What I Mean When I Say "Men"

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Hello and welcome to Dandelion Tales. This podcast is sponsored by Polly Rafferty from Change the Script: Changing Internal Stories for a Better Future. I'm Polly Rafferty and welcome to the first ever episode of Dandelion Tales. First, I want to introduce you to myself and to the podcast. Dandelion Tales has been named Dandelion Tales mainly because I believe stories are like a dandelion seed. When was the last time you picked up a dandelion and blew that clock so that the seeds flew away and you had no clue where they were gonna go? A story's like that, and like a dandelion. Hello and welcome to another episode of Dandelion Tales. Today I just want to clarify before we get into any further into this and before I get loads of people going, oh, but it's not this and it's not that and it's not this. Just want to clarify a few things because I've had this said to me sometimes when I've been talking about what I do and why I do it and stuff like that. So I want to just set that out. Now, when I talk about men, I don't mean all men. The misogynists, the ones that are really causing the problems, the ones that are really backing the patriarchy, those are the men that I mean, the men that I'm talking about. The majority of men are fine, and the patriarchy is actually damaging them, the misogyny is damaging them and hurting them as well. But we need to empower those men as well to stand up and stand step forward. There was something in the news just recently about a gang rape of this poor woman by some men, and there was 50 other men in this group chat that knew about it, and not a single one did it, did anything about it. So this is bystander apathy at its worst, because everybody else is going to think that somebody else is going to do something so they don't have to. So we need to educate our men, our good men, that it's their responsibility to do something, to say something, to take action. We need to help empower them as well to turn around to their mate and say, Oh, that's just not on. You can't do that, you can't say that. Because every single man out there has sisters, they have mothers, they have aunts, they have daughters. They're connected with women in every single way. And if people don't say something to somebody, they don't always know they're doing something wrong, especially with the algorithms that are going out today, and the algorithms that just keep feeding you stuff that you've looked at. I mean, I was looking at something with EcoTalk for my phone, the Chris Packham initiative for mobile phones. And I just looked up my account the other day, and I keep getting adverts for it coming up on Facebook. You mentioned socks in a conversation, and you get bombarded with with Facebook ads for socks and things like that. If people are looking at things that are misogynistic or all of these dangerous things, like the patriarchy and all of that, Britain hates or whatever it is, that one that's all against immigration and things like that. That's all they're gonna get because Facebook wants them to stay there and to feed into it. So that's all they're gonna get. That's all the information they're gonna get. They're gonna get this from this and this, and it's all gonna come through to them. So they're gonna believe that everybody else in the world believes that. That's the way the world is. Those are the stories that they're taking in so that they then internalize those stories, then they could become part of them. And yes, we are indoctrinated to have certain beliefs. We've been bombarded with this for years, for generations and centuries, that the men are a higher power than women. At one point, a man was encouraged to go home and beat his wife to relax and things like that. This is it's going back a long, long way, but there's still the echoes of that from the past. And these echoes need to be challenged, they need to be silenced. And it's everybody's responsibility to challenge anything that is misogynistic, is violence towards women, is aggressive towards women, is detrimental towards women. Because women support men and men support women, and we're all there together in one big mishmash, and we're all trying to survive the world and trying to be happy. And the way to do that is to support each other. And we can't do that with the fear of not being understood, not being listened to, not being taken seriously. Women are taught not how to get raped, how not to get raped. They're told to not wear this, not wear that, not wear the other. Why are men not being taught how not to rape women? It's we get statistics where it's the women seem to be at blame for being raped. It's not 50% of women will have said faced some sort of this is just out of my head, I haven't got the right percentages available right at the top of my head. Probably more than that have been affected by sexual abuse or something like that. It doesn't tell you how many men have committed these rapes. It everything is always focused on the women. So when I talk about women, I'm talking about us genuinely, and yes, there are some nasty bitches out there that do horrible things and can do, but the percentage is way, way less than the men that do it. Yes, there are abusive relationships in same sex, same everything, you know. And I'm not talking about them because they are not the majority. They are appalling, it's horrible, it's not right to happen to anybody. Nothing like that should happen to anybody. But when I'm talking about men and women, it's the majority or the minority. For women, it's like the majority of us have suffered some sort of abuse, whether it's physical, verbal, or anything like that. It that we will have had some form of abuse over our lifetime, or we will experience some form of abuse in our lifetime, and women need to share their experiences so other women can be aware that they're not the only one, and to stop the shame behind it, because the women should not be feeling shamed for being abused or anything like that. It's the men that perpetrate it should be the ones that are made to feel ashamed. So we need to get our messages out there, get our stories out there, just try and share how it is to be a woman so that other people, other women don't feel alone, and men start to understand it. Because we only live from our own perspective. We uh have only experienced life from our own perspective. So men have experienced life from their perspective, from their gender norms, from the social stories they've been told, from the familial stories they've been told. They'll watch with the dynamics between their mum and their dad, or their their mums, or their dads, or and they'll watch those dynamics and they will learn from those. So if we can learn from other people, we can learn to transform our own dynamics within our own family unit, and then our family unit can spread out and share the dynamics onwards and onwards. So it's a ripple effect, really, when you're talking about these sort of changes. It's it starts off small and then grows. Unfortunately, men had violence behind it, and it didn't just subjugate women, it subjugated a lot of men as well. So the people with the power, the people with the weapons, the people with the the money were the ones that perpetrated the power, and then they just wanted more, and then they wanted more. So it's a very small minority of the patriarchy that are actually benefiting from the patriarchy. So a lot of other men there being because the the line is men go out to work, it's still there. Women have to go out to work as well now because we can't afford not to. But men have to, they feel they should be the breadwinner, they should be the ones earning the money. There's a really good book actually that I read called The Breadwinner. Can't remember who it was by, and that really opened my eyes to a lot of things, and a lot of things that men are struggling with as well in this society and with the social stories that are going on around them. So more men these days want to be part of the family, they want to be part of the family dynamics, they want to help raise their children, which is fantastic. And it is lovely over the years. I've seen more and more men on the school run, on the school pickup, and things like that, and that is to be applauded and that is to be supported. But unfortunately, these manly men that are there going, no, it's a man's role to go out to work, and there's still a very a lot of them are the ones that are still perpetuating the the stories and making it harder for the men that actually want to be at home with the children. Because in some circumstances, women can earn more than their partners or their husbands. They can earn more by doing by doing a job and going out. And some women want to go out and have a job and would love their h husbands to stay home and look after them. Sometimes both they want to share it. My husband and I are lucky enough to have been in a position where we were able to share the responsibilities. We'd both had part-time jobs, we've both had full-time jobs, and we've worked it around the family and the kids. At one point we were shifts in the wind, we'd pass each other as we were coming in and going out. But it worked for our family and it worked for our dynamics, and we both took care of our children. So it wasn't, oh, he was babysitting, he was taking care of his children. And it's language like they're babysitting or they're helping with the housework. It's that's what's perpetuating some of these problems because it they're not helping, they're just doing their share. And there's a lot of things that that men have been told is okay for them to do, which generally actually isn't, weaponised incompetence. It's one where they say, Oh, I can't do that, so you'll have to do it for me, or they do it badly, so you go, Oh, get it undo it yourself. So these sort of things have been told that they're actually acceptable in men. It's okay for a man to not be able to do it or to do it badly, because we accept that expect them to do it, because that's the story that we've been told for generations that our men are useless at housework, they're perfectly capable of housework. Absolutely perfectly capable of housework, they just don't want to do it. We don't want to do it either, but it's got to be done. So if you want to live in a decent, clean house, then you've got to do the housework. There's other people in this house that's capable of dusting. So I'm going to be doing this, and if nobody else does the dusting, I'll get round to it when I get round to it. So it doesn't always get done, but it does eventually get done. But it's like my husband does most of the vacuuming, he does, he organises the washing because I'm absolutely awful. He asked me the other day to take the washing out and hang it out, and I did. I did, I remembered that, but then I was I got busy doing something else, and I forgot to take the towels out of the dryer, so we had to wash them again because I'd put them in there because it makes them nice and soft. And I've forgotten, but it's my ADHD. So it's like they say, horses for courses, and it's whatever is your power, your strength within that relationship. And so it's fine to have that conversation. What is your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What do you like doing, what you not like doing, and that stops a lot of resentment and a lot of overb overwhelm and a lot of burnout, especially for women, because we take on so much because we've been programmed to, we've been told that, oh, we should be able to do this, we should be able to do that, we should be able to do the other. So we often feel like failures. I felt like a failure of a woman for years because I couldn't do it. I couldn't, that's not my superpower, that's not my ability. So we worked it through, and my mental health has been a lot better since we've done that, and we get on great. So there are times when when you might be wanting to do something and that isn't suitable for that dynamic. So just talk about it. Open communication is so important in a relationship. And I've gone off track a little bit. I do that a lot. None of this is scripted. I do not prepare a script beforehand. I might have a few pointers that I want to talk about, and I will talk about them, and then I might go off topic a little bit. But just bear with me and I will get back on track at some point, or I might just go on saying something even more interesting than I had ideas for in the first place. So what I wanted to come on today to talk about was what I mean when I say certain things. And I do research, I do use a AI for my research, but I do double check everything that I get. I have got books that I read that for my research, and I do go on and do Google searches and just general research myself. So I do try and research everything that I say. Some things are just my opinion, some things are just how I feel. Some of them are a bit out there sometimes. I do try and research everything. If I do bring up facts and figures, I will try and research them and find them so that they're they are as accurate as possible. Obviously, if I don't, I will disclose that and say I'm just pulling figures out of my head like I did earlier, just so I can back up everything that I say. So I am looking eventually to upset some people, probably, most likely, with what I'm saying, with what I'm doing, because they don't like it when people try and change things or people try and better themselves, because it makes their perch wobble a little bit and makes them feel a little bit unbalanced, and they don't like that. So when I am talking about men, please don't start showing go get getting all up in my face, and then my socials go, Oh, it's not all men, I know it's not all men. I wouldn't be married to one if it was all men, but it's a majority. There's a lot of men out there that aren't doing what men should be doing, and that's what I'm gonna say on the matter. For that, yeah, don't be a bystander, don't just sit there and watch things unfold, take action. If for for the men out there, if there's men out there listening, then please take action, say something, do something, just turn around to your mate and say, Yeah, that's not acceptable. I saw something on TikTok about a transgender man, a trans man, and he was saying he's happy with his transition, but it just does scare him for the female population because now he can hear what men are saying about them behind closed doors. And that's scary. That is really scary, and we can get on to transgender at another point because I just believe that people are people and it doesn't matter whether they were born male and now female or female and now male. And again, with that issue, the focus is always on male to female transgender, because I think men can't understand why somebody would want to become a woman. There's very little talk about female to male, because obviously, why wouldn't anybody want to be a male? It's all this thing about the the toilets that's been going around recently and having people having to use the toilets that that they were for the sex they were assigned at birth. Because men might dress up as women to access the toilet. This is my understanding of it. But if that's the case, then men don't need to dress up to walk into a woman's toilet. If a man's going to attack somebody, they don't care. They're not going to go into a women's toilet. The type of men that the type of men that are going to attack women or abuse women aren't going to dress up as women anyway, because that's degrading for them. So they're not going to do that anyway to get into a woman's toilet. It's not that that sort of thing. But it just means that trans men are going to have to go into the women's toilets. So men can just wander freely into the toilets. Have they actually thought about this? They haven't thought it through. They've thought of trans women only and not about trans men because the gender society, the stories of the society that we're in are saying that it's better to be a man than it is to be a woman. So why wouldn't you want to be a man? And why on earth would a man want to be a woman? And it's ridiculous. They don't they don't think things through. People don't think things through, I don't think, half the time. These are some of the little rants that you might get at some point. It's not quite what I was intending to come on to say today. But it's how I feel, and you'll have more of this. And I believe that for an equal society we need to speak up, stand up, and stand up for ourselves, stand up for each other, and support each other, be together within the society, be together within our families, and share the burden so that not one person is suffering more than the other. If a man's going out nine to five in a job that he hates, and a woman's stuck at home looking after the kids that she hates hates doing, she wants to be out there and doing stuff. Because the kids, they drive you crazy. I love them to bits, but they can drive you crazy, especially if that's those are the only people for day in, day out. And it's not necessary anymore for that to happen. And if a man's out there doing a 95 job that he absolutely hates, he should feel that he can come home and say, I hate this job. Can we work something else out? I want to spend more time with the kids. It's harder for a man to get a part-time job than it is for a woman to get a part-time job because society indicates that the man should be the breadwinner, and that is not the case anymore. They don't need to. We can look at our lives and decide, actually, this isn't working for us. We need to try and find something to do. And all we need is employers and people in power to realise that and they can then turn around and say, actually, we're going to make things more flexible for our men. Because then they can go and help their support their families, and they will become more loyal to the company. Sometimes I think people don't have their heads screwed on right. But hey, maybe hopefully I can help screw them on correctly. So if you've enjoyed this episode, again, I don't want to go over 20 minutes because I think hearing me run and rave for a bit is enough time for anybody, and I'll just get worse and worse if I carry on. So that's been another 20-minute episode of Dandelion Tales. Can't believe how quick these 20 minutes go. I hope it goes quickly for you too. If you've enjoyed my little rant today, then please do like and share and subscribe so that you will get more content from me. I will try and just give some educational content at times as well, without my opinion and my ranting. Thank you very much for listening. See you later. Bye.