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.
>Also true. But then there would be no such thing as thinking for oneself. I’m curious as to how malleable the brain actually is.
You can think for yourself, but I found that it’s pretty hard to think outside of the framework your specific culture endowed you with over the course of your life.
@lowquacks, yes, it doesn’t help mutual understanding. 🙁
XD. Sorry, I forgot the golden rule. For every position that can be conceived of, there is at least one defender of that view.
@Kiwi girl
I was actually making a free will joke, but it really doesn’t.
@Jarrod, the issue is the centrality of mens rea to the criminal justice system. The absence of free will would call the idea of mens rea into disrepute.
http://users.phhp.ufl.edu/rbauer/forensic_neuropsychology/barratt_felthous_03.pdf
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1187&context=dlj
Potentially one of the key foundations of the criminal justice system would need to be overhauled (and old precedents replaced with new ones).
@lowquacks, sorry missed it. It’s funny now you pointed out the joke. 🙂
I find the idea of free will incoherent. Any thoughts or feelings I have are either a) random, b) the result of prior thoughts or feelings, or c) the result of sensory sensory input. I don’t really get where the idea of choosing something freely fits in. To quote someone, not sure who, “A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
I’m going to exercise my free will to go and walk about the weekly arts fair. I may choose to have a beer and a snack. I may not. I might eat out, I may come home and make supper.
Kakanian –
Very good point. It’s hard to escape the bars you can’t see, or the cage you don’t realize exists. I do believe that if I hadn’t turned out gay, I would now be one of those red-caped Catholic loons, most likely in the Knights of Columbus instead of the Masons. Even now, I realize, there are a whole raft of ideas that were drummed into me – e.g., home and family are more important than what you do for a living, you can judge a person by the enemies ze makes, calling people obscene names will make people think you’re stupid – that I didn’t even realize until well into adulthood.
@Kiwi
I’m having troubling figuring out how the linked articles are actually supposed to contradict anything I said? I have no problem saying that the realization that we have no free will would radically alter our notion of imprisonment (see the book I linked).
This is my forte.
If your wife/girlfriend gets murdered the police are looking at you FIRST, get your alibi in order. Law enforcement does not take that procedural route due to any feminist propaganda, it’s what they KNOW.
Also husbands/boyfriends ex boyfriends, those women are the first that are given the interviews at the station with the polygraphs as an investigative tool.
Then they move on to people that know the victim.
AND… you already know that. so … just me chiming in.
“Can it be blamed on testosterone by itself, or is there more to it?”
o.0
Well, I think there’s more to it. lol.
The only thing is about women getting murdered, I really thought it was more than thirty percent via IPV.
As a good friend of mine says: It must be nice not to let knowledge get in the way.
Funny how some people make ASSumptions about what I believe. I was just going to mention the honor killings in certain cultures. I suppose if you saw women as property, killing them is not so bad.
Ruby: Capitalising for emphasis there? Cute.
We’re mostly just not letting up because we’ve seen you saying things we find totally abhorrent. That ain’t an assumption, that’s a derivation.
So, uh, maybe testosterone causes honor killings?
I don’t believe in free will, personally. I think that my brain functions by the interaction of atoms with each other in accordance with the laws of physics, which is either deterministic (Newton) or random (some interpretations of quantum mechanics).
I don’t think it’s relevant to daily life though, and it sure as hell FEELS like I’m making decisions.
Never thought I’d say this, but I actually get where the MRA came from. The sign is ambiguously worded, and I actually initially misread it as 30% women killed [by ANYTHING] rather than 30% women MURDERED.
Right, that’s true about feeling you own something, I would suggest that is an underlying component in IPV,
but Ruby, I think people were wondering about the testosterone thing. Why would that be an issue? Makes no sense, billions of people with loads of testosterone have never murdered, and I think that was such an obvious response to you ppl may have felt it was tedious to write out an argument on that. I don’t know what others think and feel tho.
“Funny how some people make ASSumptions about what I believe.”
And today’s award in ALL THE IRONY goes to Ruby!! Congrats!
“I was just going to mention the honor killings in certain cultures. I suppose if you saw women as property, killing them is not so bad.”
That’s testosterone’s fault? Not the socialization that leads to seeing women as property? DO you ever even try to stay on point? (Oh wait, you’re really sticking to “prison rape is justified”, so I guess you sometimes stay on point…the worst point you’ve made, but on point nonetheless)
LBT — yeah it could be worded better, but that reddit post is getting rather angry about how this must be all lies because men are killed more often than women and thus PROPAGANDA!! (I really don’t think they know what that word means…)
IDK LBT
look again, right
30 percent of women killed
not ambiguous.
only if you think the word ARE is dropped but that would be weird and awkward and wrong, etc.
30 percent of women killed
sounds good.
🙂
I wonder why we aren’t constantly told other fact’s. Like when women hire someone to murder their husband, it’s not listed as a wife/girlfriend killing her husband/boyfriend. Her hands might not be bloody, but the man is just as dead. How about how 70% of all non-recipricol DV is perpetrated by women. Maybe how most violence between men and women is initiated by women. How men way under-report be victimized by women. Perhaps how the majority of child murder/child abuse is by the biological mother and the safest place for a child is with the biological father.
Why are women always portrayed as either angels or victims and men are always devils or oppressors? Why does the filthy taint of feminist deception, lies and manipulation hang over every statistic? Tell a lie and tell it often?
————-
@WordSpinner
” So even if men are doomed to be more violent than women on average**, they certainly aren’t doomed to be as violent as they are now.”
Since women initiate the majority of violence, let’s hope women aren’t doomed to be as violent as they are now. Add to that the violence women routinely use when employing the guns of the State, plus the lies and manipulation they use when getting other men to be violent for them and you’ve got a free for all bonanza of female violence.
————–
@indifferentsky
“Law enforcement does not take that procedural route due to any feminist propaganda, it’s what they KNOW.”
That’s incorrect, law enforcement are taught feminist predominant aggressor theory when dealing with DV. Things like who is showing “fear” when they arrive. Who is crying. Who is hysterical. Also, who is bruised, women of course bruise far more easily. Also, wrist bruises on a woman are considered proof she was being restrained, when that restraining could just as easily be to stop her from hitting, especially since women initiate most DV. In all cases, men are considered the aggressor under predominant aggressor theory.
I could initiate a fight against a pro boxer and lose yet I’d be at fault. A woman suffers no such stipulation when initiating violence. She can have either the State or lie and manipulate other men to come to her aid, even though she is at fault for initiating the violence.
Ruby, we don’t have to make assumptions about what you believe, you tell us. With your words. Words mean things.
Aw, fuck it. You’re just ignorant.
@David: “Only 5% of murdered men are killed by ‘intimates.'”
To be accurate, this 5% figure applies only to those women who kill their male partner directly. The FBI does not classify it as an intimate partner related homicide when a woman asks her new male lover to kill her former male lover.
Because that happens so often.
RE: indifferentsky
*shrug* Just, my mental definition of kill is ‘to cause to die.’ I could get killed by a car. That’s just how I think. Like, it was only a momentary mental glitch, I quickly realized what they meant, but yeah.
“The FBI does not classify it as an intimate partner related homicide when a woman asks her new male lover to kill her former male lover.”
96% percent of wives cheat on their husbands, and 78% actually murder them, that is why there are so few men left in the world. It are fact in MRA land.