Differing reactions to men & women getting abused

[Cheezy the Wiz]

@All jumping at Cheezy for his past: Don't tell me that he's the first case of born-again critical theorist of some sort that you've met?

Indeed.

There is something to be said for "no true believer like a convert", but that doesn't take away from the fact that he dug himself out of a pretty deep hole, so his thinking toolset is probably pretty sharp!

Thanks.

I quoted "echo-chamber" since it was Crezth who brought it up now, so no irony...

It was used more liberally in my recent thread.

To clarify, I meant that you guys seem to visit the reddit MRA sites more than anyone. Does anyone of us 'crypto-MRAs' visit any such sites? I've never been to one. I've learned about this from the 'feminists' here. ..and if you go back to the start of the thread you'll notice that it didn't start with slander of feminists. It got off to a bad start after some pretty antagonistic posts by Crezth. If it got less high-strung after some of you left, it might be because the tone improved somewhat.

I don't visit MRA sites, it's rather MRAs who come to the feminist pages to lecture us on how it's all just biology and human nature, etc etc. Hell, a simple post on Facebook of a feminist article or image, and my male friends come out to denounce it and voice their opposition to it. You can read any comment section (there's a reason they say "never read the comments") of any article remotely about the topic, or hell, even a normal article about women in general, and see the utterly despicable attitudes people have about women. A few months ago we had a few threads in OT about Rape Culture, once that topic began to get more attention, and the amount of victim-blaming was astounding. It continues everywhere, in our courts, in our media discourse, on the streets every day. You don't have to frequent feminist media organs to see that, you just have to ask questions, pay attention to the words people use and how they portray things, and look for the dog that does not bark.

And I read about them. There's been intense debate in recent years about the MRA character, and whether or not they "exist" outside of reddit subforums and Facebook. As recent events should demonstrate, they do indeed. I'm not so alarmist as some, who think this is an "awakening of MRAs" entering some new and more active stage, but I do think it's a wake-up call that these people really exist, really interact with women on a daily basis, and are "normal-appearing" enough to talk themselves out of a property search by a police officer. This is clearly a problem, and it shouldn't be ignored, dismissed, or explained away as anything else but misogyny resulting from an onmipresent patriarchal ideology reproduced from cradle to grave.

By the way, I never called anyone here an MRA, a crypto-MRA, a sexist, or a misogynist. At best, I would have referred to an action or belief as such, although I do believe I said something along the lines of "the ideology of patriarchy and sexism affect all of us all of the time, and we can't escape it," but that's not the same thing as calling everyone a crypto-MRA! All these labels are things people seem to have assumed themselves, I never said it. I realize this also comes about as a way of exaggerating your opponent's position in order to make them sound more extreme or unreasonable, as well, which was been plentifully practiced towards me.

Since I can't call you guys feminists. Is 'crypto-feminists' the appropriate word?

Allies. I mean, feminist is fine in conversation, I guess, for brevity's sake, I just wanted it to be understood that it's not something I identify myself as, and that radical feminists make this distinction. In our internal discourse the specificity would matter.

Where do you get these ideas from? gender studies? books? certain communities?

All of the above. I subscribe to certain blogs and such, but also news media, opinion pieces, and books.

These are not exactly new concepts, either. You can trace most of what I've said to mid-20th century, in The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, among others.

I wonder if you know how ironic it is that, prior to Loppan's quotation of it, it had in fact only been used by yourself and Crezth, posts 75 and 211, respectively.

As I noted above, it was much more common in my recent thread than here, but it has nonetheless appeared.

That would be from posts 197-207. The only back-patting that went on was me thanking Rash for helping make my anti-patriarchy post more precisely worded!

No, almost every other post is "I agree" "Agreed" "this is such an interesting discussion of feminism," all made toward and between people who foamed at the mouth when the feminist opposition was present and vocal.

Skipping a lot of posts admittedly, but here is my (perhaps irrelevant) observation: the root cause of the disparity in society's treatment of male victims of domestic violence vs female victims is... the construction of "maleness" as created and maintained by men.

"Take it like a man" is the knee-jerk reaction you would probably get from most men learning of another man being abused by a woman. Or "ooh you got molested by a woman, hot" or something equally stereo-typically "manly." The idea that men should shut up and take it and act like men and not complain--that complaining is for women--is a male construct. So I get confused when people blame "feminism" or worse, women in general, for this disparity.

So to me, creating a healthier awareness of male abuse starts with a healthier male gender identity and male sexuality. One that does not shame other men for being physically or sexually beaten by "the weaker sex."

I think you're absolutely right. As I was trying to explain earlier, this is a consequence of patriarchy, which defines both female and male roles and identities, so when feminism gives rise to some sticky situations for men which seem unfair, that's not feminists stepping on masculine toes, it's patriarchy buckling and folding under the pressure of its own contradictions (which I worded as "coming back to bite men in the ass"). It's not women who are responsible for creating the "expectations of men," we created it about ourselves. When they reinforce it, it's only because they are participating in that ideology.

I
This is what Cheezy is asking you guys to do: Take a few seconds to shut up and listen, instead of retreating to your reddit echo-chambers to hear about what idiots women are.

I never told anyone to shut up, but I did ask them to listen (although the two do generally go hand in hand).

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Simply pointing out "that person is weak!" might be a "statement of fact" but it serves exactly zero utility whatsoever. It serves no purpose other than removing blame from the abuser and making it more difficult to treat the abused.

I agree. Again I feel like you haven't grasped what I even argued from the get-go. Which was that - never mind our attitudes - there will still be a notion of weakness. Simply due to the facts of the matter. And that this is not so much the case with women not because they weren't weak but because we excuse their individual weakness with their sex. Which however only reinforces the notion of weakness on part of the man.

 

[Oruc]

And I read about them. There's been intense debate in recent years about the MRA character, and whether or not they "exist" outside of reddit subforums and Facebook. As recent events should demonstrate, they do indeed. I'm not so alarmist as some, who think this is an "awakening of MRAs" entering some new and more active stage, but I do think it's a wake-up call that these people really exist, really interact with women on a daily basis, and are "normal-appearing" enough to talk themselves out of a property search by a police officer. This is clearly a problem, and it shouldn't be ignored, dismissed, or explained away as anything else but misogyny resulting from an onmipresent patriarchal ideology reproduced from cradle to grave.

Are you still think that Rodgers was Mra?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Are you still think that Rodgers was Mra?

I was initially skeptical about his direct connection to MRAs, but yes, now that more information is available about his writings, his self-identification with Men's Rights and hatred not just of women, but of feminism (among many other things), is readily apparent. He was an MRA, not just an accidental lookalike.

 

[Oruc]

I was initially skeptical about his direct connection to MRAs, but yes, now that more information is available about his writings, his self-identification with Men's Rights and hatred not just of women, but of feminism (among many other things), is readily apparent. He was an MRA, not just an accidental lookalike.

We both know this is complete bullcrap.

Elliot didn't kill people because women turned him down, Elliot killed people because everyone else saw women turn him down. Rejection is easy to survive, but for a narcissist like Elliot, rejection meant that he was revealed to the world as impotent and undesirable.

Ask yourself: why did he kill men and women? Why did he write a ridiculous manifesto? Why did he spend so long talking about everything? Why was he obsessed with the relationship itself and not with one specific woman?

 

[Gori the Grey]

I never told anyone to shut up, but I did ask them to listen (although the two do generally go hand in hand).

When you ask someone "Why comment?" (hissy fit #3) or tell them to "leave the thread" (train bias #207) or tell them that, as men, their opinion categorically doesn't count (train bias #256), they tend to experience it as being told to shut up.

Your comment that you don't even need to read the posts on this site because you already know what they're going to say doesn't suggest that you care about listening too much.

I don't visit MRA sites, it's rather MRAs who come to the feminist pages to lecture us on how it's all just biology and human nature, etc etc. Hell, a simple post on Facebook of a feminist article or image, and my male friends come out to denounce it and voice their opposition to it. You can read any comment section (there's a reason they say "never read the comments") of any article remotely about the topic, or hell, even a normal article about women in general, and see the utterly despicable attitudes people have about women.

I think you carry some of your righteous outrage from your participation on those other sites over into your participation on this site. I'm not claiming there's no crypto-MRA in the comments here. In fact, these threads have put my antennae up to that too, and you'll find me making common cause with you in some cases in the future. But a lot of the posts are quite explicitly not, and when you use phrases like "the men on this site," you speak categorically, in ways that look past more nuanced posts, even more feminist-ally posts that just draw a different conclusion than you do about a particular case. Light Cleric has been begging you for two threads to acknowledge that he did go seek the opinions of women of his acquaintance regarding the California bus sign.

Anyway, the s-storms about to break. Huff post is reporting on a Detroit men's-rights convention in June.

 

[Light Cleric]

I think you carry some of your righteous outrage from your participation on those other sites over into your participation on this site. I'm not claiming there's no crypto-MRA in the comments here. In fact, these threads have put my antenna up to that too, and you'll find me making common cause with you in some cases in the future. But a lot of the posts are quite explicitly not, and when you use phrases like "the men on this site," you speak categorically, in ways that look past more nuanced posts, even more feminist-ally posts that just draw a different conclusion than you do about a particular case. Light Cleric has been begging you for two threads to acknowledge that he did go seek the opinions of women of his acquaintance regarding the California bus sign.

Pretty much this, yeah. I had only been giving this thread and others an occasional cursory glance but I did feel the need to comment when someone said something about most sex workers knowing what they're getting in to because that triggered a flat "what" and set off big alarms in my head, or whatever thread that was where people put some blame on women being raped, or egregious dumb stuff like that. Beyond that, I pretty much realized that any kind of detail or nuance was going to be ignored so there was little point in going beyond that because, hey, I'm just going to be stereotyped anyway.

 

[Crezth]

We both know this is complete bullcrap.

Elliot didn't kill people because women turned him down, Elliot killed people because everyone else saw women turn him down. Rejection is easy to survive, but for a narcissist like Elliot, rejection meant that he was revealed to the world as impotent and undesirable.

Ask yourself: why did he kill men and women? Why did he write a ridiculous manifesto? Why did he spend so long talking about everything? Why was he obsessed with the relationship itself and not with one specific woman?

This would be a salient point if narcissistic personality disorders (NPD's) didn't otherwise function normally in everyday life. Yeah, he exhibits a lot of the traits of NPD, but that wasn't the problem by itself.

He also was never really turned down by women. As some of the news sites have been reporting, he never even attempted to court a woman's affection. His manifesto has very few examples of him interacting with women beyond dumping sodas on them. He called it "rejection" when random women he'd say "hi" to on the street didn't say "hi" back. So he had a serious delusion going on. Aye, he's probably not a run-of-the-mill MRA. But he certainly identified with the movement, deluded or no.

 

[Rashiminos]

This would be a salient point if narcissistic personality disorders (NPD's) didn't otherwise function normally in everyday life. Yeah, he exhibits a lot of the traits of NPD, but that wasn't the problem by itself.

He also was never really* turned down by women. As some of the news sites have been reporting, he never even attempted to court a woman's affection. His manifesto has very few examples of him interacting with women beyond dumping sodas on them. He called it "rejection" when random women he'd say "hi" to on the street didn't say "hi" back. So he had a serious delusion going on. Aye, he's probably not a run-of-the-mill MRA. But he certainly identified with the movement, deluded or no.

He was not interested in reality due to personality issues. He held himself in high regard and made a 140-page warning label in a vain effort make everyone think the way he does (because in his mind, people who don't think his way can only be wrong) and failing that, try other ways to make them do things. The inconvenient people who wouldn't conform to his delusion, he sought to eradicate. His worldview collapsed inward (self-destruction) because that's where he spent practically all of his focus -- himself.

Nevermind that you or Cheezy cannot tell the difference between PUA and MRA ideas, or that Elliot wouldn't have applied either with consistency since the concept of people having the right to think differently eluded him.

 

[Senethro]

We both know this is complete bullcrap.

Elliot didn't kill people because women turned him down, Elliot killed people because everyone else saw women turn him down. Rejection is easy to survive, but for a narcissist like Elliot, rejection meant that he was revealed to the world as impotent and undesirable.

Ask yourself: why did he kill men and women? Why did he write a ridiculous manifesto? Why did he spend so long talking about everything? Why was he obsessed with the relationship itself and not with one specific woman?

Writing a manifesto makes it political. If he had just been a little more competent it would have been a minor incident of domestic terrorism like an abortion clinic bombing.

 

[NovaKart]

Pretty much this, yeah. I had only been giving this thread and others an occasional cursory glance but I did feel the need to comment when someone said something about most sex workers knowing what they're getting in to because that triggered a flat "what" and set off big alarms in my head, or whatever thread that was where people put some blame on women being raped, or egregious dumb stuff like that. Beyond that, I pretty much realized that any kind of detail or nuance was going to be ignored so there was little point in going beyond that because, hey, I'm just going to be stereotyped anyway.

Did you read the article borachio posted a link to? It seems that a lot of people are misinformed about the subject and even questioning the subject and all we've heard from the newsmedia is tantamount to supporting rape or something along those lines.

 

[Rashiminos]

Writing a manifesto makes it political. If he had just been a little more competent it would have been a minor incident of domestic terrorism like an abortion clinic bombing.

If he had the self-control to mask his pathology, he might have been a banker... or a politician.

 

[Narz]

I don't think the nut read "MRA" stuff (no evidence that he did AFAIK), he clearly wasn't concerned with anyone's "rights" male or female (in fact he hated to see other men with women more than anything it seems) except his own "right" to get some punan. Just a crazy rich kid with serious entitlement issues.

It annoys me when people try to slander a whole group by one nutjob's actions. Like people who claim the Unibomber represents all anarchists (which is a more apt comparison because at least he identified with being an anarchist whereas Rodgers didn't identify with being "MRA").

 

[Gori the Grey]

Writing a manifesto makes it political.

When the manifesto is called My Twisted World, it makes it psychological. Look it doesn't have to be either/or. This guy had NPD and mapped misogyny onto it.

For all that, I'll say the psychological should predominate in our account of this killer. And I'll say that by denying that he really wrote a manifesto (even if that is what the press calls it). A manifesto generally seeks to get others to sign on. He didn't say, "hey guys, let's go kill women." There aren't even any other guys worth appealing to in his narcissistic mind.

 

[IglooDame]

I've read almost all this thread, and comprehended some of it (and learned about reddit MRAs and tumblr feminists, as a bonus).

Is the original goal here for there to be identical reactions to men abusing women and women abusing men (and presumably men abusing men and women abusing women) legally, or culturally, or within every individual brain?

 

[Gori the Grey]

The reactions may be different. The response should be the same: stop the violence.

They should do it again, by the way, with a much shorter man abusing a much taller woman and see how much of it is gender and how much is perceived physical power differential.

 

[classical_hero]

I didn't say that. I was questioning how many are trafficked.

WE do know that trafficking humans is the second largest illegal trade after the drug trade and many of them are forced into sex slavery. The evidence points to the problem being more widespread than you think.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I've read almost all this thread

You are a brave dude.

Is the original goal here for there to be identical reactions to men abusing women and women abusing men (and presumably men abusing men and women abusing women) legally, or culturally, or within every individual brain?

And this is a good question.

If I may just try a personal answer:
Legally? Check (though I think that a single moderate slap under extraordinary circumstances is certainly no matter for the police, weather dealt by a man or a woman)
Culturally? There needs to be less of a taboo about males being abused by females. And females need to feel less entitled to hit man. But there will remain differences of one sort or the other. Trying to totally equalize that is just trying to establish very implausible narratives IMO.
Individual brain? Not a chance except some exceptions who think very ideological about it

The reactions may be different. The response should be the same: stop the violence.

I like this.

 

[NovaKart]

WE do know that trafficking humans is the second largest illegal trade after the drug trade and many of them are forced into sex slavery. The evidence points to the problem being more widespread than you think.

How do we know that? The evidence is contradictory and little is known for certain.

 

[Oruc]

This would be a salient point if narcissistic personality disorders (NPD's) didn't otherwise function normally in everyday life. Yeah, he exhibits a lot of the traits of NPD, but that wasn't the problem by itself.

He also was never really turned down by women. As some of the news sites have been reporting, he never even attempted to court a woman's affection. His manifesto has very few examples of him interacting with women beyond dumping sodas on them. He called it "rejection" when random women he'd say "hi" to on the street didn't say "hi" back. So he had a serious delusion going on.

No he also had aspergers, was half-Asian. Where this guy went people thought he was weird even on these forums he went to other members pegged him as serial killer.

I have read some of it, so I know about that and the escalation of violence with throwing orange juice at random couples and attempting to push people of a ledge (which ended badly for him because he is a consistent screwup), but to him that was rejection because he was delusional.

Aye, he's probably not a run-of-the-mill MRA. But he certainly identified with the movement, deluded or no.

Rubbish, where has this part come from? Just suddenly he is an Mra because reasons (of course we know the actual reason it's convenient).
There is no mention of men's rights at all in his 'manifesto'.