So there was a bit of ugliness over on the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day. No, scratch that; there was a giant explosion of ugliness.
A couple of days ago, you see, a Redditor with a nine-day-old account posted a story to r/menrights detailing the alleged ill-treatment he’d gotten at the hands of a vengeful ex-wife and an unsympathetic family court system. The story was filled with literally unbelievable details – among other things, he claimed to have been rendered homeless by the demands of the court, forced to pay $1000 a month in spousal support to his ex though she had a $60,000 a year job. Some commenters challenged the veracity of the tale – while the OP gave a case number in his post, no one has been able to find evidence that a case with that number actually exists. (The OP has not responded to the skeptics.)
But most of the respondents assumed the story was true. And why not? It seemed to reinforce every paranoid MRA fantasy of evil women and courts out of control. Despite its fishiness, the post got more than 700 net upvotes.
And that’s where the ugliness began. Not content to merely offer the man sympathy and advice, many commenters started talking murder, and some of the most violent comments got dozens of upvotes.
While these particular comments were deleted by the mods (you can find them in the comment histories of Volcris and graffiti81, where you’ll see they each got many more upvotes than shown above before they were deleted), other violent comments remained up, many of them receiving upvotes as well. Here are some screenshots of some of them.
Here’s PacoBedejo, with nearly two dozen net upvotes for a comment seconding the burn-them-and-kill-them suggestion.
Speaking of arson and murder, here’s ErasmusMRA offering a not-quite-endorsement of the terrorist manifesto of Thomas Ball, an MRA who burned himself to death in front of a New Hampshire courthouse in hopes that his death would inspire other men to firebomb courthouses and police stations in protest of allegedly anti-male courts.
Here’s wazooasiteverwas relating the allegedly true story of a friend who solved the problem of an unfair divorce settlement with double murder:
What a shock that the alleged double murder has given the kids a “bad impression” of their dad.
This comment from Synackaon’s directly advocating murder was downvoted and deleted. (You can still find it in his comment history.)
Yet this comment of his offering an only slightly veiled advocacy of violence remains up, and has gotten dozens of upvotes:
I didn’t get to this now-deleted comment in time to get a screenshot, though one Redditor memorialized its (alleged) content in a post on the Circlebroke subreddit:
TheIrish7 tries to avoid the charge of misogyny by not-quite-justifying gender-neutral violence:
Arx0s contends that if he were in a similar situation he would stop short of actual murder:
This strange and elusive comment from Syn_Ick seems to suggest that the Men’s Rights movement can’t succeed unless and until it becomes socially acceptable for men to physically assault women.
There are many more such comments in the thread; I don’t have have the time or the patience to screencap and post them all. You can find more collected in r/againstmensrights, or by going through the thread itself.
Now, not all of those advocating (or not-quite-advocating) violence or murder in this thread are r/mensrights regulars. But some of the worst comments come from one very active r/mensrights commenter who has advocated violence against family court judges in the past: Demonspawn. (I’ve written about his threatening remarks in the past here and here.) Here are some of his contributions to the, er, debate (Each comment is from a different part of the thread; click on the images to go to each original comment in context.)
Given that advocating violence is against the rules in r/mensrights, and that Demonspawn has been advocating violence fairly regularly for some time, you might wonder why he is still allowed to post in the subreddit. I sent a note to the Men’s Rights mods, and got this response from the top mod:
This gives you some idea of how seriously the mods or r/mensrights take the issue of violence.
The phrase “digging your own hole” comes to mind.
If you want to see what happens when people turn to violence to “solve” disputes with partners or exes, see here.
(Thanks to Cloudiah for the first screenshot and for pointing me to many of the other comments linked to here.)
Can it also win the “Manboobz Award For Abuse Of Language” (colloquially known as the Steeley, of course) since apparently he’s a singing pony?
“One note pony” is fucked on the level of “jester’s fool,” which is why I totally think SGBWYS is a sockpuppet.
I thought it was Mikey for a while, but the whole pony-is-lame thing seems far too funny for him to have written. Unless that was unintentional, in which case it’s just sad.
There was also his little paranoid fit about doxxing last night, and the fact that Steele has not yet rushed in here to buddy up to him.
Now we’ve made Some Dumb Guy really sad,
he’s disgusted, and hurt, and he’s mad.
He just cannot see
we MOCK misogony.
Some Dumb Guy, stick the flounce – you’ll be glad.
Does this mean David will have to change his image to something like this?
http://a1.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/87/3bdd20c5c2fe3479911af6889912df82/l.jpg
“Patriarchal peer support refers to ‘the multidimensional attachments men form to male peers’ who abuse or assault female intimate partners or who ‘provide resources that perpetuate and legitimate such assaults’” (DeKeseredy et al., 2006, p. 231).
Does that sound a bit like what is happening on r/mr in this thread, or what? Sorry, I tend to go on Google Scholar when I’m freaked out.
Quote from
Rosen, Dragiewicz, Gibbs. Fathers’ Rights Groups: Demographic Correlates and Impact on Custody Policy. Violence Against Women May 2009 15: 513-531, first published on March 2, 2009 doi:10.1177/1077801209331409
@ Some Douche
This blog is about misogyny. Before you start telling Dave what to write, go get your own blog.
Talking about misogyny is not misandry.
Oh but it is! Even suggesting misogyny is a thing is misandry!
David won’t have to change his picture, but he will have to change the blog’s subheading to:
Some guy needs to refer back to this post.
http://manboobz.com/2012/06/21/shortpacked-somewhere-theres-a-conversation-thats-not-yet-about-dude-problems/
I think this sums up their thoughts on marriage
http://no-maam.blogspot.ca/2008/02/questionators-should-women-have-right.html
@ Xtra
That is a whole lot of fucked upness. But I do agree with him on one thing: MRAs should not marry or date or sleep with women at all. Ever!
You can be a one trick pony or a one note johnny but pony’s don’t play instruments, yanno?
@Xtra, I gotta give them credit: I had no idea where the second half of that acronym was going to go. No idea.
Also, that’s this stupid blog post that GirlWritesCrap recently quoted both extensively and approvingly in one of her videos. Now that I see the source, I find it’s even more ridiculous than I originally expected.
Xtra: Nice find! I got about as far as “women like socialism because they used to live in herds” before I realized just how massively long it was and gave up.
Oh don’t they?
More about that in the second part or last quarter or so of this video all about GWW’s nonsensities:
Also, it is now my established headcanon that David Futrelle is actually a Pony who has the ability to magically kill anypony in Equestria if he writes their name in a notebook whilst picturing their face. (His Cutie Mark is a bunch of gumdrops.)
I don’t know why I could not stop reading, like watching a crime, scared to call 911 but also scared to try and stop it.
Herds? Odd that none of my history classes ever mentioned this.
Here’s the thing: under traditional marriage, men “owned” the children, and also the money brought in by themselves and by their wife–who, if she wasn’t working outside the home, was certainly working inside it, and usually doing work that otherwise would have had to be paid for (e.g., making clothes, cooking food, taking care of the children, nursing the sick–and those all were a lot more work back in the 1800s than they are now). And yet if the marriage ends, guess who gets all that money? Not her. So… how is she buying his excess labor? And if she is, why doesn’t she get to keep it if he gets to keep the children?
Also, did he never hear the expression “A man works from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done?” Women have never *not worked*. Not worked for pay, sure, but there is a reason why the 1950s only lasted about a decade: having half the population not contributing to production is not natural.
Oh, and beside the fact that humans are not herd animals, it is unlikely that any of our recent ancestors lived in groups with only one male (both bonobos and chimps live in multimale-multifemale groups, and so, apparently, do humans). AND GODDAMN IT WOMEN MADE/CONTINUE TO MAKE ALMOST ALL THE FUCKING CLOTHES ANYBODY HAS WORN OR WEARS TODAY.
@fembot LAWL -> link.
[Btw, ftr, not a troll. I just develop a really, really sarcastic sense of humor when confronted with examples of men falling into lockstep with other men in defense of men’s right to rape / murder / destroy women.
I had a blog at screaming-banshee. Long story involving a “mistake” from my former hosting provider. The moniker “Miss Andrist” is specifically a nod to Solanas, in particular the play on words tucked into SCUM (where ‘cutting up’ is also an old slang term for ridiculing, particularly publicly.) I tack on the “Lover of Men” because pretty much everybody misses that, even a lot of rfs.]
This shit? Is why I own a shotgun. Men publicly and cooperatively endorsing, advocating and espousing violent hatred of women? Quel shock. /sarc
– Miss Andrist
Lover of Men
It’s really funny to contrast GWW (constantly pissy, bitter, paranoid) with the woman from Freethought Blogs (witty even when she’s pissed off, doesn’t make claims she can’t back up, doesn’t radiate that same sense of deep anger and bitterness). Which one of these women would any reasonable person want to hang out with? I’m going to vote for the one who doesn’t seem like she’s devoted her entire life to being as angry and paranoid as possible.
Seriously, GWW freaks me out. She’s like a female version of JtO – nobody talks like that unless there’s something very wrong with them on an emotional level.
There are currently 639 comments in that thread.
The vast majority express sympathy, and the vast majority condemn violence.
You know we can follow the link and look at the thread ourselves, right? Even with some of the more horrific comments deleted by the moderators, it’s still mostly guys applauding violence, sharing their own violent fantasies, complaining about how unfair it is that a man can’t kill even one ex-wife without some nosy judge getting his knickers in a knot, and ruminating that murdering your family maybe isn’t entirely right but they can totally see how it’s a reasonable reaction to the agony of paying child support.
Most of the posters who criticize the violent threats argue not that the threats are wrong, but–horror of horrors–they make MRAs look bad. The one or two people actually condemning violence keep getting shouted down.