I'm just so tired of everything

[CloudsCoveredTheSky]

I feel so ground down by all of the shit women have to deal with. I feel traumatised by it, knowing that huge swathes of the population don't view us as human beings.

I'm so tired of all my friends acting like I'm some kind of bigot because I won't join in with the TWAW/be kind/pronouns nonsense. I'm sick of my friends saying porn and prostitution is "women's chooooooice".

I'm tired of the endless stupid shit, the judgement because women choose not to breastfeed or because they chose to breastfeed in public, because you dress up too nicely or not nicely enough, because your husband helps around the house (not my Nigel) or because he doesn't and it's all left up to you. Every single thing we say or do is policed, by men or by each other.

I've been a feminist since I was 16, now 42 and just tired of it.

Get new friends isn’t terrible advice. I hope that in the near future I will live near enough some rad fems to join a women’s group.

I haven’t raised the subject of women’s rights with regard to the trans agenda with many of my friends, and on the odd occasion I have, it’s been very tentative, but most agreed with me on fundamentals. Most women don’t see men as real women, but want to be nice.

Part of the problem with your clear vision of the problems this causes is it’s hard to get back to where that person is now.

So you are not worried about the real problems
1 human overpopulation, leading to
2 habitat loss leading to
3 wiping out of wildlife, leading to viruses
4 climate change

Agree however woman’s rights in third world countries where they are forced to have large numbers of children, even though they cannot feed them. Difficult to address mainly due to the influence of the evil cults.

I feel your pain. I'm going through similar at the moment. Lockdown is making it worse. innocence lost cannot be regained.

That said, the advice about hanging out with different people is good advice. After I had my third child I was in a pit of despondency about the patriarchy, sexism etc. Having a good DH made it worse bizarrely. People kept telling me how lucky I am and how good he is. People set the bar low and it is depressing. I deliberately went out and found myself a right bunch of battle axes to become new friends. It took about 3 years to enrich my friend group. One of the reasons I'm finding it hard now is not being able to stomp through the woods ranting together. It does help to have someone to trauma bond with.

Yes , once you have seen it you can’t unsee it. Yes it makes us become the evil harridans that the men have warned us about, and things will never look the same. I now tend to stick to friends who are more or less on the same page . I wish it were different but now at least we know where the problem lies.

I'm with you, OP, particularly on the policing of what women do. (Some) men seem to get very angry at women who don't make the effort to make themselves attractive, but also very angry at women who make too much effort. If a 12 year old girl wears a short skirt to school then she is blamed for "distracting" the boys as if boys can't be expected to control themselves. But if she wears plain clothes the boys will insult her for being ugly.

If a woman is wary of men because she's worried of being assaulted, she's a man-hater, but if she's trusting of men, then it's invariably her fault if she gets raped, because she should have known better than to get in a car with a man, or go to his hotel room, or meet him for a date. Breastfeeding is bad because it means she's over-invested in her baby or because she enjoys "flaunting" her breasts in public, but bottle feeding is also bad because the baby loses out. etc etc.

And that's just in this country. I despair when I hear about what happens in other countries where, for example, rape is used as a weapon of war and women who have been so badly injured by rape that they become doubly incontinent. And are disowned by their families for the crime of having been raped. I was talking to someone the other day who was explaining about a town that didn't have a fresh water supply so the women had to walk to a well to get water. But walking to the well put them at risk of being raped. At this point you think: wtf is wrong with men? Why can't they even let a woman walk to get some water without raping her?

And then there are "honour killings" where a woman is killed by her own family because she wants to marry the wrong person. And the murderers don't get sent to prison because in that culture it's considered OK.

I could go on for much, much longer.

.. What a useful comment, thanks..

You're welcome. I have ended friendships with people during my life over things like racism, sexism and homophobia. It's very hard or impossible to get them to stop I've found so why bother? There are other people in the world to be friends with and I'd rather have them in my home eating and drinking. And, yeah, talking to my children.

Great post Royal Corgi. Another one of my bugbears (though a relatively minor thing compared to your points) is that if you accept ‘chivalrous’ behaviour then ‘you only want equality when it suits you.’ If you don’t accept it you’re a man -hating feminazi. Essentially, its a no win situation.
TorkTork - your post really resonated with me. I’ve been lucky enough to snag a good one too - and am always being told how lucky I am. Even my friend’s husbands say they want to marry my DH.😃 I agree I am lucky to have a man who cooks, helps with housework and is a great parent, but no one thinks he’s lucky because I do those things too! It does get on my wick a bit. I often hear men complain that they get blamed for other men’s bad behaviour, but actually I think good men benefit from other men’s bad behaviour - because they only have to be half decent and everyone thinks they’re bloody amazing.

Leckford, women , and indeed many humans, can be concerned about many things at the same time.

And what impacts them directly at any point in time may change

We don't have to ignore one problem because others exist. Neither
do we have to prioritise problems in the same way. We may focus on what we can effect. We may communicate where communication is helpful.

Get new friends isn’t terrible advice.

No it isn’t. The only happy rad fems I know are women who surround themselves with likeminded people.

I am with you OP. It is so bloody tiring and seemingly endless.

I completely agree that you need new friends. You surely wouldn’t remain friends with,say, a racist, homophobic, fascist, anti Semite, if you discovered belatedly that they held these views? What’s different about anti feminist views?
The alternative is to stay friends but never discuss feminism, or the trans invasion of our rights, or rape culture etc with them. Just stick to social chit chat and swap recipes or whatever!
Mind you, I have one friend who not only doesn’t “get” feminism, she’s a rabid SNP supporter. I’m a Unionist, involved in campaigning during the referendum! But funnily enough, if we avoid those topics, we can get on fine. We have our religion in common. And she has been a huge help over the last 7 weeks I’ve been ill with Covid.

I agree with you entirely OP. Like someone else says, once you've seen it you can't unsee it. I do thinik it is traumatising and exhausting, to find out how much hatred of women is out there and then be told there isn't, it's just your thinking that's faulty.

It is very hard to be the odd one out among your peers with regard to an issue. Much harder than people realise until it happens to them. I try to remember people in the past who believed in something but were ridiculed or shunned only to be vindicated decades or centuries later. Take pride in yourself as an independent thinker who came to her own conclusions and had faith enough in herself to hold onto them.

And yes, porn and prostitution are shit!

1 human overpopulation

it is estimated that 40% of pregnancies globally are unplanned or unwanted. There are so many women in the world who are not allowed autonomy over their own bodies, are married off young, forced to have more children than they would like because it's validation of a man's masculinity, not allowed to use contraception, not allowed abortions. Raped.

All the stats show that the more rights and education women have, the lower the birthrate. Seems quite clear to me that if you allow women control of their own bodies and lives, they would sort the population issue out pretty bloody easily, and hence all the other issues you list. Women's bodily autonomy should top your list.

I get this, OP, and have times when I feel overwhelmed by the same things. And everything feels like a bigger deal at this point in isolation - it's easy for our brains to focus on the negatives.

Get new friends is good advice though Life's too short to spend it trying to come to terms with your friends are so unthinking that they support men's sexual freedom over women's basic rights.

"to find out how much hatred of women is out there and then be told there isn't, it's just your thinking that's faulty." @Antibles

And that gaslighting is part of that hatred too. That those still stuck with their internalised misogyny are unwittingly complicit in this gaslighting makes it even worse.

I want to shake people and open their eyes to it. If I have to live with this, so can they.

I need to find some local radfems...

Just look at how women are being exploited and bullied being made to work from home with no child care during the current crisis. It is scandalous.

it just me, or is this working from home with children completely unsustainable?
On phone so don't know if this link to the thread will work. It is a shocking and distressing read. In the coronavirus topic.

Sorry, didn't work. For some reason it isn't possible to do links on phone.

You and me both, CloudsCoveredTheSky. When it overwhelms me, I try to distract myself, which mostly works, but it's always an effort, simmering in the background at best.

And then I get even angrier and tireder that I have to waste that energy doing nothing but not thinking about something that should never be happening.

The whole thing is a total waste. Amputates the humanity off men, ties women into impossible tiny bundles, all so some people can avoid doing dishes.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/3902119-is-it-just-me-or-is-this-working-from-home-with-children-completely-unsustainable?msgid=96310946

I'm entirely with you OP. I feel like so much time and effort is being wasted, we should be able to campaign for the important issues. IMO these are 1) ending VAWG 2) climate breakdown as it disproportionately affects women 3) improving women's healthcare. Ending fgm, surrogacy and prostitution, establishing a register of domestic violence offenders all falls into category 1. And we can only seriously put the requisite changes needed to tackle these issues in place when women are in positions of social economic and political power. At the moment it feels as if we'll never get there.