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.

The other way of looking at it, is that you don't know too much now, you just didn't know enough before!

I came to this realisation sometime ago!

Yanbu and AMALT!

I'm pretty sure that the Palestinian women would quite like the fighting to stop, seeing as Hamas have described women's wombs as their "greatest weapon" and healthcare, including maternity care, in Gaza is severely stretched.

Imagine a situation where one of two people are going to be the victim of serious violence and you have to pick which person you'd rather be. Would you choose to be the one who has a 70% chance of being attacked and will probably be killed/seriously injured, or the one who will definitely lose but only has a 30% chance of being attacked in the first place?

Having already been in the 30%, I'd rather be the 70%. I can train to meaningfully improve my odds against a violent person of my strength and size. I cannot train to meaningfully improve my odds against a violent person who starts with 162% of my punch force. I cannot train to make my skull thicker or my bones stronger. I cannot train away my vagina and uterus, with the pregnancy hazard that they pose if "losing" looks like a third rape.

My earliest memories of being attacked are by gangs of boys in the schoolyard. Being female has not protected me from group assaults.

When you are autistic, the chance of being attacked during your life is basically 100%, regardless of sex, because you are catnip to every bully in a 10 mile radius. I'd rather be a bloke, given that certainty.

@Galadriel You've talked about women being catty and manipulative. Yeah, they can be. Yet the incident from twenty years ago that I've just had flashbacks to was a group of men trying to use me as a cat's paw against another group of men in a dispute about the "winner stays on" rule in pub pool, without my consent, and me having a panic attack because of it. No woman has ever manipulated me to the point of panic, not even the ones who were actively trying to bully me. That's because I could see these men jostling for dominance and squaring up, with me stuck in the middle and completely helpless if they kicked off. Women cannot induce that visceral fear. Men absolutely can be manipulative, as any woman who has ever suffered spousal abuse can testify, and they back that manipulation with brute force.

No offence, but it seems you're just determined to focus on negatives and embrace victimhood. It doesn't have to be that way. Being autistic definitely doesn't equal a 100% chance of being assaulted. That's a ridiculous statement.

I've got ADHD, dyspraxia, and have previously been told I fit much of the criteria for AuDHD, although I'm in no hurry to be assessed. Trust me, as a male you'd face much more confrontation and generally need to be much more prepared to fight your corner to be respected. That's how male hierarchy works.

Most men have had to punch a bully at school/get in a fight because boys usually bully physically rather than psychologically like girls. It's much easier for women to be respected without being 'assertive', even if that's embracing stereotypes. But let's face it, the world isn't politically correct and society usually doesn't work how we want it to. We have to find a way to navigate it.

Oh Yes Yes, there are! Thank you for finally pointing it out to the harpies on here.
Plen-ti-ful, like in a fucking cornucopia. Everywhere and everywhen. Since childhood. The world is basically held together by all those decent lovely men, and women are too blind, right? Hysterical? Exaggerating?

Alas, you did not need to type that much in your comment, there is a 3-word-catchphrase for that sentiment: NotAllMen.

Conversely it’s apparent you’re thinking far too little. If you think what’s happening with ICE has nothing to do with your life because you're in the UK you’re living in a fantasy world. The Sarah Everard case revealed that your police force isn’t serving you. These things matter in a very tangible way in your own community - you’re just lucky you haven’t felt them yet.

No, the Sarah Everard case revealed that Wayne Couzens was a vile reprobate. The police don't have technology like in the film Minority Report where they can forecast future crimes.

I'll not deny there's a fair bit of misogyny in the forces but a single police officer murdering a woman doesn't really say anything about the thousands of other policemen. I've actually worked with the police. Have you?

Are you worried about neonatal nurses after the Lucy Letby case?

Most men have had to punch a bully at school/get in a fight because boys usually bully physically rather than psychologically like girls.

So have I. I have had to try to fight back with my fists.

Being female has not been the protective factor against men that you keep claiming it is.

One does not "embrace victimhood". Victimhood is not a state of mind, but a condition imposed upon one by one's attackers.

Someone who has been raped is, as a matter of fact, a rape victim. They cannot identify out of this.

ADHD doesn't impose the same social difficulties that autism does. They aren't comparable.

This thread is so depressing. I would hate to be a man reading this.

People are citing their individual cases of times when a man was violent or threatening to them, as if that proves that all men are evil! I have more cases of times when women were abusive to me (I am a woman too)- cases of being bullied at school, as an adult, being ostracised and lied about by a family member and my son was bullied out of his school by three 7 year old girls. These have left a greater mark on me than any negative interactions I've had with men. I don't extrapolate this to mean that all girls are bitches, although I am more wary and attuned to these tactics. Just as I am equally attuned to potential for violence in men.

It isn't all men and it isn't all women.

Exactly. There is one person in particular who is insistent that their personal experience is universal, which is ironic. If I insisted that my personal experience was universal, then I would barely have a bad word to say about any man, and would insist that nobody else did, either.

Sigh. Nobody has said it is "all men". It would be nice if there could be one thread - just one, discussing mens violence against women without someone simpering NAMALT!

No One Said It’s All Men. Is That Clear Enough For You?

It’s so wild. I’ve yet to see one without them appearing. Simpering nails it.

To return to the question in the thread title: it is impossible to know too much, OP.
You know what you know.
You know the statistics about male violence, especially sexual violence against women.
You know that it is not all men.
You know that it is impossible to tell by looking which are the good ones and which are the rapists and abusers.
You know that there's an element of risk in interacting with men because of this.
You know some women are lucky and only encounter the good ones.
You know that one in 3 women will experience sexual violence, one in 4 partner abuse

So you don't know 'too much', you know the facts, you know the odds. What you do on the basis of that knowledge is up to you to decide.

Violence against women and girls – what the data tell us | World Bank Gender Data Portal and other sources.

This jab is aimed at me.

I'm autistic, so I am well aware that my experience isn't universal because most people are not autistic. I'm not sure why you'd think that I was extrapolating my experience to everyone.

What I am saying, and I don't think I can be more clear than this, is that men as a class pose a risk to women as a class and that risk is not mirrored.

I am also saying that predatory men seek out vulnerable women, such as the autistic, the disabled, the child abuse survivors, the traumatised, deliberately and so these classes of women don't get to waltz through life relying on the tendancy of men to attack each other more often than women to stay safe.

I have been hurt by men more often than I have been stung by bees, despite growing up in a beekeeping household and spending time at the hives. I've met far more individual bees than men, yet fewer bees have hurt me. This is because bees sting purely reactively to instinctively defend the hive and will leave you alone unless threatened. Yet, if I started saying "not all bees are like that" when people expressed a fear of being stung, I'd get looked at very strangely.

Me: "Bees as a class pose a stinging hazard to humans."
Everyone else: nods in agreement or asks why I am stating the bleeding obvious.
Me: "Men as a class pose a rape and violence threat to women."
Some other people: "NAMALT!" "I'd hate to be a man reading this." "You can't judge all men by the actions of a few." etc etc.

Lisak and Miller noted that 6-15% of men are undetected (i.e. unreported to the police) rapists and offend repeatedly, at an average of 5.8 rapes each. That is enough for any woman to be worried about. Yes, a minimum of 85% don't rape, but they are indistinguishable from the ones who do.

As Marie's post above this one says, we can arm ourselves with facts, including information about the women these men prefer to victimise, to inform our efforts to try to make ourselves harder targets and also understand that we can never completely rape-proof ourselves, so it isn't our fault.

I refuse to wheest about this in case I might hurt someone's feelings. And I refuse to stop saying that only men can solve this. Women are already trying to and it isn't working.

I will never stop challenging the NAMALTers. If you are lucky enough never to have been the victim of a bad man, please recognise that your experience isn't universal and those of us who have been victimised are justified in our wariness. Once bitten, twice shy.

The title implies that it's most, if not all. That is not the case. I do get the point that you don't know which will be dangerous, but I think it is possible to tell a bit. There are certain signs that someone is not to be trusted, I don't buy this theory that dangerous, violent men are all master manipulators whom noone would suspect. That might be true in a few cases, but not in the majority.

If anyone wants a convincing rebuttal to the "women's fear in public spaces is disproportionate to the risk they face, particularly in the context of male-on-male violence" fallacy, Chapter 2 of "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado Perez is eye-opening.

There's also a highly convincing take-down of the domestic violence fallacy somewhere by a statistician(?) who breaks down the complex realities behind the numbers in the research, which I can't find right now.

In ways, it is complicated. But in other respects, it's very simple indeed. As Self has explained so clearly above, given the extraordinary strength differential and the character of the attacks that women face, it shouldn't be hard to understand.

I do find the "saviour argument" - that it's the men who rush in to save women's lives from other violent men - especially interesting. Yes, it's true, to a point... But it's also itself an excellent example of the problems and limitations of patriarchy - another condemnation of it, in fact.

To get the obvious out of the way, without male violence, it wouldn't be necessary - at least to the same degree. Also, who's to say that women wouldn't respond in kind, given proportionate strength? You see the archetype of male heroism - strength and explosive action - reflected in women's defence of vulnerable children in moments of crisis. The biological imperative? Maybe, but maybe that explains the men defending women, too!

But above all, it frustrates me no end that the male heroic ideal disguises the fundamental truth that courage is, itself, culturally constructed. To me, the stoical endurance of a woman protecting her children from a violent partner as she plans her escape, living in constant fear of extreme violence for hours, days and weeks in some way transcends the more conventional courage of the man who, powered by adrenaline, testosterone and ideals of masculinity, rushes into the fray to hit the headlines and win the medals.

This isn't to "do down" that man - thank goodness for him, in so many even recent cases I can think of - but just to say, it's very, very hard to see clearly, living in a world that's shaped by, and celebrates, the male body as subject and female as object. In our physical realities, women will always be constrained by their proportionate weakness, regardless of the degree to which an individual recognises or acknowledges this; it's only the fairly fragile construct of societies (laws and social contracts - hence the "obsession" with toilets!) that enable our equality. And the cultural air we breathe has it that man is active and woman is passive, and dismisses woman's stoical endurance of physical vulnerability and secondary status as natural and necessary, as opposed to a very real courage of its own kind.

Its clear by the thread. It’s baffling that by not explicitly stating NAMALT Every. Single. Time. VAWG is brought up to be discussed (when no one says it is), that is what bothers you, and that’s what you focus on. I’m glad I’m not that person.

Also, who's to say that women wouldn't respond in kind, given proportionate strength?

We respond smart, not hard. We have to.

I recall intervening twice at school to protect a boy from violent assault from another boy. The second time around, I didn't know either boy from Adam. I walked over to this lad that had a smaller lad by the lapels and said, with the sarcasm turned up to 11, "I wouldn't be seeing any bullying here, would I?", then just stood there, waiting. The assailant gave what I now know as the sociopath's smile (a.k.a. paedophile's smile) and walked off. The first time around I knew both. I helped the victim up from the floor and shouted "leave him alone" repeatedly at the attacker who was trying to shove me out of the way so he could carry on kicking the downed lad, and then other kids came along and pulled the attacker away.

But there was a time when I screamed like a horror movie actress (which was actually very useful because my screaming summoned two patrolling WPCs), times when I've frozen, and times when I've run to save myself.

Maybe if I was stronger, I'd be more willing to step in and more willing to try to use force. But the funeral photos of Sophie Lancaster sit in my head and I think of how she'd be alive now if she'd run from the attack on Robert instead of trying to protect him. Her skull was thinner and her bones weaker, so the kicks to the head that put him in a coma killed her.

To me, the stoical endurance of a woman protecting her children from a violent partner as she plans her escape, living in constant fear of extreme violence for hours, days and weeks in some way transcends the more conventional courage of the man who, powered by adrenaline, testosterone and ideals of masculinity, rushes into the fray to hit the headlines and win the medals.

Yes. Likewise the courage of Madame Pelicot, waiving her anonymity to face dozens of her rapists in open court. And Leanne Lucas and Heidi Liddle having the presence of mind to remove some of the girls from danger in Southport, in Lucas's case after having herself been stabbed five times.

Yes.

I hadn't heard of Sophie Lancaster. Her story's utterly devastating.

I reminded myself of Lucas and Liddle. It's maybe interesting that the very first article I read arguably reinforces that same narrative - that (whereas physical mastery is self-evidently heroic) courageous endurance and strategic action is seen as more complex: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/10/southport-attack-inquiry-testimony-dance-teachers. I know this is, itself, reductive (eg. see Lisa Potts), and it also feels disrespectful, somehow, even to use these examples. But...

I do think that women's day-to-day courage, of the kind you showed above in managing those attacks, and of a much more mundane kind, is vastly, vastly undervalued, in large part because of the stories patriarchy tells us.

"Check your privilege" is so commonly applied to various other disparities, but rarely, if ever, male strength. And yet, is there a privilege more fundamental than the knowledge that you enjoy a huge inherent physical advantage over half the population (and are at least fairly well-matched with most of your own half)?

I sometimes imagine the sheer, blessed release I'd enjoy in walking through a rush-hour crowd as an average-sized man (or even down an empty pavement - I compare the confidence with which men stride right into my path with my own barely conscious anticipation of their movements). The conventional example is, of course, men's proportionate freedom of movement (want a bit of air at night? go for a walk! need some time alone? enjoy the forest trail!)

That even this is underestimated by society (there'll be someone along soon to say #notallwomenarewimps, someone else to say I'm painting us as victims, and over on the RSPB thread, Christinapple's bemused by women's frustration given that "It's not about toilets" 🤦) only shows, to me, what a number patriarchy's done on us. When schools are teaching kids to "check their privilege" in relation to verbal micro-aggressions, yet female physical vulnerability is barely worthy of mention, Houston, we have a very telling disparity...

You sound as if you were very brave in your management of the situations you describe. More so, arguably, than the hypothetical 6-foot male staff member who'd likely have got more credit for actually wading in and physically hauling them off one another.

I don't like reducing everything to a more/less better/worse comparison in this way - as I say above, of course it's more complex - but as long as the basics of biological difference aren't understood or respected, or are outright denied (different but equal, FFS, it's not hard!) it does feel as though we have to go back to black-and-white basics instead of being free to engage with the nuance! See also: trans activism.

Over 98% of sexual offenders are men. Most of them are likely to have had multiple victims before being put away (given how many cases of rape and abuse are unrecorded), and the victims are usually female. Most violent crime are committed by men.

No, it isn't all men, but it's clearly far too many of them.

If you're going to make sweeping, controversial statements on a public discussion forum you need to be prepared to have your assertions challenged. That's how debate works.

If I started a thread about how the biggest DV metastudy to date concluded that women perpetrate more than men do you think feminists would sit down and shut up just because I said I didn't want a two way discussion?

I think it's important to note that the views espoused on this thread aren't shared by the majority of the public, despite 83% supporting gender equality.

New YouGov poll reveals only 35% of Britons identify as feminist

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thenewfeminist.co.uk/2025/03/new-yougov-poll-reveals-only-35-of-britons-identify-as-feminist/%3famp=1

Nearly half of Britons say women's equality has gone far enough

www.kcl.ac.uk/news/nearly-half-of-britons-say-womens-equality-has-gone-far-enough

The thing with polls is that younger people, who are more naive, tend to say ill-informed shit like "women's equality has gone far enough". Twenty years later, they are posting on the Relationships board saying "my kids' dad won't stick to the court-agreed access arrangements" and "just found that my husband is having an affair" and finding out the hard way that de jure equality doesn't translate into de facto equality when trying to get a fair assets split and sensible custody and child support.

Two things make women's de facto subordination very clear: male violence, and having kids. Most women won't face male violence, but most will have kids.

Even if you've escaped rape and DV when younger, motherhood is when the double burden of wifework and paid work really kicks in, it's when your finances take a hit, and it's often when you find out for the first time that your husband is an abuser. 30% of DV starts during pregnancy and 40% during the first 1001 days of the child's life. The figures I linked upthread about who does more childcare speak volumes.

Young women, who have yet to live with a man and raise kids with him, are blissfully ignorant about just how unequal they are unless they've been the victims of male violence.

Well I for one would love to see the research on that. It would depend if you were just spouting misogynistic woman hating rubbish or had actual stats, studies and peer reviewed research to back it up. For someone on a feminist board, you don’t seem to like women much.