To this day, she remembers the racing thoughts, the instant nausea, the hairs prickling up on her legs, the sweaty palms. She had shared a photograph of herself in her underwear with a boy she trusted and, very soon, it had been sent around the school and across her small home town, Aberystwyth, Wales. She became a local celebrity for all the wrong reasons. Younger kids would approach her laughing and ask for a hug. Members of the men’s football team saw it – and one showed someone who knew Davies’s nan, so that’s how her family found out.
Her book, No One Wants to See Your D*ck, takes a deep dive into the negatives. It covers Davies’s experiences in the digital world – that includes cyberflashing such as all those unsolicited dick pics – as well as the widespread use of her images on pornography sites, escort services, dating apps, sex chats (“Ready for Rape? Role play now!” with her picture alongside it). However, the book also shines a light on the dark online men’s spaces, what they’re saying, the “games” they’re playing. “I wanted to show the reality of what men are doing,” says Davies. “People will say: ‘It’s not all men’ and no, it isn’t, but it also isn’t a small number of weirdos on the dark web in their mum’s basements. These are forums with millions of members on mainstream sites such as Reddit, Discord and 4chan. These are men writing about their wives, their mums, their mate’s daughter, exchanging images, sharing women’s names, socials and contact details, and no one – not one man – is calling them out. They’re patting each other on the back.”
I think part of why she didn’t seen men fighting some of the shitty stuff online is due to the echochamber effect of those communities. Any resistance is downvoted, dogpiled with hateful comments, and maybe even removed by a biased mod. A lot of the good men who would defend in those comments don’t even browse those specific forums because of how toxic and shitty they can be.
The good men aren’t there and don’t even know what’s going on. I’ve used Reddit and Lemmy but have blocked the NSFW/NSFL stuff. There is no opportunity to denounce or report because I remain deliberately blissfully ignorant.
If you happened to go in there and speak against them, you’d just be banned and have your post removed.
Additionally, those kinds of shitbags routinely get tossed out of respectable places. What brings the manosphere, and things like it, together is usually a shared experience of rejection and isolation.
You’re absolutely right, but haven’t I read that they’re learning to lie about their presence in the manophere? So if it’s, say 10% who actively think and act that way, plus 15% passively subject themselves to it without going all in, but who aren’t really judging, that’s 1/4 guys who I wouldn’t risk a relationship with, many of whom are actively hiding their positions. I can see why it wouldn’t be worth it to date any man. Especially for someone with her experiences.
And my IRL impression is that it’s way more guys than 15% who intentionally expose themselves to it, and slightly more than 10% who fully buy into the misogyny.
I agree, and in my opinion, women and partners in general need to get better at leaving piece of shit men (or shitty partners in general). Many of them keep acting like this cause they get away with it after some small talk and a nice dinner just to be a piece of shit again next week. I’ve known girls who date men who genuinely claim that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and all i can think is “why is this girl staying with someone who hates them?”
Fear.
We should have social systems to help people over come those fears and protect them from threats, both physical and financial. No one should be forced to be with someone they fear because of finances, childcare, safety, or loneliness.
Not all shitty partners induce fear. I’ve known some girls who are just head over heels due to how attractive, wealthy, or mostly sweet a guy is. The good times outshine the bad times and they get into the “i can fix him” mentality. My brother is like that where he has gotten away with cheating with nearly every partner he has had. It usually takes the girl months to finally leave him and say its been enough. Hes the chad gym type and genuinely doesn’t have to try to pull women. Any time they threaten to leave he gets all sweet, shows up with gifts and acts romantic and sexy just to get caught cheating again next week.
We need to be hard on ourselves sometimes and push manipulative people out of our lives. I think an erosion of IRL friendships has influenced this trend as well. I used to know girls who would band together to help a girl get rid of a shitty guy they were infatuated with but that is much harder to do online than in person.
We should have social systems to help people over come those fears and protect them from threats, both physical and financial. No one should be forced to be with someone they fear because of finances, childcare, safety, or loneliness.
I don’t disagree with that. I would support that in a heartbeat if I had the funds to do so.
Not all shitty partners induce fear. I’ve known some girls who are just head over heels due to how attractive, wealthy, or mostly sweet a guy is. The good times outshine the bad times and they get into the “i can fix him” mentality.
Sure, not all shitty partners, but there is often more going on behind closed doors than many people realize.
My brother is like that where he has gotten away with cheating with nearly every partner he has had. It usually takes the girl months to finally leave him and say its been enough. Hes the chad gym type and genuinely doesn’t have to try to pull women. Any time they threaten to leave he gets all sweet, shows up with gifts and acts romantic and sexy just to get caught cheating again next week.
That’s called “love bombing” and is a common part of the cycle of abuse.
We need to be hard on ourselves sometimes and push manipulative people out of our lives. I think an erosion of IRL friendships has influenced this trend as well. I used to know girls who would band together to help a girl get rid of a shitty guy they were infatuated with but that is much harder to do online than in person.
I don’t disagree with that, however, people like this tend to worm their way into positions of authority like a parasite that you can’t get rid of. The fact that they often have zero issues lying through their teeth to get you on “their side” is a massive issue that many of the general public simply cannot grasp (“why would my wife/husband/preacher/friend/etc lie to me?” etc…).
It gets even worse when someone like that gets their hands on the very methods used to build those organizations and tears them all down. See the current state of the USA for example. I lived with an abusive partner for 11 years, and there is an unbelievable amount of parallels between them and the current US administration. What they are doing right now is incredibly triggering, knowing that I essentially have no escape from it.
These women don’t leave because these men are narcissistic assholes who have destroyed their self-esteem and made them think they are worthless and won’t find anything better and can’t live on their own.
IDK, instead of picking fights with random fucks in their own echo chambers where I’d just get banned anyway, I strive to be a positive example for the youngins around me in real life.
Instagrams algorithm purposely pits extreme opposing view points against each other to drive engagement via hate comments to sell enraged consumers knickknacks and graphic T-shirts.
Christian vs atheist
Red vs blue
Abortion vs choice
Even vegan vs carnivore
The faster we abandon social media sites the better.
Yup. I’m not going to actively hang out with shitheads just to try and change them. I will however steamroll over them if they come into MY space and do it.
Right. As a guy, I’ve never received a nude pic of a girl from a friend. I’ve never had a friend tell me that he sends girls dick pics. I’ve never been in an online community where photos of women are traded like what is described above - I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for this. I’ve never heard about anyone I know having their pictures shared, or anyone I know sharing pictures of someone else in an unethical way. This is quite simply a social sphere that I am completely excluded from. The idea that I have any responsibility or capacity to police this kind of behavior is ludicrous - what am I supposed to do? Talk to my friends and say “So, look at any unethical porn lately, bro?” Or spend my time seeking out toxic communities so I can debate them/report them, instead of going outside and having a life?
“I’ve never had a friend tell me he sends girls dick pics” Well he wouldn’t, would he? They know it’s toxic behavior even though they enjoy doing it and might even brag about it with equally toxic guys. This is a problem women constantly have, the men in their lives don’t believe things are happening because it doesn’t happen when they’re there. It’s a far less niche sphere than it appears to you, and I agree it’s probably not going to be out in front of you for you to do something about. But you can start by assuming women mostly don’t bring things up unless they’re really bad, because they put themselves at risk by doing so. So if they do, they’re probably not lying or imagining it. Even if your experience of that guy is completely different. And you can (continue to) shut down the more “minor” conversational shit that normalizes and perpetuates that mindset.
But you can start by assuming women mostly don’t bring things up unless they’re really bad, because they put themselves at risk by doing so.
Ideally I wouldn’t assume anything based on such broad generalities. I would base my understanding on my understanding of the person making the claim. If the woman making the claim has shown tendencies in the past of lying and starting drama, I will likely do nothing, and will sort of quietly wander away to find another conversation because I don’t want to be involved in whatever shit she is starting now. Though I will also probably never be present for this conversation, since I probably would have removed this person from my life a long time ago and would actively avoid interacting with them, because it is an unpleasant experience. If I know the woman to generally be trustworthy and straightforward, I will say “wow, that sucks, let me know if I can do anything to help you feel better”.
I’ve known several women who confessed to me that they’d been sexually assaulted in the past. My response, more or less, was “wow, I’m sorry that happened to you. Let me know if you want to talk about it more, or if there is anything I can do to help.” And that is the extent of what I can do, since I have no idea who the people who assaulted them are. It’s not like I can just bust down some random guy’s door and beat him up.
And you can (continue to) shut down the more “minor” conversational shit that normalizes and perpetuates that mindset.
Such as…? I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. I assume you are talking about the conversations where guys say things like “no means yes, yes means anal” - which, again, I have never, ever been involved in. Like, ever. I don’t know who these people are or where they hang out. I infer they exist based on second hand accounts if others. But they seem to not like me, and don’t invite me to their parties.
When my male friends and I talk about women, our conversations usually go: ugh, why don’t girls like me?; ugh, my girlfriend is being distant and standoffish; ugh, my girlfriend broke up with me. I’ve never had a friend speak poorly of women in general, say they “deserve” anything as a group, or anything like that.
So, again, this seems like a big case of “I can’t do anything about this, so I’m not going to worry about it.”
I explicitly stay away from such groups. I call it out in person, and politely check my friends when they say something that they might not realize is harmful, exactly the same way I expect them to check me, but that’s just it. That kind of discourse isn’t welcome in these groups because they were created with one explicit purpose: to justify and normalize the absolute shittiest behavioursof the most sexiest of male culture.
She’s right, it isn’t a small amount of men. But it’s a supermajority in certain circles, and a tiny, neglible minority in others. She, unfortunately, exposed herself to the worst of men enmasse. We should instead go to those latter circles, and avoid/ostracize those former circles, until they realize if their only goal is sex, they’ll have to figure out how to be a decent person first. And men, choose to be better.
Guys seem to like going into a game together and fighting against overwhelming odds, working together to shoot down the enemy. Even if they “die” several times.
Maybe it would be interesting to get together and make a raid/foray into one of these manosphere forums, supporting each other’s arguments and shooting down sexist crap.
You’d be banned faster than trying to say “Tiananmen” on grad
r/conservative has already disproven that experiment, no matter how much opposition, they will spin a million excuses and point out how their echo chamber is being “brigaded” by bots or whatever
Any decent man who has spent enough time in locker rooms understands that ~30% of men are shitty people and of those, somewhere around half are probably violent.
Once you have a daughter or put youraself in womens shoes, you realize how terrifying those odds are for women trying to navigate this world.
This is 100% correct. I have 4 daughters myself and an amazing wife. I see it almost daily. In the current landscape, it’s even harder. My older female family members don’t even care. They “got theirs” and could give a shit about women growing up in this world.
I will always defend women, and I patiently wait for the day a woman in my presence gets disrespected by some Chad, Andrew Tate loving motherfucker.
I’m here for all my human sisters, as we should all be equal on this planet. Fuck these men with no morals and no human equality compass. Scared of something they don’t understand or what incels tell them to act like. Its madness and makes me sick.
God I hate that you are right. I only have like one male friend because I legit had to distance myself from ao many other male friends who were just horrible people and I couldn’t stand to listen to them anymore.
Similar experience. Had a best friend who kept saying more and more misogynistic bs. After he said: “I could rape you, yoo know. And you wouldn’t be able to stop me.”
Over time, I made a munch of male friends who are awesome. Nothing beats binge watching the Owlhouse with the bro’s. Or a drunk pillow fight. Or a boat trip. They are fun. One friend is the kindest, humblest dude I ever met. I view him as a role model if anything. I’m also friends with a war veteran, and he is a kind guy who loves to train dogs and people.
It’s hard to find these people though. Most men don’t want friendships with women. They just fuckzone em.
That just seems… Insane? My experience certainly doesn’t reflect this. But I never do averages based on a sample size of one.
~30% of people being shitty tracks with voting patterns
I like that this can condemn either side
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I read through their new posts and “strategies” frequently, mostly out of a sort of morbid fascination, but also a desire to protect myself from men.
Sound advice, it’s useful to recognize the bullshit lingo & rhetoric that’s all a part of these idiotic schemes (see: “Pickup Artists”). I realized that one of my acquaintances had started slipping those catchphrases into convos years ago, and it caught me off guard. They hadn’t seemed like much of an asshole before, but it raised my hackles knowing that they weren’t just reviewing the media, but integrating it into their personality/beliefs without any sort of filter.
Honestly knowing what I know about guys, I wouldn’t date them either if I was a chick.
It is really disturbing how there are entire online communities of men basically dedicated to teaching each other how to be abusers.
beautiful quote, saved…saved to my wank bank! had you going there for like 7 periods! I need to share this on twitter
but no very pretty never heard it before
Sending unwarranted dick picks should get you a sizeable fine, maybe 600 bucks and a 2 year registry in a sex offender list.
Give you a choice to stop fucking up and if you escalate and keep doing it then things get worse for oyu.
What if they were banned from owning a smartphone or any camera phone? And banned from social media?
Impossible to enforce
Some countries manage to enforce it better. But I agree it would be more difficult to enforce this in the west.
As a middle-aged man, I agree that there are some completely shitty men (loosely) out there. A real man should be compassionate, caring, protective when wanted, supportive when needed, and should never do the absolute scum things this poor woman experienced. This is on fathers (mostly) and mothers to teach their sons what it means to be respectful to everyone around them, not just women but men as well. Fathers need to model the behavior so their sons don’t grow up to be terrible humans. It is on parents to address online safety. It’s uncomfortable to do this but really, really needed. As far as the man sex culture, I’m not sure that is a fair statement. That would be like saying a woman sex culture. From what I’ve seen in my life, you will always be proven wrong if you stereotype anything about any perceived group of people.
From what I’ve seen in my life, you will always be proven wrong if you stereotype anything about any perceived group of people.
Not always but the exceptions (or as close to exceptions as generalizations can ever get you anyway) are usually cases where the stereotypical behavior is entangled deeply with the very definition of the group, e.g. the vast majority of kids of rich parents can’t understand the struggles of being poor.
I understand what you’re saying, what I meant was every time i got to the point where I had a preconceived idea about a group of people, I was proven that I was wrong. There are always exceptions - that is my point.
The thing is most of these dudes are highly desired and taken already so what you get on tinder rotation is absolutely not that.
If anyone is unsure why women would chose the bear…
Most young men and women choose not to date. “Choosing the bear” isn’t limited to one gender. And yes, I understand it, at least partially. It’s rough out there.
Social division as a result of people not socializing anymore has driven a massive wedge between the diverse and beautiful spectrum of people who used to find appreciation and joy in each others differences.
Now every time you meet someone with different feelings than yourself, the internet has trained you to feel attacked.
This is why we’re all alone, we’re afraid of being attacked, and somehow our definitions of what an attack is has been radically subverted.
99% of men are disgusted by this type of thing, but with billions of people and instant communication. this type of thing is bound to pop up. and because normal people aren’t looking at this type of thing, they’re echo chambers of degeneracy. but it really bothers me when people use sex based generalizations for things like this. millions of people isn’t very much on a global scale.
I think it is more widespread than you imagine. If admiration for Andrew Tate is an indicator of seriously misogynistic attitudes, then the statistics (for the UK) are quite shocking:
Nearly a quarter (23%) of 15-16-year-old boys have a positive view of Andrew Tate compared to only 10% of girls at this age.
Furthermore, one-third of dads (32%) view Andrew Tate favourably compared to 10% of mums. This positive view is even higher among young dads: 52% of 25-34-year-old dads compared to 19% of mums.
Additionally, 49% of 25-34-year-old dads believe their child has a positive view of Andrew Tate.
Source: https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/research/research-into-online-misogyny-and-image-based-abuse/
Maybe my opinion is influenced by my geographic position. I never would have imagined that many people of my generation support him. Where I live, saying you like Andrew Tate would be like saying you support Putin, maybe worse.
Then I’ve got some bad news for you about Putin, too.
99% of men are disgusted by this type of thing
wow. naive.
As a man, it’s also reasonable to say this is nearly non existent among women. Does it happen? Of course. But not nearly to the scale it happens among men.
It’s moreso a matter of semantics. If someone says “Men are disgusting”, you don’t have to take it literally. It’s conveying the meaning that there is a large enough amount of men that are doing this that it is a massive problem in nearly every woman’s life. The saying would be a bit less valid if it was so extremely prevalent. But as it stands, I can go up to just about any young woman, and they more than likely would have (at least) been sexually harassed by a man.
So sure, with as many people as there are, it’s “bound to pop up” but saying it that way seems to undermine just how prevalent it is. And correcting a statement that expresses the sentiment that this is a large problem by saying “But not all men are bad” is counterproductive. They are talking about the systematic issue among men. You could instead respond with “Yea, we need systematic changes” or something along the lines that address the concern they are raising.
When I said it’s “bound to pop up” I was talking specifically about the online communities mentioned. I don’t disagree that there are systemic problems but I think that they were focusing on a specific and small subset of a larger problem.
I might be wrong about this, correct me if that’s so. but because most men aren’t rapists, yet a surprisingly high number of women get sexually assaulted/raped, It seems like the problem is not that most men are predators, but that our society is letting the minority that are get away with it repeatedly.
because most men aren’t rapists, yet a surprisingly high number of women get sexually assaulted/raped, It seems like the problem is not that most men are predators, but that our society is letting the minority that are get away with it repeatedly.
It’s much muddier than that. Most cases of rape are someone the victim trusted. And most of those cases don’t ever get reported to authorities. So there are many men may have taken advantage of a woman, and that woman see’s him as an abuser, but nearly nobody in that mans life even knows about this. The victim may stay silent for any number of reasons. There are almost definitely cases like that involving men you know, but are unaware of what they did. As for the solution to these cases? Societal norms need to change. Consent needs to be required every time no matter what. There should never be pressure for sex, and peers should not encourage pressuring a woman into sex. Instead, the man will say the person stepping in is “cock blocking” when in reality they’re defending someone who doesn’t want to have sex with them. Men will back up other men in an attempt to help their bro “get their dick wet”. They will get women drunk in hopes they will have reduced inhibitions, or perhaps so drunk they don’t even remember the night. This is not as simple as “lock up the bad guys” when very few cases of rape involve being snatched up off the street.
When I said it’s “bound to pop up” I was talking specifically about the online communities mentioned.
Gotcha, I misunderstood what you were saying. I do still disagree that groups like that are bound to pop up, at least not as much as they are right now. I think womanizing groups are far more common than dedicated racist groups online. Racism has taken a massive downward trend over the last hundred years. Of course, it is not fixed, very far from it. But I also think it is undeniable that racism is less of a problem than it was 50 years ago. That is the kind of societal change we want. If the internet were around 50 years ago, the insane number of group chats dedicated to racism would have been far larger than they are now. Bringing awareness to these issues, and especially men standing up to other men, is what will help bring a decline to the number of vocal sexist pigs and their echo chambers.
It’s the same as everywhere, those who scream the loudest get heard
AI will fix this. Everyone will have nudes of everyone, and nobody will believe anything is real.
Even watching porn will be weird, when you can only assume what youre watching is a computer trying its best to not turn the womens bumhole into a picture of a dog.
I don’t know, photoshop exists, and it hasn’t stopped anything so far.
AI makes it easier, but may not do much to stop it.
Just look at Facebook, or the puff-jacket late pope. People do take AI-generated posts as the real thing so much of the time.
I just like that she calls out and lumps in 4chan with Reddit and Discord—because that’s really what’s it’s become now. I mean there are dicks lurking and active in any corner of the Internet but those platforms in particular are obviously mainstream enough or known to harbor all kinds… especially the kind she talks about.
When I was in HS if a girl wanted to show you some racy pics she’d just show you on HER phone.
yeah people suck welcome to Earth
And in the west they seem to be getting worse. Anecdotal, but that’s what I’ve been experiencing.
i agree.
Dating in general these days seems like such a ugly slog I don’t understand how people even find time to do something productive and play this dating game.
Feels like marriage is becoming very much desired again huh.
Dating for the most part is monetized vanity.
Misogyny and misandry, two unhappy twins; one celebrated, the other shunned. Both found their way into this thread.
That’s enough internet for today I think.
Except they’re not at all the same, you understand that, right? Misogyny is build upon layers of social and systemic discrimination
I invite you to look into the term misandry some more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misandry
Trusting a wikipedia link to make your point for you doesn’t work any better on lemmy than it did on reddit. In case anyone is curious, a couple excerpts from wikipedia
In the Internet Age, users posting on manosphere internet forums such as 4chan and subreddits addressing men’s rights activism have claimed that misandry is widespread, established in preferential treatment of women, and shown by discrimination against men.
[…]
Men’s rights activists invoke the idea of misandry in warning against what they see as the advance of a female-dominated society. The idea of feminism as threatening towards men, encapsulated in the term misandry, forms a core part of the vocabulary of the manosphere and is used within the men’s rights movement to counter feminist accusations of misogyny.They aren’t equivalent-but-gender-flipped terms anymore, because “misandry” has been hijacked by the incels as a dogwhistle and convenient catchall term to dismiss concerns exactly like what’s in this thread. While I don’t think HexesofVexes intended this, they’re conflating the two terms to be equivalent in meaning which, when taken in context, just simply isn’t true.
At the root it’s a very difficult topic to address, let me change my language a little to avoid the politics implied by the room.
When you generalise a negative trait to a particular gender, you are making a sexist and hateful comment. The “emotional woman” and the “deceitful gold digger”, the “violent man” and the “potential rapist” - the former would lead to a talk with HR, the latter leads to open agreement and often accolade.
The argument made for this discrepancy is that it is redressing the systemic sexism built into our society, but I think that it has ceased to do so and us now fuelling the misogyny more than it is addressing it.
There is a need to redress societal imbalance that disadvantages women - however hatred only breeds more hatred. The path currently taken is wrong, and history will show that to be true.
It’s like she hasn’t ever considered that there are men that don’t even know it’s happening.
But sure, yeah - I’m totally patting wannabe rapists on the back. I won’t be reading misandry as a response to misogyny.
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