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.
pft! What table?
Um, so, on the issue of stealing bras. For those ladies who are members of the busty tribe any bra that would be worth stealing would be a. not all that small and easy to hide and b. worth rather a lot of money, therefore unlikely to be made easy to steal by the store in which it’s displayed.
Also I’ve always had to buy most of my bras online (most stores don’t carry a 34E in the US, or if they do it looks like it was made by the Army Corps of Engineers right after they got done making a bridge). I’m not quite sure how one would shoplift from figleaves.com.
Agreed that fathers who abandon their children are reprehensible. However, it is both the right and responsibility of each individual woman to ascertain the character of the men she allows to impregnate her. Ideally, no woman would choose to have a child by a man likely to abandon both her and the child. (A problem not limited to the U.S.: an unemployed Briton who’d fathered seven children by seven women is getting married to future single mom number eight.)
Too, women make the choice, generally, to carry a pregnancy to term or abort; since they have more control over whether a child is born, the problem could be more readily resolved by a change in women’s behavior than men’s.
Spoos: Agreed that fathers who abandon their children are reprehensible. However, it is both the right and responsibility of each individual woman to ascertain the character of the men she allows to impregnate her.
More woman blaming. If the dude scarpers it’s her fault for failing to, “ascertain the character of the man she allows to impregnate her.”
Nice use of the passive voice to make it seem the man didn’t really have any part in the equation.
Spoos, stop spooging all over the thread. It’s not polite to do that unless the spooge-ee says they’re OK with it.
@cassandra
In some stores bras of any size would be easy to steal. I mean, a lot of stores use those tag things, and most have signs to limit how many you take in. But I have been in a few stores recently where they aren’t paying that much attention and don’t use tags.
No matter what size you are, if you go in sans-bra, all you need to do is put one on and it’s hidden. Assuming there wasn’t a noticeable different in your bra-ed/unbra-ed appearance.
But re the original comment about bras and lipstick. While it does come off as pretty sexist, if you rephrase – products which are mostly for women get stolen (i.e. they use tags and stuff to prevent theft so the stores must believe they do) which implies women are doing the stealing. I am sure that unisex products like CDs get stolen by women too, but you can’t make any assumptions about the thieves.
And you don’t need to steal glitter… you just have to brush against it and it will never go away.
And ignoring the fact that there are plenty of charming bastards who will lie their arses off, and who make a point of targetting women who vulnerable to their horseshit.
Your concern is noted and appreciated, HellKell, but I assure you I’m doing fine. In point of fact, I think that Ella was holding me back a bit; keeping me from experiencing the bachelor’s life, as it were. I’m looking forward to “trolling the bars”; diving headfirst into a new experience!
“Allows to impregnate her” like it’s always and solely HER choice being exercised. Or like the US isn’t really good at making contraception difficult to obtain for more and more women. Or like access to abortion isn’t under constant attack, and women who need it not subjected to pressure from all sides, up to and including state-mandated rape in the form of transvaginal ultrasounds.
You know what would help with that? Free birth control. But apparently any policy that benefits women’s health is misandry and must be eliminated.
Steele, I sincerely hope you’re better at bar trolling than internet trolling. Keep it simple, stupid.
Spoos: Any kind of spending is germane to the issue at hand. Please take your faux reasonableness and above it all attitude back to your own blog. Anyone who uses PUA terms is not to be taken seriously.
Meh. I guess my examples provoked some ire, but between being a teenage girl and counseling teenage girls, the shoplifting phase is pretty damned prevalent across the social spectrum (albeit in a somewhat wealthy, developed metropolis). And yes, the examples of what’s stolen tend to be impulse items (no pun intended), either because they are status symbols to young teens (like nice nail polish) or because they are being stolen by multiple girls at the same time (like the same bra).
And while I’m more involved with kids in trouble than middle-aged women,there is a cliché, at least among clerks, that the well-dressed ones are always in for shoplifting. http://www.more.ca/body-and-mind/self-and-spirit/why-midlife-women-shoplift/a/146
I’m not trolling, I’m simply wondering where the idea came from that men are wired to steal and women are not when my experience tells me otherwise.
Well, the idea came from Diogynes, and he’s kind of a dumbass.
If any spending is relevant, then there’s the issue of public debt crowding out private borrowers, which is also quite bad for the affordability of children. More gov’t spending at a time when the national savings rate is negative might not be the answer.
The question is: would it be useful to reduce fatherlessness and, if so, how?
Assuming, for a moment, that a two-parent household is desirable, I can all but guarantee that the current crop of deadbeat dads is not going to stop having unprotected sex with a large number of women. Affordable birth control is a good start (it’s already subsidized in my state), as is defending abortion access, but the only thing that would truly stamp out fatherlessness is women not sleeping with any man who would abandon his kids. Now that’s a tricky thing to do, since men do lie for sex, but I have every confidence that women can accomplish it if they put their capable minds to the task.
Nobody is arguing with you on that point, but I don’t think women are mostly stealing lipstick. They’re stealing all the things, just like men who shoplift. Cold medicine, t-shirts, candy bars, whatever. Your using specifically female coded things as examples makes it sound like you’re just making stuff up.
Spoos, how are women supposed to see ten or fifteen years down the road? I know plenty of women whose partners left them high and dry after several years of marriage and caring for kids. Your assuming that single moothers are primarily stupid women who could keep their legs closed on a first date scenario.
And spoos? You a B5 fan?
So, men are hopeless and women must take all the responsibility. Misogyny and misandry wrapped up in one package.
Oh god, the ‘indigents.’ Go fuck yourself.
Seriously, this whole sneering on things like food stamps and Medicaid (both of which are keeping me alive at this time) really pisses me off. More and more, I’m realizing poverty is people blaming you for having the bad judgment to be poor. (Like I just woke up one morning and decided, “Wow, being poor sounds like so much fun! I’ma quit my job, get hospitalized, and move into a shed now! AHAHAHA!”)
Poor folk aren’t destroying society. It’s society that’s causing people to be fucking poor in such enormous numbers.
You’re kidding, right? Perhaps you should get a checkup for problems with your eyes or maybe your ears. You’ve never heard that many women get their first taste of partner violence when they’re pregnant with a child that both of them wanted, or that pregnancy is a time when many men are unfaithful to their partners – and many/most women see that as a dealbreaker just as many of them see violence as a dealbreaker? (http://www.babycenter.com/0_domestic-violence-during-pregnancy_1356253.bc , http://www.womensweb.ca/violence/dv/pregnancy.php – These are literally the 2 top google responses on a search titled pregnancy violence statistics.)
These women are single parents from the time the baby is born even though that’s not what they had in mind when the pregnancy started.
The percentage of single parent women who got that way as a result of casual sexual encounters is pretty small. Many of them are that way as a result of relationship breakdown – sometimes because of the pregnancy itself, sometimes during the pregnancy, or because the relationship breaks down under the pressures of caring for small children.
@mildlymagnificent
Amen.
And if they are, so fucking what?
SO TRUE.
Aww. Looks like Spoo darling was looking for a quick hit and run on an easy target and then realized that target was a concrete barrier…
Well there’s that old saw about never having to work so hard to be so fucking poor.
RE: pillowinhell
Yeah, no joke. I didn’t realize what ‘poor’ truly meant until I realized that my most elaborate fantasies now consisted of maybe one day being able to rent my own apartment, and buy used clothes and used books whenever I needed. My more ‘reasonable’ dreams are now, “One day, I’ll have a room of my very own, and it’ll have four walls and a window.”
And then I feel guilty for scraping for Social Security or Emergency Aid, because obviously if I just tried hard enough, I wouldn’t be in this mess.