Over on The Spearhead, the regulars are discussing the three young men who sacrificed their own lives to save their girlfriends in the chaos of the Aurora theater shootings.
Needless to say, many of them aren’t too keen on any act of heroism that might benefit a woman.
Here are the two highest-rated comments in the comment thread. (I have bolded some of the more egregious stuff.)
Young Guy writes:
Sacrifice was once expected of men and women, but it has only been expected of men since the social contract between men and women was torn up by feminists. Most women have been told their entire lives they can have it all, and their happiness is the most important thing in the universe, so most women hate the thought of having to give up anything or putting other people before themselves. Most relationships today are one-sided, so don’t be shocked when men shun marriage or take up pumping and dumping. That might sound harsh to some people, but most women did it to themselves.
Why should I give every ounce of my being for a woman when she is one bad mood away from tossing me onto the scrap heap? I have heard the horror stories from men who worked hard to provide for their families, only for it to mean nothing to their ungrateful ex-wives. I have seen men risk life and limb to protect women they loved, only to have the women in their lives leave them or forget about their sacrifices. It has been said men have obligations while women have options in our modern world, I and agree with that statement. Most women think the world is their oyster, and everyone should cater to them. Most men understand the world is a harsh place, and no one is going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Most women have done an excellent job pissing away all the goodwill men had towards them. I look at women my age, and I realize almost none of them are relationship material. Their entitlement is through the roof. They almost never say “thank you.” They demand chivalry even though they think they should never have to return the favor. They have been told any man who stands up for himself is guilty of abuse. It really is too much to ask of most women to be pleasant, keep the house clean, take care of the kids, and realize a relationship isn’t the Disney fairy-tale which they have been brainwashed with since birth.
Nietzsche (presumably not the ghost of the real Nietzsche) is a bit more concise:
They saved their lives so the girlfriends can be screwing other dudes in several months time…….. probably much less. Heroism is a suckers game.
These two comments each got nearly two dozen upvotes, even though the thread is still young.
Some other highlights of the thread:
Peter South agrees with Nietzsche’s assessment, but expects the girlfriends to move on even more quickly:
These young women will don black for the rest of their lives to mourn and commemorate the passing of these great fallen heroes.
Well ok they’ll be twittering, texting and yakking on their “smart phones” within a week about other guys…
But I think we can all agree that men generally make great meat shields.
Phil, meanwhile, derides the heroes as “suckers.”
Those boyfriends were suckers. These men were living in the past. The boyfriends were living in the 1700′s while modern day American women are living in feminist 2012. Modern day American women don’t live by the old social contract. The problem is men like these three don’t understand. These women will find new boyfriends and move on with their lives. The three men are dead. Gone forever. They died believing is something that doesn’t exist. It is tragic and disgusting.
Eric adds:
the grrlz who survived are probably moving on to the next cock even as we speak. And I’ll bet the types of guys they’re moving on to won’t be the type who’d take a bullet for them either.
Meanwhile, the lowest-rated comment in the thread, with more than two dozen downvotes and only 6 upvotes, is a comment from Georice81 praising the heroes, which starts off with:
The Bible says that there is no Greater Love than when a man gives up his life so that another man may live. I believe in this no matter what anyone may say, MRA or Feminist.
What these men did was heroic and defines what a true man should be. It isn’t a question of being a white knight. It is a question of being a brave man and a true man at that.
I guess the Spearheaders are only fans of traditionalism when it benefits them personally.
@Cassandra
I had an opposite experience in that my family was/is awesome but was extremely over protective. So that once I grew up and escaped that, I was all no, I’m not going to live in fear like you guys do. I am going to walk at night sometimes and will use the subway because I’m a citizen and its my damn right to do so. The messages I got to take care and be alert are always there and I’m mindful of my surroundings, even when I have earbuds in. But I don’t have that fear that they do.
I mean, my grandmother didn’t even think it was safe to go see DKR after the shooting, I just rolled my eyes. There’s legitimate fears, and then there’s paranoia.
Even so, I do understand why other women may feel differently. I can see the difference in the “be careful” messages I constantly get and the ones my brother gets. I get them more often and I’m older for fucks sake. This is why it really angers me when MRA twits accuse women of being misandrists simply because they fear more and try to explain WHY that is. You fucking deal with the message that you’ll be attacked, raped, or god knows what else for daring to exist in public and that you must always be careful, not wear miniskirts, don’t make eye contact or men will get the wrong idea (and yes assholes, some men DO think simply looking at them blankly is an indication of sexual interest so maybe you ought to address them) etc. And the frustrating thing is even though women are statistically more likely to be raped by an acquaintance, women are also more likely to be sexually harassed in public. So the fear is legitimate. I personally don’t feel fear because my experience has been lucky in that I never faced much harassment. However if I did, I probably would feel more fearful or at least edgier in public and especially at night.
@Nanasha
Good point. I do think when one becomes a parent the fear is now doubled because you have kids and want them to be safe at all times.
@ Quackers
I suspect that part of my relative lack of fear is that I never got “be careful” messages from my family very much. I mean, I got “pay attention” messages, but not “if you go out alone dire things will happen” messages. My parents seemed to think that I would be OK, so I guess I assumed that they were probably right. And I was getting harassed just as much during the day, so I figured, why did it being night make any difference when I seemed to be just as likely to be pestered at 10 am on the bus?
I’m weirdly nocturnal, though, so if I’d felt like I couldn’t go out at night that really would have felt like imprisonment, and my tendency to sleep all day was probably a pretty big incentive towards being willing to go out at night.
Yeah, that article by Hanna Rosin was obviously a shameless plug for her book first and foremost.
@Cassandra
Hmm…that’s interesting, because why haven’t my family’s messages stuck? lol.
I dunno, back when I was living on campus I’d cut through this forest, many times at night. I was always warned not too, but it was a shortcut and in the freezing cold winter I wasn’t gonna pass it up. Even though I was very alert and had eyes in the back of my head, I didn’t register it as a big threat like my mom did.
I’m a night owl myself but in certain places, I won’t go out very late though, past midnight in my neighborhood for example. It’s pretty quiet and empty and I find that more threatening that if I was going out for a late night snack in a very busy city. If you get attacked then there are actual witnesses and someone is more likely to call the cops.
I like to think I have a healthy dose of caution and awareness but not outright fear that my family seems to have. Nanasha made a good point about physical issues though, if you’re not in good health that could make you less likely to escape or protect yourself 🙁 My grandma would certainly be right to be more fearful in public than I would.
@ Quackers
Yeah, I think always having been able bodied and extremely mobile, and being a former sporty person, have both contributed to my relative feeling of safety. Just imagining trying to escape from a bad situation with, say, pregnancy-related hip issues is making me feel much more cautious.
MRAs don’t understand and have probably never experienced romantic love. It’s a tragedy.
For some reason, this thread, more than most others, has made me really feel sad for the state of some people’s lives.
When I visited the US for the first time in the mid-90s, I half expected to be shot at as soon as I stepped off the plane – in Britain, the notion that the US is a violent crime-ridden hellhole is so pervasive that it’s very hard to shake off.
But I quickly discovered that although my fears were completely absurd (I don’t think I even so much as saw a holstered gun in the entire three months I was there), so too were the parallel fears that my American friends had developed about visiting Europe: they were convinced they’d be targeted by terrorists. In 1995, one of them really wanted to go to Belfast, city of her ancestors, but was too scared of the IRA, so she went to Paris instead.
Which might sound superficially rational, but…
1. The chances of the IRA blowing up or otherwise harming an American tourist were as close to nonexistent as makes very little difference – it would have done massive damage to their cause;
2. In any case, there was a formal ceasefire at the time…
3. …but there was an Algerian terrorist campaign going on in Paris that was far more random, and which had claimed several lives.
Granted, her chances of being blown up even in Paris were vanishingly small – but I thought it was interesting that she’d conditioned herself to think that Paris was safe and Belfast wasn’t, when the exact opposite was true.
There’s ample evidence to support this theory already, even if this didn’t clinch it.
And it’s not just a tragedy for them personally, but it means that rational communication with them is very very difficult because they genuinely believe that relationships are essentially transactional and will inevitably end with betrayal. I also think there’s a fair amount of self-loathing at play here, in that they can’t get their heads around the notion that a woman might actually want to be with them, so assume that she must have an ulterior motive.
Even their insults are hugely revealing. I can’t begin to tell you what little effect ‘mangina’ has on me – in all seriousness, I’d regard “big stinky poopyhead” as being more effective, because at least it casts aspersions on my personal hygiene. But words like “mangina” reveal one hell of a lot about them and their belief that taking the side of what they regard as “the enemy” is something to be condemned.
That’s why I felt genuinely sorry for Mister Al – unlike our other older and too-far-gone trolls, he was young and immature enough to convince me that he hadn’t completely swallowed the MRA Kool-Aid and was actually worth saving. And I know I wasn’t alone in this, even though he revealed otherwise. But it was his choice to go down that route: it’s not as if people didn’t patiently explain the consequences in exhaustive detail.
@ Wetherby
Yeah, I tend to agree.
What I thought very, very interesting was JtO announcing that he had a girlfriend. I have no evidence about this, but I suspect that the relationship started recently and that, despite his constant repitition about “shaming”, he wants it to be known that he’s in a relationship. Essentially showing her off as an acquisition.
“It’s similar to spouses knowing nothing about their financial affairs and then when their spouses die, they’re left helpless.”
I actually have a grandmother who didn’t know what a two-pound coin looks like. She’s been confined to a wheelchair for years and is cared for 24/7 by my grandfather – hasn’t handled finances or even basic transactions since forever. Crazy.
“For some reason, this thread, more than most others, has made me really feel sad for the state of some people’s lives.”
MRAdom is filled with damaged people. It’s one of the reasons I dislike the gallery of pigs here at Manboobs, since it’s basically point-and-laugh, which always makes you the dick, regardless of where you’re pointing and what you’re laughing at.
The problem is the men are 1. men and 2. often white and hetero, so they don’t fit your officially designated oppressed groups, and thus get little sympathy. Naturally it doesn’t help that they’re mostly pretty unlikeable.
Of course I know I’m quite dickish, whereas you people seem addicted to moralizing, making you in a strange way even more dickish than me. 🙂
Mockery: It does not work that way. Things that are ridiculous should be ridiculed. Like the notion that men are oppressed.
They aren’t oppressed on grounds of male, white, or hetero. They may be on other grounds.
You’re the one trolling a blog, dude, so no XD
*the notion that men are oppressed on grounds of being men, rather. Black dudes are oppressed, but it’s on their blackness, not their dudeness, f’rex.
Rutee, the sad thing is I could’ve wrote your reply for you. Heard it before; don’t care.
It’s a lot more complex than “basically point-and-laugh”, as you’d know if you’d read the threads properly.
Few of our trolls are more obviously dislikeable than AntZ, who goes out of his way to insult and belittle anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him, often in advance on the off chance that they might. Yet when he admitted that his decidedly peculiar worldview might have been shaped by serious sexual abuse, the response could hardly have been more sympathetic – we were one hell of a lot nicer towards him than he ever was towards us.
Same with Mister Al, as mentioned above – when he said anything stupid and immature (which was often), he was of course roundly mocked for it, but when he was more emotionally honest with us he got a much more sympathetic hearing. Example: when he said he was convinced that he was still a virgin because of what he was convinced were hideous physical deformities, but which were actually utterly trivial in the wider scheme of things (average height, a lazy eye).
I believe they’re both male, white and hetero. As am I, and I’ve never felt the least bit oppressed here, and it’s not as though I slavishly agree with everything that’s being said.
So remind me what your point was?
I could have written your uncaring dismissal for you. The wheel turns.
Why do I care about your approval, again?
Then why the fuck are you here, you smug asshole?
NWO – you’d have to support that “massive” figure and then the reasons for this (if it is true) before you’ve got an argument of any sort.
NYT had a good short piece on guessing the motives of the shooter btw. MRAs take note of this when you put blame on that one thing you believe was his reason: http://nytimes.com/2012/07/22/opinion/sunday/the-unknown-why-in-the-aurora-killings.xml
Wetherby,
Being nice and understanding to somebody who’s revealed a life-altering vulnerability to you only means you are not a totally irreemable psychopathic douchebag. Even I don’t sink that low. It also reinforces my view that you have very specific little empathy switches that only get turned on when somebody’s pain is literally staring you full in the face.
MRAdom is abounding in mental health issues. You don’t need a wall full of certificates to know that. Apparently the progressive way to address this is mockery and leftwing dogma.
Haha, am I being accused of arrogance by a Manboober? As the feminists say “wow, just wow.”
Not everyone who’s an arsehole has mental health issues, in fact that’s pretty insulting to people with actual mental health issues who aren’t arseholes.
im sure the mrm is super glad youre here to make dumb, condescending excuses for them dude.
I can promise you that those women most likely wish their boyfriends hadn’t been killed at all. I know I would rather go down together than survive without my love.
So if I read your argument correctly, you’re assuming:
1. That every MRA who posts something stupid and mock-worthy is doing so because they have mental health issues and don’t know any better;
2. That the MRM is so heavily comprised of people with mental health issues that they need to be treated with kid gloves, lest they get triggered by anything said out of turn;
3. That because of (2), MRAs can’t be held responsible for their douchebaggery.
Is that right?
i know it’s not inconceivable that there are two pseudointellectual contrarians on the internet, but can we get a check to make sure rhw isn’t the baby without a name