I watched them all. The second one (hysterectomies) was most impactful. I might break up my responses a bit. If I don’t get to them all in this post I’ll get to the missing ones later. (I don’t, I only wrote about this one)
Hysterectomies:
I’m surprised by how bad this seems in terms of prevalence. Taking it at face value, it made me wonder if all men really are that bad. (“All” here could mean like 75%, enough so that it’s the norm not the exception.) I really hope not. I have sympathy for the women described. I’m curious about their spouses and home-life too – would there be lots of problems or is this kind of thing commonly latent?
I’m more critical the rest of this post, but it’s not my intent to lessen the experience of the women described.
I think Bonniedoes (author) is biased to some extent in that it doesn’t sound like she was in a relationship and she’s seeing a small sample in a biased context (women who have sought out support groups). So I’m not sure it’s wise to draw conclusions besides that the bad stuff is happening to some degree. I also wonder what the take-home handout is after a hysterectomy (probably nothing).
The US has like 600k hysterectomies annually (about 2x other western nations), so it’s possible this is actually a pretty small problem, but it’s hard to tell. I’m also curious about culture since the US has much higher religiosity which I’d guess correlate with more traditional views on “wifely duties” (as one commenter’s MIL put it). IPV incidence looks higher in the USA than other western countries (maybe up to 2x).
The title is interesting “Animals actually wouldn’t even be this cruel”. Nature and animals absolutely would be this cruel (putting aside the actual capacity for cruelness). Animals die after having their insides ripped out all the time, and what looks like rape is common. She’s not really making that point though (and later, 5:20, compares the male abusers to “wild, rabid animal[s]”. Rather it seems like she’s making a point about the lack of humanity, empathy, respect, etc shown by the spouses.
I didn’t like part about cutting dicks off. Understandable but the video has 60k likes / 300k views so kind of irresponsible. Also cruel.
Towards the end she says some interesting things:
How much, uh, do you have to view your partner as inferior to you and as subhuman that you know that they just had a surgery that involves nothing going in the kitty cat and still, because you want to get your rocks off, and because you’re a fucking animal and you have no self control, you still make your partner do things… knowing it could literally kill them. Or irreparably and horrifically harm them.
Getting one’s rocks off and having no self control seem like a small part of the story. Like the husbands could just masturbate (and arguably with a 6-12 week recovery time this is the only viable alternative). The “no self control” part isn’t about frequency (at least not entirely) because combined with masturbation it doesn’t present a direct problem. The animal part though makes sense since there’s a direct disregard for one’s wife’s welfare, comfort, long term health, etc. I wonder if these people see everyone else like that or just their partner or all women generally.
I don’t like the misandry at the end (after the above quote).
The Comments:
I am mostly just writing my immediate thoughts here, so they can get off topic a bit. I mention the likes for top level comments too since it seems relevant how popular various comments are.
THE BEAR. THE BEAR. THE BEAR. THE BEAR. THE BEAR. [repeated another 15x or so]
4.7k likes but other bear posts had a more. I understand (emotionally) this position more than I have before.
One thing that occurs to me is that, thinking of women picking the bear, it makes a lot more sense thinking about it as a choice between a bear and some particular man (or group). Ofc when someone picks the bear we don’t know which man their thinking of, but I think that would be curious as a follow up question.
I’ve never been so grateful to be a childless single woman.
2.9k likes. First thought was sad because I don’t like people feeling vindicated for anti-natalist ideas.
Second though, it strikes me as an odd thing to say considering that the OP is about hysterectomies and ended with the claim that men will always leave disabled women for someone 10 years younger.
Working in healthcare opened my eyes to these issues. Nurses have told me about walking in rooms and having to forcefully remove men from women who had just given birth, had surgeries, traumatic accidents, comas, you name it. I can’t imagine the stories we don’t hear about.
800 likes. I might ask someone IRL how common this is.
[Possibly reacting to the end about men leaving disabled women] Everyone in health care knows this. There’s more. Most men leave a terminally ill wife. Most women do not leave a terminally ill husband; every cancer hospital has counseling for women to prepare them for this reality.
7.9k likes. I checked and while data is scarce, one study found men left 21% of the time, and women 3%.
Republicans are trying to put an end to no fault divorce.
8.1k likes. Forced sex + tearing stiches sounds like rape + grievous bodily harm to me, which should be grounds for divorce. I get the feeling that with the no fault divorce topic, among feminists, any opposition is seen as wanting legalized marital SA or something. I wonder what the view is among the republicans she’s thinking of.
That said, no fault divorce has always seemed like a poorly discussed topic to me. It seems like the feminist view is either make marriage trivial to dissolve (no fault divorce included), or go back to what we had pre 70s. But what we used to have was stupid and had a short list of conditions for acceptable divorce. Example: one reason was infidelity, which produced a cottage industry (pre NFD) for staging SFW but scandalous or risqué photos to facilitate mutually agreeable divorce.
While I agree with no fault divorce in principle (why do you want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to be anymore, anyway?) I think people don’t take marriage that seriously anymore which is not great. I guess if anything I’m against no-responsibility divorce, where courts don’t take into account context and how each partner is behaving (sometimes this hurts men, and sometimes this hurts women).
“I don’t see your mouth bleeding tho”
396 likes. Also,
when I would have a cyst rupture my ex would say, you still have a mouth… one reason he is an ex
2.7k likes. While oral seems fine if both parties want to, I sympathize with the objectification. Also I would guess that most women wouldn’t be in the mood with any downstairs pain.
First reply to cist comment:
The first time someone said this to me, I replied, “You have a hand, use it.” He smacked me, I gave him a black eye and that was the end of our relationship. I wish I had stayed that strong, but dating really wore me down and it became harder to stand up for myself.
Fair response. BF is the asshole. I struggle to figure out how women end up in these relationships sometimes.
Maybe this is one of the reasons that women shit-test.
my ex husband (father of my children) waited 6 months without asking ONCE when I said “im not ready” after my 6wk checkup after our first child. never asked at all after our 2nd child until I said something, and then later when I divorced him, he still helped me in my recovery with my hysterectomy 2 months after I filed and we had been separated because I was struggling more than I thought. no questions asked. we were not compatible at all, but he was at least not going to make me suffer in that way
673 likes. Later in that thread (same author):
[…] I was just trying to say that some men are still decent. […]
The husband here seems kinda detached. I’d want updates, not just for the sake of resuming sex, but also because it’s relevant to her recovery in general. Maybe this isn’t the full picture, though. It is nice to see someone mentioning that decent men exist despite the complications in her story.
this is such an unpopular opinion but this is why i believe in waiting as long as possible during the dating phase, to see how they respond to not being able to get physical. sometimes these situations or childbirth are the first time in the relationship that women get a chance to see their true nature.
139 likes. I agree with this (now, not 5+ years ago). Something like 3 months instead of 3 dates (or 1). But it only works in a society where women apply this generally, not just for the guys they see as having long term potential (otherwise there are incentive and dynamics problems). I don’t think no sex before marriage is viable anymore outside of specific communities.
My girlfriend is getting a Pap smear (which sounds painful) in a few weeks and I wouldn’t even dream of doing ANYTHING like that until she’s telling me she’s good to go and fully healed, let alone something as intense as a hysterectomy
127 likes. IDK how old this guy is but I feel like one should know that a pap smear is routine. (He’s corrected in replies at least.) I know sex ed is pretty bad and inconsistent in the US though. Apparently some countries have replaced pap smears, favoring a cervical screening test that can be self administered.
All men:
I was thinking about the all men thing the past few days. There is kind of an obvious way to put it that’s true, which is that given an appropriate historical context and upbringing, all people are capable of doing terrible things. I don’t think that’s the argument being made, though. The argument is that it’s salient.
If it’s true, then I don’t think it shows up in IPV data. Given most western countries have something like a 25% incidence over a woman’s life, and that men can be responsible for more than one woman responding that they’ve experienced IPV, my guess would be 5-25% of men are problematic in the ways described above. It could theoretically be more than 25% of men, too, but that would need to count men who have never been in a relationship, or have a weird skew in relationship distributions.
In terms of the idea that men would SA someone if they could get away with it, IPV seems like a reasonable proxy, but not perfect.