Feeling depressed after conversations with my young adult daughters regarding female value.

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I was out for a drink with my 22 daughter a couple of nights ago. She showed me a list of her ‘bodies’ the men she had slept with. It turns out of the 9, 2 were indeed rapes. She shrugged it off and was more concerned about her tally. She says that young women now are deemed to have lower value if they sleep with a lot of people. That the men she meets often ask her how many ‘bodies’ she has had.
she believes that feminism driven by millennials has caused a huge back lash amongst men, given raise to people like Andrew Tate and devalued women.
I was so horrified.
The next day I asked my 20 year old daughter if she concurred with this and she did.
So we are going backwards. Young women are deemed higher value the purer they are.
I feel so bloody sad and angry.
I hoped for better for my daughters.

I do think we have to look seriously at why Andrew Tate has become so popular amongst young men. He can only have become popular if he was talking into something already there. He didn’t pop up in a vacuum. So what is going on?

i don’t know what ‘millennial’ feminism is, but it sounds like sexist woman- hatred to blame feminism for the fact that men hate women. I mean, c’mon!

I do think porn will have a big impact on how men view women. You can’t grow up enjoying images of women being abused and degraded and existing just for your aggressive pleasure, and not have that affect how you view women.

I guess (some) men have realised that a lot of women are increasingly disenchanted with misogynist behaviour and are willing to be single for a long time or even permanently rather than date a man who doesn't see them as equals (which is obviously a good thing!). Obviously it makes misogynists extremely angry that women have the power to reject them and all men like them. Hence the popularity of Andrew Tate. If some women continue to date men like this, more fool them. It's terrible that your daughters feel the way they do, and the rapes are shocking and awful, but statistically not surprising, unfortunately.

Exactly this.
Patriarchy...men are allowed and are of high value if they sleep around, go on son mentality ...women no, she is slated.
Andrew tate is a misogynistic sexist dick head accused rapist and ive already talked with my grandson about respect for women, to not believe anything slating women when the man does the same thing and is usually congratulated for it. Its unfair.
It might be a good idea if she reads to buy her a feminist book on the patriarchy and why these views are.

He speaks to their worth in a way that almost no one does any more. Jordan Peterson did that too, but with a dose of discipline and taking responsibility. Having worth and value leads to less hatred.

It was always like this, historically a woman's virginity was guarded carefully and in some of the Bible states in the US they still expect a woman to be a virgin when she marries. Men can be very hypocritical about sex, they want a woman to them sex with them but don't want her to have done it with too many others. The cynic in me thinks they prefer a lack of experience so a woman doesn't know if they're poor lovers.

It was the same messaging when I was their age and I’m 48, so I’m curious what age you are. Just want to give you some comfort that whilst things are FUCKING SHIT, this messaging isn’t a backwards step. It wasn’t delivered in the same way, but you were ‘a slapper’ if you ‘slept around’.

Very concerning she’s shrugging off the rape though. What’s going on there?

Slept with 9 people by the age of 22? God I'm old

Women need to stop engaging with men the moment they raise the issue of "bodies". It is a huge red flag and not a conversation that can ever have a positive outcome for a woman.

Agreed and I don’t recall ever being asked it. Is this a more recent thing?

she believes that feminism driven by millennials has caused a huge back lash amongst men

Feminism has not caused misogyny in men. It exists despite feminism's best efforts. The tsunami of hard core porn has a LOT to answer for.
The mass use of internet porn was not caused by feminists.
Pop culture that depicts women as one dimensional sex objects was not created by feminists.

I mean simply using the term bodies dehumanises people.
i have told her to tell any men who ask her that question to mind their own business.

And yes- she mentioned the wide spread use of porn as a big contributing factor- that young boys have easy access to it
and of course it has a huge effect on how they view women.

V sorry that your DD has been raped and had to encounter such men. That’s terrible.

I agree with telling them to mind their own business, or as an indicator they’re not a keeper. The nosey part of me would want to ask them what they consider an acceptable number for a woman and then ask them their body count/the acceptable number for a man so I could point out the double standard.

I do agree with her about the backlash. There is always backlash when women inch a tiny bit for themselves. It gets bigger the more we inch forward.

But it's also the media for portraying feminism as "women better than men", "girls better than boys". It's never balanced.

There is a growing conversation that men feel like they are loosing their masculinity because of feminism which I think is BS. Women are more independent (in the west) so men feel threatened. I’m a millennial and I am lucky enough to be around and to have witnessed other millennial women that value their independence and self worth more than anything (regardless of how many people they have slept with) and I have noticed it is so much harder to find a decent man that will settle when you hold standards for yourself.

I don’t think the issue is “millennial feminism” - whatever that means in definition. I think the issue is that there is a perceived threat from men that fear the “power” in women. Despite the fact that women are still fighting for better childcare, equal pay, safety on streets - there are a small group of men that have low self esteem and it’s projected through violence etc.

I do hope that your daughter sees her worth. There are good men out there but they are so hard to find when you won’t settle for less. I also hope she is able to get any support needed following the rape - that is awful.

Well the men want what they want and if they can’t get it they need to blame someone. Must be hard to simultaneously desire and despise people.

I always say we should feel sorry for Tate as he’s never had sex with anyone he liked.

It’s a fascinating development in the battle of the sexes. The more women gain control over their lives the less it suits inadequate men. Oh well.

My own young adults are definitely more wary in general. It’s sad to see. My DDs have very low/zero ‘body counts’ and say they just don’t want a man. My (extremely beautiful) eldest DD is very reserved around men and says she’s fed up of being told she’s ’wife material’ as a consequence.

Tate and Peterson would tell her she’s destined to live alone with cats and she’d say 👍🏼.

Both OP’s daughter and mine are wrong in the eyes of the angry men. Women can never win.

I think there’s a lot to be said for young men growing up and struggling to find a place in the world for them. Millennial feminism has been probably cynically latched on by capitalism and reinforced in advertising etc and now men feel like the underdog as there’s nothing “for them”
tbf, any type of feminism is an existential threat to men as they need us way more than women need men and as they feel their power slipping they react in anger. That’s on them way more than it is on us women but what’s the solution? Centuries of subjugation of women can’t change in a few decades and it’s caused a fallout of women with more choice and men feeling like they’re left behind in the dust. They still feel entitled to our bodies and whilst I genuinely believe we can turn this around it won’t happen overnight.

Just to expand on this, as I find it really interesting I think standards of masculinity are so unnatainable for most men these days and it is a trap of their own making. Their value is so tied up in needing to be a provider for females that when they see that actually we don’t need them, they react in fear and violence. If they can’t become a provider, they express their masculinity in hugely toxic ways to compensate. It probably used to be easier when women had no choice but to match with a man for financial security and now they don’t have that easy control, they’ve spat their dummy out. It’s actually really sad

I'm a similar age and agree that I think the unspoken message was the same then.

Agree I have never been asked that.

I feel lucky to have been part of the generation that felt much freer to explore our sexuality in a way - we had easy access to contraception, in my school years we had half decent sex ed and the women on TV we admired (and our boyfriends fancied) were shown as happily dating around without judgement. DP (40) and I spoke about it this the other day, during our teenage years the internet was just becoming more of a thing and young people didn’t have the access to the kind of material that is easily viewable on mainstream sites now - I remember my brothers getting a telling off for trying to download and print a picture of Pamela Anderson on our dial - up! There were the lads mags (problematic in their own way) but for teenage boys in particular it was photos and their imagination, not watching hardcore often violent and degrading porn on their phone. For most of my friends their first sexual experiences were with boys who were frankly just overjoyed a girl was allowing them to touch her and didn’t have any expectations warped by what they’d seen online.

Young women I work with tell me things that shock me about what the men they meet expect in bed - these same men will judge them for how much sexual experience they have had while expecting them to dive straight into rough anal sex or choking.

That’s not to say my generation haven’t been impacted by what they can now view online - but there are plenty of men who haven’t been warped.

I do feel sad things have changed so much in a short space of time. I’ve never been asked about “body count” and would be offended if anyone used that term - I’ve discussed LT relationships with partners but never felt the need to list each person I dated or slept with as a student or in my 20’s.

What shocked me recently was a young girl dating a lad for several months told me she was hoping he was going to ask her to be his girl friend.

tjey had been on dates, away for the weekend, brought Christmas gifts, slept together, stayed over at each other homes.

Now that’s gave me the ick.

Wow, I’ve never heard that term before! I would have presumed it meant number of people you’d killed so would have given any bloke asking the very mistaken impression I was a virgin! Also would have blocked him thinking he was in some type of criminal gang. 🙃

I saw a podcast trying to explain this 'phenomenon'.

It basically said that the worst thing that can happen to a woman is a violation like rape. As this is unlikely to happen to a man, the worst violation for a man is a violation of the woman he is with, either consensually, or unconsensually. The 'cherry on top' bad-of-the-bad reault of this situation is that he finds out that the baby he's been raising is not his.

A woman doesn't have this worry, the baby is ALWAYS hers. So this need for chaste women is for men at least, an indicator of the likelihood that their progeny is their own.

this body count thing is horrible. I agree the basic concept is nothing new - women are better if they’re pure, etc. many cultures still expect women to be virgins on marriage while also expecting there to be a supply of women available for men to sow their wild oats. And uk and western society was like that and retains that attitude.

but I do also think we’ve gone backwards since the 80s/90s when I was young. I wasn’t even especially wild and knew lots of women who had more partners than me, but I was never asked this and being sexually experienced wasn’t frowned upon for either sex. At university I had at least two partners who were virgins and I wasn’t. They were perfectly happy to accept that.

Women who were known/perceived to sleep around a lot were teased/talked about, but that went for men too. There were two notorious “will sleep with anyone” students in my college, one female one male - and he got much more opprobrium than she did as he was known for targeting freshers.

i had a boyfriend at a different college and one woman there was renowned for having shagged absolutely everyone. It was seen as funny/a talking point as she was very quiet and non-wild in personality. But she wasn’t ostracised or rejected or judged.

however no one has to reveal their “body count” if asked. None of your business should suffice, but also if anyone ever asked me that it would put me off them.