How do you feel about men as a whole?

If you do at all. If you don't, great. That's probably the way it should be. (I think? I'm still a work in progress)

My T has been trying to tackle a lifelong mistrust of men. (My T is male)

My view? Men are pigs. (sorry)

I know that not all men behave that way, but my overall feeling is that their minds are all in the gutter sexually.

I came to think this way because of a few things:
1- I live in the city. Catcalling happens. A lot. I have even been groped on public transport.
2- TV/Media. I think that TV is unfair to men and paint them this way. As perverts, and as morons who only think about how their next move can lead to sex.
3- Private School. I went to an all girls private school. They really really didn't want us to have sex before marriage. So they drilled it into us regularly that all men are pigs, and we should not trust them.

I'm happily married. My husband is respectful and loving and kind, but I still think he has an inner pig. My T doesn't think it's healthy.

It's hard to deny the differences. Men have their hormones that will affect their personality, women have theirs. We are different.

How can I reframe the way that I feel about men? What is your view?

I did not grow up feeling safe around Males or Females , I learn at a very young age both are driven by sex , drugs and drinking , anger , porn , violence , so to me that was normal .

I was sexually abuse by female's and Males ( not at the same time ) threw out my life .

So for me both sexes are = not one is better then the other they both have there faults .

My husband is my best friend and he drives me nuts and I drive him nuts but he dose take care of me and I owe him my life .

I never thought my best friend would be a male but he is .
Deep down inside I do fear men in general , do to my adopted father that male agression " triggers me " into a frozen little girl scared

I don't trust either gender at all, but for different reasons. Women can be real *****es. Myself included. I don't feel like I belong anywhere.

I have problems with both genders. Being hetero I love and am attracted to men, but I also think that universally men don't truly value women as anything other than sex objects. As a child I was encouraged to be a thin attractive nicely dressed girl who displayed very feminine characteristics, and it always seemed humiliating and devaluing to me. At the same time that I feel men deep down dislike women, I am also not a huge fan of women. Women have always seemed emotionally unpredictable to me, with irrational wild mood swings. I suppose I'm a traditionalist, I think men are dumb pigs and women are crazy. Of course, I also come from a pretty F'd up home.

I used to trust. When I was young I was too trusting. My experiences have changed me. I find it hard to trust people now.

I married when I was 25 despite a gut feeling that said don't do it. We had already set a wedding date and my fiance pressured me when I said I wanted to wait. We divorced about 7 years later. He was a jerk but I am glad we had my son.

I met a man about 2 years after that and we developed an intimate relationship. For the first 7 years or so it was wonderful. We were happy. He was a good father to my son. But then... He met a guy who was trafficking drugs. I thought it was just weed. But it was also meth. My BF became moody, unpredictable and progressively more violent. He never used the meth in my presence so I was confused by his changing behavior. I did not know about the meth until after I killed him in self defense.

I no longer trust people. Not men, not women, not family. I love my son but I cannot trust him 100%. I have learned people can change and if someone can be so kind for 7 years and then change how can I trust anyone not to change?

I prefer animals. Their character doesn't change. I had a wonderful horse, Dusty, for 12 years and I knew what to expect from him. He could be stubborn at times but he was always gentle. And I always treated him gently even when he was stubborn. I was patient and he learned to do what I asked him to do. After we bonded I trusted that horse 100% and I believe he trusted me. He had no hidden agenda like people often do. I never had to go into the field to get him. I just sang out his name and he came to me. Often he was rewarded with a food treat. At Halloween I cut up apples and put them in a tub of water and he would bob for apples. Sometimes he would press his face up against mine and he would breathe my breath and I, his.

My horse died a couple of years ago at the age of 24. I miss my relationship with Dusty more than any human relationship.

I only trust animals as well. I get more emotional about pet deaths than human ones so far in life.

I like the fact that men don't beat around the bush -- at least at work - and they play fewer games. But they are stuck up and look out for themselves. I find men and women attractive. Only lived with a man once and it was a disaster. Not sure a woman would be any better. So I remain alone which is mostly ok. On the whole animals are better than people, both the pets and wild ones. I wish there were animal smilies and emoticons on PC.

I like men much better than women. I don't like women much at all. There are some women in my AA group who keep asking me to come to their women's meeting, and I have absolutely no interest. Why would I want to sit around a room with a bunch of women?
I don't like that I'm a woman. I know how to use it when it suits me, but I'd much prefer to be male, or genderless. I'm going through peri-menopause and it really reminds me how "female" my body is. Rats!
I was Daddy's Girl. Men are smart and safe (and easily manipuated when I was that kind of person). Women are not interesting to me.

I wonder if you could come up with a more neutral way of talking about your husband's 'inner pig,' and if that would good enough for the reframing. Like instead of thinking of it as inner pig, it's ... a more vigorous sex drive? I don't know - I don't know what the language would be. I think that you are right that men tend to be different in that way from women, but there's probably a more factual way of describing it.

But I think changing the language is what I would use for the reframing.

I liked it before puberty when it didn't seem to matter what sex you were. My husband and I are androgynous, and that's fine by me. I can trust him, and though he's very lustful, he's neither piggish nor a perfect gentleman. After puberty I disliked females, because they got all weird. Pretty soon I disliked everyone. Now I feel I've risen above all that and am not engaged in the culturally defined gender stuff. I can focus on fostering harmony, awareness and good communication with my best friend ie husband. We've had our squabbles and tough times and prefer the new patterns mentioned in the previous sentence. Not always easy, but so worth it. The rest of the world can be full of crazy battles and finally we have peace at home. I want to keep it this way. I feel very appreciative of animals because they are rarely liars. People do change, and so it's important to focus on my/our highest values, such as openness, communication, etc, as a protection against degrading changes.

Thanks, everyone, for sharing your experience in this thread.

I make friends easily with (certain kinds of) men, and not so much with women, but I suspect that is because I am more nervous around women, and care more whether or not they like me. Sometimes men can be easier to talk to, but they nearly always end up disappointing or frustrating me in some major way that has to do with their maleness. As far as the men who are not my friends - well, I try hard not to have hateful of angry feelings for anyone, but men make themselves easy to dislike. I don't like the way men act around or treat women. I don't like the way men believe that the world is made for them, first and foremost. I don't like the entitled anger that some men demonstrate, and seems to happen only with men.

In general? No, I don't like men at all. I wish I didn't have to deal with them.

I like men as much as I like women; in that pretty much everyone has to pass a few basic filters for me to like them at all.

1) Treat the waitstaff/counter persons like they're relevant
2) Have compassion
3) Be honest
4) Be approachable

As long as these four things are met, I'll generally like anyone without regard for their sex or gender. There are things that are socially/culturally engrained in men that drive me crazy when I run into them, though, and same with women (including myself!) Since I study anthropology, I tend to step back a lot and look at the big picture when a man acts like a pig or a woman acts like a shallow twit, and look at what social factors are influencing this blind obedience to stereotypes.

The cool thing is, more and more I notice that it's acceptable to flaunt contradicting those stereotypes. A man who once hid his moisturiser now just says "Hey, I'm metrosexual" and keeps right on lotioning up. Men are now permitted (more so than a decade ago, anyway) to admit to emotions, insecurity, eating disorders, and so on. Women are definitely much more permitted to wear trousers, not care about getting married, not want to have children, or want to work in construction. I'm not saying that all of these things don't have detractors, but it's no longer so socially stigmatised. So, with these changes, a lot of the assigned "masculine" and "feminine" attributes that really only got set in stone when the Cult of Domesticity became the reigning social control are also getting wobbled off their tracks.

I know guys who hate sports and women who won't miss a football game, men that want to get married and women who couldn't care less. Guys who don't want to have cheap meaningless sex and women who collect one-offs like postage stamps. The social norms are a'changing, and I say huzzah for that!

I don't like men but I'm also sexually attracted to them(and women). I really just actually hate testosterone and what it does to the brain. I find the world would be so much simpler without sex and stupid stuff like that.
Sometimes I feel really compassionate towards them and other times I wish they could all be off the face of the Earth.

I don't really care about people's gender, but generally I often find women more interesting than men (men and women are equally shallow and ditzy IMO, it just depends on the person - I don't really hang in crowds where anyone is particularly much shallow or stereotypical). I think it is because with women, sex doesn't get in the way. To clarify: I don't really have that much sex. I've had quite a few sex partners, but also had dry spells of a year or even more. So it's not that I always get attracted to men or anything. It is just that I feel they look at me differently because there is some primal drive in them that makes them think about sex first when they see a woman. I have a lot of wonderful male friends, and I think they are past that point with me, we are basically like siblings now. What confuses and angers me, is that even if we (we are a friend group of both men and women), the women in our group, talk a lot about what we hate when men do, or about respectless, rude, gross or even creepy men you meet when going out, some of my male friends still act like that. Not towards us, but towards other women. This enrages me. It is as though they do not understand that other women would probably feel the same about it as we do, or something. I don't understand it. That makes me a bit angry with men, because it makes me think they don't really care how women feel about their advances, they feel entitled - even if they have female friends or sisters who tell them how uncomfortable it is.

That being said, I also have some really wonderful male friends. Particularly the ones that are 1) in a relationship or 2) identify as feminists, and thus are very aware of the sexual harassment etc. women face. They also get angry when other men act like this. So I know not all men do. And gay men, I love them because they never see you as a sex object at all. One of my best friends is a gay man, and I feel that he does not see me as a competitor as some types of women do and he does not see me in a sexual way. It is just about our personalities, we have a lot of things in common. I am sure people think we're together when we're out, we hold hands and stuff sometimes, it's just because we feel so safe being with each other and we have a lot of fun. I have never had any sexual or otherwise attraction to him and I know he hasn't with me. And I know he will never think of women sexually and thus not see them differently (which I think some men do, involuntarily or not, when they think of the women they talk to and see comitting sexual acts with them - in a way I think it sort of degrades women in many men's minds, but I am not always sure they realize this).

I have no real bias either way. Most of my bad experiences have been with men but I understand that the few I've run into aren't the norm.

The need to be masculine or macho and not be seen as weak can lead to a lot of pressure for men which in turn leads to less desirable behaviour in their attempts to fit in but it also makes it harder.

The successful suicide rate for men is much higher than the female in part because there is no room for emotions in a "mans" world so too many are trying to fight on their own.

The cases of male eating disorders are steadily increasing too. Women are not the only ones being objectified and the pressure on men to be the ripped six packed model is growing.

Dare to reject a woman's advances and his sexuality or masculinity is questioned because a man should always be up for it.

Then there are the instances of female to male domestic violence. Again that macho facade leads to hidden suffering and often times they are not believed when they do go to the authorities because how could a big strong man be scared of a woman?

Over all, both genders have their challenges and faults.

There are certainly more than enough men out there willing to put their raging misogyny on display. (I once read a comment from an MRM that blamed women for WWII after they voted for Hitler because he was attractive. ) but I've seen my share of misandry (Ironic that that word should be marked as spelled wrong.) as well.

Overall most men are struggling their way through life just like us women.

I don't like men. I think almost all men are assholes. They can't be trust, they are rude, they don't have manners, they are disgusting.
I thinks this from experience. There are very few men that are good.
They say women are *****es, mean, play games. But from my experience boys and men are much worse then women.
I'm straight, often I wish I wasn't.

I love men. Its the boys pretending to be men i have a problem with. Real men, that are kind caring and supportive? I love them. If only so many boys didnt pretended to be men, the world would be a bit better of a place...

I believe that there are good men and bad men. I know that there are some good men out there.

I am heterosexual and I would like to get married someday. Yet I'm afraid of dating or getting married because I don't want to end up with someone bad.

Depressingly enough, I've come to believe that even the kindest men who try their hardest to see women as equals are still going to end up having countless built-in biases that they don't want to give up. Obviously I don't treat guys any different from others except that these days I'm less inclined to spend time around them in the first place. (I'm asexual and biromantic so if I ever date again, it doesn't have to be a man.)

I don't really like them at all. However, I have learned that they respond favorably for the most part to the culturally accepted femininity displays (soft spoken, gentle gaze, nice smelling flowery perfumes, soft laughter and accommodating posture, soft flowy dresses that show the female form...etc ad nauseum) so I use that to my absolute advantage irl. But, underneath the mask I show them is a tigress that's usually strategically plotting for her own gain. I will always do what I must. Women are generally masters of this. The real me is quite 'masculine' and rough. I have to make a conscious effort to switch to 'girlie' mode at times. I hate that life has to be this way...that you have to be fake to survive.