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| Pablo Picasso had a way with the ladies. |
“Well some people try to pick up girls, and get called assholes,” the song goes. “This never happened to Pablo Picasso. He could walk down your street, and girls could not resist his stare. … Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.” This is more or less true, even though, by almost every account, Picasso was pretty much a complete douchebag.
Life is unfair. Famous men can behave like utter boors and predators towards the opposite sex and get away with it, even win reputations as charming ladykillers. The rest of us, well, we make awkward passes and often get rejected; sometimes we even get called creeps. This makes some men bitter; a few even become Men’s Rights Activists.
In a recent article on AlterNet, feminist sex blogger Clarisse Thorn offers a defense, of sorts, of men unfairly labelled “creeps.” “Why Do We Demonize Men Who Are Honest About Their Sexual Needs?” the article’s title asks, and it’s not a bad question. Women are naturally, and quite justifiably, wary of the attention of strange men, who could easily turn out to be predators. “So it’s completely understandable that we’re all on high alert for predatory expressions of male sexuality,” she writes. What this means is that perfectly decent guys are sometimes seen as creeps until proven innocent.
Her solution? We need to “accept male desire” as natural and legitimate — not something “toxic,” or some kind of macho accomplishment:
It’s hard to disagree with that. I worry, though, that many of the guys in Thorn’s intended audience will only notice the bit about male sexuality being “hot, awesome, delicious and valuable,” and miss her careful caveats about consent — which she repeats three times in two sentences in an attempt to drive home the point. Unfortunately, as Amanda Marcotte puts it in a response to Thorn’s piece:
Looking through the comments Thorn’s article got on AlterNet, Marcotte finds ample evidence of this kind of creepiness — men with both a sense of entitlement and a massive amount of self-pity. That toxic attitude shows up as well in a comment from the perhaps aptly named “jackwripper” in a discussion of Thorn’s piece in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit:
It’s a bizarre and insidious sort of argument: Women need to start having sex with men they don’t want to have sex with, because otherwise some men will have to go through life alone — or, I guess, with “2s” who aren’t too stuck up to go out with them. Why exactly is it women’s job to “fix this?” Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.
Jackwripper’s argument eerily echoes the logic of George Sodini, the bitter, dateless antifeminist asshole who shot 12 women in a health club last year because he felt young women had unfairly rejected him. And so it’s perhaps not surprising that Sodini had his defenders in the MRA/pickup artist crowd. As one fan of Sodini put it in a comment at the time on a PUA blog popular with MRAs:
So, women, the message is clear: Date some losers, or someone is going to get shot.
No one “deserves” to get laid. If you’re a creepy asshole who doesn’t understand that any woman is allowed to turn you down for sex, for whatever reason she wants, however stupid it might seem to you, then you don’t deserve shit.
>fred:"That woman isn't trying to have sex with the club kids she's photographing is the difference. She's just doing her job."That's interesting. The paragraph about club photography is word-for-word identical between the male and versions. Why then do you say that they have different motivations? This looks to me like sexist gender-stereotyping.
>"I would say more or less the same thing to the woman you describe that I would say to the guy, which is basically:…"Yet it seems to me that what you go on to say is profoundly different from what you said earlier. Your 'unisex' response, which you articulated with its applicability to a female respondant specifically in mind, takes the form of non-judgemental advice. Contrast with what you said, when you were only responding to a man:"Self pity, check. Entitlement, check."I'm honestly not getting it. I really do not see what is entitled or even particularly self-pitying (at least, no more so than women's complaints typically validated in feminist spaces) about what he said.Help me out with this. Seems to me that what he's saying boils down to this:1. People find him creepy.2. This is because he is fat, short, and prematurely balding.3. People will find him creepy no matter what he does.Setting aside the question of whether these beliefs are true or not. Is there anything anything inherently 'entitled' about believing these things?As well as these beliefs, he also expresses an attitude, namely that he "accepts" it. Is that an expression of self-pity?
>"You get bonus douchebag points if you use the white knight link in the above comment as a resource in a future post."Now there's a plan. David, according to Coldfire's cite you are "the complete opposite of a troll". I think you just got your first testimonial.
>@Daran – Because the old fat bald guy is trying to fuck the hot young nubiles and the fat hairy woman is just trying to take pictures of them, as per her job requirement. Are you retarded?
>Just FYI, while a relatively low percentage of men are rapists, a relatively high percentage of women have been raped or sexually assaulted. 1 in 4 college-aged women have experienced acquaintance rape or attempted acquaintance rape, which is obviously not the sum of all rapes or attempted rapes. (The source is the DOJ, by the way.) 1 in 8 women are affected by breast cancer in their lives, and we have an entire month dedicated to raising awareness and finding a cure. When more than 1 in 4 women are affected by rape or sexual assault, we're not supposed to worry? (I want to point out that this analogy is not intended to imply that women are responsible for preventing either breast cancer or rape. Indeed, the guilt assigned to women who do get breast cancer, or are raped, is ridiculous: did you breastfeed? had you been drinking? do you wear underwires? how short was your skirt? have you taken estrogen supplements? had you previously had sex with him?)
>Daran — My advice to both the guy and the women is the same. Women do not automatically find all fat, short, bald guys to be "creepy." They really don't. Most adult men in this country are at least somewhat fat, and they don't all lead lives of celibacy. Nearly half of all adult men are bald. Plenty are short. This guy is somehow assuming that these things, which are all really really common, mean that all women think he's a creep. That's wrong, and it's self-pity. The flip side of this is entitlement. He also seems a bit bitter that all women, including the club kids he photographs, don't think he's hot. That's entitlement. So what if a few superficial hotties in their twenties don't think he's hot? I'm pretty sure club kids don't think I'm hot either, and if I went to photograph them they'd look at me oddly. If I were younger and looked like a male model they probably wouldn't. Boo fucking hoo. And again, all this applies to the woman too. She's indulging in self-pity, for the same reason. She's also got a sense of entitlement: I'm entitled to have everyone think I'm hot, and if they don't, life is unfair. As I said, life IS unfair. People you think are hot aren't required to think you're hot in return.
>That all said, I think one of the reasons women have their complaints "Validated" in feminist spaces is that, comparatively speaking, for example, fat women put up with more shit than fat men. That's certainly the case with every fat woman I've ever known. People don't come up to me on the street to say, hey guy, why are you so fat. They've done that to women I know. And there are studies showing that, for example, fat women face more job discrimination than fat men. In the past you've dismissed this as playing "the oppression olympics." That's silly. Some people ARE more discriminated against than others. Black people are discriminated against more than white people. Women are discriminated against more than men. That doesn't mean that, say, white men don't have some legitimate complaints, but they need to keep those in perspective. That's really not a difficult concept to understand.All that said, it's a bad idea for anyone individually to sit around wallowing in self pity because life is unfair. Life IS unfair, but self-pity will only make things worse.
>@Daran, I didn't find all of Amanda's example comments to be the terrible cesspits that she did, and I agree that Amanda's not working very hard to think past her biases. (Although I also agree with most of what David Futrelle has said, for the record.)But I really didn't like this example comment:One especially grating thing that I’ve noticed is a very old fashioned belief among women that “the man who really wants you is the one who keeps trying.” So for example, 2 men ask out a woman in one week, and she automatically says no to both of them just to see what happens.Because I think it's projecting a lot of typical bullshit onto women. I think there's this idea that women turn down men in order to jack up our market value. This isn't true for me and it's not true for most women I know, though I suspect there are one or two who do think this way (but that's not a reason to project that attitude onto all of us, especially when they're in the minority).The reality is that most women are simply less likely to want to go out on a date than most men, but if a guy is really interested — and demonstrates that he's really interested — then we may change our minds. Everyone changes their mind sometimes.I think that the attitude about "being entitled to women's bodies", and trying to communicate that entitlement in a way that intimidates us, is a REAL thing that happens. I don't think it's just in women's heads (or David Futrelle's head, since he pointed it out in this post).I wish that more men who feel so frustrated about not having enough romance in their lives would try harder to understand what kind of experience women have — especially unattractive women. I also wish they wouldn't fall back onto threats of violence. I don't think this is too much to ask, especially given the amount of time I've spent trying to understand men's experience 😛
>"Now there's a plan. David, according to Coldfire's cite you are "the complete opposite of a troll". I think you just got your first testimonial."What they mean is that the roll of white knight is the complete opposite of the roll of troll, i.e. white knighting is the opposite of trolling. David trolls MRAs while white knighting for feminists; no contradiction there.
>Clarisse:"I think there's this idea that women turn down men in order to jack up our market value."Maybe so, but this isn't the idea expressed in the Alternet comment. Rather the commenter is saying that women turn down men in order to assess the man's value to the woman. According to this theory, women rate persistent men more highly than those who withdraw at the first rebuff. Rejecting men's initial advances is therefore a kind of "shit test", to use the PUA vernacular, intended to winnow out faint-hearted men."The reality is that most women are simply less likely to want to go out on a date than most men, but if a guy is really interested — and demonstrates that he's really interested — then we may change our minds. Everyone changes their mind sometimes."OK, so there's no intentional shit test. She initially rebuffs him because she doesn't rate him high enough, but his subsequent persistence causes her to rate him more highly.The effect of this is to put men into a bind. Behaviour which women find attractive is identical to behavior which women find harrassing. (Obviously not the same woman at the same time.)"I think that the attitude about "being entitled to women's bodies", and trying to communicate that entitlement in a way that intimidates us, is a REAL thing that happens. I don't think it's just in women's heads (or David Futrelle's head, since he pointed it out in this post)."I think it's projecting a lot of typical bullshit onto men. It isn't true for me and it's not true for most men I know, though I suspect there are one or two who do think this way (but that's not a reason to project that attitude onto all of us, especially when they're in the minority).For example, according to Lauredhel, Hugh Ristik "seems to be an Antifeminist-Bingo! bottom-dweller of the Entitlement Variety." I understand you know him quite well. Do you agree with that assessment or is Lauredhel projecting? Isn't "projecting" just another way of saying that the person is "not working very hard to think past [their] biases."?"I wish that more men who feel so frustrated about not having enough romance in their lives would try harder to understand what kind of experience women have — especially unattractive women. I also wish they wouldn't fall back onto threats of violence. I don't think this is too much to ask, especially given the amount of time I've spent trying to understand men's experience :P"That's a pretty one-sided deal. You want "men" to try harder to understand "women", but in return you offer only a single woman — yourself — who has made an effort to understand men.In respect of threats, well, firstly it is only a small number of men who make them. This is not to downplay the impact of them, but but that's not a reason to project that attitude onto all of us, especially when they're in the minority.I also think it unreasonable to construe every statement that says "if problem X is not remedied there will be violence" as a threat. This shuts discussion about whether the lack of a remedy for X is a causal factor for violence.
>Please check to see if a comment has been spammed.
>"Just FYI, while a relatively low percentage of men are rapists, a relatively high percentage of women have been raped or sexually assaulted. 1 in 4 college-aged women have experienced acquaintance rape or attempted acquaintance rape, which is obviously not the sum of all rapes or attempted rapes. (The source is the DOJ, by the way.)"You are wrong. The primary source, as cited in footnote 4 in the report you link is Fisher et al. Firstly Fisher's subjects are college women, not college-aged women. Secondly, They were asked if "anyone" had forced sex upon them, so the findings do, in fact, refer to all rapes, not solely to those by intimate parters.Thirdly, the actual finding was that 2.8% of college women were victimised during a reference period which averaged 6.9 months. They go on to sayProjecting results beyond this reference period is problematic for a number of reasons, such as assuming that the risk of victimization is the same during summer months and remains stable over a person's time in college. However, if the 2.8 percent victimization figure is calculated for a 1-year period, the data suggest that nearly 5 percent (4.9 percent) of college women are victimized in any given calendar year. Over the course of a college career–which now lasts an average of 5 years–the percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions might climb to between one-fifth and one-quarter.In a footnote they emphasis that "These projections are suggestive." It is irresponsible and wrong to take the upper bound of this highly speculative exrapolation, based upon problematic assumptions, and state it without qualification as though it were an established fact.Fourthly, the 4.9% annual rate in the above quote is incorrect, and appears to be the result of inappropriately rounding an intermediate figure. The correct figure is 4.8% to 1 decimal place. Not a huge error, but hardly one to inspire confidence in the authors' statistical competence.Fithly, and this is crucial, the 20-25% range is not supported by the data. The authors do not explain how they calculated it, and the only way I can obtain a figure in excess of 20% is if I make an additional "problematic" assumption that repeat victimisations occur with negligible frequency. But this is falsified by the data. Fisher's actual finding was that 22% of victims were subject to repeat victimisation. Accounting for this suggests a somewhat lower prevalence over a five years, possibly 10-15%. See my comments in this thread for more details.
>Clarisse,I kind of end up splitting the difference between you and Amanda in some ways. I thought your article's three suggestions were great and I am all in favour of moving to a less pathological image of male desire, even as I don't think society demonizes it quite the way you say.At the same time, I do think the word creep is useful and I don't think it quite gets used to police men the same way slut gets used. As someone with strong views on consent and good boundaries, it could be that I am just seeing nails since I have a hammer, but I do think the use of creep for "unable to accept boundaries" works pretty well.
>Daran: A post of yours did indeed get spam filtered; it's now posted above. Not sure why the filter keeps grabbing your comments. At the moment Blogger seems to be acting screwy with comments, so anyone posting: save your text before posting a comment in case Blogger eats it.
>David: I hate blogger. You should move to wordpress in my opinion, and do it before your blog is too established. Suit yourself though, of course.Daran: Well, of course I don't think Hugh Ristik is an antifeminist bingo troll.I think it's projecting a lot of typical bullshit onto men. It isn't true for me and it's not true for most men I know, though I suspect there are one or two who do think this way (but that's not a reason to project that attitude onto all of us, especially when they're in the minority).:laugh: fair enough. But if you insist that I ought to understand that men like that are in the minority, then do you see why I insist that men ought to understand that women who are out to take men for all they can get are in the minority?That's a pretty one-sided deal. You want "men" to try harder to understand "women", but in return you offer only a single woman — yourself — who has made an effort to understand men.I think more women will start doing so. I think I'm the head of a wave. Two separate feminist groups have had me lecture on college campuses about masculinity at this point, and I have no reason to believe that there won't be more. I think it has to come from a woman, and there are both good and bad reasons for that, but I am hoping that there will be a lot more space opening up to discuss this within the next few years.I think women will also be more likely to want to understand men's issues if men demonstrate understanding of women's issues. Just like the vice versa.I also think it unreasonable to construe every statement that says "if problem X is not remedied there will be violence" as a threat. This shuts discussion about whether the lack of a remedy for X is a causal factor for violence.Being someone who fantasizes about threats of violence a lot, I think I'm in a position to say that "if X is not remedied there will be violence" is an extremely typical formulation of threat. I don't think it's unreasonable to construe typical formulations of threat as threats. I think that men, being aware of the history of violence against women, would probably do well to phrase the idea much more cautiously if what they really mean is "if X happens, violence may occur, but of course that violence won't come from me and I won't smile when I see it".@lightcastle — Here's a comment I thought was interesting from my giant manliness thread. It comes from a man:Lots of people seem to have missed that the word “creep” is not “a useful, commonly understood term” at all. I’ve seen people being referred to as creeps because they had a beard or a wonky eye, because they were wearing all black or because they happened to be standing near a group of children. That word is so far from being commonly understood, it’s not even funny.If we define the word in reasonable ways, then it'll be reasonable. But is the word commonly understood to have one of those reasonable definitions (like "person who ignores boundaries")? I don't think it is.
>Clarisse:You are absolutely right about threats. An implied threat is a threat. It may not mean that the person making the threat (particularly if they're making the threat on the internet) is literally going to go out and attack the person being threatened, but it is designed to frighten and intimidate, and there is absolutely a fantasy of violence underlying it. It's a bit like these guys, only not funny:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRm5WcjOikQ#t=1m45sAs for WordPress. There are certain advantages I guess, but in a lot of ways blogger is much easier to deal with.
>"David: I hate blogger. You should move to wordpress in my opinion, and do it before your blog is too established. Suit yourself though, of course."Seconded. I'd also recommend registering your own domain. That way you're not tied to any particular provider."Daran: Well, of course I don't think Hugh Ristik is an antifeminist bingo troll."Of course not. Any more than you think I'm one of the pro-domestic violence set merely for advocating choice for men, or that David is full of shit merely because he advocated a little more understanding of creepy men. But that's what we get all the time in feminist spaces, and that's what David will get, whenever he says anything that isn't in lock-step accordance with the prevailing anti-male sentiment in mainstream feminism. (Pandagon is hardly a radical feminist blog, after all.)"But if you insist that I ought to understand that men like that are in the minority, then do you see why I insist that men ought to understand that women who are out to take men for all they can get are in the minority?"I think only a minority of men think that most women do this."I think more women will start doing so. I think I'm the head of a wave. Two separate feminist groups have had me lecture on college campuses about masculinity at this point, and I have no reason to believe that there won't be more."I hope so, and I do appreciate your efforts, though I suspect that a sea-change in attitudes on both sides of the divide is a long way off."I think it has to come from a woman,"I find it deeply ironic that a movement which defines itself as one which advocates for social equality between the sexes should treat them so differently that a woman is deemed to speak more authoritatively on the subject of men's perspectives than men are."Being someone who fantasizes about threats of violence a lot, I think I'm in a position to say that "if X is not remedied there will be violence" is an extremely typical formulation of threat. I don't think it's unreasonable to construe typical formulations of threat as threats. I think that men, being aware of the history of violence against women,…What I know of the history of violence against women is that men, by and large, do their best to shield women from it, and as a result, throughout history, men have been violently victimised to a much greater extent than women."…would probably do well to phrase the idea much more cautiously if what they really mean is "if X happens, violence may occur, but of course that violence won't come from me and I won't smile when I see it."Obviously whether an utterance should be construed as a thread is highly dependent upon exactly how it is phrased, but I honestly do think it highly unfair and prejudicial if men (and only men) are assumed to be making threats, if they talk about violence without an explicit disavowel.This for example:The problem is, our feminized society has given every woman the power to hold out for higher quality men than they deserve. This creates an imbalance that leads to tragedies like the one in PA. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. (Newton’s 3rd Law) If empowered women keep applying pressure, they will create an explosion.Is clearly a statement of causality. Whether or not he's right is another matter entirely. He's not making a threat.
>'Nother comment in spam
>I unspammed it. For some reason the spam filter loves eating your comments and almost no one else's.I have to say I disagree with you on that statement being causality. Here's another comment from the same guy — tell me you don't think this one has a threatening edge to it:A decent looking man who earns a good living and does not abuse women DESERVES to get laid. Period.The fact that so many do not, is a crime.And in a just society, all crimes are eventually punished.And another one:Not being able to get laid, after jumping through all the hoops women tell you to jump through, is NOT celibacy.It is forced sexual slavery.And another one:A man deserves to get laid, just a a person who walks into Starbucks with $5 deserves a drink.Men do everything women ask them to do, in pursuit of sex, and when it comes time for women to give it up, they don’t.So just like that guy with $5, men have followed the rules to create the value that women have demanded in exchange for sex, and after they pay, many of them walk away empty handed.In any other place in ‘the world’ a crime like this would not be tolerated. So we've got entitlement, bitterness, rage, and a pretty obvious threat: men are being taken advantage of and deserve to have some kind of retribution. Which in the case of Sodini, obviously, meant shooting women. It's about as much a statement of "causality" as Travis Bickle's speech about a "real rain" coming to "wash all this scum off the streets" in Taxi Driver.
>"It's about as much a statement of "causality" as Travis Bickle's speech about a "real rain" coming to "wash all this scum off the streets" in Taxi Driver."Reading the full quote, it looks to me more like a prediction than a threat.Looking at the quotes from the MRA commenter, I can't see that there's anything coherent there. He's certainly bitter and raging, and he has a great sense of injustice. But beyond that, it looks more like venting than a coherent argument.You also see entitlement; I'm not so sure. But instead of speculating about his thoughts, let me talk about mine, starting with a TV quote.Torchwood is Sci-fi drama with a cult following in both the UK and the US. In the episode "Greeks Bearing Gifts", Tosh acquires an amulet which enables her, unknown to others, to read their minds. It only works at short range, so what she gets is fragments of the private unguarded chitter-chatter that takes place, I guess, in all of us. Mostly its pretty trivial stuff, but one of the fragments bowled me over. Ianto, one of the regular cast walks past, seemingly untroubled, then Tosh – and we – hear him thinking:Can't imagine the time when this isn't everything. Pain so constant, like my stomach's full of rats. Feels like this is all I am now. There isn't an inch of me that doesn't hurt.I was stunned when I saw the episode, and it still overwhelms me to read it. Because that's it. That's what it felt like to be me. A constant pain knawing away at my guts every waking moment, day-in, day-out for years and years and years.I'll try to finish this comment later. Right now, I can scarcely put two more words together.
>I got out of an extraordinary swimming pool to write this (yes! I love these conversations THAT MUCH) and don't have much time, but I was thinking about violence and statements of causality etc., and I wanted to ask you guys what you think of this phrasing:For men who legitimately want to talk about feelings of violence, or fears that society will become more violent if there's no open-minded way to talk about male sexuality, it seems to me that the best way to put it is this: "It makes me feel violent when I feel like male sexuality is being ignored, condescended to, or discounted." Other phrasings may be interpreted as a threat, which is understandable given the history of male violence against women and the stereotypes of male violence that permeate our culture.
>Clarisse:That wasn't half bad.Clarence
>Commenting on the "jackwripper" comment mentioned in the original post:"Men learn not to be very picky, maybe women need to learn not to be picky too."Historically, women have had to be the picky ones, as it is women, not men, that must bear the potential consequences of the sexual relations that result from the dating game. Not saying that EVERY date turns into a sexual relationship, but that dating has been, by and large, the search for a potential mate and sexual union with that mate. A man could walk away from the sexual union that he had with any woman and not have the tell-tale signs that had him hidden away, in shame, in the home or in a home with other men who were in like circumstances. With the advent of various new methods of birth control that aren't wholly dependent upon the woman not having sexual intercourse with a man, the above-mentioned potential consequences may be lessened to a greater degree, but the sexual double standard still exists. As was stated in another thread here, and I'm paraphrasing, "men don't want sexually experienced women for wives", whereas the same is not imposed upon men. I'm not judging the rightness or wrongness of this double standard, just that a man's pickiness will result in women being picky as well, and maybe even more picky than a man, as it is she who is slut-shamed, not him. Just as women need to understand that women's fairly recent sexual freedoms might affect a women's marriageability, men need to understand that their marriage standards might affect the amount that they are rejected, even in light of women's sexual freedoms.That's what gets me about some of the more 'militant' MRAs, sometimes they are the 'victims' of their own standards (or double standards), and yet want women to "fix this" while denying their own complicity in the problem. The only women they seem to want to listen to are ones that are sycophantic and don't try to press them to be introspective. I read one MRA who advocates getting rid of women's being able to choose by herding all females into "rape camps", where then ALL men could have access to ALL women, because that is where he thinks the problem lies, with women being able to choose at all. The problem certainly doesn't lie with men's standards affecting women's choosiness."It is very strange how a female "3" can reject the advances of a male "7" because she is convinced she is a "9" and expects a male "10"."Or, perhaps, knowing that she is a "3", she is wary of why a "7" is approaching her, as she knows she is a "3" and expects maybe only a "4". Does he, as a "7", know that a "10" might possibly reject him, but figures that a "3" has no right to reject him? Not saying that that IS the scenario, just that it's another possibility.
>I see so many guys get so wound up in their heads about asking a girl out, literally tormenting themselves with fear of rejection, fear of looking like a fool, and often this fear leads them to behave in a way a girl finds confusing or alarming. I hate it when I see my guys friends feeling like this. And this feeling comes from unfair expectations set in place by the patriarchy. Ideas about how men act with women and are treated by women. I, as a woman, WANT men to ask me out. I WANT to ask out men. If I reject a man, I want him to understand that I'm not passing judgment about him as a human being, I'm expressing a simple preference. And I want him to know, when I ask HIM out, I'm also expressing a simple preference. No pressure, no rumors, no angst, just a simple question. I hate the games girls and guys play. They're stupid and designed to make men and women fucking hate each other for creating so much misery.
>"Can't imagine the time when this isn't everything. Pain so constant, like my stomach's full of rats. Feels like this is all I am now. There isn't an inch of me that doesn't hurt." Your girlfriend got turned into a cyborg and died, then you almost got fed to an alien after a period of being kept in a freezer full of human body parts, your father broke your arm in one of the beatings during your childhood because you weren't butch enough, and now you are feeling attracted to a man and risking gay bashing (similar to the heaps of shit from the father) while feeling as if you are betraying your dead lover? Okay, then go ahead and feel in deep pain. You got turned down when you asked someone to date or have sex with you? Get the fuck over it. The legitimate level of stress from watching a loved one die a horrible death or almost being murdered is in no way equivalent to the level of stress warranted from "No, I am not interested". Not all anger and feelings of injustice are equal, there are these things called reality and proportionality. Is rejection fun? No. Does it warrant a killing rage and threats of violence? Hell no. If a person can't handle being refused a date without homocidal urges, they need to get some counciling and stay the fuck away from the rest of us for our safety. Don't go on a shooting spree because the bakery ran out of your favorite muffins either.