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.

I like dinner first.

See, that's another thing I understand now! Before it was obvious to me that, "Since we are thinking of having a highly intimate personal interaction, it only makes sense that we should get to know each other a little more over dinner." But now it's like, "What does food have to do with sex?? I just want to use your body and let you use mine. Why should we waste time talking and eating first? Unless you mean it as foreplay, of course..." Which in turn goes into the whole entitlement mindset of "Hey, I had dinner with you, you can't turn me down now!" It all makes too much sense.

You’ve not seen the videos on the Internet then of people putting bacon on their dogs nose and their dog resisting the urge to eat the bacon with the headline that if my dog can resist eating meat when he is literally given temptation on the nose why can’t men resist being bastards?

Agreed.

Of course men are capable of self control

And they show that, by not being inappropriately sexual 24/7. They amply show that when they want, they can totally control these instinctual urges and behave like proper human beings. So when they don't? It's totally a choice. The initial interest may not be a choice, but the acting on it totally is.

Men cook as well. Electrical faults are the second-leading cause. I don't see very many female sparkies.

Men are the at-fault driver far more often than women.

Having rolled out lab equipment into a building that was still under construction, I can testify that a large part of why women swerve construction is the shocking sexism shown by construction workers. I can also testify, having seen some of the stupid things these men do, that the reason why 95% of workplace fatalities are male is because men don't obey basic safety protocols such as clipping their fall arrest harness to the equipment they are using.

Many apparent choices, though, arise not through clear reflection and determination, but as a result of deeper emotional or psychological drives which have been 'programmed' by past life experiences and sometimes traumas.

If a boy has no good male role model who shows what masculine responsibility and love can look like, or who was maybe brought up with abuse and violence then they may well not have learned the psychological mechansims that can control their impulses.

Same with females........and you often find that women who become involved in propstitution, for example, have a history of sexual abuse which has conditioned their responses and attitudes towards men and towards sex. So 'sex work' is not always a conscious, self reflective choice...it is a 'choice' which has presented itself based upon past experiences or expectations around sex, around their own bodily integrity, and around men.

Is this not just the other side of the coin, though, of transwomen who have embraced stereotypical 'femaleness' - whether by wearing dresses, demanding to be called 'she', invading women's single-sex spaces, having surgery/implants and/or taking female hormones - and then declaring that they now fully know what it's like to be a woman?

Not trying to belittle your experiences, and thanks for sharing them; but I don't think any of us are denying that testosterone can have powerful and horrendous effects on very many men.

However, in the context of a biological female having artificially high, male-level, amounts of testosterone - which I believe studies have shown to increase risks of cancer in women - I don't think you can take that as proof that it's a given that all men will be affected that way.

You said that you've been on testosterone 'for years', but you weren't born with a body designed to have that level from puberty. It's a powerful hormone even for males who are supposed to have it - and that potential and concomitant strength and power is largely responsible for a lot of bad but also a lot of good in the male population as a whole - so surely it can't be a surprise that it would cause a woman's physiology to go haywire?

Any more than the transwomen who take drugs to enable them to supposedly 'breastfeed' babies can have anything like a true idea of the experiences of a woman who breastfeeds normally, with her biologically female body, following the whole natural process of pregnancy and giving birth and all that entails.

I'm absolutely not criticising you or saying that you shouldn't live as you feel happiest; but speaking as somebody who is GC in both directions, I don't believe that somebody can seek to modify their body to appear more stereotypically like the opposite sex and then somehow believe that they or their resulting experiences are representative of the people who are biologically that sex from birth.

I used to feel absolute rage towards men after reading Andrea Dworkin, though, of course, it is not healthy to be filled with anger and rage all of the time.

Of course Dworkin's life experiences around sex and men were very extreme and some women obviously do have such extreme experiences- but they are also not very typical nor 'normal'. Over focusing on the negative possibilities and things that have happened can negatively condition your overall feeling towards men and or towards sex.

There are obviously safeguards that can be put in place, though, to give some protection against such known risks...and single sex spaces are one of those. There is a very long history of male sexual abuse of women and of women being victimised by male sexual urges that makes such safeguarding measures an obvious, common sense solution.

I think you're arguing against something I never said?

declaring that they now fully know what it's like to be a woman?

I never said that I fully know what it's like to be a man. How could I? I wasn't raised a boy, and I don't have a male body. I only said that I was given "an insight into the male perspective with regards to women", nothing more.

so surely it can't be a surprise that it would cause a woman's physiology to go haywire?

I'm not sure what the question is, here? Are you saying that maybe testosterone doesn't have all the same effects on a female body as on a male body? Well, yeah, obviously. But that doesn't change the fact that it did create those stereotypically male urges in me.

I don't believe that somebody can seek to modify their body to appear more stereotypically like the opposite sex and then somehow believe that they or their resulting experiences are representative of the people who are biologically that sex from birth.

Hum, I agree with that? I don't believe my experiences in general are representative of what it's like to be a man. I'm just saying that my experience with testosterone in particular exactly aligns with the way too many men behave. But it's just one experience, not some revelation from on high, so I certainly don't expect anyone to automatically defer to me! By all means, feel free to ignore my experience if you think it's not relevant.

I just can't be arsed wading through the shitty ones on the off chance a decent one may be in there somewhere. Most men need to do better, it's no good the 'decent' ones standing by passively. If you are a bystander, you are part of the problem.

If a boy has no good male role model who shows what masculine responsibility and love can look like, or who was maybe brought up with abuse and violence then they may well not have learned the psychological mechansims that can control their impulses.

More precisely, I'd say many boys and men do learn to control their impulses - but for the wrong reasons: fear, shame, misogyny, and so on, instead of out of respect for women and girls. So that when an opportunity presents itself where, for whatever reason, those restraints are not applied anymore, they feel free to assault. Is it truly a choice if they don't have a reason not to do it? That's a complicated question indeed.

You’ve clearly been lucky enough not to have been in consecutive abusive relationships.

I think it can be a big realisation when we move from the idea that male violence against women is an aberration, or deviant, or rare to realising that men we know who appear ‘normal’ are capable of it. For some that realisation unfortunately happens very early, for others far later. Media stories have got a bit better at showing this - in the past it would be a lot of stranger rape and violence, now there is more focus (due to the campaigning of women) on domestic abuse. We’ve also seen more on men in previously trusted positions such as the police being perpetrators.

I work with women experiencing male violence, hundreds of them over the years and there is a lot of it. I appreciate that skews my view somewhat, and I know there are plenty of non abusive men, but I also know there are a lot of abusive men in the world, from all walks of life, all professions, classes etc.

I'm a man and I 100% agree with this.

I've never committed rape, domestic abuse etc, but I also don't think I'd fit entirely into the idea of what constitutes a "good man" held by some here.

What I do know, from years of experience and reflection, is that women can NEVER understand what's it's like to be a man, sexually. The whole nature of the impulse and how it's wired (or not) to everything else in you is just different. (There may be some exceptions to this, those women with exceptionally high libidos and, for whatever reason, a high sense of objectivity and compartmentalisation around sex. But if so they are a tiny minority that doesn't affect the general point).

You can then look at what men are in their own terms and either accept them (or some of them) or not. Everyone has the right to make that decision as they see fit. But I think trying to find a way to approve of men while judging them according to fundamental assumptions that derive from the experience of life as a woman (including physical/hormonal experience) can only end in tears.

Yes, I feel the same. I have some long-standing male friends whose minds I no longer trust. In fact, there’s no man in my life that I trust now.

But, I don’t think women have ever been able to trust men. They keep a lot hidden in an effort to appear decent and civilised.

Same. There's a very similar case ongoing in the UK but she's reserving her right to anonymity. Poor woman.

There needs to be better, and longer lasting punishments imo. To stop the rot from spreading.

I think this is right.

What bemuses me is how reflexively MNers say the problem is that men have been “socialised” into this or that bad behaviour.

The socialisation is the saving grace. The natural state is manly what’s driving the bad behaviour.

I have always felt a bit like that. In the last decade or so knowing about how men behave in online dating and being aware of how porn both shapes and reflects men's desires, and how society makes excuses for it, I have actively chosen to not get involved with men any more. My daughter's dad is very easily the most decent man I've ever met and I do like seeing how my daughter, at 10, has a high bar for male behaviour and has absolutely no truck with 'boys will be boys' no matter how much her school implicitly reinforces it. I hope she carries this through to adulthood.

You sound like them.

Many feminists learned to rebel against gendered expectations, often at an early age. This is difficult as it’s ongoing and relentless. More men need to do the same, rather than endlessly complaining about how difficult it is not to be obnoxious.

I'm not a fan, myself. They're hugely overrated as a group. Some good ones, clearly.

I don't think its anything like Andrew Tate. Women's direct experiences of men is what shapes their view of them. Until the majority of men step up against that behaviour, the majority of men are quietly endorsing the idea of women being kept 'in line' one way or another. There's no female equivalent of that - Andrew Tate's main complaint is exactly that women are more difficult to control by dint of our own agency.

They are obsessed with sex and everything revolves around that. I accept that now and just use them for when I need them. Once you recognise them for what they are, it becomes easier to accept.

This is one of the problems with social media, bad stuff gets repeated and repeated until you think everyone is like that. Did you really think all men were wonderful when you were a teenager? You must have lead a very sheltered life as a child if you did. The papers and news have always been full of terrible stories and we certainly had some neighbours that you would be pretty wary of.

I dont hate mean they are just not important to me.
I love my single life.