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The thought being that yes, men like to have sex, but they mainly see women as inconvenient life support for our sex organs. Nookie on the hoof, if you will. lol. They don't respect us, they don't care about who we are, what our personalities are, any of the things that I value about myself as the human being who lives inside the skull of this body are irrelevant to a man. The only reason any man would even pause to sigh in annoyance and consider such aspects, is if a woman is bothering him with her noise and he needs to make her stop, or perhaps in evaluating if she will be a good mother to his children, or to figure out how to trick her into consenting to sex.
And we do have a handful of dudes on this board, who, through the safety of anonymity, do say things like, "why would I even talk to a woman if I didn't want bang her?" or throw out the old sitcom ball-and-chain stereotypes. If someone didn't have real-world experience or chose to not listen to the other men chiming in with their tales of functional relationships and respect for the women in their lives, those negative voices might drown out the normies.
And we do have a handful of dudes on this board, who, through the safety of anonymity, do say things like, "why would I even talk to a woman if I didn't want bang her?" or throw out the old sitcom ball-and-chain stereotypes. If someone didn't have real-world experience or chose to not listen to the other men chiming in with their tales of functional relationships and respect for the women in their lives, those negative voices might drown out the normies.
And I just cannot say it enough...
Believing that, as a woman, it's not so much a matter (at least it wasn't for me) of antagonism towards men, no matter how much it may sound like it.
It was a soul crushing feeling of despair. The emotional knives always got turned inward.
I never took those messages to mean that men were bad, or were pigs, or whatever. I took it to mean that I was stupid and naive for hoping to be seen or respected. Just a stupid child. Will never get that. Don't deserve that. I would go through my life looking at men, giving them respect and regard as PEOPLE but if they seemed to be returning it, it was nothing but a trick. A lie. Because as a woman, I just wasn't worth it. Not a person.
I was only as good as my sexual appeal, my appearance, and once I aged out of that, I was good for nothing at all, in the eyes of those whose love I craved...
And I hear echoes of this in the OP's internalization of the red pill talking points, and that's what I wanted so badly to jail break her from. Honestly, it's probably (at least in my case, can't speak for anyone else) an echoing trigger of "Daddy issues." I had an alcoholic father who was often not around, ran around and cheated on my Mom, and for sure was not a healthy male influence in my childhood. A child thinks, "I am bad, my parent doesn't love me. That's why they are angry, that's why they aren't here." I think that tons of people carry baggage around like that.
Of course we have an obligation as an adult, to shine a light into those dark corners of our minds, to try and find the bad code and break it, to stow the baggage so to speak. I'm in such a vastly better place, but it has taken a LOT of work and the work is not completely done...may never be. I don't know.
But indulging the voices that trigger our worst inner gremlin talk, that's a fast road to a depression spiral. And that sounded to me, a whole lot like what the OP was doing. I hope that she was being truthful when she got her other thread closed after saying the she was going to turn away from those red pill forums and stop letting them make her feel so badly.
Thing is, in order to start really hearing all of the wonderful and healthy voices of all of the great men out there who can totally respect me, like me, see me as a person, EVEN when/if they are sexually attracted to me no less!...I had to let go the confirmation bias of those early bad messages that got programmed in. Stop whatever impulse lived in my head, that when encountering an unhealthy message from some guy, said, "Yes. That is what I believe," and start really listening to the good stuff. It's out there. You just have to be willing to receive those signals and bat away the crappy ones.
I bit my tongue on this one, wrote a whole thing and then changed my mind. He and I have argued before and he has never shifted from his manosphere saturated opinions, and it's been years. He's already acknowledged that between baggage from his family of origin, the way a couple of guy friends abandoned him (he believes because of their tyrant wives) and all of the sitcoms he's watched, he will forever insist that women are "Hitler in heels on God Mode" out to subjugate and ruin men.
Even attempting to shift his thinking is way above our pay grade. Just saying.
So more to the point in the recent page and comments here, and I agree with a lot of what Corporate Cowboy is saying... I just want to say that when I have believed that men don't even LIKE women, it was men who put that idea there in my head. It was things I was told by men. Starting with the first boys I interacted with in high school, and there was the way my father acted, and then there was my first husband who really tried to hammer that idea into my mind.
The thought being that yes, men like to have sex, but they mainly see women as inconvenient life support for our sex organs. Nookie on the hoof, if you will. lol. They don't respect us, they don't care about who we are, what our personalities are, any of the things that I value about myself as the human being who lives inside the skull of this body are irrelevant to a man. The only reason any man would even pause to sigh in annoyance and consider such aspects, is if a woman is bothering him with her noise and he needs to make her stop, or perhaps in evaluating if she will be a good mother to his children, or to figure out how to trick her into consenting to sex.
It is all about his convenience, his use of her, not about "liking." And men and women can never, ever be friends. Unless perhaps she is so ancient or hideous that he won't think sex thoughts...and even then she's likely invisible.
Also? Men who push this notion, usually try to tell you that even though they know what it's like to be a man, and I don't, because they are men and I'm not...THEY are special and different because they love me and it's all of the OTHER men out there who are like this. So I'd better not talk to any of THEM.
And when it travels its path of twisted logic and lands on this conclusion, the agenda is revealed. You have an insecure man who feels a need to train "his" women (daughters, sisters, girlfriends, wives?) to avoid competing men they don't feel they measure up to, to do the work of protecting his territorial interests for him. Probably. Or else, the other thought I eventually had that really was quite liberating for me...that said man is in fact telling you who he is, rather than telling you who "men" are. "Men" aren't like that, he's like that.
And no, healthy and mature people do NOT think this way. Breaking away from this thinking was a huge part of getting away from abuse and harm and healing myself and going forward into my present happiness. I labored under this enforced delusion at least partially (it was often a source of conflict in my head and I didn't always accept it) for years...well into my 20s at least.
Had similar experiences with my late husband. He was constantly trying to tell me how "men" think, when in fact, it was he who was immature enough to think that way.
I don't remember exactly what happened, but whatever trivial thing it was, he ended up screaming at me for doing something that he couldn't control. In fact, almost everything he got angry about was trivial, but that's beside the point.
Anyway, I remember asking him why he was yelling at me, especially since it was the first time I ever did "it", so it wasn't even a pattern. He said, "Once is a pattern to a guy!" At that point, I was tired of him trying to tell me how "guys" think, knowing fully well that it wasn't true. I finally yelled back at him (unusual for me, since I'm not a 'yeller'), "Either you're stupid enough to believe that, or you're stupid enough to think that *I'M* stupid enough to believe that. Either way, I'm not about to stay married to someone who's stupid, nor will I stay married to someone who thinks that *I'M* stupid! So, what's it gonna be?" He walked away. But at that moment, it was as if the planets lined up, Heaven opened up, and the angels came and ministered to me. I figured out his game, and he could no longer use it on me. I was onto him. Oh, he still tried...and I called him out at every turn.
What he didn't seem to get was that I had other relationships prior to him, that were decent relationships. Perhaps not many, but enough to know that not all men are the same. He even tried the whole,"Those other guys didn't love you like I do" and my response to that was...
Can't rep Corporate Cowboy again but I agree with him especially the last paragraph.
My understanding of the Me Too thing is that it was about men taking advantage of women in a working/professional situation, not social.
And I thought it was inauthentic in a "fit of the vapors" kind of way. It mostly seemed to be about women who wanted to be actors and what they thought they had to do to be cast in a movie.
Mostly it seemed to be centered around Hollywood directors and producers who expected sexual favors for hiring women to act in their movies.
No one forced women to comply, it was more like "hey babe, you want the role? Well I want a roll too, how about it?" And the answer was either Yes (she gets the part) or No (she doesn't). All this was totally understood between both parties. Does this make it right? Depends on the point of view I guess. Directors and producers probably thought it was perfectly right in a transactional sort of way.
Besides it didn't start with Hollywood, it's as old as theatre, sexual allure is a big part of performance. Look at Elvis as just one example. Yes he had a great voice but that wasn't the only thing he was selling.
It's consciously naive to think that when going into the entertainment industry, which is notorious for sexual activity, women will be treated like nuns. Not that they shouldn't be treated with respect, if their actions warrant respect, but some people think expressing physical interest in someone is a compliment not a threat or an insult.
And besides what mature person thinks it's reasonable to accept a meeting for possible employment in a hotel room? Like that in and of itself isn't dodgey. Like the lobby, the restaurant, a conference room isn't a better more professional choice.
So okay she makes the silly decision to meet Harvey in his hotel room and he answers the door wearing nothing but a robe. Nothing compels her to step in but her own ego and ambition. So it is transactional. She gets something, he gets something. No one is an innocent victim here.
Anyone who doesn't understand what they're getting into when they enter the world of performance doesn't belong there. It's not for the faint of heart, it chews most people up and spits them out without a second thought or a backward glance. Don't like it? Don't go there. But if you do, don't complain about how it just isn't fair. It ain't nursery school, there is no "fair." And it's not the fault of one gender or another. It's people being people.
Other industries and working environments aren't this way as much but there is a "Shark Tank" element in most professions, even if not so blatant.
As me old Mum used to say "gotta be tough out there, baby."
I did not see the "Me Too" movement as that, at all. But I was on Facebook at the time, where I've got over 500 friends who are honestly a blend of family, friends and acquaintances, and tons of them are women. When that whole thing started, there was a wave of these women speaking about what they had experienced. Pretty much none of them were calling for justice against the men who had treated them badly...whether it was childhood abuse, rape, sexual harassment in the workplace...that was not the point. The point was to try and get society (especially men) to understand that this is not rare. And it's not like five bad men in the world doing all of the bad acts. There are guys you probably know, who never showed you that side of them, but it doesn't mean it does not exist.
And there were a lot of things back decades ago that were just "the way it is" and "we don't talk about it" that really are deeply harmful to others. Just like beating the crap out of children was once seen as basically fine (my husband was beaten bloody by personnel in a private school he attended in the 60s, in front of the entire class.) There is a film we watched together once called, "How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying)" that features a song with the title and refrain of, "A secretary is not a toy."
When I was in high school in the 90s, a group of boys I knew violently and viciously assaulted a girl they persuaded to come over to a "parents not home" party and they got her drunk and well...I won't share the details now but damn. It was rape, but they didn't see it that way. They figured that if she drank alcohol she surely wanted them to go ahead and do anything they wanted to her. She was injured. You think that was OK? I don't. They did. At least one of them I've had contact with in all the years since (quickly aborted contact on social media) STILL thinks it's OK.
Of course we did not report it to the authorities, they would have blamed her, too, and she would have been in big trouble with her parents.
The thing is, people act like it was all about these "cancel culture" callings out of famous people, because those are the cases that got blown up in the news. That was not the intent, nor the point.
But first of all, I saw immediately (predicted it, because the world sucks, and I wasn't wrong) that some people would use this to pursue their own agendas. Some of those individuals might have valid complaints against scummy people, and others would just be weaponizing it for their own gain.
Secondly, also because the world sucks I guess sometimes... A lot of guys decided I suppose that if a woman dares say out loud that rape is bad and sometimes guys do that and it sure would be great if they would NOT... Then that means "oh my god, she's overreacting and lying to get me, can't even tap a woman on the shoulder..." It's really something how defensive some dudes decided to be, about the very notion that any man might be called to account for his actions.
But, you know, again...in a way it's not all bad, because now we can just let some people go right ahead and tell us who they are. They can keep right on talkin' I figure. Of course they will whine about how they're treated when they spout disgusting viewpoints but hey...that's not really my problem.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
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Yeah, the men are just wired like this (even worse, saying "real men" are wired like this (hello toxic masculinity)) and even going so far as saying "God" just makes men act as pigs, well, nope. Its you. You may be wired like this. YOU. Not men as a collective.
And heck, even if you are wired a certain way, you don't need to act upon your instincts if they make you less than a quality person.
Yeah, the men are just wired like this (even worse, saying "real men" are wired like this (hello toxic masculinity)) and even going so far as saying "God" just makes men act as pigs, well, nope. Its you. You may be wired like this. YOU. Not men as a collective.
And heck, even if you are wired a certain way, you don't need to act upon your instincts if they make you less than a quality person.
Ohhhh, but dontcha know, that if you don't act upon your 'instincts', you're repressing them...and obviously that's not good.
I don't know of a time when beating children bloody was seen as acceptable.
I also don't see women as victims. Women have their own agency, as do men. Women are every bit as capable as men of being vicious and deceptive, cruel and self-serving.
Women in general aren't as physically strong as men in general. In all else women are men's equal, for good or ill.
Eh, I and society are better off with me repressing many of my instincts.
True for most of us.
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At that point, I was tired of him trying to tell me how "guys" think, knowing fully well that it wasn't true. I finally yelled back at him (unusual for me, since I'm not a 'yeller'), "Either you're stupid enough to believe that, or you're stupid enough to think that *I'M* stupid enough to believe that. Either way, I'm not about to stay married to someone who's stupid, nor will I stay married to someone who thinks that *I'M* stupid! So, what's it gonna be?" He walked away. But at that moment, it was as if the planets lined up, Heaven opened up, and the angels came and ministered to me. 
