Quote Originally Posted by Annabelle Larousse View Post
In my view, popular culture tends to sink to the lowest common denominator, and it can be misleading to look to it for what people really think on various matters.
Yet it sometimes defines the terms of discourse. If some particular nonsense is repeated often enough, people will get a sense that everybody believes it, even if they don't really agree with it themselves. Eventually, they will simply accept that that is the way things are, and will start acting in accordance with the nonsense, so they won't feel like an outsider. It's called "groupthink." It's the principle behind propaganda.

Quote Originally Posted by Annabelle Larousse View Post
I firmly believe from my experience in life that men have a much better view of women than is commonly believed.
Which men? And which women?

There are a lot of men out there; billions in fact. And a lot of men just at CD.com. And they're all different. As are women, and any subset of the set "women."

I have seen a number of threads here at CD.com in which posters have expressed themselves in ways which strongly suggest that they don't actually have any interest in what women think, say, or feel. There are posts which prefer to deal with women as stereotypes. Go elsewhere on the web, and it's a lot worse. Misogyny is rampant.

This isn't all men. But it's not a negligible number, either.

Even if we assume that everyone in this thread is englightened, sees women as individuals, and shows them the respect they are due as human beings and who they are as individuals, we need to keep in mind that the women in our lives deal with an awful lot of men who aren't that way. We may choose to ignore the existence of those men, but the women in our lives do not have this privilege. And it affects how they relate to us "good guys." (Assuming that "we" -- for some definition of "we" -- are, in fact "good guys," and not just kidding ourselves.)