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.)
Also, weren’t y’all debating last night about whether Bored Stick is Steele? I’m of the opinion that BS doesn’t write badly enough to be Steele, but based on this:
Ruby does.
The “I’ll just go to jail” guys also don’t seem to realize that you have to work in jail. (I spose you could just sit on the floor and refuse, but then you’d probably get thrown in solitary and lose all chance at parole and all canteen luxuries, plus possibly get worse “informal” punishments.) You don’t just get to treat it like an uncomfortable hotel. You spend eight hours a day sewing shoes or assembling furniture.
If you’re the sort of guy who thinks every interruption of his super-comfy middle-class lifestyle is a terrible attack upon his manhood, you’re gonna have a bad time.
WTF Price is just pissed because his own kids can’t stand him. “I’m going to make them love me, damnit, cuz I own them, therefore they owe me love!” Typical abuser logic.
I stand corrected! Not only do I accept that David could be a one note pony if he so chose (except for the pony part) but I further concede that he could be a one trick johnny (except for the johnny part) if he so chose.
But could he be a Black Jack Davy?
Gawd. All that ‘ownership’ crap sounds like the situation in the 19th century (in England, at least) where a woman really did only have any say in the matter if her children were born outside marriage. Inside marriage they belonged to the man – just like the woman herself, her earnings, anything she made … ah yes, the good old days of the 1850s, just what the MRM wants. Except they’d be pissed off because women (wealthy ones, of course: the poor wouldn’t exist for this lot, I daresay) wore those lust-inspiring crinolines and low-cut evening dresses, and mostly depended on men for an income, and kept getting pregnant as a result of sex … and of course the final insult would have been that there was a queen regnant, even though the balance of power had well and truly shifted in favour of the all-male parliament.
Has he ever run off with someone else’s wife? Because that’s my understanding of the Black Jack Davy requirements.
I’m interested in how people view battered women’s syndrome defenses. I think there might be a moral justification for killing one’s abuser, but I never understood why we incentivized it via a defene that allows bad actors to cloak themselves in it so readily.
The same logic of victimhood legitimizing retaliatory violence could be used to rationalize violence against exes, kids, spouses, etc. To me the biggest tell all of this mentality is usually narcissism is that fathers so often kill the kids in the murder suicide with an ex; “if I’ll be dead you have no reason to live.”
@Drew
“Battered woman syndrome” doesn’t get someone off the hook for murder, at best it slightly reduces the sentence, that’s hardly victimhood legitimizing retaliatory violence. From what I understand, to use that defense you need to demonstrate a consistent pattern of abuse that rendered the abuse victim terrified of leaving no matter the circumstances, so that they see no other choice but to kill the abuser. Again, not exactly allowing bad actors to cloak themselves in the defense readily.
The thing you said about parents killing their kids in a murder-suicide is not an example of “battered woman syndrome” because the kids do not pose any threat to the abuse victim, the abuser does, therefore there is no justification for killing the kids, therefore the defense does not apply.
Anything else?
Not a crim law scholar here, but I do know that in states like the one I live in, with mandatory sentencing laws, the “battered women’s defense” basically doesn’t exist.
For an absolutely chilling example of what that looks like, see the HBO documentary “Every Fucking Day of My Life.”
Drew: What do you think, “battered woman defense” means?
Once we know that, we can answer the question. Because terms need to be defined.
pacobedejo didn’t advocate murder in his post, he said that’s what he would do if he were backed into a corner like that. a lot of reasonable people driven into unreasonable circumstances could conceivably do that.
the united states supreme court doesn’t have a problem with talking about murdering the president
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=18+U.S.+871+true+threat&hl=en&as_sdt=2,31&case=8610537150639053664&scilh=0
why do you?
Um, because decent people with morals don’t advocate murdering anybody? Is this some kind of trick question?
Not to mention this dude has about as much chance of actually being pushed into a situation where the only answer is violence as he does of winning the lottery. The odds of that happening, despite how much they wish it would, are vanishingly small.
I’ve seen BWS raised as a mens rea issue to get charges down to manslaughter and i’ve seen it raised as an absolute defense. Once you get it in front of the jury, I’d think you could get people acquitting (essentially nullifying) even if the evidence was introduced for only a limited purpose. It’s a fact and jurisdictional specific issue and I don’t really see the point in trawling case law for the purposes of this discussion – which was to express surprise that MRAs haven’t drawn an equivalency with this issue. Plenty of bad actors try to cloak themselves in the defense but that isn’t a reason not to have it – it’s a reason to have judges and juries.
Again, I wasn’t saying BWS is somehow equivalent to parents who do the murder-suicide response to a failed custody battle. But I would expect MRAs to draw the link when they describe their treatment at the hands of the criminal justice system as violence or abuse. Even if one was tempted to go with the analogy to begin with, given that the fathers lash out against the children sort of puts the lie to the notion that they are equivalents.
Men do get screwed over by the legal system in the context of alimony and child custody/support fights and I don’t think it helps to deny that it happens – I think it’s better to solicit MRAs policy suggestions on how one could improve the system because actively engaging people makes it harder to invent and sustain a narrative of persecution and victimhood. MRAs tend to not be able to offer any, of course, other than that they shouldn’t pay it unless they get custody of the kids. It does seem fairer to allow “male abortion” and just have the state pay the child-rearing parent directly, but since they all seem to be tea partiers the obvious coherent solution doesn’t fly for them.
Citation needed.
Really? You’re focusing on that point? Any system that is adversarial and relies on human decision makers gets decisions wrong. Allegations of child abuse or parental drug abuse are used as litigation tools. If a judge makes a custody decision on an untrue or inflated allegation against one of the parents, and that parent is a father, then *voila*, men have been screwed over. The same things happen against women. If gendered assumptions factor into the judge’s decision making, then men are being punished qua men, too. It’s all an ugly business and why I don’t touch family law with a ten foot pole.
Another example of how somebody might be screwed by the legal system would be improper service, leading to a default judgment against one of the spouses. It shouldn’t be hard to get that kind of thing vacated but if one side has a bad lawyer, or no lawyer, those things get screwed up.
The point is that people will have anecdotal stories – some valid, some not – about being wronged by the legal system in the context of custody or alimony. Insofar as MRAs identify legitimate problems it’s important to acknowledge them and figure out solutions or one risks giving their kooky stuff traction. In the child support/custody context, one concrete solution everybody should be able to get behind is expansion of civil Gideon measures – giving indigents free counsel in civil litigation, to make the playing field less uneven when there is a resource differential.
Just because the MRAs don’t identify the entire problem or have a sane solution doesn’t mean they haven’t identified something that’s problematic and that should be fixed. By way of illustration: false rape allegations. Categorically denying people fabricate rape stories doesn’t make any sense. MRAs’ response seems to be generally to repeal rape laws or that police depts should ignore people reporting rape. I don’t have citations here either (though I doubt you will care as much as I am making a statement you likely agree with) but I expect that the number of unreported sexual assaults greatly exceeds the number of false rape allegations. MRAs of course don’t acknowledge that, or likelier don’t believe it. But it doesn’t mean that their issue shouldn’t be fixed. So it seems the proper response is to improve policing to better weed out false allegations while creating a law enforcement culture that doesn’t traumatize and discourage rape victims who report.
absent actual data, proving that something could happen isn’t the the same as proving that it did happen, fyi.
you have a bunch of speculation here and zero proof, and i’m not sure why youre so indignant that nobody is taking your guesses on faith.
oh shit guys, he’s got anecdotes.
or well, he doesnt have them… but he knows they exist.
and well, they’re not necessarily even good anecdotes, but… their anecdotiness is indisputable.
nothing can stand up to this mountain of evidence.
No it is not. The only “solution” they would offer would strip women of their civil and other rights. Essentially they would want to return to the 1850s when women were nothing more than chattel.
Cuz he is a MAN baby!
Sorry sorry, I just could not help myself.
I would love to see one of the trolls come in and whip out something like the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies to prove their point. But then again, I would love to see unicorns, win a million dollars and be able to instantly teleport. All of those are not going to happen so…
If I don’t dig around SSRN for a few hours people are not going to believe that men are sometimes wronged in the course of a family law dispute? That strikes me as weighting ideology over common sense. Just take a look at appellate court decisions – lower courts get stuff wrong daily.
MRAs are going to have real, valid anecdotes about being screwed over, and that denying their experiences and portraying them all as delusional is unproductive. Of course they draw the wrong conclusions from their experiences and substitute anecdotes for statistical evidence when it comes to suggesting policy discussions, which is Bad, but assuming they are all delusional liars who all abuse their exes and made up all of their bad experiences with women, the courts and the state generally seems to be more a rhetorical tool to marginalize people than a good faith conclusion
Is the system working perfectly for all men?
No? Aw, shucks.
Is the system weighted heavily in favor of white men?
Yes.
Huh. So its almost as if you’re papering over that deliberately, Drew.
[quote] No it is not. The only “solution” they would offer would strip women of their civil and other rights. Essentially they would want to return to the 1850s when women were nothing more than chattel.[/quote]
@Posterformerlyknownas – that’s exactly the point. I get that it’s cathartic to flame people who are wrong, but civilly asking MRAs to put up or shut up are going to get the kind of gibberingly crazy answers you offered, which makes them look bad, and has the added side effect of showing everybody who isn’t a true believer how crazy they are.
And that’s why no-one does it, aside from inside your boundless imagination.
What people actually do is say that the existence of false rape allegations should not be used to derail discussions about actual rape. And that, since the false larceny accusation rate is roughly 15 times as high as the false rape accusation rate, maybe there’s a sketchy reason for the massive focus on false rape accusations in our society?
And yes, gender roles and patriarchy hurt men too. However, everything the MRA does is designed specifically to further marginalize male victims and gender police men. It’s kind of like saying that the Republicans have some valid points about the harmful effects of public service cuts. I mean, it’s possible that some Republican somewhere said something true about public service cuts, but that person’s continued membership in the Republican Party shows they don’t give a shit.