Amanda Marcotte, feminist blogger and Friend of Man Boobz, has been taking a lot of shit from MRAs – and I mean a LOT of shit – for a comment she made here on the Thomas Ball suicide.
As you may already know, Ball burned himself to death outside a New Hampshire courthouse. In a lengthy manifesto he wrote shortly before killing himself, he portrayed his suicide as a protest against a corrupt family court system, and went on to argue that MRAs should quite literally assemble some Molotov cocktails and “start burning down police stations and courthouses.” (You can read the whole manifesto here.) Despite his calls for violence many MRAs have hailed him as an MRA martyr.
Marcotte, in her comment here, suggested that there might have been other, more personal reasons for his suicide – namely, the desire to hurt his ex-wife:
I’ll point out that setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell, and if your anger at losing control over her overwhelms all other desires. Which is common enough with abusers, who will ruin their own lives and their own shit and turn their children against them in an effort to hurt the woman they’ve fixated on.
One MR blogger declared this comment “pure feminist evil”; a conservative blogger compared Marcotte to the Beast of Babylon. Still other MRAs resorted to assorted variations on the c-word.
Marcotte has now responded to this, er, “criticism” with an excellent post on Pandagon. As she points out, correctly,
suicide and threats of suicide are common tactics used by abusers to hurt their victims. Abusers dramatically self-destruct all the time in their desperation to control and hurt the objects of their obsession. There was just recently a big story about this, in fact: Jason Valdez of Utah, who had a long criminal record that included domestic violence, held a woman hostage in a hotel room for 16 hours and kept updates about the situation on Facebook. He eventually committed suicide.
The notion that suicide can be a hostile, aggressive act designed to hurt other people is hardly a controversial one, whether the person committing suicide is male or female. Threats of suicide are often used to manipulate other people; suicide itself can be an act of revenge.
Marcotte goes on:
Apparently, I’m supposed to pretend that suicide isn’t a disruptive, selfish act in many cases (especially when the suicide victim commits it in a public and destructive way), and that people who do it, while yes victims of their own mental health problems, are also thinking that they’re going to make everyone pay for not indulging them. In fact, not only is this true in Ball’s case, but he spelled it out in his suicide note. The “make the bastards suffer” theme of his note is the reason that wingnuts are supporting him.
But you don’t have to take her word for it. Read Ball’s entire manifesto, to the end, and ask yourself if this man is an appropriate “martyr” for any political movement.
Sarah: I don’t find it all that bubbly.
Personally, I get offended when people tell me I’m normal 😛
You know, I’m comfortable with deriding this guy for trying to incite violence against innocent people. For that, he is a douchebag that should rot in hell.
What I’m not comfortable doing is calling suicide “selfish”.
Really? How do you justify that?
Was it selfish when he doused himself in the gasoline? (He was just trying to make a smelly, gasoline mess all over the floor for other people to clean up.)
Was it selfish when he set himself on fire? (He was just trying to draw attention to himself with all those flames.)
Was it selfish when he screamed in agony and crumpled?(Trying to draw attention to himself again)
If suicide is an act of revenge, then it’s a very lame one. Suicide bombing maybe. suicide-murder, sure. But suicide itself, especially a messy and painful suicide, speaks more to the desire for self-obliteration than anything else.
@ Sarah: I love beer! I have 5 gallons of porter brewing in my closet, so I’m always happy to talk beer talk with other people.
@Ami: I’ve been lurking in that thread, and nothing any of the regulars did popped out at me as particularly odd.
Oh noes, I’ve lost the ability to distinguish normal from not!
…
Oh well!
@Feyline I meant that he thinks that we’re all weird and cult like and horrible and stuff xD
Beer is good
Wine is good
Cider is good
Spirits are good
Men are bad. 🙂
When I get to New Jersey… cider is the name of the game. I’ll have a carboy in the garage before the Autumn is out.
Ami: all except for Dave, “Dan” and aMiRA.
Hey Feyline is that avatar a representation of what you look like? :3
If suicide is an act of revenge, then it’s a very lame one.
Well, yeah, it’s not generally done by people who are thinking clearly about consequences and logic and all that fun stuff. Saying it’s revenge doesn’t mean we think it’s a GOOD idea or anything. But it does work – the people left behind are very hurt by it. Probably not in precisely the way the person killing them-self intended, but definitely hurt.
Yum, cider! I’m totes about the cider now that I can’t drink beer. Do you think I could make a weird (because that’s the word of the night) michelada out of hard cider, ice, and a salty rim?
I’ll have a carboy in the garage before the Autumn is out.
That’s misandrist. I suppose you’ll let the cargirl sit in the air-conditioned house and watch Oprah?
WHO IS DAN?
http://manboobz.com/2011/06/22/arms-and-the-mens-rights-movement/comment-page-7/#comment-33242
that’s Dan
@Ami Nooo! Now all the mystery is gone.
@Bee/Pecunium Yay hard cider! And regular cider. Oohh, and mulled cider! I can make a kick-ass mulled cider. I should make that…. damn this desert never having an appropriate time for mulled cider!
Ohhhhh, right. I had completely forgotten about dan! I went back a page, after The Crack Emcee told him to follow him to various places on the internet, and gave up.
Oh, dan. Please don’t follow The Crack Emcee anywhere. It can only lead to bad things.
Oh. I think I just figured out dan. *whistles*
Bee… do tell. And, because I like you.
sweat bee
Oh crud. Maybe I didn’t figure out nothing. I’m on sangria #2.
Thanks for the bee! So pretty and iridescent. And hairy!
Bee: It’s a California Native. An Halactid Sweat Bee; they are solitary. I got lucky in spotting her (and it’s a her, the males don’t have pollen combs).
It makes me chuckle when we’ve got our lovely Manboobz community full of geeks and oddballs
First thing someone’s said around here I can completely agree with. Sheesh.
You North Americans have a weird sense of humor. It’s like watching Ned Flanders on meth.
ask yourself was Thích Quảng Đức an abuser????
really, he didn’t hold his wife hostage nor blame her in his 10,000 word manefesto. You are putting things there which weren’t there. You are using him for YOUR political cause and that is just as shameful as the MRA’s using his as a martyr…..
There is nothing in the linked article to indicated that Valdez shot himself ‘to control and hurt the object of [his] obsession’ or even that the woman was his obsession.
The linked to guidance says only that ‘seeking revenge’ can be a sign that a person might be suicidal. There was nothing there to indicate that ‘suicide itself can be an act of revenge’ or otherwise ‘a hostile, aggressive act designed to hurt other people’. My own experience of being suicidal (two decades ago), and of speaking to other suicidal people is that the prospect of hurting other people through the act just adds to the misery of the suicidal person.
That isn’t the question at hand. The question at hand is whether Marcotte’s conjecture that his ‘goal [was] to make [his] ex-wife’s life a living hell’ is a reasonable one given the information we have. Marcotte refers to the ‘“make the bastards suffer” theme of his note’. There is indeed such a theme. But which bastards? He’s angry at judges, politicians and various other agents who together make up The System. But is he angry at his ex-wife? Quoting from his manifesto:
It doesn’t look like it to me. I only skimmed much of his diatribe, so it’s possible that he expressed anger toward or a desire for revenge against her in another part of it. But if he did, you or Marcotte should be able to cite it with specificity. I should not have to carefully read all ten thousand words and try to guess what it is you think supports your position.
“What I’m not comfortable doing is calling suicide “selfish”.
Really? How do you justify that?”
The problem with the word ‘selfish’ is that we tend to link it to assholes who only care about themselves. But even people who are generally considerate of other people are capable of the odd selfish act. When you consider the fallout from most suicides- there is almost always someone left devasted or grief-stricken or even just guilt-stricken- how can it be anything other than a selfish act?
I don’t post much but I lurk and feel like I know some of you, which is why I feel oddly comfortable sharing this: Back when I was in my early twenties, I tried to kill myself. Obviously, my thinking was extremeley messed up at the time but I remember thinking that finally people would understand how much pain I was in. I wanted them to realise it and feel bad that they hadn’t done more to help me. That extremeley selfish motive aside, I gave no thought to how my boyfriend or my mother or my sister or my friends would feel when they found out. I was in so much pain that I was unable to focus on anything but myself. And that’s selfish. Could I help it at the time? Not really. But, later, after the hospital fed me a bottle of liquid charcoal and I’d thrown up all the pills and I was a little high on the drugs they gave me, I realised what a tool I’d been.
Of course, I realise that my one and only brush with oblivion doesn’t make me an expert. But as someone who has seriously attempted to end their life, I feel quite comfortable owning it as an inherantly selfish act. And I can say that even though I fully understand how divorced from logic the suicidal can be.
She makes the frequent mistake in equating suicide with attempted suicide and treating both the same as the latter.
They are two very different things and only rarely overlap. The only time they do, is when somebody accidentally succeeds (one of those was in my family) but that is uncommon to say the least.Just because somebody has attempted suicide does not make them knowledgeable on actual suicide.
I’m also extremely critical of those who attack suicide as some sort of selfish act anyway. Apart from being an absurd contradiction (calling self destruction “selfish”), nobody has the right to make such a judgment about someone else’s life and situation.
@unreal, I disagree with you-suicide attempts are generally serious. I think the issue is not suicide attempts and self harm, but suicide threats and threats of self harm. Using these threats is a pretty common tool for emotional abusers, but few of them actually go so far as to actually try it. I think there are some cases of simple suicide (as compared to suicide murder) where the person does see their suicide as a tool of revenge. I am just unconvinced that actual suicide attempts and suicides from this motive are that common. Suicide notes are often apologetic, and fairly often in western cultures cite being sick in an attempt to reduce responsibility. Plenty of suicidal people feel that their loved ones would be better off without them or that they are so totally unloved that no one would be upset for too long.
My suicide attempt at twelve was about the polar opposite of Jules. I spent copious amounts of time thinking about death in general and my death more specifically. So, yes, I did consider the impact on others, I just thought they would get over it and just forget about me soon enough, if they cared at all. It never once occured to me that anyone I knew would ever understand how my mind worked, either. But, as death was very final, I wanted to be extra certain that I was committed to the results if I tried to kill myself. I had this notion that long, painful, bloody suicides were the ones that indicated real commitment and that other forms of suicide were for weak indecisive people. But, as a masochist in certain ways, I have this sort of contradictory instinct where the times when I want to inflict small levels of pain on myself tend to be the times when I am in a relatively decent mood. I also had to have everything completely secretive, because I feared being caught and loosing what control I had over my life more than I feared death. So, contriving a long, painful suicide that did not start out with small amounts of pain and could be done in absolute secrecy was arduous enough a task that I never actually did it. My single suicide attempt actually was the “better off without me” type. I had anger problems, severe anger problems, and in a fight with my friend, I had that urge where I genuinely wanted to kill the other person. The idea that I might snap and hurt him scared me bad enough to overide all of my usual odd notions and make me try killing myself with pills. I don’t have the strongest digestive system, and ended up vomitting on my own. I was never caught and I did not tell people about it. Afterwards, I understood perfectly well why I had tried it, but I hated myself for trying a weak suicide and still being weak enough to fail at it. So, I told myself that I would set up a proper plan for a proper suicide the next time and in the meantime I would work on only wanting to kill people who hurt me when they were bad people. That made me slip back into my usual mode with the complicated contradictions.
“She makes the frequent mistake in equating suicide with attempted suicide and treating both the same as the latter”
I think it’s rather presumptous of you to assume (as implied by your “Just because somebody has attempted suicide does not make them knowledgeable on actual suicide”) that, because I failed, I didn’t mean to go through with it.
Also: “nobody has the right to make such a judgment about someone else’s life and situation.”
Pot, meet Kettle.