A couple of intriguing quotes from Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit.
The topic at hand: A Redditor claims an ex falsely accused him of rape and caused him various other problems and basically acted like a shit. No one, of course, can possibly know if the guy is telling the truth, but the r/mr regulars all assume the alleged false accuser is guilty until proven innocent. (And maybe not even then.)
Naturally, some of the regulars use this as an opportunity to discuss how completely understandable it is when guys kill their exes.
Really, in this misandrist world, dudes murdering their exes is totally like slaves murdering their masters. Illegal, sure, but who can blame them? At least that’s how texaswildfires sees it:
Yep, in his mind, dudes today are totally in the exact same situation as slaves in the antebellum south — so when a guy murders his ex, the person you should feel empathy with is the murderer.
Naturally, both of these comments got upvotes, because that’s just how r/mr rolls these days.
And for fuck’s sake, learn to spell “yeah.”
So, I think the thing that most people miss is what PTSD does to a person. PTSD and things like Stockholm Syndrome are real psychological states that manifest to victims of abuse.
Have people coming back from wars done things that were pretty inexplicable due to PTSD (like committing suicide or lashing out at family)? Yes. They’ve experienced sustained trauma.
Members of cults have often done things that were outside the norm legally, due to mental abuse and coercion.
Does it justify murder? No. Does it explain how warped a persons’ mental state must be to consider murder? Yes, I think it does.
I’ve never been in a position in my life where I’ve been verbally threatened, physically beaten, sexually assaulted or the like in a consistent longer term way. I’m guessing a great deal of commenters haven’t as well. So it’s pretty easy (and lazy) to say, “I’d just leave.”
That’s called cognitive dissonance, and people who haven’t been abused often experience that particular kind of CD. “It must not be that bad if she stays.” “I’d never put up with that.”
It allows the non-victim to create a place of safety for themselves mentally.
But people who have experienced that level of intimate abuse from someone they are supposed to trust, and from someone who they may have kids with (who may or may not be witnessing or experiencing the abuse), or who may have control of “escape routes” or money, and whose families may well have given up on them for not leaving during other periods of abuse, or neighbors who have turned a blind eye, or police that haven’t helped…well…they don’t see escape as an option often. Part of themself gets shut down. People are capable of snapping.
Does that mean killing someone is a good thing hooray for feminizzzmmm! No, no it doesn’t. It means that humanity and the systems we’ve designed as society and culture have horribly failed. That the woman was left to suffer in a system that was run by a sociopath and help was offered or intervened. It means that the man was somehow brought up to believe that a woman was his property to treat like an object. Don’t like what she does? Hit her. Scare her. Control her. He needed to be in jail, she needed to be in therapy.
The result of a murder, may mean she’s free of the abuser, but the system has failed miserably, and she’ll doubtless suffer the rest of her life, as will his family and if they had kids, them too.
Yeah, murder is just great.
@Laura: Really? That is your justification…the off chance she didn’t have friends and no one new she existed other than her husband.
Maybe…maybe…maybe…sounds like “I need to find something that excuses this woman from any blame”
Maybe she should have tried a less damaging and dramatic way first before killing someone.
Oh, Brandon, be quiet, the adults are talking.
It’s not like you’re going to actually read what people write and understand it. You’ll just give it a quick once-over and regurgitate your crap.
Brandon, did you ever think that maybe she tried to leave before killing him and got her ass handed to her?
Nah, not in BrandonWorld.
@Laura: Don’t be so snobbish.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ya
Seems like “informal slang” too me. If you like, I can start using the German “ja” instead.
How do you know what she tried, Brandon? Believe it or not, most women aren’t chomping at the bit to kill men. Most people don’t use murder as a first resort. Most people who snap and murder their significant other have had their psyches twisted terribly by abuse or mental illness.
But of course, you wouldn’t understand that, because you’ve never been there. You only care about yourself. You remind me of those people who whine that we shouldn’t have food stamps because “poor people can just grow their own food…poor people can just can things…poor people can do all these things that I’ve never tried and have no idea how difficult it would be.”
@Laura and Hellkell: It seems to me that all you have is a lot of “what if’s” and “maybes”.
Ya well “what if” she ran to the cops and said he was abusing me. Then “maybe” she wouldn’t feel the urge to kill a man in cold blood.
Fine. Look uneducated if that’s your choice.
Lauralot, don’t engage with Brandon on this. No matter what you say, he’ll say “Nuh uh!” and make you, and the rest of us, have to weed through his comments to get to actual critical contributions. Besides, there are tons of people out there who somehow just can’t fathom that abuse is this insidious long term process that changes a strong person to a frightened dependent one. Like the whole frog in a slowly heating pot of water vs dumping one into a boiling pot (though I’ve heard that whole example isn’t true).
But even in cases where a person is in a seemingly loving relationship and there is a “pop” to the face during an argument, often that person doesn’t just walk out. They’ve invested time and trust in a person and the cognitive dissonance that strike creates is very painful. It’s painful to admit that you need to leave someone.
Anyway, I’m guessing based on past threads where many of us tried very hard to explain things to Brandon (that taping sex with someone outside their knowledge is bad, that culture exists and he’s influenced by it) to no avail, he’ll do the same kind of obstinate, stubborn, derailing thing he does and we won’t actually do him or ourselves any good. He’ll only laugh at our attempts to convince him of what he knows is false because BRANDON.
@Brandon: don’t be so stupid. “Ya” makes you sound just like the mouth-breathing douche you are.
Your tone trolling is obnoxious.
Brandon, YOU don’t know what happened, either.
BrandonWorld is a very black and white place with precious little critical thinking.
Gosh, what an odd coincidence it would be if a person who was being abused by their partner was also isolated from their friends and family. It’s not like there’s any sort of systematic connection between those two elements…
@firebee: I know, right? Gotta love the “on the off chance she didn’t have any friends,” there. I mean, it’s not like isolating the victim from others is one of the first warning signs of an abuser or anything.
Thanks for the well wishes. I’m feeling better. I think my meds are putting me out of whack again, which mean… Experimentation time again! My NP will fucking love this.
But guys, it could never happen to Brandon! So clearly other people just aren’t doing Brandoning right.
I think it’s important to stress that it’s vanishingly rare that people get away completely scot free after directly causing the death of their partner, unless it was a genuine accident. Even if the charge ends up being manslaughter instead of murder, they may well still do jail time – and most people would agree that this would be entirely correct. (I certainly would.)
In fact, Sara Thornton, one of the high-profile UK cases that led to the recent change in the law, said that although her own sentence was reduced to manslaughter, it was entirely right and proper that she spent five and a half years in jail for killing her violent alcoholic husband. To quote her own words “I am not saying that every woman should be sent to prison, but for me it was fair. I took a life at the end of the day.”
Someone should add “Brandoning” to Urban Dictionary and define it as “assuming everyone has shared your life experiences and ignoring all evidence to the contrary.”
Also, anyone who thinks taping sexual encounters without the other party’s consent is A-okay as long you’re ostensibly doing to cover your own ass (so to speak) isn’t really in a good position to lecture anyone else about “Acting like a responsible adult.”
Brandon, you do realized that none of what have been said about victims of abuse means “women should get a get-out-of-jail card for killing their husbands if they annoy them”?
Especially because everything that has been about the psychology of victims apply both to male and female. And I know that feminists are supposed to deny the existence of male victims, but still…
I find this amusing because of the blatant gender-bias. She is the woman and “victim” in this hypothetical. No one knows any of the details..,yet most of the commenters here are like “Ya, it’s ok to kill someone because of all these possible what ifs maybe’s”
But if the genders where reversed…we would not be having the same discussion. It would be about “why didn’t he just leave”. There would be no mention of syndromes or diseases. It would all be about “why didn’t he leave” and “I can’t believe he was a wimp for so long and just took her abuse”.
You are so dense, you are really dense. For real.
No, we wouldn’t be saying that if the roles were reversed, people HAVE BEEN saying men can be abused, and YOU KNOW THIS.
You are totally dishonest.
Jill the Spinster wrote, “Unimaginative, I have read a few blogs where MRAs discuss getting consent before hand in writing or text messages as pre consent before the act. In their eyes this protects them from FRA but there is no allowance for their sex partner to change their mind before the act or during.”
Shit, Brandon isn’t the only person who thought this was a legitimately good idea? I liked it better when I thought he was just a one-in-a-million twit.
So, you just didn’t read the post right above yours then, Brandon? Big fucking surprise.
And no one has said it’s OK to kill someone.
But YOU have said it’s OK to tape someone without their consent, so who really cares what you think?