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.
Steele, you get so work up when you talk about your movements. You should go lie down.
It seems to me that there are some corners of the Men’s Rights Movement (for example Fathers and Families*) that have valid arguments and are pretty constructive in their approach. The rank and file though, at least the more outspoken ones you see in MRA internet forums, are usually slavering hatebags.
*I admit that’s the only example I can recall, unless you count feminist allies like The Good Men Project.
@thebionicmommy- Iknowright? There are so many details and ins and outs with paying bills, scheduling doctors’ appointments, ferrying kids to activities, and on and on, that women are often saddled with in relationships and that many men, let alone MRAs, don’t even think of. Certainly this is not how it works in all couples, but I’ve observed that it’s the norm. Even my parents, who had a relatively egalitarian marriage, my mom was the one coordinating our schedules and appointments, even if my dad did pick up and drop off on a regular basis. Once we see MRAs talking in detail about cleaning up their infants’ puke and sending checks for summer camp, then MAYBE we can start talking about women “taking responsibility.”
And probably take some Mintec or Gastrostop. They work wonders for IBS.
Oh Varpole… Explain the ways in which the irresponsibility of women is to be corrected by the MRM. Also explain how relegating an half the population to the status of needing to be “corrected” isn’t bigoted?
You do know what bigotry against women is, don’t you? Course ya’ do. It’s Misogyny, and you’re soaking in it.
Pecunium: pointing out Steelebutt’s misogyny is MISANDRY!!!
@Diogenes
‘It ignores the reality that most women are not predisposed to theft.’
Um… I’m going to have to argue with this, unless shoplifting bras and lipstick doesn’t count as theft. Like being harassed on the street, as soon as you get women talking it is odder when they DON’T have a dozen stories to tell on the topic. YMMV.
What Diogenes actually knows about women could fit on the head of a pin.
Now I’m actually curious. Have any studies been done on that? How would you even do them? (If there was a foolproof way to identify when someone was shoplifting, surely the stores would already be doing it.) Would you measure by incidences of theft or total amount stolen?
Copper IUDs, I had forgotten about those! I’m still a little sketchy on how they work, scientifically (copper ions! in the uterine lining! that kill sperm!) but Wikipedia says their failure rate is comparable to having your tubes tied, so they are certainly among the most effective possible methods.
Re: Steele claiming that the MRM wants women to take responsibility for themselves, I’ve seen dozens of MRAs asserting more or less the same thing, but they never specify what women are supposed to be taking responsibility for. What is it that women aren’t already doing that they should be held accountable for? Raising kids by themselves? Sacrificing careers to provide their children with full-time care? I thought the people who did those things were already predominantly women.
I guess the MRM just doesn’t want to make the world a place where it’s easier for women to be responsible adults and have the option of keeping their careers and getting assistance raising children.
@bionicmummy and m dubz,
for sure…Mr Big Momma is a total hands on dad, cleans up puke, changed nappies, got up in the night etc. However, I am always told how lucky i should feel and what a great man he is (oh and he is, reader, otherwise I wouldn’t still be here). I get where these other mums are coming from but I shouldn’t have to feel lucky. This should be the norm. Or rather, before we had kids we discussed what it would mean for us and agreed what it should look like. This relationship is the result of communication and trust, not because of some fluke of nature that made Mr Big Momma like this and I should just thank my lucky stars and accord him extra special status, grrrrrrr
It’s always the same old contradictions with them. They want women to be forced into pregnancy when it suits men, but complain about women being pregnant at all, or squeal about “spermjacking”. They want no responsibility – financial or anything else – for raising the resultant children, but also want to complain about being cut off from them. They don’t want women “stealing men’s jobs” but don’t want to have to support women once we’re forced out of the workplace. They don’t want us to be able to say “no” to them, only to any man we might actually like. I suspect they really just want slavery reinstituted, though even then they’d whine about not being able to afford it.
I KNOW, RIGHT? When you get us talking, you’ll find out that we steal a lot of stuff, but only special girly things. BRAS! LIPSTICK! ANYTHING THAT IS PINK OR SPARKLY! That’s how you know our stories are for realz.
Yeah, my mileage pretty definitely does vary, in that I am completely unaware of this supposed epidemic of bra-thievery, and my one-and-only “shoplifting” story goes “one time, when I was about three years old, I did not understand that the candy bin at the grocery store was different than the free sample displays, and was gleefully stuffing handfuls of candy in my pockets when my parents found me and explained that the candy was not, in fact, free. At which point I put it back, because I was actually a pretty decent little kid, although I suspect I probably pouted about it, because even decent three-year-olds are still three-year-olds.” SHOCKING, amirite?
Don’t you love the “answering Diogenes’ nonsense with different nonsense” combination?
Polliwog: I’m (possibly incorrectly) imagining you doing that to a pick-and-mix type display and therefore going “argh, 3-year-old-hand germs!” 😉
MorkaisChosen – gah, that reminds me of being at the Swagman eatery and seeing a kid (MUCH older than three) picking food out of the smorgasboard, taking bites and putting it back …
I go into stores and straight up steal pink glitter. This is how you can identify me as a feminist.
YMMV is not a get out of shit free card cynic.
I go into stores and steal high-heel boots for grinding down teh menz.
IIRC, it was one of those displays where they have candies that are individually wrapped, like caramels and Tootsie rolls and Smarties and such. So it wasn’t TOO horribly unsanitary, thankfully – at least I probably only germed up the wrappers rather than the candies themselves. 🙂
Speaking for myself, I don’t want women to be forced into pregnancy. Ever.
That said, I do indeed want more women to use the plethora of contraceptive options at their disposal (including abortion as a backstop) to avoid having children they can’t afford with irresponsible men. I doubt that we can continue to afford subsidizing indigents’ reproduction, especially as the global economy continues to contract.
More education is not necessarily going to help reduce this issue, as illegitimacy is currently trickling up the socioeconomic ladder. A single-income household is even harder to keep afloat in the face of undischargeable student debt.
My 2¢
I would accept your 2 cents if they weren’t full of shit. The money we spend on “indigents’ reproduction” nice dogwhistle, BTW, is a mere drop in the bucket compared to unwinnable wars and shittons of corporate welfare. But hey, feel free to keep blaming women,
Your two cents were overvalued, by several orders of magnitude. Mostly cheap clich&eactute;s to blame women, nonsense about, “the global economy” (meant to make you look “serious”); and using your inane ideas about it to blame women some more.
Blather, steeped in misogyny.
You can keep it; to yourself.
I didn’t say we could afford Iraq and Afghanistan or the bank bailouts, either. Also, “indigents” sounds better than “poors,” wouldn’t you agree?
Glibness aside, those programs are not a “drop in the bucket.” Medicaid had over 43 million on the rolls at a cost of $332 billion in 2011, compared to $879 billion in defense spending. Add to that the federal expenditures on other welfare programs, totaling $473 billion, and you’re pretty to parity, there. Too, states also provide funding to Medicaid and welfare programs like SNAP, WIC, TANF, and quite a few other acronyms cheerfully advertised on the train I ride to work in the morning.
We shouldn’t be trying to police the world, but U.S. defense policy isn’t especially germane to the issue at hand. Subsidy of corporate losses, however, along with illegal immigration depressing unskilled-labor wages, is likely quite relevant to Americans’ decreased ability to support children without suckling at the government teat, yes?