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Amanda Marcotte on the Thomas Ball suicide, and MRA haters

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.

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ithiliana
13 years ago

GRA: Great link! I shall save for future use.

Also: it’s possible to distinguish between INTENT and IMPACT. THe “selfish” in regard to suicide discussion seems very much about impact on others — whatever the person’s intent is. Intent can never truly be known, but impact can be traced.

I’ve been concerned over the years with what I believe is a fairly small martyr impulse in feminism, especially in literary feminisms around Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath–an impulse toward making them martyrs of the patriarchy. I want to resist that, just as I’d resist the attempts by the MRA’s to make Ball a martyr.

I’ve just been re-reading Heilbrun’s Amanda Cross series–and am saddened by the news of her death, I’ve read her essays and scholarship, starting with the essay in the late 50s/early 60s (I cannot remember dated) about the literary marginalization of Hamlet’s mother in the scholarship (what I consider the first Anglo American academic feminist literary scholarship in the 20th century). I know about her beliefs regarding suicide.

I do consider suicide a selfish act–but that doesn’t make the person who does it a monster, or evil–just human. We do selfish things all the time.

GRA
GRA
13 years ago

Wait, I’m all confused now. Do we follow in the Wordes of Amanda Marcotte or this Carolyn Heilwhatever, or the unqualified opinion of whoever it is that wrote that piece?

I DIDN’T GET THE FEMINST WORLD RULE NOTE THIS MONTH, what am I going to do now????

Do we start nominating Carolyn Heilbrun for sainthood and / or martyrdom because of her suicide now?

theLaplaceDemon
theLaplaceDemon
13 years ago

@GRA – fantastic link.

I have a really hard time figuring out how I feel about the suicide/selfishness issue. On the one hand, it does seem very selfish to me. On the other hand, I think the idea that taking your own life is illegal (particularly in cases of extreme illness) is ridiculous and people have a right to decide what to do with their bodies.

But I also come at this from a very naive and biased perspective. I have never been suicidal, and I have a hard time empathizing with the feeling. So I acknowledge that this is a situation where I really don’t understand what it’s like, and I’m uncomfortable projecting my opinions on suicide/euthanasia to onto others – I mean, who am I to say what it’s like for an individual who wants to die?

At the same time, I have had a suicidal significant other, and it’s hard for me to see his suicidal threats that as anything other than selfish. He point blank told me once that he would become suicidal again if we broke up. Months later, after I did break up with him, he would call me in the middle of the night telling me about how hard it was, but he refused to talk to anyone but me about it. One night when I went to see him he pulled out a large kitchen knife in front of me and said “You gave up on me, so why shouldn’t I?”

I understand that he was hurting. I don’t doubt his pain was very real. But it was selfish, even if not intentionally malice or manipulative, that he refused to get help or talk to anyone but me about it. I was nineteen years old at the time, and had never been in a serious relationship before. I stayed with him for months longer than I wanted to because I was so afraid of him hurting himself. After we broke up he continued to insist I be his only confidant, and I was so afraid of what he would do if he didn’t have someone there to argue that he shouldn’t kill himself that I spent months quietly listening to him go on about how much I’d hurt him, how I’d given up on him and “us,” how he didn’t understand how my love for him could have just gone away, how he felt like an empty shell. And for a long time I was afraid to bring up any of the things he had done to me, the things that had driven me out of the relationship, because I felt that my primary role was to convince him he deserved to live. It was honestly the worst period of my life.

I’m sorry if that was an overshare. I also don’t mean to equate all suicidal individuals with my ex boyfriend – I don’t assume that just because he was this way anyone else is that way.

I guess what I’m trying to illustrate with my anecdote is how intentions really don’t matter – because I genuinely believe that he was never intentionally manipulative or anything, but it didn’t matter because his constant threat of suicide did keep me in that relationship, and near him after the relationship, for far too long.

So having stewed a little, I guess this is what I think of it: I don’t think that killing yourself is de facto a selfish thing. I can understand people coming to rational choices about how the pain of life, for whatever reason, outweighs the benefits. If you are in truly great pain, I don’t think it’s always bad to put your own peace above the happiness of your loved ones (though if there are children involved…I think that’s a different story). But I think it is selfish when you put the responsibility on someone else and/or refuse to get help. I think it’s selfish to use suicide in ultimatums. And even if all of your intentions are good, even if you are in pain, that does not cancel out the pain you cause others.

tl;dr overshare. Posting it anyway. :-/

Bee
Bee
13 years ago

chuckeedee: I can’t disagree with what you’ve said (except for not wanting to enter the conversation about bees. Who doesn’t want to talk about bees? We’re fascinating!), because what you’ve said is kind of how I feel, to a certain extent, about the situation: We don’t know what was going through Ball’s mind. We don’t know why he set himself on fire, what his primary motivations were, or whether he was absolutely sane or not. And, to a certain extent, trying to guess his motives becomes distasteful to me.

But if you read Amanda’s comment and her blog post, she never says that she knows. She says things like, “there might be a more personal reason for this guy’s suicide,” and she talks about common threads in suicides, in general. That’s it. She’s admitted it’s her opinion.

And it is an opinion that’s based in Ball’s own words. The letter, as you say, doesn’t pin blame on the ex-wife, or say anything as clumsy as “I’m doing this to get back at my ex-wife,” but Ball does state that he believes the events that led to his suicide started when his four-year-old daughter licked him, and he never takes blame for hitting her three times in the face, until she was bleeding. The implication is that what happened next was his daughter’s fault for being disobedient. And the wife’s fault for calling Family Services and not knowing enough to take her chances by not calling the police on the man who had just hit their daughter in the face, and then not, in the six intervening months, trying to reconcile with a man who made no efforts at all to re-enter the family. He never takes the blame for anything, and that leaves us with the idea that he believes his ex-wife and daughter — along with several government officials, named and unnamed — are at fault for at least some of his desperate suicidal state.

That’s the way I read it, anyway. And I’ll say again that we don’t know — can’t know — what his intentions were when he wrote the letter the way he did. Maybe he was just in too much pain and wasn’t thinking about how his family would read the letter. Maybe his mind was somewhere else completely at that point. But Amanda’s opinion is definitely not coming out of nowhere.

GRA
GRA
13 years ago

The Laplace Demon: Wow. I’m sorry, but your ex sounds like a manipulative and controlling bastard. I’m sorry you had to go through that.

It makes me so angry when people do that. I have an uncle like that too. He refuses therapy or medication (he’s not crazy, yaknow, and only stupid, weak, crazy people who need to get a grip on themselves and try harder need those things), but whenever he’s depressed, he phones up my mom and tells her how he’s going to kill himself etc. etc, at least twice a month.

I think it’s a form of therapy for him? It makes her a wreck, though, and is extremely selfish and un-okay.

ithiliana
13 years ago

GRA: I can halp ur confusion: I DIDN’T GET THE FEMINST WORLD RULE NOTE THIS MONTH, what am I going to do now????

We all follow Ami Angelwings. It’s very simple.

XD!

Hippodameia
Hippodameia
13 years ago

“We all follow Ami Angelwings. It’s very simple.”

Ami is our Goddess. All hail Ami Angelwings!!

XD

Amused
Amused
13 years ago

I think whether or not Thomas Ball’s suicide was a selfish act, or whether suicide in general is a selfish act — these are the wrong questions to ask. (IMHO, of course.) And I also think it’s a bit of a denial to state that we have no idea why Thomas Ball committed suicide because we don’t have a window into his mind. Sure we do: he left a note explaining it. Some things are subject to interpretation, certainly, but I don’t think his diatribe is so indecipherably vague that we can honestly say we have no idea why he did it.

Outside of certain narrow cultural practices (limited to women on the Indian subcontinent, as far as I know), public self-immolation is almost always a political act; and based on Thomas Ball’s note, he intended it as a political act in his own case. Essentially, the idea is to use the horror and the suffering entailed in self-immolation to lend legitimacy to a cause that most people either don’t care about or don’t agree with. (In 1995, for example, a German man set himself on fire in a public place to protest what he thought was a pattern of unfair disparagement of the German military’s actions in World War II.) It’s a method for forcing people to think with their stomachs instead of their heads.

So while I wouldn’t use the word “selfish”, I would say it’s an extreme form of manipulating the public opinion, by guilting people into lending credence to something that is wrong. It’s cruel to his wife and daughter (he essentially argues that his daughter’s disobedience is what started the whole thing), and it’s cruel to the public at large. And furthermore, he is calling upon other men to kill police officers and judges, because doing so in the name of a man who believed in his looney cause so much he actually burned himself is quite fine, whereas doing it in the name of bullying the polity into depriving women of legal recourse and civil rights wouldn’t be.

To the extent that Ball was a father, as opposed to a political man, his suicide is no different than if he simply walked out on his children — and quite consistent with his non-payment of child support. This, of course, again, is just my personal opinion.

It was Ball’s intention — and it’s clearly working — to make fence-sitters believe that he was a victim of an injustice, and everything was everyone else’s fault. However, the instinctive belief that a guilty man wouldn’t kill himself protesting his innocence has no basis in reality, only in our fantasies about martyrdom. The one thing that strikes me about Ball’s own words is that he simply refused — REFUSED — to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with striking his four-year-old daughter so hard that it busted her lip. I could buy his contention that this was a one-time thing if he didn’t take the position that she deserved it, and he was right to do it. That is the mindset of an abuser.

Feyline
13 years ago

(he’s not crazy, yaknow, and only stupid, weak, crazy people who need to get a grip on themselves and try harder need those things)

Wow, you’re right! When I was suffering through regular psychotic attacks, I should’ve just let them continue! Never mind that I almost killed the family dog once and scared the shit out of my poor kid sister by screaming at her through a door that she was out to hurt me and I would “gnaw [her] fucking hands off” if I could. I was so weak and stupid to take pills so I and those close to me could stop going through that! I’m off to put myself through another long-term trauma in the hopes of bringing the attacks back so I can suffer like a real person should.

Yeah, I was crazy (still am, but with something else; variety is the spice of life, I guess), and I did need to get a grip. But I don’t see why needing chemicals to counter the unbalanced chemicals in my brain is a bad thing. It’s not like I can just will myself out of insanity.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system:

theLaplaceDemon: Wow, I went through something frighteningly similar. My ex would also use threats of suicide to keep me under his power. I have no doubt that there were times when he genuinely wanted to die, but there were definitely times that his threats of suicide were a means of control.

It may be because of bias, but it sounds to me like it might’ve been a similar situation with your ex.

theLaplaceDemon
theLaplaceDemon
13 years ago

GRA – thanks. I mean, I always feel a little weird talking about it, ’cause as much as it sucked it’s still probably much easier to be me than it was to be him, and it is something I have trouble emphathizing with. What I guess I was ultimately trying to point out was that as far as selfishness goes, there’s a big difference between wanting to die and using suicide in ultimatums.

Also, major lol at this: “Wait, I’m all confused now. Do we follow in the Wordes of Amanda Marcotte or this Carolyn Heilwhatever, or the unqualified opinion of whoever it is that wrote that piece?

I DIDN’T GET THE FEMINST WORLD RULE NOTE THIS MONTH, what am I going to do now????”

Pecunium
13 years ago

unreal man: So… let’s see how your modelling works. We have a large group of people who have actually attempted suicide, but failed. We can talk to them, get an idea of what they were thinking.

We have another group, who have actually attempted suicide, and succeeded. You argue the difference (that they succeeded) is so different from the people who failed that none of the psychological model obtained from the study of the first group can be applied to the second.

Can you give a cogent explanation as to why? Something more than “we can’t know what the second group was thinking because they are dead,”?

What I see your, “we should remain open minded and non judgemental” doing is giving an excuse to not take the tone (and I read it all) of his manifesto into account. He blames everyone else. It was a way to engage in some grandiosity, so as to give meaning to his killing himself.

He may have had depression. He may have had other issues, but part of his purpose was revenge. And one of the people he seemed to want revenge on was his wife, for “failing” him, and talking to other people about his hitting his daughter in the face until he split her lip.

He did it for himself. This wasn’t diving into the freezing Potomac to save people. This wasn’t throwing himself on a grenade. It wasn’t (depsite the attempts at parallel) a someone setting himself on fire to protest active abuses by the state, for which he had no other recourse.

He may have had additional motives, we will never know, but the one’s he gave are overblown, and more personal than not.

Which is what Amanda Marcotte said.

Feyline
13 years ago

Dammit, should’ve re-read before I posted. I forgot one of my main points to theLapelaceDemon: that feeling suicidal and using threats of suicide as an emotional weapon can overlap.

Feyline
13 years ago

Oh, GRA: I missed that you mentioned therapy as well as medication, so now not only are you indirectly shaming me for having the gall to take medication, but you’re also telling me that what I’m doing now to not have flashbacks, not have anxiety attacks, not throw up when I have sex, and not be unable to walk or drive near certain streets or see certain people or hear certain words or smell certain scents without at least one of the above getting set off is the mark of someone weak.

I cannot will the crazy out. If you had schizophrenia, you would not be able to will the crazy out. If the most strong-willed and stubborn person in the ‘verse had one of the types of crazy that was due to chemical imbalances or metaphorical crossed wires in the brain or severe trauma that the psyche is unable to cope with, they would not be able to will the crazy out either. That is not how brains work.

I’m going to leave now so I’m not tempted to keep post-spamming.

theLaplaceDemon
theLaplaceDemon
13 years ago

Feyline – “that feeling suicidal and using threats of suicide as an emotional weapon can overlap.”

Definitely agreed. Like I said earlier, it’s something I still sort of have trouble processing and contextualizing in my head…a combination of wondering who that person was who stayed in that relationship for so long (how could that person have been ME?) and wondering if I’m painting him too harshly or not harshly enough…To hear him tell it, I gave up on us and didn’t give him a real chance to try to change and have since turned into an unreliable flake. Of course, my friends and family were thrilled when I broke up with him…and all of my memories are heavily saturated in emotional subjectivity, so I have no freakin’ clue how to get any perspective on the situation. But I feel pretty confident in my ability to not put myself in that situation again, and in my ability to get out of bad relationships – so lesson learned, I suppose.

Pecunium
13 years ago

Thomas: Seppeku has a lot of forms, some are pretty selfish. junshi-seppeku is seppeku my way of revenge. It was done to cause a fued. There is another (I want to say it was funshi-seppeku) which was a form of reprimand to one’s feudal lord. Think of it as a form of resignation in protest.

The difficulty there is that defining selfish as binary, is limiting. To commit seppeku was a selfish act. One did it, oftimes, to prevent the state from from having control over your death. It is a difficult ethical question. One I am conflicted on. But we aren’t discussing an edge case here.

Pecunium
13 years ago

LaPlace Demon: Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. The nice men will come along, cherry-pick something, some woman; somewhere, wrote, sometime, and tell you what you believe.

theLaplaceDemon
theLaplaceDemon
13 years ago

“LaPlace Demon: Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. The nice men will come along, cherry-pick something, some woman; somewhere, wrote, sometime, and tell you what you believe.”

Oh right! Let me look it up in my Official Guide to Mandated Feminist Beliefs! How silly of me, putting all of this effort into thinking

Snowy
Snowy
13 years ago

Feyline, I’m pretty sure GRA was not actually saying that people who go to therapy or take medication are weak, but that that’s what the uncle might have been thinking.

“It makes me so angry when people do that. I have an uncle like that too. He refuses therapy or medication (he’s not crazy, yaknow, and only stupid, weak, crazy people who need to get a grip on themselves and try harder need those things), but whenever he’s depressed, he phones up my mom and tells her how he’s going to kill himself etc. etc, at least twice a month.”

Pecunium
13 years ago

LaPlace Demon: ! How silly of me, putting all of this effort into thinking… If you try to think, the poor hamster has to run faster, and that’s not kind. Just let the men do the work, and everything will work out fine.

Feyline
13 years ago

Snowy: Oh, you’re right! Shit, I feel silly now.

Sorry, GRA. As you can probably tell, I’m a tiny bit bitter and hypersensitive towards those sorts of sentiments. I see now you were mocking that viewpoint. You have my deepest apologies for going off on you like that.

*sits in shame corner*

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

I had an aunt who would do the same thing to my mother–go off her meds, cry that no one loved her and wouldn’t the world be better off…etc. She did attempt suicide once while she was living with my parents, had she been successful, I would have found her when I got home from school. She tore my mother up for years to the point where I cut her off, because there was no way I deal with her rationally.

My grandfather, on the other hand, never made a peep about suicide and shot himself right between Christmas and NYE four years ago. I do think he was selfish–he could have reached out to my dad or my aunt, but he chose to do that. He also had the money to travel, he could’ve been all, “Screw you all, I’m going to Thailand to bang hookers for a month. See ya.” Instead, he gave us the final “fuck you,” all right.

So yeah, there’s no way that we can gauge someone else’s pain, I guess, but it feels like a selfish act to those who are left or have been manipulated by threats.

amandajane5
13 years ago

I dated the same guy from 16 – 20. He fell into the depths of depression and tried to commit suicide at 19. Did his best to hide it from me, but he’d left a concert we were at together

I have an ex-boyfriend who actually did try to commit suicide. He did it in private on his own, and had I not gotten to him in time he wouldn’t have received the help he needed. One of the most terrifying nights of my life – sitting in the ER alone wondering if he was going to die.

Of course, I then spent two years getting out of the relationship, because he would threaten to do it again and he knew I wouldn’t leave him and let him do that. And he wondered why I wouldn’t marry him after two years of suicide threats. (He’s fine now that he has a good therapist and anti-depressants, but he was always a manipulative fuck and an emotional abuser, and I’m still glad to be shot of him.)

amandajane5
13 years ago

Sorry, should have edited that better – talking about the same guy in all three paragraphs.

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