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.
Oh God, now he’s pulling the “I tried to help, but the feminists were so unreasonable” game.
Look, if you want to make a directory of gender-neutral DV shelters and put it online, that’s a worthy goal. Go do it.
But it’s pretty clear you want to do no such thing, you just want to leave increasingly nonsensical and aggrieved comments on a random blog post.
Rosco, at the beginning of the thread you said
and
Now you’re pretending that you never wanted feminists to build men’s shelters and instead you have wanted more gender neutral shelters from the get-go. If you have changed your position, then you should say so. Otherwise, I will think you are either confused about your own position or you are engaging in bad faith.
Finally, what are you talking about when you said “Do you think that I should invest time collaborating on a project with someone who has openly called my sincerity into question, and who has invited others as collaborators who have done the same?” At this moment, you are not finding collaborators for a project. You are trolling a website that mocks misogyny. If you have a goal here, just come out and say what it is. Are you here because you get a kick out of pestering feminists? I would appreciate it if you were honest enough to admit it.
Do you think that I should invest time collaborating on a project with someone who has openly called my sincerity into question, and who has invited others as collaborators who have done the same?
Dude, I don’t think anyone is attempting to collaborate with you on anything. A “flounce” is when someone gets all huffy at being called out on their crap and loudly announces “I’m leaving!”
As for how you invest your time, well, you invested all of yesterday evening in arguing about whether or not there are male-only DV shelters (for REAL MEN, not gay men!) when you don’t even want there to be male-only DV shelters, so forgive me if I don’t find “my time is far too important to be wasted on such things” very compelling.
PS shitfuckpisscuntcocksuckermotherfuckerandtits
There’s also the fact that, as I pointed out before, Roscoe did not enter this thread with collaboration in mind. He was suspicious, hostile, and accusatory from the very beginning.
Run along now, trollboy.
PS Roscoe, you are what my people like to call a fuckwit. There you go – an insult and obscenity all at once! Feel free to clutch your pearls.
What the fuck is this collaboration noise? Roscoe, if that was your intention, you should have made that clear 400 comments ago. Still not sure why you’d come here though.
I guess you’re just not that bright, are ya, fucko?
In fact Roscoe only reluctantly admitted that he actually does DV work when challenged on his nonsense. I feel sorry for women who have actually had to work with him (“Oh, you want to stay in this shelter? What, do you want a private room with your own bathroom? You know what would happen if you were a man? You’d get kicked out! Even if there was room!”)
Oooh, the flouncy flouncy!
http://imagemacros.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/flouncy.jpg
Oh, wait, sorry, ooh the collaboraty collaboraty
I’d love to know which shelters he’s worked with where there are a selection of empty rooms with private bathrooms just waiting to be used. Where is this paradise?
Seriously… Surveying services provided by DV shelters is a good idea, but I can’t figure out a logical thought process that leads him here. “I know! I’ll head over to manboobz.com and comment on an unrelated blog post in a totally hostile manner. That is the most effective way I can think of to find people knowledgeable enough about both shelters and domestic violence to collaborate with on my project.”
Kendra’s hypothesis
is looking likelier and likelier.
Some shelters do have private bedrooms because they house families and/or they’re based in old houses with small bedrooms. I’ve never heard of one with a private bathroom for each room, though.
Given how old the converted houses tend to be I’m not sure how it would even be possible to build an en-suite bathroom into each, not to mention where the money to do so would come from. I’m even more skeptical about the idea of said shelters not already being full.
Cloudiah – Were you here when Samuel was around? He had the same schtick–antagonizing feminists in various nonsensical ways, then offering a “collaboration” no one wanted, and when nobody volunteered to be his collaboratin’ buddy he got to yell “feminists don’t want to help!” like he’d proven something really damning.
It was a very similar game, and with similar levels of interest (i.e., zero) in actually doing or even defining the project he insisted feminists help him with.
Commenting on a blog is hard work! Even more so when you do it in the name of a subject you probably don’t give two shits about.
I think one of the things that often get ignored in the whole shelter debate is that the prevalence of abuse is not the only factor that determines the amount of shelter space needed for either men or women.
In almost any situation involving abuse — short of one that would require the victim to actually go into hiding — it is preferable for the victim and any children to either live in a real home or to stay with family. However, in cases where the victim is the woman, the abuser almost always controls the finances — making it impossible for the victim to go out and get decent housing. Family and friends also tend to side with the abuser when that abuser is male, so staying with family becomes problematic. And, in such a situation, it is the woman and the children who are expected to leave the house, and the abuser to hold on to the marital residence, at least for awhile. All this makes women’s shelters particularly necessary. In a situation where the roles are reversed, the victim almost invariably has access to his own funds, which he can use to obtain decent housing, and the family’s sympathies would most likely be on his side. So even assuming, for argument’s sake, that the number of male and female abuse victims is exactly the same — though “studies” purporting to prove that are hopelessly misleading and flawed — that still wouldn’t mean that there is a need for the same amount of shelter space for men as for women.
@Holly Nope, lucky me. “Feminists don’t want to help, and they’re MEEEEEAN!” I’m going to go over to the LA Times blog and propose a collaboration on surveying DV shelters; I’ll let you know how that goes. 🙂
Roscoe is still going on? Geesh! After two days of arguing I’d have thought you would find something better to do!
I obviously hit a nerve. XD Poor widdle trolly, nobody respects him!
Stick the flounce this time, douchebag. If you come back, we’ll only laugh harder.
Allright, stop, collaborate and listen!
Well played, sir.
*Slow clap*
Ya know, I actually do some collaborative work: I have team-taught with people; I have co-written articles and grants with people; I am currently working with a team of five to do interdisciplinary grants. And I’ve been on committees where we had to collaborate on things.
And in none of these collaborations, did I start by showing up places where nobody knew me and hurling accusations around hither and yon, and implying that the people there were the cause of the problem, then whining that nobody would collaborate with me.
I do not think those are considered ‘best practices’ in collaboration!
Of course Roscoe is a complete troll who doesn’t do any actual activism, or he’d have understood the difference between a co-ed agency and a co-ed shelter, ffs.
I am glad that dsc and Ami brought up the problems with binary gender segregation, though.
As noted, it’s not just that non-binary folk often get left out even if the shelters go ahead and let in anyone on the trans spectrum who feels they fit there (I can think of a number of binary trans men who would not feel at all safe or comfortable in a women’s shelter); the already existing problem of same sex abusers stalking their victims to the shelter is non-trivial. The heterocentrism of the idea that “men abuse, women are the victims” tends to co-exist with the second-wave radical feminist idea of “sisterhood.”
What I do know of shelters from my limited work in DV organization is that at least around here, they don’t just let in anyone who claims to be abused; there is at least one interview, and that is for a number of reasons but (sadly) primarily because on any given night there simply aren’t going to be enough beds for all those who need one.
Oh what a pile of steaming horseshit. I staffed a DV hotline that included information about available DV shelters. Every day, we got a list of how many beds were available in each shelter and for whom (some with kid, some without kid). Every day, this is how the majority of calls about needing a bed for the night went:
“I’m sorry, there’s nothing available. You can try again tomorrow, or I can give you a list of homeless shelters in your area (i.e. not secretly located or particularly geared toward DV survivors, some co-ed, some not).”
This was BEFORE anyone got as far as an “intake.” If there was a bed listed as available and someone was directed toward it, it still didn’t mean she’d get it:
-someone else could’ve contacted the shelter directly and gotten to it in the time between the list going out and the phone call
-intake would determine the woman wouldn’t be a good fit for a number of reasons, including her having previously been at that shelter, because once you’ve stayed and know the location you could’ve told someone else, making you an unsafe prospect.
-woman would have no means of transportation to reach it.
etc.
Mostly, though, they were just full. Overflowing full. And yes, all of the calls seeking shelter were from women. I expect that had the name of the organization in question indicated more of a co-ed approach, they might have gotten more calls from men? But, well, one can only speculate. Anyway, point being: no, there were not men being turned away from empty beds (much less private bathrooms wtf) because so sorry, it’s empty but you’re a dude.