Our old nemesis The Pigman — the MRA blogger and one half of the cartooning team responsible for atrocities like this — has some thoughts on the Aurora shootings, specifically on the men who lost their lives to protect their girlfriends from gunfire. Their heroism makes him angry, much like the fellows on The Spearhead we looked at the other day. Here’s his complaint:
How’s that for inequity? How’s that for disposability? These guys appear to have sacrificed themselves for these people primarily because of their sex.
Well, no, I think they sacrificed themselves for their girlfriends because they loved their girlfriends.
After all, where are the guys who jumped in front of their best mate, or their dad or brother? And above all, where are the women who died saving their boyfriends?
There were many heroes in the Aurora shooting. Jonathan Blunk, Matt McQuinn, and Alex Teves died protecting their girlfriends. Stephanie Davies risked her life to keep a friend shot in the neck from bleeding to death. Other acts of heroism had less storybook endings: Marcus Weaver tried to shield a female friend. He was wounded but lived; she died. Jennifer Seeger tried to drag a wounded victim to safety, but fled when the shooter returned.
But the Pigman is interested in none of this:
This isn’t heroism, this is male disposability at its worst and by praising it society is encouraging it.Cheering these men’s actions is as reprehensible as it is stupid and discriminatory.
The heroes in Aurora acted quickly, and on instinct; they didn’t have time to stop to think. Is it possible that, in the cases of those men who tried to shield the women with them, gender socialization had something to do with what their instincts told them to do? Almost certainly.
But “male disposability” has nothing to do with it. We live in a society in which heroism, as an idea and as a cultural ideal, has been gendered male for thousands of years. In the stories we tell ourselves, the video games we play, the movies we watch (including The Dark Knight Rises) , the “hero with a thousand faces” is almost always male, and the damsel in distress is, well, almost always a damsel.
The Pigman ignores all this, instead attacking the three dead men as
foolish enough and unfortunate enough to fall for a lifetime of anti-male propaganda telling them to die for the nearest woman whenever the shit hits the fan.
I have no doubt that many are concerned with the feelings of the dead men’s survivors and wish I would just shut up.
But then he barrels ahead anyway:
But this is a simple case of “What you praise, you encourage,” and I for one think calling out those who encourage men to waste their lives for people worth no more than themselves is more important than being “sensitive”. Die for a child if you must, die for some guy on the verge of finding a cure for cancer if you must – die for someone no better than you simply because you have been taught to and you are a fool.
Had these men died protecting male buddies, would The Pigman have applied this calculus of worthiness to the beneficiaries of their heroism? Would he have suggested that the dead men thought they were worth less than their friends? Of course not.
The three men didn’t do what they did because they thought they were worthless or disposable. They did what they did because they wanted to protect those they loved. Others in the theater, like Stephanie Davies, risked their lives for friends, or people they didn’t even know. There’s nothing foolish or “wasteful” about putting yourself on the line to protect others. In every major disaster, whether natural, or like this one man-made, ordinary people emerge as heroes precisely because they are willing to put the lives and safety of other people ahead of their own.
Do these real-life stories of heroism play out in gendered ways? Often times they do. Men may be more willing to risk their lives to protect their wives or girlfriends; mothers may be more willing to risk their lives to protect their children.
In real life crises, it’s hardly surprising that people sometimes act like characters in these stories we tell ourselves. If you want to change how people act, you need to change these stories.
MRAs like to pretend that men are the “disposable sex” but in their hearts they know that’s not true. They’re well aware, as are we all, that our cultural narratives of heroism privilege and glorify men and put them at the center of almost every story. MRAs like The Pigman aren’t interested in expan ding our cultural narratives of heroism to include female heroes — nor are they willing to even acknowledge that there are such things as female heroes in the real world. They certainly don’t want more stories, more games, more films featuring female protagonists.
Instead they’d rather wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood, and attack real heroes like Jonathan Blunk, Matt McQuinn, and Alex Teves as “white knights” or “fools.”
How people react in a crises reveals a lot about them. How MRAs like The Pigman, and like the Spearhead commenters I quoted the other day reacted to the Aurora shootings has certainly revealed a lot about them, none of it good.
Unfortunately, attitudes like theirs aren’t confined to the fringe that is the manosphere.
After hearing the stories of Blunk, McQuinn, and Teves, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto tweeted “I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice.”
After numerous readers responded to his remarks with outrage, Taranto offered an apology of sorts, along with an explanation that suggested he really didn’t understand why people were angry in the first place. When someone does something noble and heroic out of love, it’s not up to you to second guess their actions or their love. Taranto’s words not only dishonored “the the girls whose boyfriends died to save them;” it dishonored the heroes as well.
Like The Pigman, like the Spearhead commenters, Taranto has failed this test of his humanity.
@Rutee: given that their other recent post was to demand details from a hypothetical argument…
Perhaps this is just me but this is how I picture an MRA that thinks heroism is for suckers:
oh man, total fail at the cut and paste job. *facepalm* Sorry guys.
Um, okay… It’s apparently a youtube issue. Sorry for cluttering up the page.
BROs: The “wage gap” exists because Women’s Choices do that.
But when men put themselves at risk for women, it’s all down to society.
@Rutee Katreya:
Loved ones? A girlfriend of three weeks? I hope I don’t offend anyone, but I suspect other reasons, at least in that case.
Are you a robot? Or have you just never once in your life been in love?
howardbann1ster, please, feel free to use any pronoun you like for me, use he, she, ze, whatever, but don’t use “they”, I’m not a symbiotic organism. Thank you.
Well, the Monstars have been suspiciously quiet, and they ARE notoriously misandrist. Hmmm
@Nikan
You know, a much easier solution is just to tell us what pronoun you prefer
Surely any question that begins “Why do Men’s Rights Activists…?” can be answered “Because they’re a bunch of arseholes.”
Do tell. Does it have anything to do with whores and misandry?
Whoops, sorry David, I used a bad word and got myself moderated.
If the MRM isn’t a hate group, why is there so much hate and bitterness evident in their websites and postings?
As far as I’m aware, ‘they’ as singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender is an entirely standard English usage. I’ve been doing that all my life.
And in the long argument on a previous thread about the usage of the term “zie,” another troll argued that we SHOULD be using “they” when gender is unknown. So, can’t win for losing, I guess.
If you read the comments on Taranto’s column, you’ll find a woman commenter pointing out that yes, women saved other women’s lives too. A group of NRAs then jump on said woman commenter to yell that she’s diminishing men’s achievements and let the men have their heroic moment, etc.
Because reality has a well know misandry bias.
livingcolor and cloudiah, thanks for the info and links on Taranto.
also, garvan (in a moderated comment I just let through; I can’t remember if he’s moderated or banned), said
I love how you guys just make up whatever you want to believe about me and somehow convince yourself it’s true. When the fuck did I laugh at anyone dying on the Titanic? As I’ve pointed out a zillion times, my great grandfather was one of them.
Remember that time garvan ate those puppies? Man, that was disturbing.
“our cultural narratives of heroism privilege and glorify men and put them at the center of almost every story.”
Haha! Thanks for that. Naturally if this kind of lethal bullet-catching gender norm applied to women, Feminists would be all over it with their garbled critiques.
The priivlege of having the glory of being a human shield! Hmm, I’d almost rather have a girlfriend who’s fat enough to hide behind.
Yeah Garvan, it’s such a wild extrapolation to guess that people trying to save the lives of people they care about loved them. Far more reasonable to believe in a shadowy cabal of invisible bigots baying for their blood. That totally makes more sense.
@Rutee Katreya:
So he was infatuated (well, that’s the best explanation, there are worse, maybe he just wanted to have a good argument to finally take the relationship one step further.)
@Shadow:
Maybe they have their reasons?
@blitzgal:
I think “they” is acceptable, if the rest of the sentence makes it clear that we mean singular.
you’re not good at getting what words mean, are you?
soo… you are a robot?
This is going to be their new Titanic, isn’t it? :/
Which, how nice for them. The old Titanic was getting old. Fantastic that someone has found an upside in this tragedy. All the George Costanzas of the MRA, who would trample their own children as they ran for the exit, can turn the deaths of these three brave men into a grievance that proves how all men are “disposable”, and completely erase all the other victims, survivors and heroes of the Aurora shooting.
Then they’ll keep complaining about it for the next 100 years as a symbol of how much their butts hurt because they got asked to wash the dishes/the bitch they harassed on the street laughed at them/their ex-wife escaped to safety with the children/a woman looked at them funny and they just know it was because the bitch expected them to hold the door open AS IF FEMINAZI/their chairs are too hard.
I really, really hope I’m wrong about this because it makes me feel a bit sick.