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.
People need to start using vagina calculus in dirty talk. “Oh baby, our combined pleasure rate could be expressed as a 4th-degree exponential rate of change!”
Well, calculus deals with rates of change, and a lot of people have put a lot of thought into the rates of change of quantity of penis inside any given vagina.
“People need to start using vagina calculus in dirty talk. “Oh baby, our combined pleasure rate could be expressed as a 4th-degree exponential rate of change!””
That gave me gina tingles.
Challenge accepted.
That’s the heart of the matter. Would more women sacrifice their lives for their boyfriends and husbands, if only we portrayed more heroines in popular entertainment and fables? It seems to me that the way our culture celebrates the empowerment of one sex has the tendency to denigrate the other. If women are portrayed as the heroes, too often the men in the same narratives are portrayed as weak, inadequate, harmless oafs. In other words, such men are portrayed as being hardly worth defending. Under the status quo, if the man is rescued by a heroine, it seems the intent of the writer is only to accentuate the heroine’s glory. So if this (flawed) story has any influence on real women, it will teach them to rescue a man solely if they’ll get glory from it, not because he’s valuable to her or to anyone else. It would hardly provide sufficient motivation to a woman to put her body in the line of fire if she was imitating the heroines that Hollywood likes to portray. In death, there’s no glory to enjoy.
What pop cultire *should* be celebrating, when it depicts heroes and heroines, is the best in both the rescued and the rescuer. There should be no shame in being rescued, and the importance and value attached to the rescued should not be diminished. That is, not if the story is worth immitating in real life.
As for stories motivating people to be rescuers, there once was a time when it was shameful to have the means to rescue someone and yet decline to rescue them. Those days are a memory growing more and more distant.
Ugh — there’s an xkcd for that.
pecunium — why didn’t I think of giving out points for people who guess correctly? You missed the argument from ignorance though, and damned if this isn’t a perfect example of that one.
Argument from ignorance (appeal to ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantiam) – assuming that a claim is true (or false) because it has not been proven false (true) or cannot be proven false (true).
And since “begging the question” might be the most misused phrase in English —
Begging the question (petitio principii) – where the conclusion of an argument is implicitly or explicitly assumed in one of the premises
Appeal to horniness isn’t a fallacy technically, but Nikan’s doing that too (maybe file that as a type of appeal to emotion?)
Stupid broken links! Begging the question
Using the broadest interpretation of the term ‘valid explanation,’ when one explanation involves shitting on the memory and motivations of a now deceased person for no reason, and one doesn’t, well, I think it better to go with the latter. But maybe that’s just my hormones or something.
Also super lolzy –
I’m pretty sure having a troll complain that we’re TOO concerned about hatred of men is a historic moment for Manboobz.
@Argenti
That xkcd is probably the hottest depiction of stick figures I’ve ever seen.
Ugh — I’m also fond of this one but it has nothing to do with math. (Both this one and the previous one are among the handful linked at the bottom of every page)
That is super cute.
You don’t have two valid explanations to begin with, but the explanation that makes fewest assumptions is likely correct. Except the conclusion you’re insisting on isn’t really at all evidenced. Dying to have sex isn’t really evidenced human stupidity.
You’re a clueless twerp reducing all human interaction to sex…
So much like for those xkcds…
@Argenti: That’s not how Occam’s Razor actually works. The point is, all else being equal, if it appears that X works as well as an explanation for something as Y+Z, then one should favor X, because it makes fewer assumptions. (That’s not always correct, obviously, and it usually goes out the window if all else is *not* equal, but it’s a very good rule of thumb). Since “they were doing it out of desire for sex” and “they were doing it out of love” both make only *one* assumption, Occam’s Razor doesn’t really apply here.
…Not that I’m taking Nikan’s side about “desire for sex” being the more likely possibility.
Or if a person has two possible alternate explanations, that doesn’t make them more wrong than the person who has only one, provided those explanations don’t rely on each other to be true. (Added this because after going back to re-read I’m not sure what anyone’s actually arguing anymore)
Nikan: So do you think that if we have two different valid explanations,
Again, all you have to do is show that it’s valid, not hypothetical.
Because, yes, if what you have is competeing hypotheses, the simpler is the rational choice.
It’s the agnostic choice.
But you… you are saying, “I have this complicated theory, contrary to most people’s experience, and you ought to give it at least as much credit as the one that matches experience”.
Why?
“Because I say so”.
No, we don’t. That’s the “myth of the middle”, that because two theories are in competition the truth must lie somewhere in between. But that’s not the way the world works.
And even if that would be the case, why do you take that so seriously? People here think that I am male, straight and an MRA, though they don’t have even the remotest evidence for any of those assumptions.
There is evidence for the last in that series. That is, in our experience, indicative of the preceding elements, because the MRM isn’t all that friendly (nor inviting) to non straight (cis) men.
Deranged Counter-Troll — there’s also the factor that both explanations have to be equally correct, which Nikan is failing (thus why I went with the simple explanation of Occam’s Razor, no point complicating it with factors that don’t apply here)
Did I just cause a meta Occam’s Razor?
Did I just cause a meta Occam’s Razor? – Argenti
*Universe implodes*
Time for another round of Spot That Fallacy!!
Argument to moderation (false compromise, middle ground, fallacy of the mean) – assuming that the compromise between two positions is always correct
An example, since I don’t think Nikan is going to get it — “Some would say that hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet, but others claim it is a toxic and dangerous substance. The truth must therefore be somewhere in between.” (it’s the latter one)
Pecuniam,
“blah blah blah, and I could go on.”
Fuck man, I’m sure you could. Everybody gets it, pecunium. You’re an erudite guy well acquainted with history, no need to lay it on too thick.
“”Um… No, that’s not what, “our cultural narratives of heroism privilege and glorify men and put them at the center of almost every story.” means.””
Not what it means? Seems like that’s what it amounts to all too often. Being the hero means facing the danger, and for every hero that comes out of that you get a bunch of corpses that don’t come out of it. Most of the time this is a generally male affair rather than a female one, so you can do the math about whose dead bodies end up getting stacked higher by this glory and heroism business.
“So let me help you”
Well, allow me to return the favour, peccy.
The definition you quoted held that the person condescended to has to be regarded as being on a lower level, which was not at all what I said with respect to MRAs. I generally view Feminists and MRAs as opposites in the same swamp, not higher and lower.
“English, it’s subtle.”
Indeed, not like you then!
“It’s not about privilege, because you are equivocating; using the meaning of privilege as personal advantage, do attempt to disprove the privilege of social structure.”
Oh I can see where this is going to go. A debate on privilege, what it is, and whether or not it exists – for the 10,000th time. How about absolutely nah.
Felicitations, canine friend. It has come to my attention that you are fond of Occam’s Razor; therefore I applied Occam’s Razor to your Occam’s Razor argument, that you might consider the most likely true answer to your consideration of the most likely true answer.
Why are people surprised when we mock misogyny here?
Well this is different, usually we have people demanding we go through 101 stuff with them, because we’ve done it hundreds of times, but it’s new to them. RHW is saying we won’t discuss 101 level concepts because they’ve been done before…I think this might be a first.
Shade — Two minutes to Belgium!
http://youtu.be/x0cyxb2kG9E
Roscoe, I’m going to agree with you on the need to change societal narratives about heroism. I have to say, you’re solution is a solid solution.