistaking thinking your colleagues respect you for them thinking you're fuckable is definitely a thing!

Back when I was in my late 20s early 30s I spent a few years in the groves of academe. I was eminently qualified and bright enough for the job, so naive lib fem that I was I thought that was why I'd got the job. I carried the highest teaching load in the department, shit loads of the admin jobs (the wifework), managed to get half a dozen papers out, and still got made redundant when they realised I was getting too expensive and too upity (wanting a permant job instead of a never ending series of one year contracts).

Recently I checked the department's website out of curiousity - and was hit like a hammer by the realisation that their male-female ratio was still shit, and that (bar one, much older female member of staff with a permanent job) they only ever employed young pretty women in their twenties, then got rid of them. The bright young men in their twenties had about a 50-50 chance of going on to a permanent job.

Mercifully where I work now, there are about 40% female staff these days (big science R&D outfit), with slowly but steadily increasing numbers of women at all levels of management, and I'd say it was a case of employing and respecting women because they can do the job.

I'm a wrinkly old prune in my 50s now so know I'm definitely not employed for my fuckability any more. But oh, how naive I was when I was twenty something.

There was a really interesting thread on this a while back hairy ..I think it was something like "have you got more feminist as you have got older". A lot of us realised that we were treated much better at work when still universally fuckable. I worked with a lot of lovely 20 something women who would describe themselves as "not feminist" and the older men at work as "really nice"..they were not always so "really nice" to 39 year old me!

It's shocking to realise that rape within marriage only became a crime in the 1990s - in my lifetime.

It's shocking to realise that so many men will coerce and bully women into sex - but it's not rape because rape is when you jump a woman in a dark alleyway.

It's shocking that some men even write books about this shit, and make money of it (PUAs) - one of whom has said on record "it shouldn't be rape if it happens on private property".

It's shocking the disregard and ignorance so many men show around consent, and women's choices.

It's shocking to see how abusive towards women online mainstream porn is. There's a thread right now about choking and strangulation - and how young men all seem to want to do this. When did this happen? That was never a thing when I was young.

Another great quote:

"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
-Rebecca West

Ah yes... I was once greeted my a senior male colleague at a meeting. I’d only spoken to the guy on the phone, where he was polite and charming.

He looked me up and down and was clearly disappointed. His attitude to me was very different after that. I was professionally and stylishly dressed.
I later heard him berating a female delegate for not wearing towering heels. I told him that the day he chose to wear stilettos when he was on his feet for 18 hours was the day I would. Of course charmingly put and with a smile. But with the look of death.

Disgraceful.

I actually remember saying the words 'I am not a feminist' (how I cringe now) when I was younger, when I thought men and women all had the same opportunities and men respected women. Then I traveled to Asia which opened my eyes that men are kings while women are slaves.

I spent ten years working for a charity - my boss (a man of course, even when 80% of the workforce were female) used to bend over backwards to help me in my career. He would push me forward for promotion that I never got, losing out to men at each one.

Then one night when we were out he came on to me - telling me I was beautiful and he just wanted to kiss me and come home with me. I told him to get back to his wife and to behave!

Two months later I was out of the job. He was promoted to Director and my job was pulled. I can't believe how naive I once was.

I don't like to believe that men hate us - I was in denial as it is painful to think the men around me see me as less than. But you can't deny the facts.

I have a couple of male friends-maybe 5 or 6 actually, that I don't find boring at all. I'm talking really old friends, some gay some straight.
But, they tend to be the sort of "Beta" males who haven't become senior managers in IT, or creative directors blah blah.
They are social workers, or carpenters, or NHS workers-not overly well paid.
The middle aged men I know who have become wealthy and successful are frankly unbearable for their arrogance, boorishness and total inability to accept that they are deeply privileged.

Why would you acknowledge your privilege when you can pretend all your success is down to you being awesome?

And guess what many men, especially MRAs, think about ‘betas’.

Well, yeah. One of my male friends (VERY well paid) got very upset when I said that it's difficult for women to rise to the top in industry (due to the expectation that we take on the majority of the domestic tasks).
He basically said that young pretty women had privilege because men want to fuck them, and other women have privilege because we can just choose to have babies and don't have the pressure to succeed that men have. (I have heard women say this too though.)

BTW When I say Beta males, I don't mean wimps, or inadequate types. Just men who maybe didn't have the drive to be Billy Big Bollocks in their work-life. Why would MRA's have a problem with that? Is it all our fault for emasculating them or something?

The "privilege" of all sorts of random men wanting to fuck you when you're young is double edged at very very best.

I think men who see having random men want to fuck you as a "privilege" have very little imagination. They usually seem to equate it to having pretty women coming up to them and asking if they want to have a drink or sex.
Never men who are twice their size coming up to them when they are 14 and asking in obsenities if they want to get fucked, or groups of men much larger than them shouting explicit things and looking like they're following you.
Or indeed, a nice seeming chap in the pub whose twice your size asking nicely to have a dirnk and then getting aggressive / verbally abusive / possibly physically abusive when the answer is no..
And so on.

Men who say that women have some kind of power if they are "fuckable" are deluded. They watch too much TV. They believe the lies that men like to tell each other about conventionally attractive women - that they are knowing, up for it, manipulative etc. This lie is dangerous for young women who are conventionally attractive, to be honest. This is why men approach you in the pub and then call you a bitch when you say no. Because of these stories. These are not the stories women tell, on the whole.