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.
Katz says,
“So…you are saying that the existence of statistics oppresses men? Or are you making a disingenuous non-sequitur?”
Feminists, always stuck in the binary mode. Answer is neither. I was pointing out something I thought was fairly evident, but obviously is not.
Pecunium: Yes, that’s what I was thinking. Facts are MISANDRY! And work is too, and responsibility, and a whole host of other things.
“Many men don’t think that they’d get it.”
Trying is too hard for them?
@ Pam
I wouldn’t say that the authors are wrong because each man is different, but if raising kids is so thankless, why would women want to do it? Before you say they have to, let me point out that the men in your example did what they were obligated to, unless there is also an excerpt where they abandoned their obligations.
My Jo: “So…you are saying that the existence of statistics oppresses men? Or are you making a disingenuous non-sequitur?”
Feminists, always stuck in the binary mode. Answer is neither. I was pointing out something I thought was fairly evident, but obviously is not.
More problems with English (btw, there are still some pending questions for you. I’d let it slide but you made a big point about my supposedly not addressing some of yours. Sauce for the goose, and all that).
It was a non-sequitor, unless you can show some interrelation between the two ideas. Since the existence of statistics is neutral, there is no connection between them. Argenti was being whimsical. She was mocking you.
You seem to have not noticed. It’s that English thing.
John’s original position? “Men are screwed over in family court over custody and visitation.” Pecunium refutes that. John moves goalposts with anecdata about his brother.
John, why don’t MRAs run a positive educational campaign for divorcing fathers, telling them that if they petition for custody they have a decent chance of getting at least shared custody, and often primary custody? Is it because the actual reality on the ground takes away one of the MRM’s most cherished grievances? Because honestly, that is what it looks like.
Cloudiah – it’s because expecting MRAs to actually work for anything is MISANDRY. If MRAs can’t get everything they want handed to them on a silver platter the world is obviously fucked up beyone repair.
Men not wanting primary custody =/= men thinking they can’t get it.
50% shared custody is probably the best option when both parents are working and can support themselves. But honestly, how many men actually want to spend 50% of their time parenting, let alone 100%? I know my father didn’t want to. And a lot of MRAs don’t want to, either. They would rather spend their time galavanting around Europe with their young girlfriends a la WTF Price, all the while bitching about how unfair the courts are to men.
Why do feminists only support gender norms only when men are disadvantaged, he should be confident, he should be resolute, he should be strong? If a man shows doubt, uncertainty, or fear then he’s not a man. The feminist position got it.
@John
“…he should be confident, he should be resolute, he should be strong?”
He should at least know whether or not he wants custody of his children.
“If a man shows doubt, uncertainty, or fear then he’s not a man. ”
Only in MRA Land. You call these men “manginas.”
MISTER Anderson said:
Why do feminists only support gender norms only when men are disadvantaged, he should be confident, he should be resolute, he should be strong? If a man shows doubt, uncertainty, or fear then he’s not a man. The feminist position got it.
For a minute there I thought you might be arguing in good faith, but that’s just glaringly silly. No ones said anything like that.
WTF, John? Those strawfeminists in your head are acting up again.
I proudly think in the binary that a statement is either somehow related to the conversation or it isn’t. But John is boldly striking out in new directions and finding a third possibility! His statement is neither related nor unrelated!
P.S. for everyone: non sequitur, with a U. “Sequor” is a deponent verb.
John, tell us what should be done to help men like your brother. A national campaign with slogans like
“Hey divorced fathers, you could actually have custody of your children!”
“Fighting for your children, not just a girly thing”
“Guys, you know you have 50% chances of having share custody!”
Because, I can understand why people don’t want to fight when their chance of winning are very slim (like it is the case for many rapes) but when your odds are 50-50 and that, if you don’t fight, you’ll lose your children, what is the excuse?
“I was pointing out something I thought was fairly evident, but obviously is not.”
Maybe you weren’t so clear? That’s just a suggestion.
Kyrie, I think the MRA argument is if they fight for custody, they’ll be falsely accused of something, so don’t even try.
For a minute there I thought you might be arguing in good faith, but that’s just glaringly silly. No ones said anything like that.
I did offer him an out. If he was willing to admit he has problems with English than we can still work under the assumption of good faith. But if he’s going to insist he’s not got any problems with English, we have to assume he’s either lying, or spouting bullshit.
I’d tend to lying, myself. Because he just pretends we’ve said things, but he never actually provides evidence to support the things he says feminists believe.
So he’s making it up; conveniently it all supports his idea that women hate men (remember that was the belief he, “put aside” until one of us (who might have been a man) said something which hurt his widdew fee-fees.
Then it was “game on” for the misogyny.
This has nothing to do with the conversation at hand. I mean, absolutely nothing.
When parents are not living together and have to co-parent their child(ren) despite no longer sharing a household, the child has to be provided for and must have a place to live. Children don’t stop needing food and shelter because their parents’ romantic relationship fails to work out.
If your brother didn’t pursue custody initially because he wanted joint custody of his daughter then he has no one to blame but himself. If you’re brother only sought joint custody because he realized his ex was having sex with someone else then he needs to examine whether or not he really wants the responsibility of joint custody, or he just wants to punish her mother.
Either way, the onus is on him. And more and more states (and hopefully even more states) are defaulting to joint custody rulings.
Nobinayamu, that’s unclear but maybe the brother decided he needed to fight for custody because this ex wife was being careless by not hiding her naughty pictures well enough. That’s the most charitable explanation I can think of, but it’s unclear.
I agree that each man is different, and perhaps I should have included another excerpt in my previous post which more clearly demonstrated that the authors were extrapolating what is their perception of hands-on child-rearing (i.e., thankless and humiliating) to be the veracity of the American male experience. My point, however, being that continuing to propagate that particular meme as being representative of all men (or all American men) doesn’t really help men who desire to have
full or even a 50/50 split custody arrangement.
Ya got me on that one. I am a woman who is childfree by choice, so I don’t really have an answer as to why women want to do it. In addition, since each woman is different, they each probably have different reasons for why they want to do it. I do know some women who did not want to have and raise children, but did so anyway because they couldn’t handle the stigma that I sometimes endured (selfish bitch, etc.) In a slightly different vein, I have known women who did not fight for primary custody of their children when their cohabitating relationship broke down, and that is social-stigma-worthy too …
“must be some kind of MONSTER if she didn’t fight for custody!”
Yeah, that’s exactly what feminists mean when they say that if he wanted full or partial custody of his children he should have tried to gain said custody. ::eyeroll::
I actually considered that interpretation and I agree that, while charitable, it’s certainly as likely as his just being vindictive. Doesn’t change the fact that if he wants custody of her daughter he needs to do something about it.
“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.”
First, that context changes is the definition of context, yes, nice tautology there. Second, math time! Math part one — 3:2 = 150%, women are 150% as likely to be killed by an intimate as a man (no, that’s not right, because this is a ratio, but let’s play pretend some more?) Math part two — why this ratio is nonsense:
total homicide risk, male * % killed by intimates * X (we’ll get back to x) = total homicide risk, female * % killed by intimates * Y
Now, since we want to know the number of men killed by intimates, as compared to women killed by intimates, but using the ratio, we need those “total homicide risk” variables in there, we’ll round to 4 and 1. Y = women killed annually, rounding to 4000, which is slightly higher than reality, but only by ~50. % killed by intimates are 5% (.05) and 30% (.3), respectively. This gives us:
4 * .05 * x =
1 *.3 * 4000.2x = 1200
x = 6000
Except the total number of men killed annually is about 13,000 — 6,000 is ~46% of 13,000; not 5%. This ratio thing, it doesn’t actually work for determining anything besides how bored math geeks are. You can only validly collapse ratios like that if the variables are actually related, and really “for every 100 women killed, 20 men are killed by intimates” should sound like nonsense at face value. This math fails the first test of any study, does it make sense at face value? Are you measuring what you claim to be measuring? (I’m now curious the number of manboobz regulars eating ice cream, as a ratio of all people over 6′ tall, it’s about as valid, and I can’t work ice cream into this stat lesson!)
I can, however, work ice cream into why those juvie rape stats need that dreaded thing called context. (Pulling this from a hat, but) 70% of all ice cream is chocolate, thus if you’re eating, it’s probably chocolate ice cream. That’s what that 90% number is doing, 90% of juvie rape is a woman raping a boy, so boys are more likely to be raped in juvie. Well, maybe, but first you need to account for how my boys versus girls are in juvie, the same way you’d need to account for how much food eaten is ice cream. You want to find and compare the risk, if a girl in juvie, of being raped, to the risk, if a boy in juvie, of being raped — as it is that percentage is broken down as a pie chart of all rape. (The difference between this and the CDC data is that it can be assumed that in the general population the ratio of men to women is fairly 1:1)
(I have a thing for ice cream examples, this is not an attempt to minimize rape by joking.)
“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”
You missed where I said in that linked comment that rape was gendered regardless the victims gender, eh?
You’d do a lot better calling Galton a eugenicist than a misandrist…he’s the father of statistics, and eugenics. And fuck, even if he were a misandrist, that doesn’t magically make statistics inherently misandrist (a claim you don’t seem to have yet made, despite it being a common enough MRA talking point that I prefixed my Arks’s reply with it).
I realize that wasn’t directed at me, but google “safe haven laws”.
@David Futrelle
“Kyrie, I think the MRA argument is if they fight for custody, they’ll be falsely accused of something, so don’t even try.”
No one should have to fight for equal custody. Equal custody is an irrevocable right above the authority of the state. You’ve accepted your slavery to the communist state once you start believing they have the right to meddle in someone’s family. Children aren’t a commodity a man needs to pay for to visit.
My best guess is that the brother didn’t initially pursue custody because he may not have had evidence nor even thought that his ex-wife was an unfit parent. What may have been a general rule of the court (and perhaps still is in some places) was to award full physical custody of a child/children below a certain age to the mother unless she is proven to be an unfit parent. When the daughter found pictures of his wife having sex with another man on their family computer, he may have then thought the ex-wife to be unfit parent and had the evidence to prove it.
There are things like “Motion to Set Aside Entry of Default” or “Motion to Reopen Case” “Motion to Set Aside Due to Lack of Jurisdiction” and numerous other methods of letting a court know that a father had no ability to respond. But even then at some point the court will say “you had your chance, so no.” Most of the males who are “screwed” are only “screwed” because they ignored the vast volume of mail from the court, the ex and other people who are usually involved in one of these cases. So they had a chance and never bothered to show up. And the excuse of “I did not know what to do” is starting to go away since there is a serious movement nationwide to make court procedures as simple and easy as possible for the average litigant. At some point the father himself has to make some effort, misandric as that may be.
That makes zero sense. Why would the mother of the child pay the adopted parents for not talking to the father?