Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, mgriff2k4 is angry that the picture to the right here showed up on his computer screen. Sorry, make that fucking angry. “Did this really just fucking pop up on my news feed?” he asks in the title of his post, adding in a comment: “sorry about the word “fucking” but im really pissed off about this.”
Why is he angry? Presumably, he assumes the statistic is untrue, and that it unfairly paints men as evil murderers.
Luckily, in this Age of the Internet it is trivially easy to find out whether statistics like this are true. It involves something called “Google.” mgriff2k4 did not bother to avail himself of this easy-to-use research tool.
But I did. In less than 5 minutes, I confirmed that this factoid is indeed true, at least according to the most recent figures on gender and homicide found on the Department of Justice’s web site, drawn from FBI data covering the years from 1976-2005. According to the FBI, 30% of women who are murdered are murdered by “intimates.” Roughly 20% are killed by husbands or ex-husbands; 10% by boyfriends or girlfriends. (In the overwhelming majority of cases the murderers are boyfriends, not girlfriends; men are ten times more likely to commit murder than women.)
While four times as many men are murdered than women, only 5% of murdered men are killed by “intimates.” Men kill women more than twice as often as women kill men. Women suffer far more serious injuries from domestic violence than men do; so it is not altogether unexpected that they are also far more likely to be murdered by intimates.
If you want to see what this means on a human level, I suggest you take a look at the excellent if depressing web site Domestic Violence Crime Watch, which links to stories in which men are the perpetrators, and in which men are the victims. There are far more of those in the former category than in the latter.
I should note that (as of this writing) one commenter in the thread also found his way to the DOJ site, and noted that men were more likely to be killed by strangers or acquaintances. But he didn’t bother to tell mkgriff2k4 that the sign in the picture was in fact accurate.
The Zygons were always my favourite, Brrrr.
Actually, John, women may be SHOCKED… SHOCKED I say … at this factoid, but for the reason that Cloudiah put forth:
What we are not, however, is SURPRISED by this factoid, and it is our lack of SURPRISE that, apparently, makes us (at least in some circles) … now, wait for it … misandrist.
I hate typing on my tablet, so just want to thank Pam (and bacon) for expressing that so clearly.
My Jo: It’s the 11th word in the quotation (quote, my good man, is a verb)
Now, if you can show me that feminists are saying the deaths of men who aren’t killed by intimate partners is no big deal, then you might have some sort of point.
But you can’t, so you don’t.
But, since you brought it up, I see you didn’t address the question I asked, for those same quotations I’m asking for here.
If it’s so easy to do I’d have expected you to be all over it. A lot more persuasive (if less self-reinforcing) than empty invective.
My Jo: Which facts are you looking at, the fact that women perpetrate the vast majority of child abuse? The fact that women abuse those that are weaker than they and are SHOCKED that those stronger may abuse them.
Ah… another who likes to use raw numbers, rather than the statistical average. Yes, more child abuse and neglect is perpetrated by female caregivers.
That’s because women are, far and away, the primary caregiver. It’s really easy, when one sex is something like 80 percent of the population being studied, for that group to outnumber; in absolute terms, the other.
But the real questions are (again… strangely to the instigation of this post) rate; and severity.
The male portion of that population (primary caregivers) has a higher incidence of abusive violence. When that violence occurs it tends to be more severe (this is not to say that women who are violently abusive towards their husbands kill at a different rate then men; that’s not part of this data set, and I can’t address it, so I don’t. If you want to say they do… feel free to provide studies to support the claim).
So women abuse those weaker than themselves and are SHOCKED. SHOCKED that people stronger than them may abuse them.
More of that question about your understanding of English. People aren’t shocked that people exploit those in their power. They are appalled. It’s an important (and not very subtle) difference.
“I forgot, you can’t see any fact that show females abuse males.”
No you didn’t. Forgot means to no longer recall a fact. Since that’s not actually a fact about me (supra); and you’ve not conversed with be before, you can’t have forgotten it. Again, it’s a question of English usage; though I’ll give you a pass on the question of comprehension; that was more a pair of rhetorical failures. 1: Cheap device; overused trope, and 2: (the more egregious) failure to take the target/audience into account.
My Jo: I promised some feminists, who I really admire, at The Good Men Project that I would initially engage feminists without assuming that they are misandrist, a very difficult task for me at least. I think that I’ve mostly lived up to that promise so far as I’ve asked for clarifications and I’ve used qualifiers like seems. I can understand if this comment was written in frustration, but understand that I and any new visitor to the site won’t understand the back story if there is one and the comment just comes off as being dismissive of male victimization.
You are lying, if not to us then certainly to yourself.
You haven’t, so far as I can see, even pretended we aren’t man-haters. You have, to some degreee, pretended to be open to information; in that you have asked leading, and loaded, questions; which are phrased in a hostile manner (no bucko, a lack of fucks and insults doesn’t make it polite, it just makes it rude speech you don’t have to worry so much about your grandmother deciding you need to be reminded of how unpleasant Ivory tastes).
You’ve used those qualifiers dishonestly (because you don’t believe them; and won’t accept answers which account for doubts of your premises).
In short, you’ve been acting in bad faith, and gotten the short shrift such behavior merits.
My Jo: It reduces the relevance of their deaths. What if I were to say only 30% of women are killed by an intimate partner? Doesn’t that sound minimizing? Does that sound trivializing? Maybe he picked a bad choice of words and would like to edit it out. I get it people make mistakes. That’s why I asked him to clarify.
So only has just one meaning?
“He only missed the gold medal by .03 seconds. What a shame”
Yep, that means it was wonderful that he didn’t win.
Got it.
“Zuckerberg made bllions, and he only made 35 million dollars when facebook went public.”
That poor dude, it’s a real shame he so poor. That only really makes it plain how hard done by he was.
But yes, saying, “only 30 percent of x group is killed by Y” is minimizing; if that’s the only comparator you have. But the issue wasn’t an absolute reference, it was a relative one.
Only 5 percent of X are Z, as opposed to 30 percent of A who are Z.
I hope it really is just English that’s giving you troubles. If it’s not then I’d have to say you are letting a set of irrational beliefs and hatreds keep you from looking at facts. You may not like those facts, but they are facts. Wait… it’s not that yo aren’t looking at the facts. You are trying to change the subject. So that the single most obvious threat group is removed from the picture, and we just treat all death by malice the same. The accidental homicide, the felony homicide as side effect, the drunk driver; all are to be treated as if they were equal in risk to intimate partner violence.
Here’s an interesting question… what’s the incident rate in small towns? Those places where we are told the crime rate is so much less. Are they places with a higher, or lower, rate of intimate partner homicide? What are the relative rates there?
You don’t care. You just want to yell at people who think 30 percent being killed by intimate partners is noteworthy.
My Jo: Why doesn’t DV stats include third parties, because women hire hit men more often?
We’ve done this one too. The FBI says it deals with fewer than 100 killing for hire per year.
I’ve only got direct (i.e. personal knowledge) of one. It was the man who hired someone to kill his wife.
Robert Blake tried to hire someone to kill his wife.
When I put murder for hire into google, the list is, oddly, all men who hired men; usually to kill their wives.
If the prevalence of women doing it is so high… why isn’t it making the news?
Maybe it’s because you are wrong.
Cassandra: I’m still trying to figure out how NWOs math made sense to him. Obviously it doesn’t make sense from a mathematical or logical perspective, I’m just curious what sort of logic path he went down that made that progression of percentages seem in any way mathematically sound to him.
I think it was language fail, more than math fail.
I think he was saying, “70 percent of all xyz”. Then he was trying to work with a round number. He didn’t see that it looked as if he was making a percentage.
At least I hope so, otherwise I shudder to think of him trying to do the math to run the turns for a step-down converter.
And now to the post office to exchange the kilt I got. The style is such that it’s a bit small. I’ll be, sadly, about a week without a more “modern/casual” one. Which means I can’t wear one to work, because we aren’t allowed to wear patterned clothing.
:<
@John
“Every person’s death has relevance to those who love them. Did you really mean to say that? MRAs will use that as proof of misandry because it sounds misandrist.”
This is the problem I have with MRAs. I am merely stating that one number is larger than another, and you twist the context of the sentence to make it seem like misandry.
Of course every person’s life and death has relevance to the people in their lives. This is ASSUMED. MRAs are not happy unless it is explicitly stated every time that men can be victims and their lives are valuable. Nor are they happy if women are the subject of conversation, without any mention of men’s problem. The topic always has to be about men, otherwise, misandry.
Everywhere you go, you look for misandry. You see it when it isn’t even there. And this diminishes the significance of REAL examples of men’s suffering. Yes, men have problems and need help, I wouldn’t deny that and I doubt anyone here would either. I would like MRAs to focus more on helping men, but it seems to me that 90% of the MRM is just bitching about how awful women are, and battling straw feminists.
Guys! Varphole put back up his post denying his sockpuppeting:
http://antimanboobz.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/futrelle-can-sink-no-lower/comment-page-1/#comment-285
No, you fucking moron – I think you don’t care. You care as much about black men as you care about white men, or asian men, or latino men. Not a drop. Your mind is so small and your persecution complex so vast that the only person you care about is you. You don’t think that black men are “…at the bottom of the pyramid…”. You make it plain on these and other sites, day after fucking day, that you think that you are.
Really? I know that you’re, an admitted criminal who remains employable despite having an arrest record. You’re a man who brags about driving without a license when men of color have to be papered to the hilt every time they so much as get in a vehicle. You’re a single man who is responsible for no one but your own selfish ass and yet you plead poverty while claiming to work 60 hours a week at $19 an hour. I know that you’re a man who has said that he can’t actively do anything to help men’s causes because feminism and poverty prevent him but then calls me a “princess”. You lying, hypocritical, ignorant, spoiled sack of shit.
Your “activism” consists of calling women whores on the internet in between bouts of online gaming and whacking to iCarly, but somehow I’m the princess?
Yay, party at Varpole’s!
You’re a child; no wonder you still view the world through the simplicity of a child’s mind and limited observations. A small boy stuck in the body of a bitter, middle-aged man. You saw black men when you were five? In Philly? And you knew all about their lives, huh? All of black America was doing great, 50 years ago, right? The men you saw were all employed and their wives stayed at home, and they all had access to the kinds of jobs and union security, and home owners’ loans, that ensured they could create a better future for their children during America’s truncated period of growth and prosperity? Just a chocolate version of The Donna Reed show.
It can’t be said enough: you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I guess while black men were being oppressed by institutional racism –last hired/first fired, subject to absurd sentencing discrepancies, over-represented in the draft, shut out of the political and economic opportunities that enabled white men in this country to establish a middle class- black women should’ve just bowed their heads and out of loyalty to the patriarchy let their children starve in the streets. Rather than work outside the home and take the meager handouts offered by “big daddy government.” I mean, it’s not like black babies needed to eat every day or anything.
You espouse the superiority of the “patriarchy” as the “model for a thriving society…”. Then you choose to conveniently ignore the fact that through most of America’s history Black men were, by-in-large, shut out of the jobs and opportunities that would have allowed their families to function successfully under that model. Because you’d rather pretend that black women in the “ghetto” all sat around eating bonbons and reading “The Feminine Mystique” in their book clubs and decided that they didn’t need black men.
You are a complete waste of a functioning brain stem
I (and many other women that I know) would absolutely fight for father’s rights if and when fathers ease some of that overburdening when their relationship with the mother is still intact, instead of shaking their fists at the sky over the injustice of it all when the relationship has been severed and they’re in the family court system. Problem is, what many are bemoaning is their loss of status as the absolute authority who has control over the household, not their loss of sharing in the thankless, menial tasks of child-rearing. Hell, they’re bemoaning that loss of status and feel humiliated when having to do those thankless, menial tasks when their relationship with the mother is still intact!!
From Patriarch to Patsy
subtitled: “A father of three young children discovers the humiliations of being a modern dad”
In case you or anyone else doesn’t care to read the above article (which is a book review), here are a couple of choice excerpts:
“Fathers, who enjoyed absolute authority within the household for several millennia, now find themselves at the beck and call of their wives and children. Indeed, most of my male friends are not fathers in any traditional sense at all; they occupy roughly the same status in their households as the help. They don’t guide their children through the moral quandaries of life — they guide them to their extracurricular activities from behind the wheel of a Dodge minivan”
“The poor sucker agreed to take on responsibility for all sorts of menial tasks — tasks that his own father was barely aware of — and received nothing in return. If he was hoping for some gratitude, he was mistaken. According to Mr. Lewis: “Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight.” “
The article and the book that is being reviewed were both written by men, not misandrist feminists.
@Nobinayamu
NWO is an admitted criminal? Can you tell me more about this?
No, you whiny fucking titty baby, I am not a slave. I am the direct descendant of slaves and slave-owners. My great-great grandparents were slaves. But I am not a slave. I work for a living. The work that I do earns me money. I use that money to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly. I work hard and sometimes I get tired. And when I need to take a break, I take it. And at the end of the day, I leave my place(s) of employment and go to my own home. I am a citizen.
The organizations that I work for profit from my labor but they do not own me. My supervisor cannot legally rape me, impregnate me, and then sell my child away from me because it is convenient and profitable to do so. I cannot be beaten for failing to work hard enough or fast enough. I cannot be sold away to a different CEO. It is not illegal for me to be literate. I cannot be legally killed for upsetting my employer.
You diminish and trivialize the lives of my great-great grandfathers when you call yourself a “slave.” You who are not half the man that they were. But you will not diminish and trivialize me.
You may be a slave to your delusions but I am not.
Now, I need to stop procrastinating and get back at these grant protocols. And make potato salad. As always, NWO, you can fuck right the fuck off.
NWO claims that he was homeless and deeply impoverished and stole from a mom and pop store and escaped the cops by running across train tracks. He also claims the he did time for the crime of poverty.
He’s an admitted criminal with an arrest record. I’ve got kids who’ve been arrested for simple possession who can’t be hired at McDonald’s. But feminism is oppressing him because he wasn’t hired for a managerial position once.
Men are screwed over in family court over custody and visitation, but women’s excuse is they have the kids more. Why not fight for father’s rights if women are overburdened?
There is so much wrong with this.
1: Fathers who petition for custody get it about half the time. The reason women get primary custody most of the time, is that most men don’t want it.
2: You aren’t really asking for father’s rights. Fathers have rights. Most states have joint custody as the desired outcome. And most states also have, as the primary consideration of custody matters,”the best interest of the child”.
The MRM doesn’t actually like either of those. They want to have the right of refusal. They also hate the interests of the children in divorced/non-cohabting families. That’s why they are so adamant that child support should be a gift from a non-custodial father, as opposed to a court order.
So, under the terms the MRM clais to want to expand the “rights of fathers” you are correct. I don’t support that,and will fight against it.
Because those modifications make it harder for the children, who are already having enough problems. They don’t need to add grinding poverty to them.
Argenti Aertheri says,
“Context, it’s about context. If 50% of women were killed by strangers, then saying “only 30% are killed by an intimate partner” would be correct. But 30% is unarguably much larger than 5%.”
“You’ll note that we discussed the 3:2 thing back on page one before getting side tracked by free will and Ruby. (And note that Ruby is a feminist getting shit for saying prison rape is okay.)”
The question is how close do the numbers need to be before the context disappears. Is the 3:2 ratio sufficient? Do they need to be exact? I hesitate to use context because it tends to change and is too easily manipulated.
“You should google “Stanford Prison study” and find the video, the problem is prison, not gender.)”
I’m familiar with this. That was terrible, but I would caution that we don’t cherry pick what is gender related crime and what is not based on the genders of either the perpetrator or victim
About your linked post:
“And before you claim statistics are MISANDRY, modern statistics were invented by a man”
Being a man and misandrist are not mutually exclusive. Would being female and misogynist be?
So…you are saying that the existence of statistics oppresses men? Or are you making a disingenuous non-sequitur?
Katz: I’ll go with B.
I dunno, “A” might be kind of fun.
Hippodameia: Perhaps it’s the existence of statisticians. If no one ever compiled,and analysed the stats, then the men wouldn’t be oppressed by all those unpleasant facts.
Pecunium says,
“Fathers who petition for custody get it about half the time. The reason women get primary custody most of the time, is that most men don’t want it.”
Many men don’t think that they’d get it. I know that this was true in my brother’s case. He fought for custody when his daughter found pictures of his wife having sex with another man on their family computer. It’s not that he didn’t want custody before. He just thought that he wouldn’t get it.
“You aren’t really asking for father’s rights. Fathers have rights. Most states have joint custody as the desired outcome. And most states also have, as the primary consideration of custody matters,”the best interest of the child”.
Fathers have very few rights. Presumptive fathers may have more, but are not necessarily the fathers. There are many states that presume that a married man is the father if a child born during a marriage. That was an unrebuttable assumption in Michigan until recently and I understand is still true in a few states. We still have issues with adoption where paternity does not have to be determined through DNA testing and a father does not have to agree. The putative father can lose his rights simply by failing to act within a time frame whether he had the opportunity or not. I think that much of that could be alleviated by requiring a mother to pay child support to the adoptive parents if a father’s consent to the adoption was not acquired.
The only agreement I have with the mainstream MRM concerning not paying child support is that if the mother has the ability to unilateral adoption (adoption without the expressed consent of the biological father as determined by DNA test), the father should have the same option to place his child up for unilateral adoption. I don’t see where the mainstream MRM finds the legal precedent for a “legal abortion”. I see precedent for a unilateral adoption, but if mothers are prevented from pursuing it or must pay child support to the adoptive parents in a unilateral adoption, I would not support a father’s right to one either.