Manosphere misogynists love fantasizing about a coming apocalypse, invariably caused by the bad behavior of feminists and/or women in general, and invariably resulting in feminists and/or women in general lost and forlorn and realizing their mistakes, returning to men begging for help and asking for forgiveness. Like Doomsday Preppers waiting for the planet to suddenly shift on its axis due to the sudden reversal of the magnetic poles, most of the apocalyptic misogynists don’t seem to have the faintest idea of what they’re talking about.
Take, for example, one Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, who transformed himself into an environmentalist last week when he realized it would give him an excuse to rant about the evils of women spending money. Turns out that the “conventional wisdom” his thesis depends on — that women are responsible for 80% of spending — is essentially an urban legend, and that men and women seem to spend roughly the same amounts. Similarly, there’s evidence that suggests men and women in developed countries have similar “carbon footprints,” with men if anything a bit more pollutey.
But of course this is hardly the only bit of apocalyptic misogynistic fantasy that, upon examination, turns out to be based on patent nonsense. Manosphere misogynists – particularly those on the racist right – love to complain about the evils of single motherhood, especially in the “ghettoes,” which they imagine will lead to crime rates spiraling out of control, riots, dogs and cats living together, and any number of other apocalyptic scenarios.
As one commenter on Dalrock’s manosphereian blog put it, providing a pithy summary of the coming single-mom apocalypse:
Single mothers bring the very wellfare state they depend on closer to the brink of colapse with every illegitimate child they pop out, who will most likely in turn create more bastards and be more likely to commit crimes thus placing an ever increasing strain on the state’s purse stings. …
[T]hings will collapse soon enough and then it will be everyone for themselves. No more suckling at the government’s saggy dried up teet.
Of course, manospherians are hardly the only ones who like to blame single moms for everything. You may recall that odd moment in the presidential debates when Mitt Romney responded to a question about gun violence with “gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that’s a great idea.”
There’s just one tiny problem with the whole single-motherhood-means-higher-crime-rates argument: if you look at the history of the past twenty years or so you will find that while single motherhood has been on the increase, violent crime rates have been going down, down, down. Take a look at this chart, which I have borrowed from an excellent post on The Atlantic by University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen.
Huh. First single motherhood and crime rise together, then crime plummets while single motherhood continues to rise. It’s almost as if the two social trends have no correlation with each other at all.
As Cohen writes:
Violent crime has fallen through the floor (or at least back to the rates of the 1970s) relative to the bad old days. And this is true not just for homicide but also for rape and other assaults. At the same time, the decline of marriage has continued apace. Looking at two aggregate trends is never enough to tell a whole story of social change, of course. However, if two trends going together doesn’t prove a causal relationship, the opposite is not quite as true. If two trends do not go together, the theory that one causes the other has a steeper hill to climb. In the case of family breakdown driving crime rates, I don’t think the story will make it anymore.
Once upon a time, when both single motherhood and crime rates were moving upwards, you couldn’t entirely blame some social critics for suggesting there might be some connection. But with twenty more years of data we can see clearly that this just isn’t so. At this point, anyone predicting a single mother crime apocalypse is either a) an ideologue, b) ignorant about the facts or c) both.
In the case of the apocalyptic manosphere ranters, it’s obviously c.
Historophilia – and the same MRAs froth at the mouth at the idea of being required to contribute to their own children’s upbringing, and want nothing to do with them except as property and levers to control or take revenge on women (apart from those whose ideas about children are even more grotesque, of course).
Indeed, Unpaid Help. It all comes down to the MRM’s central tenant “Bitches ain’t shit”.
Also, will people please weep with me at the state of the comments on this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5122272.stm
Not wanting to be a pedant, yet compelled to be one by the worse parts of my nature, unless the MRAs have got in to the buy-to-let market then it’s ‘tenets’
For the first seven years of my life, my mother was one of these horrible single moms.
My biological father is an alcoholic with bipolar disorder who is/was physically abusive. She probably would have stayed with him…except he refused to quit drinking OR take his medication. So yes, she divorced him when I was less than a year old and didn’t get remarried til I was seven.
We lived with my aunt and grandma in their nice house in a nice neighborhood. My mom would go work 45 hrs a week so she could buy us a good life and pay the rent to my grandma. I even went to private school.
So yeah, my mom worked…never collected welfare.
Didn’t get any financial help from my father…the judge was not fond of women divorcees, even with the hospital accounts of my mother’s abuse.
She never even sent me to daycare…my aunt or grandma would pick me up from school and take me places.
How did *I* turn out? Well, Ive never even gotten so much as a speeding ticket, I have a wonderful/fun job that I’m influential in, have a Bachelors in Philosophy (minor in Business), and my own car and apartment. Never smoked, never did drugs, never been drunk and am satisfied in nearly all aspects of life.
Really don’t see how single moms are bad!
Oh, they complain about them too, whenever they mention ‘thugs’. Don’t forget these guys are usually as rascist as they are sexist.
Suzy D, care for any kind of citation at all with that brilliant put-down?
Single moms are more likely than single Dads to be on welfare and below the poverty line. There are single-mom households, yes, many of them poor, urban, and black, where a gang seems like a less dysfunctional family than the family of origin.
The reason that responsibility ultimately rests with the women involved: “her body, her choice.” There is no male hormonal contraceptive, and the choice to get an abortion lies with the woman. (Too, many physicians are extremely reticent to perform vasectomies on young, childless men.) In the event of a contraceptive failure, the woman decides what happens next; too, women file the majority of divorces, and many refuse to allow fathers’ court-ordered visitation. While some fathers are indeed deadbeats, almost all who are able pay their child support in full.
As Anders H has already pointed out, aggression doesn’t work that way. It’s NOT the case that you have a certain amount of aggressiveness inside you that must get out one way or the other, and if you let it out through video games (or punching a bag or whatever) you’re gonna punch down fewer people in the street.
There could still be a connection between video games and a decrease in violence though; if people play video games of ANY kind, violent or not, they can’t simultaneously be out on the streets fighting. If stuff you do at your home, alone or with a few friends, rather than down town with lots of people, becomes increasingly popular, you’d expect a drop in violence.
cloudiah, CassandraSays, I’m home. *hugs my red pen*
I lurk her to get my laughs, I admit it, because if I don’t laugh at the MRA’s I’ll weep. My ex is one– thankfully he didn’t blossom until after we divorced.
However, the think I popped in to say after all this lurking is that every time I read these bits, and the comments supporting the stupid I hear the following phrase in my head, over and over like a mantra:
Don’t you dare get your facts all mixed up in my opinion! It’s my opinion, and that makes it right!
@driversuz Well, I’m too lazy to look it up. But I’d wager that it’s a) about the same as the percentage of families raised by single mothers, offset by ~15 years (so, based on the chart in the article, I’d expect the rate in 2012 to be about 17.5%) And b) approximately the same percent as those raised by two parents.
But since you brought it up, would you care so share some real numbers?
chibigodzilla,
A little less (mental) laziness would do you, and your fellow Booblets, a world of good. Look it up yourself; it’s readily available. Or don’t. Facts are scary.
oh suz, you are too much.
You come to a post that is literally based entirely on actual research and refuting claims, make a baseless, specious derail, and then tell us that WE should prove you dumbfuck point.
and then call us lazy.
I am genuinely impressed at your ability to be so smug about bringing nothing to the table. That’s tough even for trolls.
driversuz,
You brought it up, so you should provide numbers that “[don’t] fit [David’s] narrative.” Until then you’re just as lazy as (and more intellectually dishonest than) I.
I bet that IF driversuz did try to post proof, it would either be a link back to AVfM or to a youtube video. Or maybe a Daily Mail story.
I’m sure she’ll be leaving plenty of evidence in the form of a letter copied multiple times and distributed to all of our local university campuses, just for the satisfaction of telling us princesses what-for.
@cloudiah: or just the phrase ‘feminists are wrong’ written on a cocktail napkin
Suz, manosphere dudes (and many social conservatives) tend to talk in apocalyptic terms about single mothers destroying society — through crime or by “bleeding” the state through welfare payments. But crime is declining, and until the recent financial crisis/recession, which caused a spike in welfare payments as a % of GDP, welfare spending by this metric has been on the decline since spiking in the mid-70s. And as the economy improves, forecasters expect welfare as a % of GDP to plummet.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_2012USp_13s1li011mcn_40t
that’s through 2012. here’s a chart including projections through 2017:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_2017USp_13s1li011mcn_40t
There’s no apocalypse coming.
The smompocalypse concept is super racist — it’s basically assuming that there are a ton of fatherless immoral brown babies outnumbering the upstanding white babies, which will cause a collapse of the
fabric of spacetimesocial fabric into ruin.You are a really stupid person. Stop trying to understand things you can’t grasp.
withenoughcourage: I was wondering when someone would bring that in.
It’s bunk. I did a paper on it about three years ago.
1: it was all asumptive corelation (i.e. no mechanism could be shown)
2: the original math was flawed.
3: when this was pointed out (by some economists at the Boston Federal Reserve) Levitt changed his measuring metrics; creating a much more complex model (with a much less solid justification)
4: When that model was shown to be flawed he just stopped addressing it.
It was a “just so” story. If you look at much of the rest of his work (and the works cited in Freakonomics) what you discover is the “associations” are all tenuous and the other economists who found them… we’re just students of Levitt, but that he had worked on the papers the chapters were based on.
It was his political theories dressed up with numbers; on the assumption that most people don’t understand them, and will therefore accept bullshit because, “math”.
Also, the idea that women taking control of their bodies results in less crime would just royally piss off so many MRAs. Delicious.
Actually, what the MRA types say is, “that just proves the thugboys are trouble because when their bastards are aborted crime falls.” Then they go on about how making women get married will fix everything (because the “thugboys, and “alpha-cocks” won’t get married, so their won’t be all those criminal bastards. The comments I saw in the course of doing the research on that paper were disgusting; deep, seamy, underbelly of Spearhead levels of awful).
So true. Parenthood is the least effective get rich quick scheme ever. A person would have better chances with the lottery or selling Amway. And if those guys thought that single parenthood comes with fabulous prizes and cash, why don’t they adopt babies to get in on the action?
Also, if these MRA’s are so upset about single moms, then why are so many against birth control? When contraception is readily available and affordable, then more pregnancies are wanted pregnancies.
Yes, it’s only right that the pregnant person gets to make the choice, because it’s their body being used to sustain the embryo or fetus. The other person can not compel them to either abort or carry the pregnancy to term.
I agree that it would be ideal if there was a male contraceptive pill. I’m not a medical researcher, though, so I have no idea how to make one. I also agree that doctors should give vasectomies to childless men as long as the men understand the permanence of their decision and are making the decision with no coercion involved. None of this changes the fact, though, that once a man has a child in the world, that he should be partly responsible for the costs of raising that child.
A man can buy and use condoms, by the way. They are effective if you use them correctly, and even more effective used with spermicide.
As far as women filing for divorce, that’s part of life. The state shouldn’t force couples to stay married if they don’t want to be. That wouldn’t be good for them, and it wouldn’t be right for their children. There are all sorts of reasons for people to divorce, and it’s a private matter for the couples involved. No fault divorce makes it easier for people to split without spending lots of time and money in the courts.
Soozie: …your attempts at misdirection are patently transparent. Any guesses as to a.) what percentage of violent criminals are raised by single mothers? and b.) what percentage of the children of single mothers grow up to become violent criminals?
Care to enlighten us? Or will it just be the usual run of patently transparent, passive-aggressive, bigoted imputations without fact?
I’m betting on the latter.
Soozie: A little less (mental) laziness would do you, and your fellow Booblets, a world of good. Look it up yourself; it’s readily available. Or don’t. Facts are scary.</i
I win. You have no facts, and will now pretend this means we are wrong.
Typical.