Over on This is Why MGTOW, the blogger who calls himself Cerberus Alpha (dude, seriously?) attempts to answer the question: Why are men more violent?
Rather than attempting to engage with the extensive scholarly literature on the subject, or even making a token effort to do any research on the subject whatsoever, Mr. Alpha instead spins a few familiar manosphere fairy tales into “evidence” that it’s all the fault of those evil sexy ladies and their evil sexy and/or feminist ways.
Young women train violence and criminality into young men. The thug with the shaved head who communicates in grunts is sexually rewarded. The empathetic bookworm is denied if not publicly humiliated if he approaches a girl. So the bookworm puts down the book, gets contacts and a tattoo, bulks up in the gym, and generally acts like an asshole. (Why would he be nice to women any more?) Suddenly, he finds himself showered in pussy. This is how it works. Women’s sexual desires are dark and pathological, and this encourages men to become violent criminals if they want to get laid.
His evidence for this?
Just look at all the Game blogs out there, which teach men how to mimic the frame of the uncaring, alpha criminal without actually breaking the law.
That’s right. Misogynist dude pontificating about ladies cites as evidence … other misogynist dudes pontificating about ladies. THAT’S SCIENCE!
Oh, but the perfidy of the evil violence-causing ladies gets worse! Because they also force men to commit evil violence by, apparently, telling them to do it in sweet sexy voices:
Women’s own violence is committed via proxy (i.e. they get men to do the difficult work of physical coercion), and thus is incorporated into men’s overall violence. That’s pretty smart of women, in a devious and manipulative sort of way. A woman who has a problem with a man (or just wants to see a guy get beaten up, because that kind of sadism makes her tingle) sidles up to her boyfriend and asks so-sweetly if he will ‘do something’ about that guy who’s bothering her. But when the fun is over and the cops show up because someone is leaving the party in an ambulance, it was all his fault, see. She didn’t do a thing. She’s sugar and spice and all things nice.
I think Mr. Alpha here is confusing real life with the TV show Cheaters.
But wait! We haven’t even gotten to the even eviller evils of … FEMINISM.
Since the 1960s, normal male behavior has been increasingly criminalized while criminal female behavior has been increasingly normalized. This process is known as ‘feminism,’ and includes legal restrictions on politically incorrect speech, redefinitions of ‘harassment,’ and so on. This ground has been covered over and over again in the sphere and we don’t need to retread how feminism makes it illegal simply to exist as a man.
Uh, maybe you do need to go over that once more because, well, here’s the thing, I’m a dude, and I’ve never been arrested for being a man. Or even given a warning. And I’m pretty sure there are literally billions of other men on planet earth in the same situation as I am. Are there warrants out for us all?
The flip side is that crimes like abortion and infanticide, for which women were typically held responsible, have been made legal and normalized by feminists.
Really? Could you remind me again when Congress passed the Actual Live Human Baby Killing Is A-OK With Us Act, because I’m pretty sure infanticide isn’t legal or “normalized” in the US or anywhere on this planet. And in the US, at least, abortion rights (not to mention abortion providers) are under pretty much constant attack.
Mr. Alpha also suggests that male violence is just a sort of side effect of men being such hard workers and deep thinkers and shit:
Men commit more crime because men do more of anything, that is apart from self-obsessed complaining. This is the Y-chromosome explanation that radfems are so fond of, except they miss out the part that if there’s no Jack the Ripper then there’s no Einstein either, and it’s kind of hard to be a career grrl if men haven’t invented corporations and desks yet. Men are proactive as women are reactive, which in laymen’s terms means we get shit done.
Also, mammoths, we hunted them to feed you, etc.
Not content to blame male violence on women, Mr. Alpha ends by suggesting that he won’t really mind if some men — wink, wink — wise up and start directing some of this violence at the ladies who made them all violent in the first place.
The majority of violence committed by men, which is encouraged or outright instructed by women, as described above, is committed against other men. Thus for the most part, it can be described as female violence against men, delivered via proxy. …
If, however, these machinations happen to backfire, and a man who has been trained into criminal violence turns on his trainers, who am I to care?
Gosh, men in the “sphere” sure do love to fantasize about ladies getting beaten up by men, don’t they?
Dude, please, go your own fucking way already. The farther you go, the better.
@AK Most countries have some restrictions on hate speech. You generally have to do something pretty vile to trigger them, though. Holocaust denial for instance. Nobody is going to get imprisoned in a “western” country for saying “I think women are basically whores and have other novel ideas about gender'” though, unless they do so in a very disruptive or stalkery way. I think these laws are absurd and wrong, but they certainly do not do what Alpha says they do.
The United States, because of the first amendment, has no such laws. The closest we get to such things are campus speech codes, where students at public universities are subject to certain speech restrictions. For a more detailed discussion of these, please consult http://thefire.org .
@pineapplecookies,
I hadn’t read that article before, but it’s interesting. I like the insight that the asshole/nice guy dichotomy is as much of a double-bind as the virgin/whore dichotomy. I actually never thought about it that way, but I think it explains a lot of the negative perception the “nice guys” have of other guys who do get attention from women… their anger comes from feeling like they only have 2 choices.
That said, I still disagree with the fundamental premise that heterosexual women en masse are predominantly responding to guys who treat them disrespectfully. Like you said, you have nerdy/geeky/nice friends who find partners and seem happy. So do I.
I think it’s more likely that guys who feel overlooked are judging guys who get laid really harshly, mainly out of frustration and sex-negativity. This article makes me see that it’s similar to the way that people judge promiscuous women to be immoral or insecure or whatever, even if those women are ethical and respectful in their promiscuity. The logic winds up being completely circular. There is no way I could have sex and /not/ be a terrible person, in the mind of someone who sees the world this way.
@becausescience and re: Facebook
Here’s a link to WAM one of the main groups involved: http://www.womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/
Where they documented all of Facebook’s ignoring misogyny/violence against women in its hate speech. They document some HORRIFYING stuff on that website. Trigger warning if you click a few links in.
The whole “well the men had to build the office buildings ya dumb ladies whatdya think you would possibly do about that situation you reactionary harpies” line of “thinking” just makes me want to scream: BUT YOU MADE THE CHAIRS TOO HARD.
also i couldn’t get through more than a few sentences of the spearhead “article.” the immediate and idiotic racism….through the stupidest interpretation of what he sees as my “urban white liberal” perspective on the topic….the article’s logic is that that “white urban liberals” are afraid of black people, so we don’t mention that black people are targeted by the CJ system more, because we know they are really dangerous (rather than, uh, all the real reasons.) it’s gross when i see their pathetic attempts at reason extended into multiple domains that i feel personally invested in.
I have glasses AND a tattoo AND I’m a girl. I’m constantly kicking sand in my own face to impress myself.
PIneapplecookies – can you give me the full reference of the Serano piece? I teach Human Diversity at a local university, and I would love to use this article in my class – but I need to know the reference. (I try to teach my students not to plagiarize – which means I can’t either!)
Thanks for posting the link.
hahaha @shaenon, your nym is awesome and i also have all those things and do that!
also everyone…
BEES.!!
in my apt. sersly. scary. tiny dog is trying to kill one.
@Bonelady
That article is from Yes Means Yes.
@Zanana the Pegging Queen (awesome nick, btw)
I think a lot about this. Observing, hetero women in my social circle are not into “assholes” (as stated in Serano’s article), but many others I have met briefly did fall in this stereotypical type. I think there’s a lot to discuss about this…
@ Bonelady
I have been away from University for a while now and completely forgot how to quote things… >___<
I hope it’s understandable as it is not correct lol I'm going back this year!!! I have to "re-learn" all that.
SERANO, Julia. “Why Nice Guys Finish Last”. In: Friedman, Jaclyn & Valenti, Jessica (org.). Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape. (Berkeley, Calif. : Seal Press, 2008), pp. 227–240 .
Aaliyah is much quicker!
Why does getting contacts, a tattoo, and some exercise mean becoming an asshole? Because you’re pissy that a girl rejected you and thus is forcing you to get in shape? Oh, woe is you! Obviously you must take revenge on all women for this terrible slight!
I adore empathic bookworms, but I prefer them to look like they’ve done some exercise some time in the past 10 years, and I’m interested in fashion, so I prefer men who are also interested in fashion. Glasses are cute on some people, and tattoos are optional. Angry misogyny, however, is sexy on no-one.
I’m always in love with nerdy bookworms…. seems to be a pattern with me. =P
They just don’t understand that being rejected by a person you are interested is just normal. It happens to men and women alike..cis, trans, heterosexual, homosexual, bi… everybody! That’s life. You can’t expect that every woman you wish HAS to be interested back. It doesn’t work that way @__@
@Pineapplecookies and @Aaliyah – Thanks so much!
The whole thing seems very high school, really. It’s like they got stuck at about 15 or so and their perspective on relationships never matured from there.
This, and they cannot get past shitty teen rom-com high school archetypes. It’s not a world of jocks and cheerleaders beating up nerds out there.
MRAs, you like anecdotal evidence, right? Here’s some: my boyfriend is both an attractive “jock” (I guess? he was a multi-sport athlete in high school, so basically these guys’ worst enemy) AND an IT professional with nerdish, intellectual tendencies; he obviously is dating me, an evil feminist harpy/professional, who at 25 is pretty much washed up physically (duh!). Strangely enough, we are “multifaceted individuals” who “enjoy each others’ company” and “appreciate each other as individuals” and “enjoy consensual sex” instead of thinking in weird MRA social archetypes and power struggles. What a pair of fucking weirdos we are, eh?
I’m working on figuring out the common components of the MRA psyche. It’s fascinating, in a biology dissection class fashion…
1: World = High School. And “High School” here is a blend of real-life high school (often an admittedly unpleasant time for many youths, regardless of gender) and teen rom-com high school, where everyone is portrayed as an archetype.
2: Cargo Cult approach to social justice–use the words and phrasing common to social justice movements, but without any actual grasp of their meaning and context.
3: Accept Evo-Psych as an actual science. (Note: Evolution has obviously affected human psychology. The field of Evo-Psych, however, has utterly abandoned real science in favor of empty “Just So” stories that would’ve made Kipling blush in embarassment.)
4: Everything they know of human intimacy, romance, affection and sex comes from porn.
5: Perspective does not exist. Rape is no worse than not getting sex; being made to fear for your safety–or even your life–by a stalker is no worse than not getting sex in exchange for being nice.
6: 1 = 0. I’ve mentioned this before–part of Logic 101 is that in a consistent system of logic, a false premise will be able to produce contradictory results. So by believing that 1 = 0, MRAs can simultaneously believe (among other examples) that women are frigid, sex-hating harpies who only submit to intercourse to get money/resources, AND sex-crazed sluts who will bang any bad boy who comes along.
Having lived the NiceGuy/Asshole dichotomy, I can say it does have elements of the Virgin/Whore split. The difference is that it is far easier to escape as you grow up, because the culture is much happier to take men as actual individuals and not stereotypes than it is to take women as such.
And yes, it is very highschool.
@pineapplecookies
Seriously, the idea that being rejected is a sign of a character flaw on their part is just mind boggling.
Lurking at Manboobz for the last while has cemented my desire to write a piece about how “Desire is not an obligation”. The fact you desire someone doesn’t obligate anything from that person.
That the MRA types believe this is obvious, what I think is more interesting is that I think many of us internalize it from the other side as well. If someone says they like us, we feel a pressure to respond somehow. How much of that is the constant bombardment from MRA types that to not respond is cruel?
(This has been on my mind because I think it may explain why a friend and I recently fell out. She felt on some level that the fact I found her desirable was somehow a demand for her to do something about it. If that was the case, it may explain a few things.)
Right? I mean, why show women any basic respect if we won’t have sex with you in return? It’s not like we’re, you know, people.
Also count me among those who are confused as to when “criminal” and “goes to the gym sometimes” became the same thing.
“Lurking at Manboobz for the last while has cemented my desire to write a piece about how “Desire is not an obligation”. The fact you desire someone doesn’t obligate anything from that person. ”
I’d like to read that, lightcastle. I spent a large chunk of my life not able to communicate with the person I desired and thus not knowing his feelings (if any), and knowing if it was a one-way feeling that was it, end of story.
I wonder what MRAs would make of me? I fell for an “empathetic bookworm” in high school who was just about the least popular boy in school because people though he was so nerdy, and I stayed with him even though people kept making fun of him and began making fun of me for being with him. Dating for status? I don’t think so. I just fell in love with him because he was so kind and we had so much in common.
MRAs really do remind me of a kind of weird, high-school mindset much of the times.
I could actually see myself thinking that there’s a kernel of truth to some of this, back when I was in high school, because I was an EXTREMELY socially-isolated nerd many years ago, and I was picked on basically constantly by both boys and girls, all throughout middle school and much of high school.
At the time, I really did think that girls liked all the wrong things and blah blah blah.
The difference between me and an MRA, however, is that I noted that the boys were just as bad to me as the girls, if not worse. I didn’t excuse their behavior just because they also had a penis. And I didn’t inflate the sins of the girls just because I wanted to have sex with them (And how DARE they not be interested in me back?). Furthermore, I realized my error as I got a bit more mature. It’s not that most high school girls are terrible. It’s that the ones you see, the visible, popular ones, tend to be terrible people. And it was the same among the boys too.
Surprise, surprise. It’s not one’s gender that is a good indicator of whether or not someone is an asshole. It’s their relative social status (and therefore their relative level of privilege). Who’s surprised?
Pics or it didn’t happen.
I don’t think I’m an anomaly in the woman world….So, I call bs on poor bookworm being told to act violent and stupid.
I want the guys I date to be educated. I certainly don’t want to see them brawling for no reason.
It always escalated quickly in MRA logic. For men or women. I think it is funny that MRMs go on about how they are for mens rights, but spend most of the time dissing on men…….
THIS!
No no no, your anecdotal evidence doesn’t count. Manosphere anecdotal evidence, on the other hand, is the objective, absolute, rational truth, arrived at through completely truthful objective analysis of the rational, logical facts of real truthiness and realityism.
How else but through objective study of realityism would these red pill popping denizens of the manosphere have woken up to the One Obvious Truth: All women are only attracted to violent criminals. This is because evolution has given all violent criminals the best genes. The purpose of feminism is to allow women to have sex with as many violent criminals as possible while no other men get any sex at all. This allows women to get pregnant by a violent criminal and get married to a NiceGuy(tm) beta, forcing him to raise the Alpha Violent Criminal Baby, thinking it’s his own, at which point the woman divorces the NiceGuy(tm) beta and forces him to pay her his entire salary in child support – which she doesn’t even need, since the government gives all women an unending supply of free money. The secondary goal of feminism is to allow women to spermjack NiceGuy(tm) betas so that when the NiceGuy(tm) beta tries to get his stolen sperm back, he can be thrown in jail for being a man, which is illegal.
Imagining violence is an appropriate answer to other people’s non-violent behavior is rather odd. Never having been a thug, or a football player, or any kind of ‘alpha male’ I’ve been fortunate enough to have had valuable relationships with people who never seem to have gone in for that sort of thing. Sure, there are jerks who have long-term relationships, but there are plenty who don’t.
I have my doubts the author ever was an ’empathetic bookworm’ – because if he really were empathetic and willing to read there’s no end of stuff written by women that could have set him straight on all this.