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.
Nikan:
Fancy being so coy about a single little word, and yet entirely comfortable about spewing your prejudices out over the rest of the post.
In your unthinkingly casual bigotry, you remind me of the time when the Daily Mail sought to explain why David Cronenberg’s film Crash should be banned:
Not too surprisingly, quite a few people found that comment to be infinitely more offensive than anything in the film. One activist commented:
I should probably add that I had a disabled girlfriend for many years. Far from it being a symptom of desperation, I actually left her able-bodied predecessor for her, because I’d never met anyone so quick-witted and so endlessly curious about practically everything. And the sex was pretty amazing too – obviously, it requires more imagination when physical disabilities enter into the equation, but since when was adding a little imagination to one’s sex life a bad thing?
@Rutree
I may be an asshole, but I’m certainly not a stupid asshole. I spent a good amount of time searching for a good study. If you can find a better one that fits my criteria, then by all means post it.
And my criteria does matter. You can’t count everybody because you will have to factor in all the women in the past that didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. So any study should be from this generation. Another thing is that you don’t want it to measure lifestyle choices like intentionally leaving the workforce. What you want is a study that can show an unbiased view of the degree to which there is an income gap, so recent graduates, who are all on the same footing are the best people to look at.
Limiting the pool to recent graduates makes it easier to compare apples to apples. It slashes away the greatest number of variables. Look, there are a lot of studies out there that are crap. Its pretty sad to say, but some of the worst books I’ve read were PhD dissertations. Just because it was typed up, and posted on the internet doesn’t mean its worth a damn.
Now, if you can find for me a study you think is good, I would like to see it.
I just spent three posts telling you that your criteria are stupid.
BLS statistics are from this generation, you stupid asshole.
Which you handle by controlling for hours worked, you stupid asshole. And those studies do, except for CONSAD, which found a smaller, but still extant, wage gap after doing a lot of shit to erase it.
Which is fucking useless when the subject of comparison is fruit as an aggregate. Recent grads are a tiny population, and the world extends so far beyond them as to not be funny.
Dude, half my studies are peer reviewed to start with.
Do you know how to read?
Also, seriously, you are not going to win points for faux intellectual rigor. Your arguments appear to be centered on a perception that you’re the only educated person on the thread. That’s the only way I can see making such transparently thin ones; you think we won’t read for content. It’s hilariously arrogant.
But hey, as flagrantly stupid as your criteria are, I found a matching study in less than a minute, out of curiosity for your intellectual curiosity.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0019-8676.721998035/abstract;jsessionid=5DA6590986A5948394FC8895E7E4CB4B.d01t02?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false
Is typing “wage gap recent college graduates” into google scholar too difficult for you?
Also, you may think, in your superficial mind, that the burden of proof rests on us, but we already substantiated our claims of a wage gap. What you need to do is substantiate that your confounds are actual confounds, not talk out your ass about how the studies fail to meet your standards without actually checking to see if your potential confounds are real ones. The burden of proof falls on you to show a confound matters, not on us to prove a confound didn’t matter.
Huh. I think that may be my first ever blockquote fail.
nasty feministses
(dot tumblr dot com)
(MAKE IT HAPPEN)
Ha! You seriously regurgitated every bullshit talking point about the wage gap that every other MRA troll has argued on this blog. You all think you’re so clever and unique, yet you all say the same stupid things.
Companies don’t hire only women because women have children and women are culturally expected to perform the lion’s share of child-rearing. So they end up being the ones required to take off work, leave early, etc. for a myriad of reasons related to their child’s care. Employers don’t like that. In fact, they hate it so much that many of them simply fire a woman when she gets pregnant, and if it’s a state with at-will employment, there isn’t much she can do about it.
In the extremely small sample size of my company alone, where twenty women have had children in the past five years, I’ve definitely noticed that they are always the ones who stay home with their sick kids, or leave early because daycare called and their kid has a fever, or who have to take a full week off because there’s no school and daycare is closed, etc. Their husbands never miss work to care for their children. I know one man who left our company to stay home with his kids, because his wife’s career was more lucrative. But he’s the only one I know. That disparity in child-rearing work holds women back a lot, and more men should be stepping up to actually be partners and help carry the load.
Just to inject a touch of optimism: there definitely are men who’ll stay at home to look after the kids; my dad’s one of them. I’m making no comment on wider trends here, just saying it’s not a universal trait. We can change things!
Oh, that’s definitely true, Morkais. All of the younger couples I know are more and more egalitarian than the generation before them. For instance, the husband cooks in every one of them. That may seem small, but cooking is a big part of housekeeping. But out of all of those couples, only one shares the responsibility of taking off work to care for their kid when needed. They take turns.
Also, just wanted to pop back in to make one more point. Look into the issue of pink collar work. Jobs that are female dominated tend to be devalued and paid less. MRAs would have us believe that’s just because women are stupid and picking “soft” majors in school. They have it backwards. These fields are paid less because they are female dominated. This includes teaching and nursing, not just waitstaff and retail, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink-collar_worker
I’m one too – in fact, I’m looking after the kids right now.
Even before I started working from home full time, we used to base decisions on who’d take time off work to deal with domestic emergencies on practicality. My wife’s advantage was geographical, in that she works only a couple of miles away from home – but I had the rather bigger advantage of being able to take time off work (or work from home) at very little notice. So it tended to balance itself out.
And “female” medical professions like midwifery, coupled with a general attitude that it’s essentially a glorified nursing role – despite the fact that midwives know at least as much as doctors when it comes to their specific area of expertise, and have just as much responsibility when it comes to making potential life-or-death decisions.
Aw, Steelepolebutthorn’s shitfit over “dude” may be the most precious thing ever.
Yeah, real upstanding, assuming Ella exists, which I strongly doubt, dude. I really hope she starts posting here.
Dudedudedudedude.
V’z fb tynq vagrearg trrxf ner fgvyy ebg13’vat guvatf. gnxrf zr *jnl* onpx.
Late to the party, and wow 560 comments…. will browse up in due time.
The Pigman’s rhetoric almost sounds like he’s angry it wasn’t him. Like he has a need to “show how it’s done” and get praised for heroism. It’s a bit sad, actually, if that’s how it is. There are other ways of gaining acceptance.
@Dracula: “They stole it from us! Thieves! Thieves! Wicked! Tricksy! False!”
XD
Argenti: She has credits on the screen; I don’t recall her name being mentioned in the film, but I think it was.
ACC: V’z fb tynq vagrearg trrxf ner fgvyy ebg13′vat guvatf. gnxrf zr *jnl* onpx.
Yrg’f whfg fnl V nz fgvyy qbvat vg.
Diogenes: I have yet to find anything.
Because your metric sucks.
It limits the sample size, excludes large groups of relevant people, fails to account for wages paid per hour worked, doesn’t account for disparities which occur over time, etc..
You are also adding an inane issue with the, “majors” issue. There’s a great post, “The Russian Lit Major which points out that “dedicated majors” aren’t all that useful as a predictor of end result.
Take, for example, the oft maligned “philosophy major”. How recent is your study? One year after graduation? Five? Make a big difference.
Why? Because a lot of philosphy majors go to law school (it’s kind of like applied philosophy with real world implications). What about history majors? Or the people who went into one of the “athletics” majors which have sprung up in the past decade? A well rounded education, at the college level, ought to train one to think, and that’s what matters in getting ahead.
But what about the high school graduates… you’ve left them out entirely. You’ve designed a study of how pigeonholes compare to pigeonholes, not how wages work in the real world.
It’s a recipe for falsity.
Even if there were no wage gap, those parameters would prevent one from being able to show it. and completely fails at being able to prove it.
blitzgal: One of the interesting things is that when a field becomes seen as, “female dominated” the rates of pay drop. Pediatricians have seen this happen. So what ends up happening is women enter a field, the wages drop, so men leave the field and wages drop more and Bang! the work is coded female, and dismissed as, “womens’ work”.
Then, when a woman enters a multi-disciplinary field (like medicine) the tendency is to shunt her off to the “womanly” side of things, and keep her out of the manly jobs. Which creates a pay gap, which is hidden when one compares fuji apples to fuji apples, but not when one compares all apples (to try and expand the metaphor Diogenes screwed up)>
Diogenes: Limiting the pool to recent graduates makes it easier to compare apples to apples. It slashes away the greatest number of variables.
That’s exactly the problem. You have stripped away the variables that make for the wage gap. You have limited your study to the least gapped segment of the population, and declared that to be the norm.
So yeah, I’d say the jury is still out on the question of stupid.
Oh… and in case anyone thinks the, “Russian Lit Major” isn’t out there… Jamie Hyneman… was a Russian Lit Major.
After children grow up and leave the nest, many mothers still have caregiving responsibilities. Sometimes grandmothers take on the job of raising their grandchildren, and they are also likely to take on the care for their aging parents. The baby boomer women taking on care for elder parents as well as children and grandchildren are called the sandwich generation
Just like with raising children, it is usually women who take on the jobs of caring for elderly parents and grandchildren. So even after a woman is done raising her children, she might still have major conflicts between her work responsibilities and her caregiving responsibilities. I saw my own mom and aunts struggle with juggling managing their own lives with caring for their dying parents. My aunt apologized to my dad when she put Granny in a home, but my dad really had no room to judge because he had left all the work to her in the first place. I don’t know if it’s a generation thing, but I was the only one who would wonder why it was daughters who would do all the work and nobody considered what the sons should do.
The sad thing is that caregiving is undervalued, probably because it’s something that women usually do. I do think there is a slow shift to more men taking on caregiving work, but it is far from even.
So the MRA’s blaming women for the pay gap should instead be speaking up and demanding that men do just as much caregiving as women. I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
You’re exactly right. Teaching and secretary jobs were male in the 19th century. As they switched over to being female dominated they were devalued. It’s interesting, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the same thing is happening in the field of law right now. It’s too complicated to tell right now because the recession has definitely impacted the field so that has something to do with the devaluing of a law degree over the past few years. But more women have been graduating law school than men, and as the old guard male lawyers die off, women will start to outnumber men. Will law become coded female as well?