Given the enmity towards women in general, and feminists in particular, that’s omnipresent in the manosphere, it seems logical to assume that most of the dudes lingering around MRA, PUA and MGTOW sites online would take a certain secret pleasure in seeing women suffer.
As regular readers of this blog know all too well, oftentimes the desire to see women suffer is not so secret: some MRAs and others of their ilk literally laugh at women getting cancer, declare that rapists should be given medals, openly fantasize about “beat[ing] the living shit” out of women, and tell feminists who complain about this sort of shit that they’re “so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.” (Those last two examples come from Paul Elam, one of the MRM’s most influential bloggers.) Still others send rape and death threats to outspoken women online.
But good news, folks! It turns out that not all manosphere misogynists want women to suffer. Why? Because suffering is an ineffective way to put women in their place. That, at least, is the argument of a fellow calling himself Höllenhund. In a comment on Susan Walsh’s Hooking Up Smart blog, he offered this argument:
Making women suffer wouldn’t achieve anything in itself – I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of the Manosphere would agree. Women are normally solipsistic and they fail to understand their own urges and don’t comprehend the connection between cause and effect. They’d never understand why they’re suffering in the first place.
So, basically, in his mind, women are dumber than dogs and thus harder to train. Even worse, the suffering women can sit down in the street and cry, and countless “white knights,” hoping to win their approval (and get in their pants) will rush to their aid:
Suffering only motivates them to fish for male sympathy (and thus investment) through crying and whining, to blame ‘ bad men’ for their ‘misfortune’ and thus play the game of ‘let’s you and him fight’. That’s how it has always been.
So making women suffer is largely pointless. I’d go further and say it’d actually be detrimental to men because it encourages white-knighting and intra-male competition. …
And some of the ladies even seem to sort of like it:
Not to mention the fact that many women actually seem to find some sort of twisted pleasure in suffering, that all this’d simply serve to justify more anti-male legislation and whatnot.
Poor Höllenhund doesn’t have much hope that women will ever see how totally terrible they really are
[T]he notion of making women ‘admit their faults’ is pie-in-the-sky as well. Again, I’m sure pretty much everyone in the Manosphere would agree. You have a bigger chance of seeing pigs fly.
If women are to recognize their faults in this SMP [Sexual Marketplace], they need to have a realistic picture of both their own sexuality and the SMP in the first place, plus they need to have empathy for beta males …
Er, you’re lecturing us about empathy?
Sorry, on with the rest of the sentence:
plus they need to be imbued with the sense of morality without which the very concept of ‘fault’ is meaningless.
And lecturing us about morality too?
I think we’ll sooner see Haiti become a dreaded military superpower.
I’d rather see that than live in a world in which women were so self-hating that they actually believed they were guilty of whatever unnamed sins Höllenhund attributes to them.
NOTE: I found Höllenhund’s comment because the blogger at Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology cited it as a prime example of the sort of brave “truth telling” that will get you banned “on feminist sites that supposedly support men.” And yes, it apparently did get poor Höllenhund banned from Hooking Up Smart. I’m not quite sure how Susan Walsh, a traditionalist devoted to slut shaming in a thousand different flavors, counts as feminist, but that’s not the point. The point is: I’m regularly accused of “cherry picking” comments from MRAs. In this case, Mr. PMAFT picked the comment for me.
I had the faintly related thought that the political arena in the US has become so ugly and hostile that it’s almost like the toxic shit driving women out of internet discussion spaces. It seems like a stretch but I wonder if ratcheting up the awfulness is intended to surpress the turnout of female voters.
What is SMP?
SMP = “Sexual marketplace,” i.e., the view of the universe where all women are goods for sale, and expecting to be treated like humans is overpricing.
“Sexual Marketplace.” MRAs like to pretend it’s real thing.
Also, I can’t admit “the faults of women” because that’s like admitting the faults of people whose names start with T. I don’t think Tim Burton should have to answer for the faults of Ted Bundy, you know?
“Er, you’re lecturing us about empathy?”
“And lecturing us about morality too?”
How is this a counter-argument to the post that you are criticizing? If women are not held to the same degree of accountability for their abusive acts as men are for men’s abusive acts, then how are abusive women supposed to be effectively challenged? And as long as women are less vigorously challenged about their abusive acts than men are, what recourse to men have? Namely, how can men who are abused by women — and who seek help — find an adequate level of assistance to meet their needs and stop the abuse?
If you were a man a woman were hitting you, and if you had not yet been injured (but feared you could be), then how would you feel if your call for empathy or assistance was rejected? How would you feel if your call for empathy was met with mocking laughter? Worse, how would you feel if this was the status quo, and yet the group of people who purport to stand up for the rights of both sexes to be free from victimization from intimate partner violence went so far as to actually justify the status quo? I have seen quotes on this blog where people actually defended the idea that men who were abused by women SHOULD be turned away from receiving shelter-based services, because those services were presumably created by women to exclusively serve the needs of women, and that MRAs should build shelter networks for men themselves because non-MRAs couldn’t be bothered to do so (nor to use the existing infrastructure to adapt to the needs of abused men).
Instead of claiming that you’re above being lectured about empathy, why not show some? After all, it was on your blog that such comments were made, and you didn’t challenge them at the time, David.
http://manboobz.com/2011/01/10/gunwitch-update/comment-page-1/#comment-5371
I got to this Elam quote by clicking around in the links David provided:
“I have ideas about women who spend evenings in bars hustling men for drinks, playing on their sexual desires so they can get shit faced on the beta dole; paying their bar tab with the pussy pass. And the women who drink and make out, doing everything short of sex with men all evening, and then go to his apartment at 2:00 a.m.. Sometimes both of these women end up being the “victims” of rape. But are these women asking to get raped? In the most severe and emphatic terms possible the answer is NO, THEY ARE NOT ASKING TO GET RAPED.
They are freaking begging for it…Damn near demanding it”
I’ve read as much as fucked up shit from Elam as everyone else on this site but…wow, this takes the cake. He really is a pathetic excuse for a human being.
Roscoe, an entire gender is never “held accountable” for anything, because an entire gender does not act as one.
Also, feminists are against DV by anybody and in favor of DV support systems for everybody. That comment you’re linking to isn’t saying men should be turned away from shelters. It’s only saying that it’s not fair for MRAs to demand that feminists make men’s-only shelters for them.
And if any feminists aren’t in favor of supporting male DV victims, they should be, and I can say this without supporting a guy who thinks women are stupider than rats and should only be spared torture because they’re too stupid to learn from torture.
And holy shit Elam is disgusting. He’s just… pro-rape. There’s not much else to it. He wants people to be raped because oh fuck I just hate the world today.
Crumbelievable, that is the worst thing I’ve ever seen from him. It’s bad enough that it actually surprised me, and not much that Paul Elam says is surprising anymore.
I just… I can’t quite fathom it.
I know this is taking things way too literally, but isn’t the definition of rape something that you can’t ask for?
It seems like if he believed his own bullshit he’d say “are asking to have sex.”
But then he couldn’t inject the maximum amount of hate into his TOTALLY MODERATE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT FOR EQUALITY.
““Er, you’re lecturing us about empathy?”
“And lecturing us about morality too?”
How is this a counter-argument to the post that you are criticizing?”
Hollenhund’s oppostion to making women suffer was not “It is morally wrong to make women suffer”. It was “Making them sufer is pointless”. As in, if the suffering was useful, he would be A-OK with it.
Then he criticizes other people for lacking a sense of morality.
If you can’t see what’s wrong with the post then you should stay away from women entirely. In fact stay away from people altogether.
Well, I’ll assume that even though this is a one-sided half blind blog whose moderation while usually light does skew on the unbalanced, that you all still don’t want to look stupid.
Holly has succeeded in redefining the sexual marketplace in her mind. It’s not like you get to go and just pick up any old woman you want, in fact, in most models sexuality in heterosexual relationships is considered a solely female resource, and ..get this…they get to CHOOSE whom they sell it to, or even if they sell it at all, so in this case the seller has all the control.
Now I don’t think male sexuality is worthless or that women never want it, but the important thing about the SMP in this context isn’t that you or I can criticize the concept (though I think there is some validity to the models based on it) but that Holly misrepresents it as giving all the power to the men.
http://psr.sagepub.com/content/8/4/339.short
Anyone else getting the impression that Paul Elam is little more than a troll? He obviously doesn’t care about men at all, as evidenced by his being just fine with making rape jokes about them. I think he just enjoys the attention that being an asshole on the internet gets him.
Roscoe, booboonation didn’t say abused men shouldn’t receive services. She just said that it would be harmful to house both men and women in the same shelter. Most of the women at battered women’s shelters are there to escape abusive men. If the shelters stopped being gender segregated, then their abusers could follow them there and move in to gain access to their victims. It would be very dangerous to allow abusers and victims to live in the same shelter.
It would be better for men to have their own shelters, staffed by men who are trained to deal with the unique needs of battered husbands. Battered men might be scared to live in close proximity to women, because the women would remind them of their abusive wives. They would feel anxiety just being around female workers, and they would be afraid to open up to female counselors. Finally, putting men and women together would make both the men and women vulnerable to sexual abuse.
The women’s shelter in my city runs mostly on donations, and it is mostly staffed by volunteers. The only reason it is available is because a lot of people, mostly women, think it’s important enough to donate their time and money to. It is not hateful to feminists to ask MRA’s to put some time and money into building men’s shelters. It’s helpful advice. Shelters don’t just fall out of the sky as gifts from the government. They’re created by dedicated people that want to help in the real world and not just on the Internet.
I somehow still manage to be shocked by how incredibly grim and heartless this kind of misogynistic shit is; not just their view of women, but their entire worldview of interpersonal relationship dynamics. To them, there’s only one kind of woman and two kinds of men. The only kind of woman is the “harpy”, a hypocritical woman who only exists to tempt men with their evil, evil boobies and take their stuff, and then the “alpha” and “beta” men, who are also bad because “alphas” are perfect and get laid all the time or whatevs, and “betas” are bad because sometimes they act like women are actually people (which is apparently an unforgivable MRA sin) and, of course, they only do that because they think it’ll get them laid. (I’d also like to know where these MRA douchebags see themselves on that scale; if they’re not the asshole alphas or the pathetic “white-knighting” betas, then what are they? Oh, right, they “go their own way”.)
This is not only the result of turning sex into a commodity, but making women into the sole brokers of that commodity. I don’t know any women who want that mantle.
Yeah, Elam is obviously a troll, but MRAs don’t seem to think so.
“Empathy for betas” means “please fuck a NIce Guy” in MRAspeak. As we all know, not getting laid on demand is the worst thing that could ever happen to a guy.
And it’s all your fault! Yes you! Why won’t women be impressed by what men think they should be impressed by?!!
What?!! You still haven’t apologized?! The arrogance, the sheer arrogance!!!! WAARGHH Alpha Fuck GARGLEGARGLE Entitled Thug Princesses SPITSPIT
and the money >_>
By the way, does the OP remind anyone else of DKM? With the “abusing women is baaaad… because there are better ways to make submissive kitchen/sex slaves!”
All it needs is a dash of “but I totally get it when men do abuse women, because they were probably terribly provoked by the women doing things like having opinions and getting jobs,” and it would be pretty classic Meller.
It isn’t Meller until there’s a creepy doll fetish aspect.
“plus they need to have empathy for beta males …”
Oh yeah, I’d temporarily forgotten that I live in a universe where a small subsection of men have tried to create a social movement to solve the problem of ‘not getting laid’.
How about everyone just forgets the entire concept of ‘beta males’? Can we have that please?
@Holly: “Roscoe, an entire gender is never ‘held accountable’ for anything, because an entire gender does not act as one.”
The point is that there is unequal justice when members of one sex are permitted to abuse with impunity and compared to the opposite sex they are never challenged on it (or are challenged on it far less frequently). And the OP was not addressing the point being made, which is that one sex receives preferential treatment after doing harm, and gets away with inflicting that harm.
@Kendra: “Roscoe, booboonation didn’t say abused men shouldn’t receive services. She just said that it would be harmful to house both men and women in the same shelter.”
Why would it be harmful? Just because they’re the opposite sex of each other? I can see the merits of separate shelter accommodations between two victims who are intimate partners to each other. In that case there’s already a pre-existing emotional connection, an animosity. But such a scenario could be prevented simply by screening out applicants who are known partners of some of the residents there. As it is, we have a whole sex of victims being denied entrance to the shelter, simply because by being male they are considered to be a threat. Yet it is not uncommon in shelters for female victims themselves to be generally violent, and yet they are housed alongside other victims as if not a threat. The point is that within a shelter setting, what seems like a threat at first can often be managed, with empathy and discretion. Yet too often, male victims of female-perpetrated DV don’t get the benefit of the doubt. They’re simply turned away. The commenter in the thread that I linked to endorses the status quo, likening the sexual separation of a locker room to the sex-based denial of services to all male applicants. She goes on to call for not just sexual separation of proverbial locker rooms, but construction of entirely separate locker rooms based on sex. It’s a comment worthy of being challenged, especially by one who seems to consider himself to be above being challenged on his empathy. And David didn’t challenge it.
@Kendra:
“Putting men and women together would make both the men and women vulnerable to sexual abuse.”
Such is the argument of the empathy-challenged. A man comes to a shelter seeking help, and in your ideal world he is turned away as a potential rapist.
@Crumbelievable:
When someone is punished through legitimate means for their abusive acts, they necessarily suffer. Justice often inflicts a form of suffering. Poetic justice (such as an abused or under-appreciated partner ending a relationship with an abusive partner) also inflicts some degree of suffering. And yes, imposing any kind of illegitimate, violent form of suffering on someone merely because of their sex is unjustified. I just think it’s unfair of you to distract from the point I was making by implying that I somehow was advocating violence against a group merely by recognizing the unfair privileges enjoyed by that group.
Yes, that sure is unequal. I totally agree with you there.
Sorry about my failure to be the Imaginary Evil Feminist who wants women to not be subject to the law.
Hahaha, this is a pretty blunt statement of “I didn’t like the OP so I just wrote about my own thing, okay? Everyone play along now.”
No, in the ideal world he’s sent to a men’s shelter.
But if men are let into a shelter for women escaping abusive men, then women have nowhere to hide from their abusers, and that’s not okay. Your feelings are not more important than that.