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.

As each year passes I become more convinced of its truth.

Putting your disdain for people who do not wish to pursue high flying careers to one side for a moment. One example I can think of two people with similar aspirations would be if both partners are entrepreneurs and can build the same business together. That actually happened in my own family with my grandparents.

Putting your disdain for people who do not wish to pursue high flying careers to one side for a moment.

That escalated quickly. Putting aside your ignorance of the way the majority of people meet people is impossible since that is the elephant in the room.

It doesn’t have to be high flying careers. Dh and I have more flexibility in some ways than say, a nurse rostered on shifts.

The same dilemmas apply. Childrearing is seen as women’s work. Too many of those nurses, and surgeons, and hospital cleaners are going to work after a broken night because their male partners ‘need to be ok for work.’ And society enables that.

I think plenty of men do see women as less than full human beings. Sources of their pleasure etc. Which is why they see ugly women as worthless. Older women as worthless.

They will be lovely to family members, but any women outside their immediate circle? You're invisible. You're an object of contempt and derision. You're irrelevant. You're not worth much as a human being.

I was pretty high flying when I met my husband. I don't tell many people this, but when I met him he was homeless. He was a musician who lived in homeless hostels. He was lovely - kind and funny. He is the best man I have ever met and I love him so much. Ten years later, he earns four times what I do - I am now part time as we have a biggish family. But he says himself if he hadn't met me his life would be very different now.

My SIL is a MAJOR high flyer - very high up in one of the biggest global names! DB is part time as he do a the lions share of their child care. The amount of insults she receives is unreal...how unlike other mothers she is, how ridiculous that she expects my brother to be the main carer for their children...it goes on and on.

Women CANNOT win. The sacrifices are expected to be ALL ours! We see that with the whole TRA shite.

NameChange that is spot on!! People love and respect their mums and grannies but any other older woman...nah!!!

thebewilderness are you saying that we have no agency in how we meet people?

LastGirlOnTheLeft who is it that is making the rude comments about your SIL. Is it mainly men or women?

Expecting high-flying women to partner less ambitious men doesn't work though. Even when women are the main breadwinners, the majority of men will do 50% of the housework/childcare/meal planning and still feel like they're doing their wife a favour by pulling their weight.

The cultural narrative of men supporting wives is about acting in a partnership, not in self-sacrificing to enable their wives to succeed. It's not comparable.

All we want is to bre treated as equal partners, treated fairly in the relationships that we have.

To suggest that women develop (as a group) strategies to reverse the current dynamic so that they have financial control and through that wield dominance over their male partners, is not what women want. We are on the whole not interested in dominating our partners. feminists on the whole want a better society not one where the existing power dynamic is simply flipped so that women get to be as awful to me as men so often are to women.

The other point is that this doesn't work anyway as:

• Society still strongly enforces the current dynamic, it's hard work to go against how everything is set up, and things can ve difficult
• Men still have the option of asserting their dominance through physicality, there were some stats about household makeup and DV that were interesting, I'll see if I can find them

This is a man issue to sort out, really. if men truly believe that women are their equals then they as a group need to start acting like it.

You are having no success at all putting words in people's mouths here, CritEqual . I suggest you try another thread.