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.
@DKM:
“Good to see somebody finally agrees with the obvious, even if it means that some, perhaps even most, claims of abuse or DV deserve to be taken with considerably more skepticism and reserve than has been the case.”
How… exactly… does this follow? Why would you need to be considerably more skeptical about claims of abuse if you hold the notion that abuse is morally wrong? Should you be considerably more skeptical about an accusation of murder because murder will most likely get you put in jail?
Of course, not content to be evil he has to cap it off by concluding that therefore people (though he obviously means women) who say they’re victims of DV are therefore most likely lying. I’m sure the bruises are from repeatedly running into doors.
Also, are we absolutely sure DKM hasn’t just been trolling this whole time? He seems to be more and more obviously going for the “women are subhuman/pets/dolls/playthings-of-ment” thing… How could you possibly believe that half of the human population, half that shares all but a little bit of genetic code, should be subjugated to the other?
Oh… right, that’s how.
At this point I’m pretty sure that Meller thinks that sunshine, water, and cats all prove that women are liars too.
Sheltering men has been a common practice in the US for a very long time. The largest mens shelter in my area has been here for over a hundred years. It now has a separate facility where it shelters families.
Sheltering women and children is of more recent establishment. Once they decriminalized women running away from their husbands, if women had no family or friends to help them they were expected to enter a convent a brothel or become a street walker.
In 1970 there were two womens shelters in the US, now there are many but still not enough.
We have a long way to go to provide adequately for the needs of the abused in our society.
Would that we could move a bit faster.
Wait, aren’t Roscoe and Meller the same person?
Roscoe, do you do anything in the real world to help men who have suffered from DV? I don’t mean arguing disingenuously with feminists. I mean: volunteering, fundraising, etc.
If the answer is no, what exactly is stopping you (and/or MRAs in general) from organizing/fundraising/etc to provide more DV services/shelter for men?
Please give me an answer that does not involve some variation on “well, the feminists would oppose us.” Because, as is clear from merely reading these comments here, many feminists would be glad to help, and some of the feminist commenters here already work to provide DV services for men.
And even if you did face resistance, guess what: every single activist in the world, including female activists trying to build DV shelters for women, has faced opposition. Saying, “oh, Erin Pizzey tried that in the 70s and feminists were mean to her so there’s no point in even trying,” like so many MRAs do, is a pathetic excuse.
I’ve got a hunch that the main reason MRAs bring up men’s shelters and so forth is because they think feminists aren’t working towards making them. Since feminists say they are for equality, then this is supposed to show that feminists really only care about women.
They don’t give a shit about the shelters.
Actually, a lot of MRA talking points seemed to be centered on “Feminists say they are for making men and women equal, but they aren’t trying to do x for men! They are hypocrites and evil, and then they argue that men don’t actually need/already have x!”
“Wait, aren’t Roscoe and Meller the same person?”
I thought for a second they might be, because their names follow the exact same pattern
Kirbywarp hit the nail on the head. Roscoe’s entire shtick hinges on an imaginary “Gotcha!”.
Well, speaking for myself…of course I don’t give a shit about shelters! I mean, I could totally sit in the middle of the street and cry and men would come running to throw money and sandwiches at me! I could easily use that money to fund a new shelter totally on my own, but selfishly, I work at my job and rent apartments. Sometimes to men who’ve been abused and are looking for a place to rebuild their lives.
Isn’t the entire MRA movement basically just a giant attempt to gotcha feminism with a bit of violent fantasy added in? Other than the father’s rights stuff there doesn’t seem to be much else to it.
@Roscoe P. Coltrane | February 20, 2012 at 1:35 pm
‘… 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.”
Why don’t you go set that up then, Shit For Brains, instead of wasting your time on a keyboard? I mean, I know men expect women to do EVERYTHING for them and on their behalf, but for once, why don’t you go and actually do something for the MENZ yourself instead of boo hooing about why women aren’t doing this for you? BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ!!!!!!!!
@CassandraSays:
It feels like any actual advocacy in the MRM is an accident of having members who start taking their talking points seriously… Of course, by that time they’ve also swallowed all of the false statistics and rhetoric as well, so the advocacy is crippled from the onset… -_-
*is not feeling to generous today*
Do not accept non feminine women who are following feminism. And do not adore feminists in any way. Accept only women who are following a perfect feminine way of life.
EN, stop spamming please.
@David:
“Roscoe, do you do anything in the real world to help men who have suffered from DV? I don’t mean arguing disingenuously with feminists. I mean: volunteering, fundraising, etc.”
Yes, I have been doing tangible real-world work on behalf of male DV abuse victims. Not just arguing in good faith as I have done here in this thread.
“If the answer is no…”
The answer was not no. So I could conceivably ignore the remainder of your comment.
But I’ll just say that if you’re going to measure difficulty, I’d say that it’s much less difficult to expand the existing infrastructure to accommodate male victims, compared to establishing an entirely separate network of shelters specifically to help male DV victims. To suggest otherwise with a dismissive “What’s stopping you?” question is, in my view, quite callous.
For now, I’d settle to merely identify which shelters serve which victims — and in which way — simply by surveying them. For now I think that it would suffice to simply to ask existing DV shelter providers the question — the politically incorrect question that so far seems not to have even been asked — of whether and how they serve male victims. And not just males, but any underserved group. Such information, if it exists, is not available publicly in any comprehensive form. But a survey of existing shelters would be a good start, to learn where the gaps are, and where they aren’t.
I like EN’s spamming! All his comments are like little riddles. (Except maybe that last one, which is unusually coherent for him.)
EN is like our very own not-so-Cleverbot.
Roscoe, it’s commendable that you are actually doing something in the real world. That seems to be very rare in the MRM.
I do think it would be more productive for you to spend your time trying to MRAs to join you in these efforts, rather than criticizing feminists, some of whom already do more in the real world for male DV victims than almost every MRA I’ve ever run across.
Hi, EN. Bye, EN.
Oh no — did I summon DKM? I’m sorry :(.
Roscoe, how is a massive derail from the OP “arguing in good faith” in this or any other reality?
Suffering women is a big fact of promoting feminism. It doesn’t promote men. On the other hand there are lot of feminists who must suffer, but hypocritical men are promoting them.