Looking at men differently now I know too much?

[clingfilmed]

In recent years I've seen so much in the news and online about men's abuse and violence towards women. A man who looks totally normal and pleasant and is perhaps in many ways a good man might still be going home and creating fake AI nudes of women he knows or watching extreme porn or abusing his wife or kids or using prostitutes or cam girls or has a fetish that degrades and dehumanises women or is a complete misogynist.

There is a post on the relationships board now where a married man is hoping that just because a mum of his sons friend has been friendly towards him she might fancy him and be up for it.

Then looking at many of the men I know day to day how they talk to and interact with their wives and families is depressing to see, almost like they don't care at all.

I know its not every man, I know some men who I do think are good. I do look back to the rose tinted days of my teens when I would idealise boys and think they were so amazing and now knowing what I do about general trends and some men in particular its quite a disappointment.

across all abuse categories, men commit more child abuse

Might've helped if you read the study...

Among women, the most frequently identified perpetrators were mothers (30.1%), fathers (29.7%) and a friend aged 18 years and over (15.5%).

Women named the perpetrator of physical abuse more frequently than men as their mother (43.2% compared with 31.2%).

I have a bowl of 1000 Smarties. 60 are poisoned and will have you shitting blood. The rest are fine.

I also have a bowl of 1000 Skittles. One of them will have you shitting blood. The rest are fine.

You are hypoglycaemic with hunger. Which bowl is safest for you to take ten sweets from?

=======

The above analogy is an attempt to represent the risk posed by men and women to a woman as numbers.

The Smarties represent men, with 6% of them a sexual assault risk (source: Repeat rape and multiple offending among undetected rapists, Lisak and Miller, 2002) The Skittles represent women, who commit only 2% of sexual offences. Shitting blood represents being sexually assaulted.

Ideally, you wouldn't take any of the sweets, just as ideally I'd not have to interact with anyone. But just as I don't get a choice about interacting with people, someone who is about to faint doesn't have a choice about eating.

This.

Most people on here don't want to actually solve it. They just want to play the blame game and use it as something to beat men about the head with.

It's a waste of time because most normal people don't think innocent people are responsible for the actions of others no matter what demographic that innocent person belongs to. Men don't really care about a minority of angry women frothing on mumsnet. They care about their families.

I can only assume you'd never do something as dangerous as driving a car?

It would have helped if you'd read my post, read all of the study, and not cherry-picked the bits you want to see.

Among people aged 18 years and over who experienced emotional abuse before the age of 18 years, the most common relationships of the victim to perpetrator were father (29.4%), mother (25.6%) and a friend aged 18 years and over (16.1%).

Among people aged 18 years and over who experienced physical abuse before the age of 18 years, the most frequently named perpetrators were fathers (45.6%), mothers (37.2%), people in a position of trust or authority (10.8%) and strangers (10.8%).

Are you trying to argue that physically abusing a girl is a different category of abuse compared to physically abusing a boy? Or that emotionally abusing a girl is a different category of abuse compared to emotionally abusing a boy? They aren't: the abuse categories in that report are "emotional", "physical", and "sexual". Across all categories, men abuse more.

Which school of Feminist thought is it that you believe women are rejecting en masse?

Off the top of my head, I can think of these schools of Feminist political thought, there are others but I'd have to look them up:
-Liberal Feminism
-Second Wave Feminism
-Radical Feminism
-Marxist Feminism
-Socialist Feminism
-Psychoanalytic Feminism
-Care-Focussed Feminism
-Maternal-Focused Feminism
-Muticultural/Postcolonial Feminism
-US WOC Feminism
-Eco Feminism
-Postmodern/Third Wave Feminism <<-- I have a suspicion that this might be the one
-Existentialist Feminism
-Radical-Libertarian Feminism
-Intersectional Queer Feminism

Not all Feminist political theory analyses society and the interactions between the sexes in the same way.

Usually they just state that they 'don't identify as a feminist' when questioned in studies. When they see women wanging on about how terrible men are I doubt they stop and reflect whether this would be classed as Marxist or psychoanalytical feminism.

Your lifetime chance of being injured in a road traffic collision, at one in four, is less than your chance of being sexually assaulted, which is one in three.

I'm autistic. My chance of being sexually assaulted during my lifetime is 90% and it's already happened three times.

My driving instructor taught me how to minimise the risk of being an RTC victim by driving defensively. There isn't comparable training for autistic girls to minimise their risk of being sexually assaulted, and if such training did exist, I would have needed it before I turned eight for it to protect me.

My sister wasn't a feminist and made many of the same arguments that you are making.

Then she began to see the patterns I see, applied them to her now-exH, and filed for divorce.

Identifying as opposed to feminism, as distinct from merely having not really thought about structural sexism much, is a luxury position.

Blah blah blah.

The fact is that pretty much all women realise that a small proportion of men are violent criminals and an even smaller proportion of women are. And they just get on with their lives.

The chances of being murdered by a man are so slim that's it's bonkers to fixate on it to the point that it affects your day to day life. Without the internet you could probs believe that not a single woman was murdered annually as you'd be so unlikely to ever encounter it in your day to day life.

What you choose to worry about is up to you but getting your knickers in a twist because the majority of women think it's a bit overdramatic just makes you look silly.

30,000 people are killed annually by dogs but I'm not sure I've ever heard of a cat killing anyone. Doesn't mean I'm going to quake with fright every time I see a dog and make it my life mission to inform all dog owners they should actually get a cat because dogs commit x amount more violence. Neither am I filled with terror every time I drive to work in case I should die in a crash.

The biggest perpetrator of feminist unhappiness is feminists themselves. I was on the train today and actually thought about the thread on here about how to stay safe on trains. Then I just thought meh and listened to a podcast on my headphones.

You've not got a comeback after misreading that report, so you resort to minimisation and the "you're crazy" routine.

I've known that men murder women ever since seeing the memorial plaque for Diane Sindall, aged eight, on a visit to see an aunt in Birkenhead.

I was around that age when sexually assaulted for the first time.

I was on the train today and actually thought about the thread on here about how to stay safe on trains. Then I just thought meh and listened to a podcast on my headphones.

The last time a man touched me without my consent was on a train. He felt up my backside.

The biggest perpetrator of feminist unhappiness is feminists themselves.

I am not unhappy because I am feminist. I am not unhappy because I am single, in fact I prefer to be alone because I don't have to mask my autism. I am unhappy because I live in a world in which women are globally second-class citizens. I am unhappy because I live with so many memories of men treating me like an object and there's a limit to what Rape Crisis can do ease those.

What happened to female empowerment?

A lot of what I see nowadays would be better termed 'female disempowerment'. It's as if there's some weird agenda to make women terrified of mundane low risk activities like getting the train to work. I sometimes wonder if it's actually an incel/MRA attempt to 'put women in their place' by posing as females online and trying to spread fear/punish the women that dare go about their business without acquiescing to men.

The frothers always seem to get sooo angry when another woman states that they don't actually find the commute to work terrifying at all. I honestly don't know if it's jealously or rather anger that it makes them look overdramatic.

And so much of it is contradictory on here. I've seen the same posters talking about how terrified they are of men but then boasting in another thread about how they play 'patriarchy chicken' and deliberately barge into men who won't move out of their way. It doesn't really add up which is why I often think it's just a load of bollocks/complete fantasy posted by Wanda Mitty types. Or just men in disguise trying to stop the trend of women catching them up in terms of influence and earnings.

I agree OP. I have rarely suffered at the hands of a woman but been assaulted, stalked, stealthed and financially and emotionally abused by men.

Then there's the disappointing frequency with which 'good' men turn out not to be so, in the press and daily life. I thought now I'm knocking on, never been a looker, now quite fat and strident, that i would be past it but recently a man NO ONE would suspect of foul play started coming onto me behind his wife's back as soon as we were alone (my partner wasnt around). Actual touching, not just words! I had to physically pull away! I was 1000% not interested and had given no signs.

It just makes me feel you can never trust them :(

It’s not the same as Andrew Tate’s misogynistic rhetoric at all.

Being very wary and suspicious of and even disliking men is probably wise.

Men absolutely commit the vast majority of crime.

How many women are killed by men every week? Raped? So many.

Porn is driven by men.

The Gisele Pelicot case - and others - where ordinary apparently trustworthy ‘good’ men did what they did because they thought they could get away with it.

It’s almost always men. And how do we know which ones to trust? We don’t.

@Galadriel, I see your annoyance. I do describe myself as a feminist because I'm pro-women & I see the harm and lack of agency women have suffered.

And that needs a pro-woman stance to be addressed.

I'm unquestionably pro-woman.

I'm not anti-man though.

I understand the harm men do. I see it quite clearly and understand the need for it to be addressed.

One can be pro-woman, but not anti-man.

We are all human.

We've got to sort this nonsense out.

Exactly- as a society, men and women need to get on the same page and realise we should be on the same team. Yes, some men are violent (towards men and women) but it's ridiculous to tar them all with the same brush and vilify them as a group. It's sexist in fact. If this thread was written by men about women, we would be up in arms about it. This kind of talk only serves to polarise people even more. It shouldn't be an "us versus them" scenario.

Again look at the statistics of crime. Closely.

Why are you so heavily invested in telling women who have already been abused by men that we are overstating the risk that men pose to us?

In any circumstance where "we" includes women and men and the goal is to benefit women, the women will end up doing most of the work.

Men need to take care of each other's and their own mental health and they need to challenge each other's poor behaviour. We are already seeing steps towards men supporting each other's wellbeing, like Movember and Men's Sheds (which should stay male-only). We need to see more of this, and men need to start challenging each other's misogyny.

There are men in my life that I love, like my father. And at the same time, men are the sex class that commit most violent and sexual attacks, by a large margin. Decent men recognise this and recognise that women's wariness is not a personal slur but a reasoned response to men collectively.

Man here. Your insight is accurate.

The sexual interest in women and the female form that most of us men have feels pretty much like an independent circuit in the brain, and it is almost always switched on.

That doesn't mean that we're in a constant state of arousal, of course, (although that isn't far off being the case when young), we are just conscious of things nearly all the time. It can be almost physically painful not to turn to look at an attractive woman in the street, for example, but most of us manage not to leer.

For all I know, of course, women may also have these feelings but mainly prefer to deny it.

As has been said, we can (and mostly do) choose not to be inappropriate, and none of the above detracts from our feelings of love for our partners.

You absolute child.

I refuse to believe that men are so pathetic as to be in thrall to testosterone for most of their lives.

Do you not have anything better to do?

Deeply unattractive.

Men should in fact then just be hidden away and used as breeding machines. They are too emotional as they are in thrall to their testosterone and can't make rational decisions. They shouldn't be allowed out let alone have a job.

But kinda true. I'm not a bloke but I've got a pretty high sex drive. Working in construction I sometimes find it difficult not to check out a bloke's arse if it's of the 'couple of boiled eggs in a hanky' variety, which is often the case with guys that do physical jobs. Usually I'll have a good peek while they're going up a ladder or something and I know they won't notice lol. It's just human biology.

Well I'm sure plenty of women would be happy to dig ditches and collect rubbish whilst the men are locked up. I did actually see a binwoman once although tbf she looked like a lesbian.