Why do Men’s Rights Activists hate the heroes of the Aurora theater shooting?
Our old nemesis The Pigman — the MRA blogger and one half of the cartooning team responsible for atrocities like this — has some thoughts on the Aurora shootings, specifically on the men who lost their lives to protect their girlfriends from gunfire. Their heroism makes him angry, much like the fellows on The Spearhead we looked at the other day. Here’s his complaint:
How’s that for inequity? How’s that for disposability? These guys appear to have sacrificed themselves for these people primarily because of their sex.
Well, no, I think they sacrificed themselves for their girlfriends because they loved their girlfriends.
After all, where are the guys who jumped in front of their best mate, or their dad or brother? And above all, where are the women who died saving their boyfriends?
There were many heroes in the Aurora shooting. Jonathan Blunk, Matt McQuinn, and Alex Teves died protecting their girlfriends. Stephanie Davies risked her life to keep a friend shot in the neck from bleeding to death. Other acts of heroism had less storybook endings: Marcus Weaver tried to shield a female friend. He was wounded but lived; she died. Jennifer Seeger tried to drag a wounded victim to safety, but fled when the shooter returned.
But the Pigman is interested in none of this:
This isn’t heroism, this is male disposability at its worst and by praising it society is encouraging it.Cheering these men’s actions is as reprehensible as it is stupid and discriminatory.
The heroes in Aurora acted quickly, and on instinct; they didn’t have time to stop to think. Is it possible that, in the cases of those men who tried to shield the women with them, gender socialization had something to do with what their instincts told them to do? Almost certainly.
But “male disposability” has nothing to do with it. We live in a society in which heroism, as an idea and as a cultural ideal, has been gendered male for thousands of years. In the stories we tell ourselves, the video games we play, the movies we watch (including The Dark Knight Rises) , the “hero with a thousand faces” is almost always male, and the damsel in distress is, well, almost always a damsel.
The Pigman ignores all this, instead attacking the three dead men as
foolish enough and unfortunate enough to fall for a lifetime of anti-male propaganda telling them to die for the nearest woman whenever the shit hits the fan.
I have no doubt that many are concerned with the feelings of the dead men’s survivors and wish I would just shut up.
But then he barrels ahead anyway:
But this is a simple case of “What you praise, you encourage,” and I for one think calling out those who encourage men to waste their lives for people worth no more than themselves is more important than being “sensitive”. Die for a child if you must, die for some guy on the verge of finding a cure for cancer if you must – die for someone no better than you simply because you have been taught to and you are a fool.
Had these men died protecting male buddies, would The Pigman have applied this calculus of worthiness to the beneficiaries of their heroism? Would he have suggested that the dead men thought they were worth less than their friends? Of course not.
The three men didn’t do what they did because they thought they were worthless or disposable. They did what they did because they wanted to protect those they loved. Others in the theater, like Stephanie Davies, risked their lives for friends, or people they didn’t even know. There’s nothing foolish or “wasteful” about putting yourself on the line to protect others. In every major disaster, whether natural, or like this one man-made, ordinary people emerge as heroes precisely because they are willing to put the lives and safety of other people ahead of their own.
Do these real-life stories of heroism play out in gendered ways? Often times they do. Men may be more willing to risk their lives to protect their wives or girlfriends; mothers may be more willing to risk their lives to protect their children.
In real life crises, it’s hardly surprising that people sometimes act like characters in these stories we tell ourselves. If you want to change how people act, you need to change these stories.
MRAs like to pretend that men are the “disposable sex” but in their hearts they know that’s not true. They’re well aware, as are we all, that our cultural narratives of heroism privilege and glorify men and put them at the center of almost every story. MRAs like The Pigman aren’t interested in expan ding our cultural narratives of heroism to include female heroes — nor are they willing to even acknowledge that there are such things as female heroes in the real world. They certainly don’t want more stories, more games, more films featuring female protagonists.
Instead they’d rather wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood, and attack real heroes like Jonathan Blunk, Matt McQuinn, and Alex Teves as “white knights” or “fools.”
How people react in a crises reveals a lot about them. How MRAs like The Pigman, and like the Spearhead commenters I quoted the other day reacted to the Aurora shootings has certainly revealed a lot about them, none of it good.
Unfortunately, attitudes like theirs aren’t confined to the fringe that is the manosphere.
After hearing the stories of Blunk, McQuinn, and Teves, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto tweeted “I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice.”
After numerous readers responded to his remarks with outrage, Taranto offered an apology of sorts, along with an explanation that suggested he really didn’t understand why people were angry in the first place. When someone does something noble and heroic out of love, it’s not up to you to second guess their actions or their love. Taranto’s words not only dishonored “the the girls whose boyfriends died to save them;” it dishonored the heroes as well.
Like The Pigman, like the Spearhead commenters, Taranto has failed this test of his humanity.
Posted on July 26, 2012, in misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, patriarchy, white knights. Bookmark the permalink. 856 Comments.
“Also, it wouldn’t be the first time that a man risks his life for sex, so why is that explanation so unreasonable?”
That it has happened before does not make it unreasonable.
Viscaria,
Haha, I said they shouldn’t be exposed to antagonistic ridicule. Apparently that means you’re condescending to them? OoooOOOookay. This honestly just gets funnier.
Ugh,
the MRM serves men! Yeah that’s right. Clue for the clueless: I’m not MRM, and I’m not Feminist either.
As far as MRAs being mentally ill and me taking up one of their talking points goes, well, ugh, I happen to agree with them it’s not much of a privilege to increase the likelhood of your early death.
Pretty straaange thing to agree with them on! But you know, if a lunatic said the grass is green, I’m not going to say it’s purple just to avoid agreeing with him.
I guess It isn’t so much fat chicks are bad as it is they don’t press the chivalry button for me somehow, so I just default to self preservation mode. Sorry fatties!
What are the hints? All I see is wild speculation.
Lets flip this around for a second.
From the perspective of an equal rights feminist, wouldn’t the fact that 3 guys died protecting women be a bad thing?
After all, why would the women need saving, and why weren’t there women sacrificing their lives for their boyfriends?
I suspect that to an extent, its biologically hardwired into our brains, but you can’t deny that socially, men are expected to show “courage under fire.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/an-awkward-engagement-woman-agrees-to-marry-man-after-he-ditched-her-in-aurora-theater/
People are calling that guy a coward for running out of the theater alone.
@PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth
Smeghead…I like that, I’m going to add it to my insult vocabulary now.
I’m sure all the fatties are devastated.
It… just doesn’t seem likely to me that these people even had time to think “Being awesome will get me sex!”
It really does just seem more likely that they’re the kind of altruistic person who’d do that because it’s a moral thing to do.
Is that so hard to believe?
Also the fact that “they might’ve just done it for sex” was the first place you went is rather.. telling.
MRA’s get pissed when female heroines kick ass in movies and video games. They derisively call it “grrrrl power”. Their whole whine about the term “grrrl power” must mean they are still butthurt about the Spice Girls, while the rest of the world forgot about them in 1998.
Seriously, though, they can’t have it both ways. They can’t say women are incompetent to be heroes and then turn around to whine that there aren’t as many female heroes.
I probably bring this up too much, but it feels relevant to this topic. Right after the tornado had finally passed, me and my family were afraid to leave our basement closet. We didn’t know if there’d be any more tornadoes, and we had no way to contact the outside world to know what was going on. My husband demanded that he be the one to go out first and figure out a safe place for us to go. I argued against that and asked him to stay with the children and let me leave and take the risk. He wouldn’t listen to what I wanted and went out first anyway. He said it was scarier to him that me or the kids get hurt than to get hurt himself, but that’s exactly how I felt too. I figure most people feels that same way about the people they love.
Even children can be heroic during a crisis, although most adults rightfully try to put the safety of children first. A boy that used to be our neighbor was at his grandma’s house during the tornado. Her house was close to us, so both his home and her home were hit. During the tornado, he warned her and got her to go in a closet with him and his aunt. The grandma got too scared during the tornado and had a heart attack. After it was over, the aunt was screaming for people to hear them and unbury them from the debris. She finally lost her voice not long before some firefighters came to their lot. The little boy then took over yelling and got the firefighters’ attention so they could get dug out. He asked the firefighters to help his grandma but she had already passed away from the heart attack. I feel like how he handled the crisis proved him to be a hero, even though he was only a fifth grader. I didn’t find out what had happened to him until a week later, and I was very happy when I first heard his voice on the phone and knew he was okay.
Sorry if this was too much information or too much of a tangent. It’s just that I’ve had some personal experiences with these kinds of issues, so it hits close to home. I doubt most of them know what it’s like. The MRA’s tend to discuss sacrifice and disasters as yet more reasons to hate women.
Here’s the deal, though. They are perfectly free to abandon their loved ones during a disaster to save themselves. However, they can not demand that I think say their selfishness is noble. They also can’t stop me from praising the heroes that put themselves at risk to save their loved ones or strangers.
@Diogenes
Good lord, are you really bad at this or what?
…well, no. Wait, do you mean ‘do they have trouble with the idea that some people should be expected to sacrifice and some shouldn’t’? Because yes. I think everybody should be taught that, not just men. That’s part of feminism. That’s why feminists say women should be allowed to be cops, to be firefighters, to be soldiers. It’s the OTHER SIDE who regularly screams at me for saying women make great firefighters. Owly threw a screaming fit over this the other day and called me a lying lickspittle.
So, yeah, you’re wrong. Feminists are the ones actually engaging with that idea. Thanks for playing.
People are mostly calling that guy a coward because he deliberately left his baby behind and then drove away. I’m pretty sure plenty of people simply ran out without helping others, and no one is attacking them for not actively being brave, but there’s a fairly significant difference between “I am not going to actively risk myself in order to help others” and “I am going to actively endanger my family, including my child, in order to save myself.” I think “cowardly” is a pretty fair description of that behavior, to be honest.
Everyone’s talking about the men. There were some women who threw themselves in the way to save people too.
From an equal-rights feminist perspective, this means that various people, in a moment of horror, decided to risk their lives to save others. They should be praised and respected for this, because they are people who did a heroic thing.
That just about sums it up.
Exactly! How could I ever call it a bad thing that somebody chose to do something brave at great risk to themselves, and paid such a high price for it?
Also, I don’t condemn that guy or think he’s necessarily a terrible human being in normal circumstances. People sometimes do incredibly stupid things when they’re in a panic. But the stupid things he did were, in fact, pretty darn cowardly.
I am unbeleivably uninterested in why you chose your particular brand of stupid. I will call you “MRA-agreeing” from now on though to be more accurate.
It also sure wouldn’t be the first time that a man died for his partner or friends. Why is that explanation so unreasonable?
Speaking as a man, there have been times when I’ve chosen playing Skyrim over sex. However, if my partner, brother, or best friend had a gun aimed at them, I’d stand in front of them. So, from my point of view, love is a massively more powerful motivator of altruism than sex.
You relaize that the fact that you think this is relevant in any way, and that you want to share how little fat girls mean to you with other people, makes you a giant sack of shit, right? Like, if you were a character in a movie, this is how a lazy writer would mark off to everyone in the audience that you’re a Bad Person, you know?
RHW is laughing at the mentally ill! SHUNNN HIMMMMMMM!!!!!
Or is it okay if it’s a feminist?
BEGIN PEDANTIC ASIDE
“The Hero With a Thousand Faces” is usually male, but he’s a specific type of hero following a specific Hero Quest, and he usually doesn’t die shielding someone else (at least, not for a while). The Hero is a young man, usually orphaned (metaphorically if not actually), plucked from obscurity by a call to adventure, tutored by a wise mentor, who goes on a long journey into a magical world beyond the ken of mortal man. In the end, through his action, all good people are saved, evil is destroyed, and we all live happily ever after. The reason Campbell coined this term is that The Hero pattern applies to everyone from Arthur Pendragon to Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter, with thousands of stories interspersed.
There are a few Heroes who are female; my mediocre (but very, very cheap) novel does. For an *ahem* somewhat infinitely more popular take, there’s the Hunger Games trilogy, though to her credit, Collins’ third act suggests the Hero Quest is kind of a sucker’s game.
Anyhow, all of this is tangential to the point of this post, which is that MRAs are soulless fools who don’t understand why one human would sacrifice for another, which is of course understandable, as MRAs really don’t seem to understand human emotions at all. But I’m a sucker for Hero Quests, and if you can’t be pedantic on the internet, what else is it for?
END PEDANTIC ASIDE
@Howard, bad at what? I think I asked a legit question.
I don’t know you, as I’m new to this forum, so I don’t know who the “other side” is for you.
Playing?
His four month old child was in his arms when the shooting started. He placed his child on the ground and fled, leaving him, his girlfriend, and I believe her other child(?) alone. I can understand blindly running for your life, but stopping to put your kid on the ground and leaving everyone behind? And then going to your car and leaving the area? That’s not so cool, whether you’re the father or the mother. A 19 year old young man helped her get her two kids out of the theater. And then she went on to accept her boyfriend’s marriage proposal. So she’s fine with it, I guess.
For realzies. What the fuck? It’s not enough for you MRAs to diminish the heroism of these men by calling them “fools” or “suckers” or by calling their girlfriends “wh0res” or “sluts” or saying that the shooter was “provoked”, you have to then go and say the men who died to save people did it to have sex and not just because, quite possibly, they might be people who cared about the people they died for?
If that’s what you truly think, I honestly feel sorry for you. Shit, even I’m not that jaded (and I’m pretty fucking jaded).
And garvan, if we’re going to talk “spiritual mediums” here, if David isn’t allowed to surmise that someone died to save someone else because they cared about them (more likely, because, duh) then it’s also kinda stupid of you to go around assuming other reasons. If we’re really going to say “unless you can talk to the dead, you can’t know what these guys were thinking”, then it’s pretty damn stupid to then turn around and say “it’s because of XYZ MISANDRY!”
If we’re REALLY going to say we can’t know, then the best we can do is honor them, and not make their passing even more painful for their surviving loved ones. Which, is what the MRAs are doing.
But, I know, girlfriends are among that “surviving loved ones” list, so, yanno, who cares?
Yeah. Again, you stay classy, MRAs.
You could make all sorts of interesting observations on gender, risk taking behaviors and the different societal responses for men and women engaging in the same behavior, but frig that- I just want to let these dudes be awesome for a while. And I hope if I had to I’d have the guts to jump in front of a bullet for my loved ones.
@RHW
Noone said specifically that it was a privilege. But it is a side effect of the whole “men are stronger, braver, and more moral and rational than women” part of our culture, which is privilege.
As an interesting part of privilege, have you noticed how little press has been out on the women who stayed behind to treat wounds, or who took bullets for their families? It’s because the media prefers hero narratives about men.
Bad at understanding what is feminism and what is cheap partiarchy-upholding? Bad at asking leading questions where the answer is, no, other way around?
The other side? Good lord, what blog do you think you’re on? This is a blog with a very clearly defined other side. Reading. Fundamental!!
@Morkais, the men died, so they’re getting more airtime. I honestly don’t know about the stories of women doing the same, but I also haven’t gone out of my way to find them.
They were mentioned in this comment thread, which is why I know about ‘em.
Incidentally, Jarell Brooks stands as a wonderful living refutation of the disgusting racist bullshit about “young black men never amounting to anything” in the other thread. (Not that that garbage really needed refutation, given how far removed from reality it is.)
@thebionicmommy –
You are not oversharing. That’s a perfect example of why most people sacrifice for others — because for many, if not most people, there really are other people we value more than ourselves.
I will agree that it’s ridiculous that men, more than women, are told that self-sacrifice is noble. Self-sacrifice is noble no matter who does it. I would jump in front of a bullet aimed at my daughter (I hope — as the Mighty Mighty Bosstones noted, that’s not something you know until you face it). But I would hope that she would be willing to do the same for a loved one, even as I would hope she’d never, never have to find out. Being willing to lay down your life to save another is one of the most noble things a human can do. The gender of the human has nothing to do with it.
I don’t think sex has anything to do with why people die saving others. One man in Joplin died to save his dogs, so his motivation for self sacrifice was friendship. His dogs were his closest friends, so he gave his life for them. When people die for strangers, that also has nothing to do with sex. Another example is that moms die to save their children during crises. In that case, maternal love causes self sacrifice.
@Howard
Chill dude.
Have I said I support patriarchy? Do you even know if I think that that still exists? How about not assuming, and getting to know me first, k?
Now, I’m slogging my way through a few books at the moment, but after I finish, Imma read “A Vindication on the Rights of Women.” If you can think of anything else I could read about feminism, I’ll look it up.
@Ugh:
So what, you probably also agree with MRAs that 1+1=2.
Unbelievable, he chose playing Skyrim over sex!
Two words: three weeks.
@ostara321:
Look, I didn’t start the speculations, I just read that “they sacrificed themselves for their girlfriends because they loved their girlfriends.”, well, I’m agnostic on that issue, I don’t claim to know why they did it, really, in one case, I can think of reasonable alternative reasons.
And we disagree that that alternative is reasonable.
Diogenes: It’s easy to support patriarchy and bullshit while thinking you’re opposing it. I’ve done it.
Yep. This is the MO of the MRM. Along with , “I am too much of a douche to have a meaningful relationship with a woman, therefore all women are wh*res.”
Keep telling yourselves MRAS: Every human relationship you’ve ever attempted has gone sour, but it’s not YOU, who is a shitty person. It’s just that every other human being on the planet sucks. LOL
Motherfuckin theives guild all the way, champ. I’m still trying to get the best dagger.
Men choose lots of things over sex. I work some nights when I could call in sick. I write novels. I play video games. I go out with my friends. I do actual human being things, as do most men. If my life revolved around having lots of sex than my entire life purpose would have been acheived in a two week period of second semester between papers and finals.
Yep, but I wouldn’t agree with them that people who give their lives for others are suckers just trying to get laid.
You really think that wanting sex is a reasonable explanation for why someone took a bullet? Like, really? Moreover, you’re arguing that it is more reasonably than actual caring about people, which is SUPER misandrist.
I fell in love with my current partner in roughly 3 weeks. Sometimes it just happens, you know?
Haha all he did was jump in here to tell us what feminism is all about, and how it means we should join in with people insulting recently murdered heroes? Why would that ever provoke a hostile response?
I just posted this on a totally unrelated thread, because today is my day to act stupid app, but in case anyone wants to read it JtO has written a lovely piece on the Aurora shooting.
And by “app” I mean apparently. Today is just my day for FAIL.
How cynical are you?
This aligns perfectley with the typical MRA view on romantic love. You think it doesn’t exist, because for you it doesn’t. Well, fuck off. Just because you are an unloveable piece of shit, doesn’t mean those men and women in the theater are.
And just because they’ve only been together for three weeks, you have to somehow devalue their relationship because it doesn’t align with your view of romantic love? I don’t know the man, I don’t know his motives, but the simplest explanation is probably the best. But you would rather shit all over a dead man and convince yourself that he just wanted sex, or was brainwashed into sacrificing himself, so that you can feel better about yourself. Seriously, fuck off.
How about no? There are no non-sexist unicorns; everyone supports patriarchy, inevitably, at some point or another, and that’s fine, because lots of people do so unwittingly. You want me to think you’re a unicorn, you better show me a horn first.
Not if you don’t have evidence to support it, and you don’t. Love is more parsimonious.
…so robot then? Because love happens in less pretty frequently.
You aren’t well versed with nerds, are you?
Oh, a failskeptic. How un-novel.
It’s irrelevant that they were dating only three weeks. People die for strangers, that they have just met. How is it such a stretch for someone to care about someone they’ve known for three weeks?
garvan —
“The real reason why Leonardo DiCaprio died on the Titanic. Futrelle pushed him off of the driftwood Kate Winslet was on.”
Not only is that a movie, but it’s exactly the sort of movie discussed in the OP —
“We live in a society in which heroism, as an idea and as a cultural ideal, has been gendered male for thousands of years. In the stories we tell ourselves, the video games we play, the movies we watch (including The Dark Knight Rises) , the “hero with a thousand faces” is almost always male, and the damsel in distress is, well, almost always a damsel.”
And wtf does any of what you said have to do with Title IX?
(Yeah, I realize I’m commenting on a comment that was 2 pages ago, but damn)
Nikan:
What hints suggest that? Really. What information do you have to support the contention?
That one of the couples was only dating for three weeks?
Not good enough. Maybe it was “infatuation”. Infatuation is a sincere emotion. It’s the core portion of “NRE”, which is what makes for the happy glow we all get when we start a new relationship. Maybe it wasn’t, “the one”, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t something important.
So, unless you’ve got a letter saying, “Dude, I’d do anything to bang this chick,”, you are making it up. And what you are making up is some pretty man-hating shit.
RHW: The priivlege of having the glory of being a human shield!
Um… No, that’s not what, “our cultural narratives of heroism privilege and glorify men and put them at the center of almost every story.” means.
It means Horatio at the Bridge, and the Siege of Camarone, it’s Lexington and Concorde and the Charge of the Old Guard at Waterloo. It’s the Alamo, and Custer’s Last Stand and the Battle of Rourke’s Drift and Thermopylae, and the Battle of Cannae, and the Battles of Culloden, and Bannockburn and Flodden.
It’s Crecy and Angincourt, Dunquerque, and The Bulge, it’s Ft. Zinderneuf,and the Battle of Hue City. It’s the Battle of Britain and the Invasion at D-Day, it’s Stanlingrad and Pt. Arthur and I could go on.
On the flip side we have Boudica.
There are, of course, the women who died, or actively risked death trying to save others in this very tragedy who are being ignored.
Sort of like the the disparity in that list above.
Ugh and Sharculese, you are vewy pwecious, but I think we all know this isn’t really a debate site. And Shar doesn’t debate so much as snipe inanely anyway.
What actual arguments are you making?
It’s not about privilege, because you are equivocating; using the meaning of privilege as personal advantage, do attempt to disprove the privilege of social structure.
So that’s dismissed out of hand; since it’s either wrong, or offered in bad faith.
RHW: You said they ought to be treated with kid gloves.
But, let me help you.
condescend [ˌkɒndɪˈsɛnd]
vb (intr) 1. to act graciously towards another or others regarded as being on a lower level; behave patronizingly
2. to do something that one regards as below one’s dignity
[from Church Latin condēscendere to stoop, condescend, from Latin dēscendere to descend]
It’s that first sense which Viscaria was using.
English, it’s subtle.
@Ugh
“Noone said specifically that it was a privilege. But it is a side effect of the whole “men are stronger, braver, and more moral and rational than women” part of our culture, which is privilege.”
It can’t be a side effect of society since these same tales of bravery exist in stories from every culture through all history. How could every society thousands of years ago be socialized in the same pattern?
Was it socialized 3000 years ago in Japan? 4000 years ago in Persia? 2000 years ago in India? 1500 years ago in France? 2500 years ago in China?
3000 years ago China might as well have been a myth to the average Morrocan. Yet the stories of bravery were the same. They didn’t turn on the TV and were socialized.
The fact is, men have a greater ability to overcome the fear of, or even certainty of death to save others. Why cheapen it to some theory of socialization? In the previous page comments we’ve already been graced with the, “See how patriarchy hurts men,” nonsense.
The luxury feminists enjoy of thoerizing about gender norms, patriarchy and socialization is because of mans inherent ability to overcome certain fears, namely death, for the good of others.
From the AVFM article on the subject:
“Those three men are not heroes, they’re just dead. The calculus of death, where one life is traded in celebration for another by preference of a vagina, is pathological and regressive. It must be recognized as the sickness it is. Those who lionized these men, whose fatal and unexamined instinct led to self-destruction; those who held them up as a heroic example to follow, are cordially invited to go first — or to go fuck themselves.”
What kind of a grotesque caricature of a human being thinks this way?
@Rutee Katreya:
So do you think that if we have two different valid explanations, we, as rational people, have to accept the simpler one as true?
LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!
@pecunium:
And even if that would be the case, why do you take that so seriously? People here think that I am male, straight and an MRA, though they don’t have even the remotest evidence for any of those assumptions.
Shorter version: I didn’t START all this hateful garbage of making this tragedy even more painful for the survivors, but I mean, since someone else was already being an asshole, I figured, hey, I may as well be one too!
Seriously, you’re an ass.
Diogness, “feminists should be mad that men died for women”? Uh, again, did seriously THAT many people miss how feminists have been petitioning to let women serve in combat for like, ever? And the freak-outs on MRA blogs over that?
Seriously, if you’re gonna whine that not enough women are dying for men (which is missing the point entirely and again, just making a tragic event worse for the survivors, and really, you’re wishing for more people dead? WTF are you?), start pushing at the very least so they’re given more of an opportunity to see themselves in what are traditionally considered more heroic roles.
Nikan — it’s called Occam’s Razor and yep, the simpler option usually is the correct one.
Nikan: So what, you probably also agree with MRAs that 1+1=2.
Spot that Fallacy:
Everyone who said, “Begging the question gets 10 pts.”,becuase the implication is his agreement with them is because it’s true.
Look, I didn’t start the speculations, I just read that “they sacrificed themselves for their girlfriends because they loved their girlfriends.”, well, I’m agnostic on that issue, I don’t claim to know why they did it, really, in one case, I can think of reasonable alternative reasons.
No, you aren’t. You are antagonistic to the notion; actively hostile even. No open mind. You keep adding implausible justifications to shore up your counterintuitive speculations.
Two words: three weeks.
To which I counter, 10 years, or 20 years.
Because guess what: every one of those “meaningful” relationships you think would justify such a sacrifice had a point when it was “only” three weeks.
Wow, I’ve never seen calculus done with vaginas; JtO is a mathematical genius!
Are you? Because I wouldn’t get too mad if I were you at people correctly associating the belief that men are sex robots unlikely to feel higher emotions or to enjoy running around as the Dragonborn with straight men who like MRA shit.
People need to start using vagina calculus in dirty talk. “Oh baby, our combined pleasure rate could be expressed as a 4th-degree exponential rate of change!”
Well, calculus deals with rates of change, and a lot of people have put a lot of thought into the rates of change of quantity of penis inside any given vagina.
“People need to start using vagina calculus in dirty talk. “Oh baby, our combined pleasure rate could be expressed as a 4th-degree exponential rate of change!””
That gave me gina tingles.
Challenge accepted.
That’s the heart of the matter. Would more women sacrifice their lives for their boyfriends and husbands, if only we portrayed more heroines in popular entertainment and fables? It seems to me that the way our culture celebrates the empowerment of one sex has the tendency to denigrate the other. If women are portrayed as the heroes, too often the men in the same narratives are portrayed as weak, inadequate, harmless oafs. In other words, such men are portrayed as being hardly worth defending. Under the status quo, if the man is rescued by a heroine, it seems the intent of the writer is only to accentuate the heroine’s glory. So if this (flawed) story has any influence on real women, it will teach them to rescue a man solely if they’ll get glory from it, not because he’s valuable to her or to anyone else. It would hardly provide sufficient motivation to a woman to put her body in the line of fire if she was imitating the heroines that Hollywood likes to portray. In death, there’s no glory to enjoy.
What pop cultire *should* be celebrating, when it depicts heroes and heroines, is the best in both the rescued and the rescuer. There should be no shame in being rescued, and the importance and value attached to the rescued should not be diminished. That is, not if the story is worth immitating in real life.
As for stories motivating people to be rescuers, there once was a time when it was shameful to have the means to rescue someone and yet decline to rescue them. Those days are a memory growing more and more distant.
Ugh — there’s an xkcd for that.
pecunium — why didn’t I think of giving out points for people who guess correctly? You missed the argument from ignorance though, and damned if this isn’t a perfect example of that one.
Argument from ignorance (appeal to ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantiam) – assuming that a claim is true (or false) because it has not been proven false (true) or cannot be proven false (true).
And since “begging the question” might be the most misused phrase in English —
Begging the question (petitio principii) – where the conclusion of an argument is implicitly or explicitly assumed in one of the premises
Appeal to horniness isn’t a fallacy technically, but Nikan’s doing that too (maybe file that as a type of appeal to emotion?)
Stupid broken links! Begging the question
Using the broadest interpretation of the term ‘valid explanation,’ when one explanation involves shitting on the memory and motivations of a now deceased person for no reason, and one doesn’t, well, I think it better to go with the latter. But maybe that’s just my hormones or something.
Also super lolzy –
I’m pretty sure having a troll complain that we’re TOO concerned about hatred of men is a historic moment for Manboobz.
@Argenti
That xkcd is probably the hottest depiction of stick figures I’ve ever seen.
Ugh — I’m also fond of this one but it has nothing to do with math. (Both this one and the previous one are among the handful linked at the bottom of every page)
That is super cute.
You don’t have two valid explanations to begin with, but the explanation that makes fewest assumptions is likely correct. Except the conclusion you’re insisting on isn’t really at all evidenced. Dying to have sex isn’t really evidenced human stupidity.
You’re a clueless twerp reducing all human interaction to sex…
So much like for those xkcds…
@Argenti: That’s not how Occam’s Razor actually works. The point is, all else being equal, if it appears that X works as well as an explanation for something as Y+Z, then one should favor X, because it makes fewer assumptions. (That’s not always correct, obviously, and it usually goes out the window if all else is *not* equal, but it’s a very good rule of thumb). Since “they were doing it out of desire for sex” and “they were doing it out of love” both make only *one* assumption, Occam’s Razor doesn’t really apply here.
…Not that I’m taking Nikan’s side about “desire for sex” being the more likely possibility.