Inappropriate callers on pregnancy/birth or breastfeeding helplines

[Goannaforanna]

The conversation about La Leche League and trans women wanting to breastfeed has brought to my mind something I heard years ago about men calling pregnancy and breastfeeding helplines and being creepy. Is there anyone here who has had that experience? I wondered how orgs like LLL are dealing with that now?

Good lord. I didn't know the bit about Varah attempting to get the Samaritans' charity status removed because they weren't allowing men to abuse women enough (I know that's not how he thought if it).

It puts the origin story of the Samaritans in another light - the girl who was so terrified at her first period that she took her own life. Its always presented as Varah having a Christian wish to educate to prevent such ignorance and fear. But after reading that, I can imagine Varah envisaging lots of adolescent girls talking about their bodies and menstrual cycle.

What's odd about that article is that there's no feminist analysis at all. Not a vestige.

Interesting less-discussed impact of AI enabled helplines - will the perverts find it satisfying to ask a female AI voice about its underwear, or will knowing they aren't forcing an actual woman to hear their sex-thoughts take the thrill away?

I was going to assume the latter, but knowing men, I expect we'll see a new fetish emerge of talking dirty to female voiced AIs and getting off on their responses.

They already have AI 'girlfriends' (chat bots) and that turns dark and sordid very quickly. One of the companies who provides this service had their chat logs leaked/hacked recently so there’s plenty of proof of man’s inhumanity to anything that gives them a stiffy.

Oh that I already know. A lot of consumerist tech (eg internet video, VR, probably digitals caeras and home video now I think about it) got a foothold via the porn/sex market in the early stages because men will overlook the limitations in their desire to find a new way to wank.

I was thinking specifically of the urge many men have to bring sex into inappropriate situations - in this case an AI that was not trained to provide sexual service.

Wellcome trust innit.

Ah, gotcha 👍

The sex drive and resulting inappropriate behaviour of some men seems to rule their lives so I wouldn’t be shocked if this were or indeed became a thing 🤔

In the olden days, when you'd put your stuff up to sell in the newspaper, I stopped answering the phone at home when I knew dad had put something up for sale because more than once I got either a heavy breather, or worse, someone who'd start asking me (about 12) highly inappropriate questions.

That Samaritons article was eye opening! I am not sure about the wholesale rejection of the method. It makes me think of the poor sods in counter terrorism or cyber detection who have to view extreme material. Or those Facebook mods who go off sick with insanity.

I think the guy was clearly on to something, understanding that men can go down a really toxic masculinity route if they aren't given appropriate therapy to help. And this method was his way. At what expense of course. But it does feel like the more we block men and punish them the more disgusting and criminal their behaviour gets (Andrew tate). I don't want to live in a world where we have to write off a significant (for it seems it is) percent of the population because testosterone makes them unable to function in a civilised society.

It makes you wonder how we ended up with one.

But these women weren't just monitoring abuse, they were being pushed to allow themselves to be abused.

The whole dynamic was gross and perverse, and compounded by the founder legitimising and urging women to allow themselves to be used as masturbatory aids by abusive men.

Apart from the moral repugnance of that, my understanding is that indulging/tolerating perversions/fetishes/paraphilias encourages them to escalate and worsen.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure it's not that.

I worked on a sexual health advice line for young people and we had frequent masturbators. Some really disturbing ones who wanted to talk about having sex with their daughters.

When I was a Sam's volunteer from the mid 90s onwards, we often got calls from men asking for the "Brenda line". They would usually end the call very politely when told that the service no longer existed. But I guess they always hoped that an unsuspecting volunteer would ask a few extra questions and the call could then be manipulated.
I did once hear some of the training material for the Brenda service, and it was certainly eye-opening!
As the article says, it was well known that Chad never forgave Samaritans for ditching the Brenda service.
And, as everyone says, pretty much every helpline gets abusive calls.

I used to be a breastfeeding counsellor for the NCT in the 80s and 90s and I certainly had a few calls that were highly inappropriate. Before mobile phones were a thing, I remember getting a call at about 1am, which I woke up and answered in case it was an emergency to hear a male voice (with a Wolverhampton accent, bizarrely) saying "Is that (myname)?" I said yes, and the voice went on to say "'ave yer got yer nightie on?" in the world's creepiest tone of voice. To which I replied "Of course I have it's one in the fucking morning" and slammed the phone down. Not exactly pornographic but creepy and unpleasant. I also weirdly had two or three calls from someone who sounded like a woman who wanted to talk about the sexual feelings she got when breastfeeding. I cut that one by the time we got to the third version because it was quite clear she (?) was getting her jollies that way.

Sometimes I just have to conclude that men can be really weird creatures.

Because forum was really only about men's pleasure!

I had a man do this to me when I worked on a helpline for people with depression. I felt violated by it - and angry he was taking resources from someone who needs it.

i still wonder about him - is he someone’s dad or brother and they think he is a normal nice guy. And all the men living around me- you never know who are the ones who do things like this.

Apparently so - that golden combination of priest and sex therapist!

Yes, I used to work for a children's helpline and we would get men calling pretending to be children, playing out really detailed fantasies to the call handlers.

I work for a drop-in breastfeeding/new baby support session, and more and more, I'm fairly sure that one of these days we will have an honest-to-god fetishist walking through the doors - and as far as I'm aware we have no specific policy in place to deal with men who want to talk about their potential to breastfeed. We are also not a women-only group, because we welcome dads to come in (the idea is that they're supporting their female partners but often they're just on their phones and eating cake) so I just don't think we have any way of blocking this at present, and I very much doubt that the policy would be changed specifically to exclude fetishists.