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.
You know, most of the time I have to actively restrain myself from ragesploding when I read Owly’s shit. It feels like somebody is strapping me to a chair and taking a metaphorical shit in my brain. I almost can’t bear it.
People aren’t criticizing him for crying. There’s nothing shameful about crying. People are criticizing him for abandoning his family to save himself. He didn’t even try to find his own children to take them out of the theater. If it weren’t for the hero Jarell Brooks, his girlfriend and children probably would have died.
It was cowardly and selfish for him to abandon his own children when they were in danger.
This isn’t a gender thing either. I think adults should be responsible for protecting and rescuing children during crises. Children need more help, and they have their whole lives ahead of them so their safety should come first.
*puts on douche hat and wizard staff*
Nikan:
Let’s bring the spirit of Occam’s Razor into sex-getting tactics. There’s countless easier ways to get sex than to throw yourself in front of a bullet. If these guys REALLY wanted sex, taking a bullet is a monumentally bad way to get to that goal.
The obvious issue being that you might not live to get that sexy reward. Or, if you do, God knows how badly you’ve been injured, so you might not be CAPABLE of having sex. If having sex was the ultimate goal of these guys, running out of the theater and trying again with a new partner (if they got dumped) would have been much simpler and smarter.
Now that I’m done with that…
I prefer to attribute what these guys did to the best that human nature has to offer, e.g., bravery, kindness, love (romantic, platonic, or other), and regard for others. Whatever was going through their heads, yes, is lost. We’ll never know.
But given that what they did obviously does not come naturally to us all (and I say this without denigration to those for whom it does not), I think it is more likely that their actions were from a very unselfish place in their hearts, than from their crotches.
RHW: Call them all you like, just said you should avoid being nasty and ridiculing
Right… you are asking them to be given special treatment, because some of them might have a mental disability.
That’s condescending.
Gee, you’d think people who keep harping on this would know about how feminists (at least in the US) keep pushing for women to be able to serve in combat.
It ain’t feminists who are pushing the narritive that guys need to do dangerous shit in order to be “real men” or that women are not capable of doing heroic things.
I also wondered about what 3-letter word this could be. Some possibilities:
ate (doesn’t quite work with “now”)
bit (same problem)
efs (extended spelling of letter f to stand in for the verb fuck)
has (but why the need to mask such an innocuous word with asterisks?)
wet (was she on fire? just really parched?)
wed (might make the most sense, but again, is wed a bad word for troll?)
But really, I think there just aren’t enough asterisks to work with. Perhaps troll central is rationing them? Hard to say.
Nikan, get the fuck out, you ableist shithead.
I’m assuming they traded the bulk of their supply for ellipses (ellipsises?)
Fucking shoddy ellipses, if you ask me..
Lemme Google that for ya.
I once *** a whole ***, with a *** right in the ***, and let me tell you: until you’ve done ***, you simply do not understand what it’s like to be a single man.
including The Dark Knight Rises
Indeed, the movie in which one of the two heroes was female, and the main villain was female.
Almost always, my metaphorical posterior. We live in a feminized, “grrl-power” society. And yet, as you correctly note, men remain the vast, vast majority of sacrificial “heroes”. The explanation, thus, is “male disposability”, not any sort of heroism bias.
@Morkaischosen
Yes, well considering how the MRM abuses punctuation, I highly doubt the asterisks were in all that great a condition themselves
However, if they’re obese, then it would be impossible for you to care about them, right?
You don’t get to take the high road after that load of shit.
LOL! Your brother being with someone you deem unworthy isn’t YOUR experience, that’s your brother’s experience. Unless your brother is telling you all the time he’s with the person he’s with because he just wanted sex, then who the hell are you to say he does not really love this woman? Just because she isn’t someone you wouldn’t want to be with doesn’t mean no one else would. For example, I personally would never have dated any of my sister’s boyfriends, but she cared very deeply for them.
Also, being with someone below your sibling’s standards isn’t evidence of some supreme dudely desperation to get laid, so desperate in fact, it includes risking one’s life. The two aren’t even related. That those two things have occurred in this world means that there are some brave men who died and that somewhere out there is a person who I am very sorry for because it appears they have a very shitty, judgemental sibling who has a rather juvenile ideal of love and an extremely damaging view of men.
@Steele
How do you feel about Nikan saying that it’s more likely that one of men who died was begging for sex rather than acting out of actual love or bravery?
For someone so obsessed with the concept of “misandry,” you seem pretty lax on coming to the defense of men here.
Male disposability’s got nothing to do with it, are you blind or is this another example of your amazing reading comprehension skills that didn’t get you into the humanities because MISANDRY!!!
” I think there just aren’t enough asterisks to work with. Perhaps troll central is rationing them?”
S*rry, * st*l* *ll th* *xtr*s.
Steele: “[…]The Dark Knight Rises[…]
Indeed, the movie in which one of the two heroes was female, and the main villain was female.”
The movie is a BATMAN movie.With BATMAN. THE BATMAN. Catwoman is pretty solidly an anti-hero, and is not a female equivalent to THE BATMAN when one considers perspective/motivation/attention/screen time/etc.
Also? The main villain was BANE. The Surprise! Bad guy is a girl, too! At the end does not qualify as (1) being a female villain (2) grrrrrl power.
I just watched this movie like two hours ago.
…a movie that doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test.
“One of the two heroes”? How are you counting this shit?
Commissioner Gordon
Batman
Blake
Catwoman
As heroism in that movie goes, that’s the short list, and the clear majority of them are men. I’ll happily grant that Selena Kyle is a good character, and that certain sexist tropes are subverted by the film, but using that movie as evidence of a “feminized, ‘grrrl-power'” society is fucking laughable.
For bonus points, ask yourself which one of the listed characters above rides around in a skin-tight suit showing off their ass.
I also like that thebionicmommy got Steele’s number a whole page ago:
Right down to the obnoxious “grrrl-power.”
@Argenti: …What?
You didn’t meta Occam’s Razor, you used a misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor to meta your misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor. I don’t know if the Universe imploded, but my brain did for a moment there.
1. Both of those make only 1 assumption, so Occam’s Razor does not apply.
2. All else is not equal (as in, both assumptions are probably not equally valid) so Occam’s Razor would not apply *even if* either side made more assumptions than the other.
3. Occam’s Razor is a “tool” you use when there is more than one possible reason for something and want to narrow down the possibilities. Unless you are somehow using it to potentially remove itself from your methods of narrowing down possibilities (and I can’t imagine how that could happen) there’s no meaningful way you could apply it to itself.
You can argue that Nikan is a crappy human being for making that assumption in the first place, but there is no level that I’m aware of where the Razor applies here.
The main villain was BANE.
Indeed, the one who turned out to be a disposable pawn.
I sense a pattern emerging…
And it is misandry.
You don’t have a literal posterior? Welp, that’s even worse than being short a few asterisks.
oh, it’s factfinder
…a movie that doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test.
Incorrect!