She added: “Mumsnet users tell us that they feel in many cases difficulties in seeking diagnoses and treatment are driven by misogyny, with women’s pain seen as less serious or valid than that of men, and women’s health concerns [are] dismissed, belittled or ignored.
That the NHS does not provide timely treatment is not news. That the wimmins’ care is worse than the chaps, well.
The attention paid to breast cancer over the decades, as compared to that given to prostate, might not quite bear that out really.
How many of these doctors are female ?
My missus, during her illness, refused to see women doctors, because of their uncaring attitudes.
“Lifetime costs for women were 14% greater than for men, due to higher costs in the reproductive years and greater life expectancy” (https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/the-cost-of-inequality.pdf).
“In 2021 to 2023, males aged 65 years in England could expect to spend 10.1 years in good health … for females, it was 11.2 years.” (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/bulletins/healthstatelifeexpectanciesuk/between2011to2013and2021to2023)
Imagine what they would say on Mumsnet if these were the other way around.
Breasts are, among other things, designed to be male attention attractors. Prostates, not so much. So, it’s really The Patriarchy at work, dummy.
A few years back, after reading some gems on a Twitter account called ‘Mumsnet Madness’, I spent half an hour on Mumsnet.
If the NHS tried to treat the lunacy on that site it would collapse overnight. One of the shorthand terms/tags on the site is AIBU (Am I being unreasonable?), to which the answer is aways: yes, you fucking nutjob.
I was going to ask why we should care what a Mumsnet survey concludes anyway, but others seem to have beaten me to the punch.
Women whinge. Feminism nurtures constant grievance. So on X a woman whined:
‘Women deal with periods, pregnancy, and menopause. What do men have to deal with?’
Lee Anderson MP answered : ‘Try the Battle of The Somme’.
Theo – ‘Women deal with periods, pregnancy, and menopause. What do men have to deal with?’
Lee Anderson MP answered : ‘Try the Battle of The Somme’.
Kids these days. I’m still sad about the fall of Constantinople (1453)
“Mumsnet users tell us that they feel in many cases difficulties in seeking diagnoses and treatment are driven by misogyny, with women’s pain seen as less serious or valid than that of men, and women’s health concerns [are] dismissed, belittled or ignored.”
That’ll be the NHS that is 77% female then. Proof if ever it were needed that the people who hate women the most are other women.
The whole ‘women are more empathetic and caring’ thing is utter bullsh*t. I don’t know how this Big Lie came about, but its been pushed for far too long. I think its one of those ‘Well of course masks must stop viral diseases’ arguments, ie it sounds superficially plausible, but to anyone with a bit of knowledge and experience its obvious nonsense.
I guess because women are the ones who care for their own children (and largely do show empathy and care for them) everyone has assumed that you can extrapolate that to all humanity. When the reality is women’s care and empathy is like a small bubble around her and the people close to her – if you’re inside it you’re golden, if you’re outside it you’re no more than dogsh*t on her shoe.
Whereas men have a more broad brush version of empathy – nobody gets special treatment, but we try to be fair across the board, even to total strangers. And the concept of merited favour is very male – you earn the degree of empathy men will show you by your behaviour. Act like a twat, men will leave you to die in a ditch. Be a stand up member of the group, they’ll move heaven and earth to help you.
Of course it doesn’t help that the few men in the NHS are probably doctors and are thus suffering from superiority complexes anyway.
‘What do men have to deal with?’
Women.
Steve
I naturally still whinge about the battle of Yarmuk. (636 AD)
Bboy – based and Waltzing Matilda pilled.
Jim – if only we could harness the awesome power of GP’s receptionists, the NHS would save billions because nobody would see a GP.
Long experience of women over the years has taught me, most of them are obsessive over health matters. Left on the kitchen top to find this morning. A tube of “Gel for tired feet & legs”. Priced on label 2,90€. Must have been left by one of the gaggle was here at the weekend. Tired legs from what? Sitting at restaurant tables? The bit of dancing at the club? Any more than a kilometer they want a taxi.
The attention paid to breast cancer over the decades, as compared to that given to prostate, might not quite bear that out really.
The numbers of false positives and false negatives for breast or prostate cancer is (or was) so high that the tests were essentially worthless once added anxiety, false confidence and the expense of further investigation are factored in.
That women get mammographs and men decline the PSA may indicate that men have a rudimentary understanding of Bayes Theorem and women don’t.
@Steve – February 3, 2025 at 11:21 am
Jim – if only we could harness the awesome power of GP’s receptionists, the NHS would save billions because nobody would see a GP.
I thought they’d already implemented that scheme – it certainly appears that way!
The whole ‘women are more empathetic and caring’ thing is utter bullsh*t. I don’t know how this Big Lie came about, but its been pushed for far too long.
This something I realised a long time ago from watching people’s behaviour.
If a bloke asks for advice from a mate, the mate will usually think what would I do if I was my mate’s position & give advice based on that. That’s empathetic & caring.
Women don’t tend to do that. If asked, they’ll offer advice based on what’s good for them. Thus a woman will be asked “I’m really having troubles with my boyfriend, should I dump him? The reply she gives will depend on what’s good for her situation. If she’s got a boyfriend, she’ll want the friend to keep the boyfriend so they can continue going out as couples. And the last thing she wants is a spare woman around the circle could attract her boyfriend away from her. To her, unattached women are an unwanted threat. However, if she’s currently single, it’ll be dump him. Then her friend will become available to come with her looking for blokes.
And the principal applies right across the board. Women don’t want other women to be happier/ better off/ etc than them. And they don’t want them to get more sympathy than them. It’s actually women who lack empathy & are less caring. To women, all other women are competitors.
So look at it this way. Women say they are more empathetic & caring because they aren’t. If they were, they wouldn’t say it.
” Women say they are more empathetic & caring because they aren’t.”
As in the the old saying ‘The more he talked of honour the more we counted our spoons’.
The kindest gaggle of women I’ve ever seen were the young teachers at the ‘kindie’ we used in Oz. Each girl had clearly discovered her métier – looking after toddlers.
Mind you I couldn’t say the like about the council nursery school we used here. You could turn up with a child at 08:45 to meet a notice saying the school wouldn’t open until 09:15 because of a meeting.
I’ll also put in a word for the pleasant girls who taught me – if that’s quite the verb – at Sunday School. You didn’t have to believe their yarns to feel relaxed and happy in their company.
(Am I claiming to have been an apprentice atheist even in short-trousered days? Indeed I am.)
It’s the “faster we counted”, but the general principal.
You only have to look at utter self-centeredness of most female journalists.
Jim said:
“women’s care and empathy is like a small bubble around her and the people close to her – if you’re inside it you’re golden, if you’re outside it you’re no more than dogsh*t on her shoe. Whereas men have a more broad brush version of empathy – … you earn the degree of empathy men will show you by your behaviour.”
My highly dubious theory is that this goes back to hunter-gatherer days, on the assumption that men did the hunting, women the gathering.
Gathering is pretty much a zero-sum game. The more of you there are when you find a bush, the fewer berries you get each. There’s no benefit in cooperation, so a woman only goes off gathering with someone whose company she values more than the berries she’ll take.
But hunting repays cooperation. Those woolly mammoths (OK, deer of some kind) take some catching, and the more of you there are (up to a quite high point) the more you’ll catch, and even dividing it by more people, a bigger group will end up with more meat per man. So men work together as a team, even if we can’t stand the twat, so long as he’s useful enough to wave his arms and help drive the deer into the trap.
It’s probably bollocks, but it seems to explain a lot.
Yes, there are bitch-trolls-from-hell, alpha-females, queen bees, etc; and, yes, women are sexually competitive with each other; but empirical psychology shows that women are more agreeable, more empathetic and are better able to understand what another person is feeling, and employment data show that ‘caring’ jobs [nursing, social work, primary school ‘teaching’, etc] are overwhelmingly filled by women. Just sayin’!
RichardT
A plausible theory that explains a lot about how women shop. They forage for bargains, either alone or with a friend but never as a group. Men when shopping have a target and pursue their quarry…
” empirical psychology shows that women are more agreeable, more empathetic and are better able to understand what another person is feeling, and employment data show that ‘caring’ jobs [nursing, social work, primary school ‘teaching’, etc] are overwhelmingly filled by women. Just sayin’!”
‘Women are more agreeable’ – another way of saying women don’t like up front confrontation (understandably being the weaker sex and often have small children in tow), but will happily indulge in other forms of conflict in order to get what they want.
‘Women are more understanding of what other people are feeling’ – is not incompatible with the statement ‘Women will use their knowledge of what other people are feeling for their own ends’.
‘caring’ jobs [nursing, social work, primary school ‘teaching’, etc] are overwhelmingly filled by women’ – is that because they definitely want to work in those areas in order to help other people, or is is it because the alternative (working in dangerous and dirty environments where physical labour is required) is considered far less attractive? Choosing the lesser of two evils does not mean you are ideally suited for either role.