SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It was recently directed at/commingled with male facial hair (Gillette commercial). So you'll have to excuse me/us for having some issue with the idea that it's not directed at "everything masculine". Thought exercise I read right after that came out when lots of people couldn't see how that portrayal of "toxic masculinity" would be so hurtful to men.. Watch the Gillette commercial again, but, instead of razors, imagine it's for tampons. With a bunch of women behaving in shit manners portrayed throughout the commercial and the message being delivered as "plug up your toxic femininity". I spent a few minutes imagining that commercial and wound up a LOT more offended than I was by the original Gillette commercial.

The Gilette ad should be taught in advertising schools as an epic example of marketing self-sabotage and how to destroy a brand and turn off your primary consumers. Particularly bad timing as more and more men simply turn away from the flawed 20th century notion that they should shave natural facial hair away constantly.

Sadly, instead it's probably taught as a laudatory example of something or other.

[This message edited by Thumos at 11:05 AM, August 12th (Wednesday)]

That said, phenomena like BH's pedestalizing their WW's are something we see all the time here.

Totally agree with that, as you know because we both talked about that like 87 pages ago

I think that's a kind of what I've heard called "benevolent" sexism. While it might sound kind of sweet and nice on the surface to view your lady as a fragile little thing that needs to be protected from the world, when that mindset prevents you from viewing your partner as a whole adult who needs to take responsibility for thier actions - well, that's where it becomes an issue.

another example, Jana, would be the book The Manipulated Man, written by a woman. The book is very provocative with some really interesting ideas. I'm not sure how I feel about it in toto, but it's worth a read. Certainly couldn't call this a "Red pill" book since it was written in 1971, but it certainly qualifies.

The writer was already arguing back then that marriage is objectively a very bad deal for men and that men should rethink whether they want to make this commitment, especially in light of divorce laws that seem to favor women (the "cash and prizes" legal model).

I think most BH's here can certainly identify with this sentiment and I don't think it qualifies as misogyny.

hink that's a kind of what I've heard called "benevolent" sexism. While it might sound kind of sweet and nice on the surface to view your lady as a fragile little thing that needs to be protected from the world, when that mindset prevents you from viewing your partner as a whole adult who needs to take responsibility for thier actions - well, that's where it becomes an issue.

Agreed, and that's what I've also referred to as "the fainting couch syndrome" that does seem to crop up here on SI - the notion that WW's are delicate creatures that need to be protected from the harsh light of truth and consequences for the most harmful and toxic of actions a human being can carry out. I don't say we need to be intentionally cruel, but sparing a WW's feelings is not at the top of my priority list.

I confess I'm still confused by statements made on this thread pointing to some really harsh misogynistic statements that I myself just have not read here at SI. Are these really as prevalent as some posters here make them seem or are they more outliers?

[This message edited by Thumos at 11:20 AM, August 12th (Wednesday)]

Agreed, and that's what I've also referred to as "the fainting couch syndrome" that does seem to crop up here on SI - the notion that WW's are delicate creatures that need to be protected from the harsh light of truth and consequences for the most harmful and toxic of actions a human being can carry out.

Could you point to when and where this has happened on SI. I'll admit I don't read everything here, and I may have just missed this. But I haven't seen this.

Could you point to when and where this has happened on SI. I'll admit I don't read everything here, and I may have just missed this. But I haven't seen this.

I would argue that it happened several times on the AHGuy thread that seemed to promulgate this thread, and I would think many others would agree. But you're welcome to disagree of course.

Now, could you perhaps answer my question?

I just have a hard time viewing marriage as some bad deal for men when I made more money for most of my marriage (full disclosure - his business became very successful right around the time he started cheating - he outright told me he felt entitled to female attention due to his success - so i do now receive child support, although I would have been paying him had we gone through with it the FIRST time we filed) - and he got half custody (I did not contest, but my lawyer said he'd get it either way).

So I guess my experience doesn't bear out the "men get screwed" marriage narrative but I can't speak for everyone.

I think most BH's here can certainly identify with this sentiment and I don't think it qualifies as misogyny.

Agreed and I said as much many pages ago. The legal system as it applies to divorce is really not fair to men at all and that is a travesty. I don't know as individuals how much we can work to change it, but as a woman, please know that I definitely stand up for guys on this. It's especially unfair in cases of infidelity when a cheating wife gets to file and get a huge chunk of change. I don't blame men for being cynical about that at all.

I confess I'm still confused by statements made on this thread pointing to some really harsh misogynistic statements that I myself just have not read here at SI. Are these really as prevalent as some posters here make them seem or are they more outliers?

Not sure if they are super prevalent, but they sure aren't outliers either (and so sorry, but I can't recall any right off the top of my head). I've read quite a few over my time here that aren't in-your-face misogynistic, but definitely have that flavor as an undertone. Maybe women are more sensitive to it? I know me (and almost every woman I have ever known in my life) has been subjected to the misogyny pat-the-little-woman-on-the-head crap more than once, both personally and professionally. I sense things slowly changing, but by and large this is just a regular attitude that women deal with.

What is wrong with considering saying something more like "your wife has had sex with another man" instead of "she couldn't wait to spread her legs for him".

Hikingout, I couldn't agree more and well-stated. I'm confused by this reference, however. Was there a specific instance where someone unloaded this vitriol? Is it a common occurrence here? I just haven't seen it.

I don't know as individuals how much we can work to change it, but as a woman, please know that I definitely stand up for guys on this. It's especially unfair in cases of infidelity when a cheating wife gets to file and get a huge chunk of change. I don't blame men for being cynical about that at all.

Ellie, as always your clarity and intellectual honesty is very welcome. It's good to read a woman not only acknowledge this, but stand up for men. You're a good egg.

[This message edited by Thumos at 11:34 AM, August 12th (Wednesday)]

So I guess my experience doesn't bear out the "men get screwed" marriage narrative but I can't speak for everyone.

Jana, I think it's beginning to change, thankfully, but for a long time the legal structures have been tilted and unfair. Admittedly there was good reason for the legal structures at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, when women were often left bereft and impoverished by irresponsible men. But given that women's earning power has essentially reached parity with men (and with more women than men in professional schools like medical and law schools) these legal structures are now antiquated and unnecessarily punitive against men.

It's surprising to me because my state isn't typically considered progressive but it does seem to me that finances and custody are handled in a much more gender-neutral way here versus other states.

Oh gosh, SI. My stupid comment about being a BH who is posting/trolling as a BW was a joke. sorry.

Ride it out

Man walks into a bar and asks for a beer

Bartender says “ do you know you are fat ugly and bald”

Man says “ hey as@ h@&$ i asked for a beer not a critique”

I am quite sure we all know we live in a shitty world but perhaps we are not here to revel in that shit but to help each other through it .

Also i think you may be wrong about numbers being such a universal scale , beyond teenage years people are more likely to judge a man by the calibre of his prior sexual partners. Women too .

[This message edited by siracha at 3:23 PM, August 12th (Wednesday)]

What is wrong with considering saying something more like "your wife has had sex with another man" instead of "she couldn't wait to spread her legs for him".

What if the 2nd is more the truth? Does that not matter? I'm pretty sure that my W was absolutely over the moon about "spreading her legs" for another man.. Or at least I was, until "kibbles" became a thing in my mind. I know I'd be pretty over the moon excited about sleeping with someone new because, well, I've slept with someone new before and without exception, I was pretty darn excited about it. So, sure, maybe it happens to NOT be true in my particular case (where she was "just doing it for the kibbles") but I do think it's true in a lot of cases. Painful? Darn right it is. But it's also reality, and reality isn't necessarily out to make you "feel good" it just "is".

I think that's a kind of what I've heard called "benevolent" sexism. While it might sound kind of sweet and nice on the surface to view your lady as a fragile little thing that needs to be protected from the world, when that mindset prevents you from viewing your partner as a whole adult who needs to take responsibility for thier actions - well, that's where it becomes an issue.

OK, let's dredge up an old poster's story here for a minute then. This poster, summing the story up, had a WW that went "full porn" with the OM and wouldn't or didn't with him. At particular issue was BJs in the car. He was trying to R, made it know this was an issue and nothing changed. One day, he snapped in a parking lot and demanded she perform that act on him or get out of the car.

Well, call it "awful" all you want, this is simply a consequence of the shit storm she unleashed and his slow mental state deterioration at her hands. She had a choice, a choice that, BTW, was not given to him (the choice to share his wife with another man). And posters went NUTS on this guy. I might have even piled in, I honestly don't remember, but it was really vicious and awful. Rape was thrown around abundantly, and just about every slur you can imagine was chucked at this BH. All of it coming from the same place, that his wife "couldn't refuse" his request/demand. And I KNOW I felt this way too, even if I did defend him, I felt in my gut that it was wrong.

Why? She's a big girl. If a BW had done the same thing and booted her husband out of the car for refusal to go down on her or tell her she's pretty, I'd say "Serves your right asshole". She had a phone, it wasn't in the ghetto, she wasn't in danger of anything except embarrassment. If we're saying sexism is treating the sexes differently, this is a perfect example of it; I kind of cheer inside when a BW puts her husband into "no sex" jail, but recoil when a woman is put to task in the opposite way? What's going on here? If there's sexism, it's my "white knighting" more than me "protecting men". In fact, I love reading stories of BW doing awful things to their WH's, but, when a BH does the same to a WW, I feel all kinds of conflicted inside. IMHO, that's more the "real sexism" here, the "injured WW, trying to find herself, in an awful marriage, who just wants love in her life". And I'm hugely guilty of this myself, in fact, so much so, that I rarely post on WW threads other than to give my standard suggestion (more/better sex for the BH) because beyond that, I feel like I'm stepping into uncomfortable territory.

Even after years of reading, and years of therapy, I still can't help but feel sorry for most WW's, including my own. I hide/cover that feeling well to my WW, but it's still there. And I live with seething contempt for WH's and basically had to eliminate most of my social life because of it, I can't stand them. So, yeah, I'm clearly sexist, excusing behavior for women that I'd NEVER excuse from men. And condemning male behavior where, if a woman did the same, I'd be the first to say "you go girl!".

I think that the Gillette ad may have been effective, I hate my own gender. Swell, sounds like I need another 10 years of therapy to get over that.

Uggh, was going to try to stay out of this and just do my usual lurking, but here I go. First, our best evidence is that women, on average, suffer more economically post-divorce than do men. This is a longstanding finding. For a recent reference, see Leopold (2018) -- "Gender Differences in the Consequences of Divorce: A Study of Multiple Outcomes." Of course this doesn't apply to all men or women, and it is a gut punch for BH when their WW get anything, but the evidence is clear that on average, the system is not biased towards women. Most of what looks like a disparity is due to the enduring wage gap between men and women. I can speak to this personally -- my mother put my father through medical school, they had five children together and he pressured her to become a SAHM, and then we were impoverished when they divorced due to his serial infidelity. Granted, that was many decades ago, but that scenario is still seen today -- men earn more, married couples make the joint decision to accentuate that even more by privileging his career over hers (which rationally makes more sense given his higher earning power), and thus he's on the hook more than she is when financial decisions are made during divorce. Likewise, custody decisions have not been show to be systematically biased against men (not saying it doesn't happen, just saying it's not systematic). Most custody arrangements today are shared. In the past, mothers were awarded sole custody much more readily than fathers, but that's because most men didn't ASK for custody. When they did, they were MORE likely to be awarded custody than were mothers. While women may be successful in specific instances (including on these boards) by claiming abuse or unfitness to influence custody, it stands to reason that it's just as easy for men to make that claim about mother's lack of fitness. It happened to my own sister, and she lost custody of her kids completely, though she did retain visitation. Because we idealize motherhood in our culture, it's pretty easy to make the argument that mothers fall short. And remember, most judges are men.

Don't even get me started on nature/nurture and twin studies. Our best evidence is that heritability (nature) VARIES because of nurture. It's not fixed, and the two interact. For instance, a crop of corn will reach it's genetic potential (nature) when nurtured, and will fail to do so when it is not nurtured. In a well-nurtured crop, heritability of output is maximized, but it is substantially lower in a poorly-nurtured crop -- nurture matters much more than nature in this case. Again, they interact, they aren't additive. This example, by the way, comes from the bible of heritability, The Bell Curve, which completely missed its own point in citing twin studies (almost completely white) to argue that the heritability of intelligence is fixed and thus IQ differences across races are primarily due to genetics . This argument has since been dismantled. Are there real genetic differences in women's upper body physical strength relative to men? Of course. Do we maximize those inherited differences by culturally encouraging men to develop their upper body more than women? Yes, yes we do.

Likewise, any argument for the fixedness of inherited gender differences is fallacious. Further, the way biological differences are discussed on this board serves to reinforce stereotypes. Even if there's a kernel of truth to those stereotypes, applying that to individuals is just intellectually lazy. Like other women who've weighed in here, I'm very strong on stereotypically male skills. I was recruited by the military, in fact, because I scored so highly on spatial reasoning on the old ASVAB test they gave to seniors back in the 1980s. I teach statistics to doctoral students in a top-20 program. I am not so good at the warm fuzzies, being much more analytical than most men even, and I hate the color pink.

I'll end this lengthy diatribe by agreeing, strongly, with Notmine that much of this is a gigantic threadjack.

1. Be cognizant of what we say to the newly betrayed and thoughtful in our responses in order to provide these people with the compassion they need.

2. STOP making insanely inflammatory, unfair and untrue pronouncements about WS when there is no evidence whatsoever to support these pronouncements.

3. REMEMBER that honesty without compassion is HOSTILITY

And for those who haven't seen the "spread her legs," "she was enjoying it ..." cruelty, I don't have time to dig those up but they are there. Someone on this thread admitted to posting just those types of comments, so it's not in dispute that it happened even if you didn't personally see it or remember it. This post was started to ask for us to remember compassion. Why argue with that?

EDITED to fix a typo.

[This message edited by GrayShades at 12:25 PM, August 12th (Wednesday)]

Thumos – Can’t see that you asked me a question so I don’t know what answer you are expecting from me.

Here’s a tip: Use google’s extended search to look for the terms you ask about on this site. I’m surprisingly amused by who use the term “cumdumpster” – it’s mainly BW describing the OW…

I haven’t participated on AHGuy thread for several reasons I won’t get into.

I did notice at least one poster that fit your criteria, but notice how that poster has few posts and has only contributed on that particular thread? It definitely raises red flags to me.

If that poster were to go to on to other threads in JFO where a BH shared his experience and insisted that each and every WW deserved to be handled delicately, get a second chance and so on and if many other posters did the same I would agree that it is a major issue.

If that poster hung about the divorce forum telling BS that was committed to D that he/she was making a mistake I would agree that it is a major issue.

If that poster hung around the Reconciliation forum telling every person that had doubts about R that D was never possible and they didn’t know a single person that had divorced successfully I would agree that it is a major issue.

That is exactly what the BTW group do. You can find a number of posters that can’t see any chance of reconciliation from any scenario, see infidelity in each and every case. Personally I remember the pain of infidelity was so intense that I chose to be CERTAIN that’s what people are experiencing before telling someone that shares his wife lied about her whereabouts that she’s probably screwing the local football-team.

Hikingout, I couldn't agree more and well-stated. I'm confused by this reference, however. Was there a specific instance where someone unloaded this vitriol? Is it a common occurrence here? I just haven't seen it.

It is common enough, yes. As I said, I don't think I am one for hyperbole. I certainly have seen it numerous times on this site and as you fully admit you have had that kind of commentary on your own thread, it just didn't bother you. I would argue that doesn't mean it wouldn't bother someone else, in fact I have received 2 messages this week from 2 newer BH's here that said this thread is very true and what they have experienced since being here. Maybe you are just used to "guy talk" and it just simply doesn't register. Maybe moving forward you will notice it more, and that alone might be worth this thread.

I don't read JFO very often because it's most prevalent there. I can't comment over there anyway and there are so many times I want to say try and be a bit gentler with this guy.

Do you really think the women who are quoting these things are making it up? And there are men (even you) on this thread that say it's been their experience. I just am not sure why you feel so resistant to it? Is it the origins of this thread and feeling like it was in response to something you said? I have not been over to look at the thread you said spurred this on, so maybe I just am missing where or why you feel defensive on it? I see you as a huge supporter of other BH, so I have to say I am a bit surprised. I have actually felt bad for you at times when it's happened on your thread, though you have always been able to handle yourself appropriately and you tell them to buzz off. I don't think really new, raw BH's are always in that position, they haven't had any time to process yet.

beyond teenage years people are more likely to judge a man by the calibre of his prior sexual partners.

I'd agree with that, the better looking the more "value" granted. Both still play, of course, if you can get 10 good looking women to vie for your attention, you're higher value than a guy who can only get one, but, point made, and I agree.

I am quite sure we all know we live in a shitty world but perhaps we are not here to revel in that shit but to help each others through it .

But is "helping people through it" mean "pretend there's not a huge pile of poop over there"? If so, that's where we disagree. I do think it's important to help people through it, but that requires an understanding of the poop pile that's become your breakfast/lunch and dinner, and will be for years, served up by your WS. There's just no good way to skirt around that, it's ever present. I suppose we can look past it once we understand the size and nature of the poop pile, but, often times, that's what's missing that gets the really offensive comments to start flying. A BH will come here and say "Oh yeah, they only kissed, one time". Or, using the poop analogy, "just one turd over there in the corner". Wake up man! It's not a single turd, it's a mountain, and you've got to crawl directly through it to get to the other side. If you want to go to your "happy place" and hide from it, that's fine, but I do think that posters who hit with the "wake up" messages are doing a service to others.

I posted my JFO on another board. And, wow, did I get a WAKE UP call from the men there. Plenty of "dude, she's lying, she f**ked him six ways from Sunday" and "I guarantee you she was a freak with him" and "Loved every inch of him" and plenty of the same stuff that often gets thrown at BHs here. You know what? While hard to read at the time, I'll say 2 things. First, and most importantly, nearly EVERY thing they said turned out to be true, confirmed by my W under intense interrogation. And second, thank God they helped me prepare for it because I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had the foresight to realize that "One time, with a condom, and it sucked" was about as close to the real answer as "I have a unicorn I'd like to sell you". How could they know? Why did they do it? Well, they knew because A's follow a pattern, a pattern I should have recognized from men I knew who had them, but it's a very easy pattern. If they were alone, they had sex, right? Well, that applies to lots of "A things". And why did they do it? I think they did it to prepare me for the reality of what was coming. It was like the "ding" on an airplane indicating to put on your seatbelt, because it's about to get rough.

Now, I am sure, the same group of guys who posted on my thread posted on other guys threads and were probably, at least sometimes, wrong. And then that guy breathes a sigh of relief because, "phew, at least THAT didn't happen". But, at least to me, a lot of this is just getting people ready for the inevitable or likely outcomes. Sad to say, but the "likely outcome" in all A's is usually "unbelievably awful". It just is, WS do absolutely AWFUL things, things that are beyond comprehension bad much of the time. There's no way to sugar coat and still keep any of the message at all. It's like trying to describe war without talking about death/people screaming, begging for someone to help them; it's the reality of war, it's grotesque to a level that it's simply impossible to imagine for most of us. Affairs, at least for me, the level of depravity wasn't impossible to imagine, I knew lots of guys who did it. What was impossible for me to imagine was my wife sneering as she walked up to an injured soldier and reveling in his pain as she slowly tortured him to death. But that's the reality of it, that kind of stuff is part and parcel of war, just like what my WW did is part and parcel of an A. Some are better, some are worse. But nobody comes out of it the way they went in, least of all those who get to see their WS's callous nature in its full "glory".

I do not believe that those kind of explicitly-stated assumptions about what their WW may have done are motivated by compassion for the BH. At all.

ETA damn typos

[This message edited by GrayShades at 12:37 PM, August 12th (Wednesday)]