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.

Yes, making a mistake in a safety critical job can have much more grievous consequences than making a mistake on an office job. Some men take risks for sure. In fact, testosterone increases risk taking behaviour.

But you can't mitigate all risks by doing things right. When I'm discharging concrete into the bucket of a digger he only has to knock the lever to the left and I'd be seriously injured by the arm. If I accidentally put a truck in reverse or forget to apply the handbrake somebody can be squashed in seconds as the type of work we do involves being in very close proximity to people. Sometimes the ground subsides and vehicles just topple over.

You can't just excuse it all away with poor safety practices. Men as a group do much more dangerous jobs than women and put themselves at risk much more often. That's the truth.

I work in an environment where I deal with men and their aggression and violence combined with alcohol on a weekly basis and there is never ever problems where women are at the centre of it being harassed and good Samaritans getting involved and there’s a fight
In 10 years, I’ve never witnessed that scenario
Men’s biggest problem is other men without a woman in sight

If you wouldn't step in and defend a man then why should he risk his life to do it for you?

Because he has 162% my punch strength. Because my skull is thinner than his. If I try to defend a man against another man, I'll probably end up dead.

Do you remember the murder of Sophie Lancaster? She intervened to try to protect her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, from an attack that left him in a coma with internal bleeding. She died in the same attack. She was smaller, weaker, thinner-boned, so less able to withstand the kicks and blows than Maltby, and she paid the ultimate price for her courage.

Women cannot fix what men refuse to fix. We physically cannot do this.

The sex drive in men is so utterly different from women, and I think completely controls them until they’re almost elderly.

Some navigate it well, but others become either total perverts or worse, abusers.

Just because you've never witnessed it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. There are around 34m men in the UK and only 80-100 typically murder women each year. Statistically it's extremely unlikely that we'll ever encounter such a man but it doesn't stop women worrying.

A quick Google search will turn out quite a few cases where men have died protecting women. Even more in the US where people carry guns. And there are no doubt many more where men faced serious injury and trauma but escaped with their life.

Strangers don't owe you anything. The idea that they do has come from this odd belief that one man is responsible for the actions of another just because he's male. Nobody is responsible for things they didn't do. Nobody is obligated to put themselves at risk even though many will.

You were saying that men save more lives than women as first responders. I was making the point that a substantial proportion of the life endangerment, especially in the examples you gave of cutting people out of car wrecks, is caused by male risk-taking behaviour. I stand by that. Men don't deserve praise for fixing their own collective fuckups.

Nurses also save lives, with a lot less fanfare, and are usually female.

I refer you to my point which you actually quoted in your reply. That strength is irrelevant because strangers don't owe you anything. Just like how the person behind me in the queue isn't obligated to pay for my shopping just because he has £500 in his pocket.

Men are much more at risk of fatal attacks. There are many violent men who have been brought up to believe it's wrong to hit a woman but that men should 'settle it like men' with their fists. That's why rapists and paedophiles get such a hard time in prison, even from inmates who have murdered other men in cold blood.

A 'victim' and a 'challenger' are not necessarily the same thing to a violent man and he may react unpredictably if he suddenly feels at threat. Also, there have been lots of situations where men have intervened in domestic violence incidents and the woman has sided with her partner. I remember one where they both attacked the good samaritan and another where the woman lied in court and said the guy who intervened was the aggressor.

We can argue all day but nobody owes anything to a stranger and there will be no legal repercussions for somebody who keeps their distance. Whether it'd be a heroic thing to intervene is a different debate but it's entitlement to believe that random people are obligated to defend you.

One woman in seven will be the victim of DV during her life. One in three will be sexually assaulted, one in four by the age of sixteen. Nine-tenths of autistic women have been sexually assaulted at least once (and yes, #metoo).

6% of men will admit to acts meeting criminal definitions of rape and sexual assault as long as the terms "rape" and "sexual assault" aren't used to describe the acts.

Women are well-justified in fearing men. And we are well-justified in being furious that men to challenge each other's misogyny.

But the problem is that you're grouping all men together. It's a bit like saying that no human should be complaining about human violence because it's 100% perpetrated by humans.

A man who doesn't drive and dedicates his life to doing a job helping others isn't made irrelevant because some of the drunk drivers he treats are also male. I made this point ages ago.

I doubt you'd say that women setting up charities to help female drug users or sex workers aren't worthy of praise because the people they assist are also women and made the choice to take drugs etc.

I'm trying to remember at what point anyone other than you conflated "defending a woman under imminent attack" with "men challenging each other's sexism". In fact, it was you who escalated from "challenging each other's sexism" to "getting teeth knocked out".

Men don't challenge each other's casual misogyny. They don't challenge each others rape jokes. They don't say "not cool".

If I was worried that someone would "knock my teeth out" for saying "not funny" about a rape joke, that person would not be my friend any more. If I was at work, I'd be noting the incident with the intention of reporting to my line manager or the whistleblowing hotline.

The behaviour you walk past is the behaviour you approve. That is the standard I am holding men to.

Tell me that you don't understand the power dynamics in 99% of instances of prostituted women without telling me...

But did it ever occur to you that men are the principle victims of male violence, not women?

Non violent men have to worry about self preservation first before they worry about defending complete strangers from a group that experiences a fraction of the violence they do.

If a man and a woman walk down the street the man is the one most likely to be either assaulted or killed. The fact that the person that kills him is also a bloke isn't likely to be much consolation.

It'd be better if the decent individuals from both sexes worked together in dealing with the violent ones. However, current feminist theory opposes this by vehemently arguing that only men need step up. No doubt this isn't really going to inspire non violent men to help as they're going to think "well, I've done nothing wrong and yet you're putting this all on me. Why should I help you if I'm already at more risk and you're clearly not interested in helping tackle the threats to my own safety?"

Thankfully, most normal people just get on with it. Despite those arguing that women are powerless to help, there are plenty of females working in law enforcement and the legal system helping to put bad men away. I used to work for a digital forensics company who extracted evidence for police/prosecution and have defo contributed in this area even if I didn't solely choose that line of work for altruistic reasons.

It's odd arguing with people who feel so strongly about the male threat yet are so determined to push the idea that they can't help. They're kinda like backseat drivers. Talking the talk but not walking the walk.

No. This type of comment pisses me off on MN.
Because you don't always agree with group think, you're automatically an MRA?!
I don't think it's healthy to automatically see bad in a whole swathe of society, a whole write off of the opposite sex just based on your experiences and what you've read online.
It stands to reason that your thinking is going to be skewed/biased on what you've come across. That's surely no better than sad incels not liking women though due to their previous experiences? Just because you think and believe in a perceived power balance doesn't make it ok.

The problem faced by men and women is male violence. As you say, the principle beneficiaries of an end to male violence would be men, yet they haven't tried to stop it. Why is this?

It's because even the weakest man can use violence to lord it over women. Six-sevenths of victims of male sexual violence are women and girls. An adult man outwith prison has a very small chance of being raped. Every rapist reinforces male dominance, as women shrink their lives to try to stay safe. When a woman opts not to take a job because she fears the walk home, a man gets it in her place.

Every act of male sexual aggression short of rape reinforces male dominance. When a female lab tech is sent away from a half-finished building by her line manager, who has seen the sexually-explicit graffiti on the lift boarding and realised that he cannot guarantee her safety in an environment where she will be mingling with the tradies who wrote such graffiti unchallenged, she loses out on having "deployed £x00,000 of lab equipment to new build whilst complying with construction site regs" on her CV whilst the men on her team do not. (Why yes, I'm still sore about missing out on that.)

Men would rather collectively lord it over women than give up violence to be safe from each other. That individual men try to protect individual women doesn't alter this class power dynamic. And as we saw with Sarah Porter being pulled from the Spine ultramarathon and me being sent away from the new building, individual men protecting individual women can look like women losing opportunities that men retain.

The reason why feminists keep saying that men need to solve male violence is because violent men don't listen to women. If they did, no DV incident would ever last more than one blow, because the battering man would stop as soon as his victim said "stop".

Cooking accidents are the main cause of fires? I very much doubt that. Where I am the number one causes is electrical incidents/faults. Heater/electric blanket, clothes driers catching on fire. Phone chargers. Lithium batteries. Even candles. Cooking doesn't even break the top 30. Top 50 even. That's home fires.

Although the main cause of fires as far as bushfires, is men/people flicking a lit cigarette away that causes a grassfire that builds into massive bushfire that destroys hundreds of homes and thousands of hectares and animals, like what happens where I am in Australia. One lit cigarette casually flicked away caused/causes all that. But there are cases of (male) arsonists deliberately lighting these fires too during high fire danger season, they get a thrill out of seeing the damage they cause.

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??

These type of individuals are pretty much female incels. I mean, it's pretty clear they don't have partners/husbands given the rampant man hating on display.

They usually seem to believe they're speaking for women but many many surveys have proven them wrong. If you read the study by the Fawcett Society (a feminist org so defo not MRAs!) they found that the vast majority of UK women support equality but only 7% are happy to call themselves a feminist.

Many surveys have shown that 'negative attitudes towards men' and 'man hating' are amongst the top reasons for this. This is usually glossed over on here with the patronising explanation that "they're feminists but they just don't know it. Anybody who supports equality is a feminist".

But in reality most people can tell the difference between what people say and how they actually act. They know that the above argument is like saying "well, most people support Trump even if they claim not to, because what US citizen wouldn't want to make America great?"

I think that rather than helping they've caused people to throw the baby out with the bathwater and many will now be wary of 'feminism', which is a shame as it's not all shouty misanthropes having a fembolism every time they see a man walking past the window. Sadly, it's becoming like the term 'men's rights activism' where it sounds innocuous but we all know what an MRA usually is.

Problem is, despite most of us being pretty aware of what some men are like, most of us want to have children and most of us end up marrying or living with a man. For many women that man is their most trusted person in the whole world. They're not going to want to associate with people that unconditionally hate men any more than a woman with a black husband is going to want to associate with the BNP.

I mean, you could've just googled it...

AI response and gov infogram backing it up.

The main cause of fires, especially in homes, is cooking accidents, with unattended stoves and overheating oil being major culprits, closely followed by electrical faults (overloaded sockets, faulty wiring/chargers) and careless smoking (improperly extinguished cigarettes). Human error, like distractions or alcohol use while cooking, significantly contributes, making vigilance and prevention key to avoiding fire.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a75a0c5ed915d506ee8046f/infographic-detailed-analysis-fires-attended-fire-rescue-england-1617.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjg5oOPuJSSAxW0dUEAHRbGIfgQFnoECG0QAQ&sqi=2&usg=AOvVaw1Lkg_LyIaHBXSIICKGZUxx

Have I gone back in time when feminists were called man haters....?

You are in the womens rights and feminism section. Do you genuinely not think that women will want to discuss the power imbalance that men have, how dangerous theynare? And our vulnerability? No one asked you to enter the thread. If you think men are harmless, why not create a thread of your own stating that, instead of coming on here and pissing on women who want to point out how dangerous men are? Your minimising of the experience of the female sex, and minimising the danger that the male sex poses, pisses me off. This is 2026 ffs. Not the 1940s. You should know better.

Not in my country it's not.

I'm a lesbian and live a very woman- centred life. I can enjoy the company of men for small stretches of time, but mostly I find even good men boring. And I find them boring because they love to talk at me rather than with me. It's very hard to have a proper two way conversation with them. The only exception is my adult nephew. I adore him and love his company. I'm 68 years old. He's the only one!
As I class, I do not like or trust men. This comes from long and layered experience, personal and witnessed, of their abusive and misogynistic behaviour.

The perilous life of a middle class white woman in western Europe. 🤣

There's a difference between discussing concerns and unconditionally hating half the population. Just like there's a difference between being concerned about immigration and hating all brown people.

Unfortunately the feminist board on MN is a man hating board and there is no space for women like me who consider myself a feminist and love or like most men in my life.