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Links: Michael Kimmel and Amanda Marcotte on masculinity, misogyny and Anders Breivik

The world doesn't need any more macho Nazis

A couple excellent pieces on Anders Breivik and misogyny.

First: The other day I posted a link to a piece by Michael Kimmel on Breivik and the sexual politics of far-right thought. It turned out that the article was a draft that got published prematurely.

Now the final version of the post is officially up at Sociological Images:  A tale of two terrorists redux. Kimmel argues that what we know about Breivik thus far

indicate[s] that … it will be impossible to fully understand this horrific act without understanding how gender operates as a rhetorical and political device for domestic terrorists.

These members of the far right consider themselves Christian Crusaders for Aryan Manhood, vowing its rescue from a feminizing welfare state. Theirs is the militarized manhood of the heroic John Rambo – a manhood that celebrates their God-sanctioned right to band together in armed militias if anyone, or any governmental agency, tries to take it away from them. If the state and capital emasculate them, and if the masculinity of the “others” is problematic, then only “real” white men can rescue the American Eden or the bucolic Norwegian countryside from a feminized, multicultural, androgynous immigrant-inspired melting pot.

Meanwhile, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon offers some thoughts on Misogyny and Terrorism:

[T]here’s definitely a strong link between misogyny and violence that can’t be denied.  Misogynists are far likelier to be violent people than non-misogynists, which is why rape and wife-beating are such common crimes.  (Domestic violence is the number one cause of injury for women 15-44.)  All bigotry provokes violence at its ends, of course.  This isn’t the Oppression Olympics.  But misogyny and violence go hand in hand so often because misogynists really buy deeply into the idea that women are weak and men are “strong”, by which they mean aggressive.  A steady drumbeat of misogynist thought couldn’t be better designed to reach the unhinged and cause them to lash out violently, all while imagining themselves to be big, tough men who claim they were forced—with “why did you make me do this?” being the battle cry of wife beaters—into violence.

Discuss.

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Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

@Ozy I know >:| I need to catch up >:

C’MON SPEARHEAD! GET YOUR GAME IN GEAR! >:O

i think the problem is, unlike the other places I show up in, I write EXACTLY the way MRAs think women write rather than “wtf is wrong w/ the way she writes!?” xD

Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

@Redlocker I love Babylon 5! 😀 Except S1 and 5 xD

Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

@Molly nobody’s sent me wank fantasies o_O Just death and rape threats xD

we all have our own niche I guess xD

redlocker
13 years ago

@Ami: Yeah, I’m currently going through Season 1 now. It’s a bit slow, but it’s an intriguing introduction to the universe of the show.

VoiP
VoiP
13 years ago

So…uh…anyone have a favorite TV show? I’m currently going through Mad Men and Babylon 5.
I love B5! Also Star Trek (except Voyager and Enterprise), Farscape, and Firefly. I just finished Sarah Connor Chronicles. At some point, I plan to get into Blake’s Seven.

VoiP
VoiP
13 years ago

Season 1 of Babylon 5 is not particularly well-written. It’ll get better, until the third season will be damn near the best sci-fi that you will have seen.

Who here likes The Guild?

Magical Laura
13 years ago

60kg??? I’m 63kg and I’m like a US size 4/6 o_O I thought I was thin now! 😛

redlocker
13 years ago

“60kg??? I’m 63kg and I’m like a US size 4/6 o_O I thought I was thin now!”

You must be THIS THIN to ride the Pentti Linkola.

redlocker
13 years ago

But really…did anyone else get “Ok Computer” flashbacks when reading that Anti-Humanist stuff? “Paranoid Android” lyrics reverberated inside my head when reading Marc’s final post.

Pecunium
13 years ago

Marc: I’m just for normal eugenics.

Ah… so the, “lets wipe out all them men” wasn’t, purely an intellectual exercise. It’s a question of if you want to wipe people out, but whom you wish to kill off.

So Brievik was merely a failure of execution; but you agree with his ends. That seems a strong case for you being not merely a bigot and a racist, but an eliminationist bigot and racist.

(btw, thanks for reminding me to go look at Molly’s tumbler. It is a bit decadent. I like a bit of decadence)

Pecunium
13 years ago

Molly: I like your blog. I’m impressed by your willingness to post the photos. I think, from a purely technical POV, they are very good at what they are trying to do.

From a personal POV, I think they make you look good too.

Pecunium
13 years ago

And I see Marc is banned… ah well. (I also see he has tried to pull an Eoghan, and failed by announcing himself).

But I was struck by this (which seems typical of his difficulties with consistency/logic)

1: People are destructive to the environment.
2: Therefore the number of people must be reduced.

1: Camels are destructive to the environment.
2: Reducing the number of camels is immoral.

redlocker
13 years ago

“But I was struck by this (which seems typical of his difficulties with consistency/logic)

1: People are destructive to the environment.
2: Therefore the number of people must be reduced.

1: Camels are destructive to the environment.
2: Reducing the number of camels is immoral.”

According to Marc, it’s the humans who are doing damage to the environment, and them solely. He was pretty much dismissing that Camels could in any way be linked to Global Warming (a little soundbyte of his that was proven to be false. As someone else has said in this thread before, feral Camels were being killed off, but not because of global warming).

Tyler
Tyler
11 years ago

Can I hate both sides. Wait a minute why am I asking permission yes I can. Both loud mouthed college feminists and “Mens rights activists” strike me as shrill entitled children. Mens rights activists seem worse sure but that goes without saying, nobody actually takes them seriously. I believe in equality between the sexes. Is that a movement anymore? I would totally sign up for that. That agenda however seems to have died with the 70s. The modern feminists seem like they just want to have a battle of the sexes, they live in this weird contradiction of insisting women are perpetual victims and yet claiming that women aren’t just equal but better than men. In essence they don’t want to win, and eliminate the social construct of sexism/patriarchy/whatever you wanna call it. They want to have their cake and eat it too. Its seems modern feminisms primary spokespersons are women of quite a lot of privilege and yet they use their female status to claim the exact opposite. To me it seems to be some escape from white liberal guilt. Anyone who too strongly identifies with either their race or gender is suspect to me, its like good job on being born, you got anything to show for it?

katz
11 years ago

Yes, Tyler, you’re very edgy and above-it-all.

Aaliyah
11 years ago

No feminist today thinks that women are perpetual victims; if that “perpetual victim” narrative actually pervaded feminist discourse, then feminists would just give up and stop being feminists because they wouldn’t see any purpose in advocating equal rights and respect for women. There are so many feminists who argue that patriarchy isn’t a permanent power structure that you must be either clueless or very disingenuous when you accuse them of arguing otherwise.

And when feminists say that women are equal to men, it’s quite obvious that they are arguing that men and women are inherently equal in regards to intelligence, moral character, etc. Obviously feminists recognize that men and women aren’t equal with respect to sexual victimization, intimate partner violence, abuse, wages, and so on.

Also, women can still be privileged, but not for being female; they can be privileged as a result of being white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, etc. So your point about many feminist spokespeople being privileged is really just a non-argument.

You’re yet another anti-feminist who regurgitates the same old straw men against feminism. We’re tired of shitheads like you. How about you actually take the time to read up on feminism instead of showing us how ignorant and/or disingenuous you are?

Fibinachi
Fibinachi
11 years ago

I’ve never understood the coy remark of “They want to have their cake and eat it too”.

Eating the cake one has is the very point of possessing cake. If one wants to have a cake and eat it, that’s… that’s not an insult. That’s enjoying a delicious good.

Now, if you’d gone: “They want to have their cake cryogenically frozen and stored for all eternity against the vast entropy of the universe, to forever admire the conditment and the storied crust of marzipan most fine”, well, then we would be talking.

Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Fibinachi — I read somewhere or another that we’ve corrupted it, it used to be “eat your cake and have it too” which actually makes sense. Once you eat it, your stomach has it 🙂

Tyler, Tyler, Tyler, whatever shall we do with you? Feminism got out of hand when second wave feminism ceased being a thing? So like, trans feminism shouldn’t exist since second wavers were big on gender essentialism?

“Anyone who too strongly identifies with either their race or gender is suspect to me, its like good job on being born, you got anything to show for it?”

Yeah sorry pal but biology =/= gender. So no, my gender is not merely a product of having been born, and seeing how non-binary people are barely recognized, even in trans* communities, you can bet that high and mighty ass of yours that I identify with my gender! What have I got to show for being born? Show of hands, who here’s learned at least a bit about trans* issues from my willingness to answer questions?

Tyler, there you have a display of wtf I’ve done that you can confirm despite the limits of the internet. You?

Also SIR PECUNIUM!! Apparently none of us have done shit besides being born! And the Argenti wants another anti-torture lecture, combine these things?

Gametime
11 years ago

Anyone who too strongly identifies with either their race or gender is suspect to me, its like good job on being born, you got anything to show for it?

“It’s like, I don’t even see gender, man, like, we’re all just people, you know? I don’t understand why feminists have to be so divisive about it.”

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