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.

In the offices I’ve worked in, crappy corner cutting practice was not sex based.

Yeah, but women are massively underrepresented in the construction industry.

So men are responsible for fires now. That's a new one lol. Given that cooking accidents are the main cause of fires I guess we have to applaud all those men for doing the majority of the cooking. Definitely unheard of for a woman to ever crash a car either!

And of course most construction errors are caused by men. Despite all the talk of inequality in certain sectors women don't actually seem to be too keen on doing the dangerous jobs. With 95% of workplace deaths being male this much is clear.

@GaIadriel

Your posts are awful.

”I'm not thinking of stuff like that on the way to work nor am I thinking about Sarah Everard.”

A lot of women are concerned for their personal safety - because of men. So yes. I think of Sarah a lot.

Gisele pelicot was a sort of confirmation imo.

I look back now at myself in my teens and twenties and think it was full of risk. I feel like it was a narrow escape tbh for me and my friends and we were lucky nothing worse happened in terms of sexual / male violence.

I still think domestic abuse is absolutely rife and there is a complete lack of support for mothers within society and the law.

I don't believe most people are thinking of Sarah Everard on the train or whilst at work any more than most expectant mothers are thinking daily of Lucy Letby. What's the point?

I've worked in digital forensics. For a company that analysed the phones and hard drives of criminals (paedophiles, murderers, zoophilia, etc) and extracted the evidence for the police/prosecution. I've quite possibly seen more horrific things than everyone else on this thread combined.

I still don't think it's healthy to obsess over it. Most people aren't like these criminals and statistically are pretty insignificant per capita.

And it is odd to me that it took something like the Pelicot case for a lot of women to realise that there are bad men out there. If anything, it shows how sheltered we are in this country. I mean, things have been pretty bad for women in most non-western countries for a very long time. I'm amazed people weren't aware of this until the last couple of years.

I think most women with any awareness knew about "out there" and had known for a very long time. How could we not?
What the Pelicot case did was shift the focus, unnervingly, to "in amongst us, very ordinary, and far more numerous than you would think".

I'm a transman. I've been taking testosterone for years. It's given me an insight into the male perspective with regards to women which is so disturbing that I'm now considering stopping the testo in hopes of stopping this particular side-effect.

Mind you, I would consider that maybe there's something wrong with me specifically, if I didn't also have a lifelong experience of perfectly lovely men turning out to be sexual creeps when they think they can get away with it.

So I'm with you, OP - unfortunately.

Charity founders abuse women too.
Firemen rape women too.
Emergency responders assault women too.
Anti-terrorist response team members abuse women too.

It's very well-known that men can have the best social persona and yet be sexual creeps in private too.

Can you expand on the insight @Seethlaw

The statistic that 99% of sex offenders are male - which I only discovered in the last few years -made me realise what different worlds men and women inhabit.

It's simple really. From the moment I started taking testosterone, random women I don't know stopped being random people I don't know, and became breasts and behinds on legs. Suddenly I completely understood the male impulse to turn around to check a woman's behind on the street. I found myself staring at cleavages instead of faces. And even with the women I already knew, I found my eyes straying to body parts I'd never given attention to before.

And keep in mind that pre-testo, I thought of myself as almost exclusively male-attracted! I appreciated the female form, but only in an aesthetic way. Suddenly, it became very sexual indeed, but not even in the global way I used to look at men, where a man was a person first, with attractive features second. No, now it was attractive features first, person second.

So yeah, now that I got what I wanted from the testo (the voice and the beard, mostly), I'm realising that I don't need to endure that mindset any longer. I just really really hope it'll go away indeed...

Sounds exhausting @Seethlaw

It feels very animalistic - what male animals do in the wild.

Very interesting perspective from you.

I’ve heard others say similar, @Seethlaw - that stuff makes people horny in a way women not on it will not experience.

I like dinner first.

I don't feel that way at all, no.

Interesting! I do think males are far more object oriented ( including focusing on specific body parts) than relationship oriented - which explains why fetishes are far more common in males than in females. Male sexual response is just wired differently, and I guess the obvious differences in biological function are one of the reasons for this.

Males do not have obvious fertility cycles like females and do not become pregnant. There are literally millions of sperm, but usually only one egg at conception. Males are wired to take up any 'opportunity' when it presents itself, even in gay culture where there is no chance of fertilisation and pregancy; and maybe especially in gay culture in which there are no female 'roadblocks' or hesitancies to getting your rocks off. Its pure testosterone - even with the most feminine of gay men.

Of course men are capable of self control and not all men are highly sexually driven - but as a general rule, even the nicest, loveliest bloke is still driven by the same impulses.

46 yo, married to a decent man three decades older (for security, 20 years), actively avoiding ALL other men for years now.
Fear, loathing and hatred come to mind, in this order.
Speaking for myself.

I feel exactly the same. It’s not all men because some hide it well. I have just posted on that thread btw, he’s gross, they’re all fucking gross.

Margaret Attwood wasn't wrong when she said that menopause is “A pause while you reconsider men”

I'm well past menopause and have no interest in men whatsoever. If you're not interested in them sexually they seem like women only more dangerous, less interesting and much more likely to sit under a big light watching sport and scratching at themselves.

That view might save your life one day, literally.