Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are discussing the case of a Japanese man who set himself and his nine-year-old son on fire on a playground in an attempted murder-suicide; the man died, but his son, while severely burned, managed to survive.
The discussion amongst the Men’s Rightsers is actually less awful than one might expect, with only a few commenters making excuses for the man, or blaming his ex-wife. Many of the regulars are actually condemning his actions straightforwardly.
And then there’s TyphonBlue, the highly inventive female Men’s Rights activist who is one of A Voice for Men’s self-proclaimed “Honey Badgers.” She thinks the fact that the man tried to kill himself along with his son is a point in his favor and, more than that, a sign that men are better than women.
No, really. She blames “pedestalization” for it all.
![typhonblue -12 points 1 day ago (18|30) He didn't kill his son. Unlike mothers, fathers don't scrimp on the suicide part of the suicide-murder. permalink source parent save give gold hide child comments [–]osbe 11 points 22 hours ago (15|4) He didn't kill his son What the fuck are you trying to say? The son didn't die (yet) so this is not "as bad" as what women do? permalink source save parent give gold [–]typhonblue -1 points 8 hours ago (2|3) Little more time today. Am I puncturing your vision of women as the "more moral gender"? How about this, when you give a group of people an automatic "more moral than thou" card, they become worse human beings. The pedestal creates the monster.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/typhonmurdersuicide.png?resize=496%2C407&ssl=1)
You see, if you didn’t put women on a pedestal, they’d kill themselves along with their kids, and all would be well in the world. I guess? I really don’t see why this would be better.
Later in the thread, TB tries to explain her peculiar logic further:
I think it’s time to pull out the old Don Draper “what?!” gif again.
I will grant her one point: she’s correct that, while fathers and mothers are roughly equally likely to kill their children, men are much more likely to kill themselves as well. Why this would be a sign of moral superiority I don’t know.
I should also note that this doesn’t mean that the men and women kill children equally: while 57 percent of those who kill children under 5 are parents, the non-parents who kill children are mostly men.
In any case, “pedestalization” has pretty much nothing to do with it — unless you’re talking about the tendency of fathers who kill themseves and their children to overrate their own indispensablility.
So why do parents kill their children? Not surprisingly, mothers and fathers tend to have wildly different motivations. In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick summarizes what we know:
Researchers, building on the work of Phillip Resnick, have shown that women tend to kill their own offspring for one of several reasons: because the child is unwanted; out of mercy; as a result of some mental illness in the mother; in retaliation against a spouse; as a result of abuse.
It may be hard to understand how a mother can come to believe that killing her children would be an act of mercy, but that’s what postpartum psychosis can do to your brain.
The motivations for fathers tend to be rather different:
Most frequently … they kill because they feel they have lost control over their finances, or their families, or the relationship, or out of revenge for a perceived slight or infidelity. … more often than not, men kill their children to get back at a woman—to take away what she most cherishes.
As Charles Patrick Ewing, a University of Buffalo law professor and psychologist, told Elizabeth Fernandez of the San Francisco Chronicle
“These are narcissistic, self-centered guys who see themselves as the glue of the family. They feel they have to take their own life, but first, they have to kill the children. To them, it seems rational. They think they can’t manage and the family can’t manage without them.”
It’s also worth pointing out that when you look at murder-suicide in general — and not just when children are among the victims — it is almost exclusively (roughly 90%) a male crime, with the victims almost always female, generally the man’s wife, girlfriend, or ex. Not surprisingly, disproportionate number of those responsible for murder-suicides involving intimate partners were also domestic abusers. (As was, reportedly, the Japanese man who set himself and his son ablaze.)
The only heartening thing here is that TyphonBlue actually got downvoted in the Men’s Rights subreddit for spouting her toxic nonsense.
EDITED TO ADD, 12/30/13: The son, who had been in critical condition since the incident, has now died.
.OMG!! I am SO Sorry for the typo’s. TooK me 20mins just to write what I did. Meant to say: “I am using a haptic device that makes writing painfully slow”
FARK!I give up! “Shinning” = shunning. Ugh, I hate MS anew.
I would Rather more of “us” progressive thinkers thought A little more interms of reaching out to Women like her.
I see no reason to reach out to someone who is such a hateful, unpleasant human being. I don’t believe in banging my head against a wall, and I see no reason to feel obligated to. If you want to do it, go for it, but seeing how Bina had personal interactions with her, I don’t have high hopes.
Where are the feminists on yotube who challenge TB’s nonsense?
Have you SEEN what happens to feminists on youtube? I can’t blame them for choosing to go elsewhere.
I think of a case like her as one needing “debriefing”.
Now, aside from how well I think that’d go over (not at all), I actually find this rather patronizing. TyphonBlue is a venomous human being, but she’s also an adult who made her own wretched decisions. I’m pretty sure it’d take more than a “debriefing” for her to change, and acting like she just needs to “see the light” is pretty condescending. For whatever the reason, she’s decided to be a raging misogynist and gross person, and I highly doubt what she needs in life could be described as a “debriefing.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if something awful happened to her, but that doesn’t oblige us to simply forgive, forget, and ignore her behavior and treat her like a broken bird.
Kilik and LBT – As someone who was raised by an MRA (and therefore used to believe as she believes, probably more so), I agree (on the main level) with Kilik. It would be ideal to help her, rather than shun her.
However, I also agree with LBT – this is going to require waaaaay more than a debriefing, and I can promise you that anonymous feminists approaching her will be of no help whatsoever.
Pretty much the only thing that worked with me, was a feminist male that I trusted (and it took him years upon years to gain my trust) explaining his views to me. Also helping were anonymous males on the internet – thank you David, you’ve done more good than you know – talking in general about how things like rape, denying medical care, schooling, etc. to females are wrong – that all helps, too. The problem is that, much as I suspect she hopes (deep down inside, probably so far down that she doesn’t know it’s there) to be contradicted on what she’s saying, the fact that all these men on AVfM and elsewhere are agreeing with her confirms the worst. And you know how it goes – one hurtful thing requires about 100 nice things to counteract it.
Why should it be the responsibility of feminists to save Typhon Blue from the path of deliberate assholery that she’s chosen? She’s neither stupid nor 8 years old, and she appears to be rather committed to her woman-hating philosophy. It seems deeply condescending to assume that she’s some sort of wounded bird who’s been brainwashed into her current state of mind.
The idea that women are naturally kind and nice and only turn into raging shitheads as the result of some nasty man abusing them or brainwashing them into it is pretty damn sexist. Unless anyone here actually knows her background and how she was brought up I’m going to have to point out that any conclusions they draw about how she got to be the misogynist she is are pretty much just conjecture + confirmation bias.
Um, no. Why on earth would you think it’s our job to reach out to her and save her from herself? Like Cassandra said, that’s mighty sexist.
As far as I’m concerned, TB has chosen this path.
‘Twasn’t me, it was someone I replied to…but yeah. That old saying about leading a horse to water applies here. Only she’s not a horse, and she’s been misled to a very toxic pond. Telling her she’s astray will only get her to retrench. Until she hits bottom and gets booted out like the Wooly Bumblebee did, there will be no chance of reaching her. And even then, she can still cling like a burr to those wrong beliefs. Cult deprogramming only works when the cultist is ready to get the hell out, unfortunately. And the only person who can MAKE her ready is herself.
This is one of those things that I found to be true the hard way.
The very hard way.
Yeah. I mean, if TB ever changes, it’ll be on her own steam. It can be tempting to believe that we just need to explain ourselves well enough and she’ll be overcome with a divine feminist epiphany or some shit, but for Chrissakes, she’s a grown woman, significantly older and more experienced in life than me. I’m not going to pretend I’m her freakin’ savior — aside from everything else, doesn’t a male feminist “saving” a female misogynist reek of grossness to you?
I think shunning someone who is actively harmful to you is a reasonable behavior. It’s not like we’re asking TB to march in a Slutwalk or something; all that’s required is she not talk shit about women in our presence. If she’s incapable of that, then shunning seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I would like to note here that the idea that the people here, who are assumed to be mostly female, should feel obligated to try to “save” someone who hates them and would like to harm them is itself deeply misogynistic. Women as caretakers, the idea that women should put other people’s needs before their own, the idea that women are supposed to have bottomless reserves of love and patience and never just want to tell someone who’s being a jerk to piss off and not bother with them any further…it’s not just the sexism being directed at Typhon Blue that’s the problem here, and there have been several of these “but shouldn’t we try to help them?” comment directed at male MRAs too recently.
This is why I’ve always said that the first rule of feminism is that just because I am a woman that doesn’t mean I’m your/any random person’s mom.
CassandraSays said it better than I did. It’s made even worse with male feminists; it’s incredibly creepy, the idea that a man just needs to “save” a woman with his superior philosophy. Gross.
My predecessors spent a LOT of their adolescence and young adulthood trying to save people. Shock! It didn’t work!
To me those comments basically read as “don’t you think it’s mean and unfair of you to have boundaries? and that you’re being selfish not to put everyone else’s needs before your own?”. It’s one of the most persistent and insidious forms of sexism, and I’m not going to let it slide when it happens here.
Before it comes up yet again – no, I’m not saying that anyone who wants to try saving the possibly-a-wounded-bird can’t do so if they want, what I’m saying is that the “we/everyone/people should” part of that sentiment is bullshit and it needs to stop.
(But anyone who wants to try to help TB should feel free, if they like. Just don’t expect any miracles.)
CassandraSays: Yep yep yep. Seconding that to the nth degree. Woman as the infinitely patient and loving caregiver is an idea that needs to die already.
People can change, but it’s hard work, and the person has to want to change and has to be dedicated to change. There’s no reason why couldn’t inform herself, there is plenty of information and resources available. Hell, she writes about this stuff, and from what I’ve seen, twists it and ignores it outright lies about it. As far as I’m concerned, her problem is a moral failing (particularly with what she wrote on reddit that the OP is about – I mean, I still can’t wrap my head around how she-I mean, fuck). I have no interest in what her internal motivations are. It would be nice if all these MRA assholes would someday gain some kind of epiphany about what assholes they are, but I don’t believe for instant that that’s going to happen, nor is it feminists job to bring that about. She’s simply reprehensible. And that’s the bottom line.
Also I think the idea that internalized misogyny is always a thing that causes the women who have it misery is nonsense. Ayn Rand was a misogynist and she thought pretty damn highly of herself, and most FeMRAs seem to have their ideas of self versus other women organized in a similar way.
I think that idea of women as caregiver is also what’s behind all of the genuine rage that gets expressed by MRAs who can’t believe feminism isn’t focusing on men’s problems. They’ve so internalized this assumption that they can’t even see how ridiculous that position is.
Sadly, a lot of feminists seem to feel guilt about that too — I hate that focus on “feminism helps men too.” It’s glib, and it really buys into the idea that feminism would only be okay if it helped men. No one says “rescuing abandoned dogs helps cats too!”
I’m not saying this very well, but I hope you know what I mean.
Wow, sorry riled some of you. But I would suggest that assumptions about My motivations are offensive. I’m new here. and feel as if I’ve disturbed a few private parties, which was never My intent. I also can’t make the leap in seeing sensitivity or or compassion to some sexism on my part! I Respect fully TBs autonomy. I never suggested” rescuing” her either. It’s vitriolic, imo, to come to that conclusion aout me. I was, mabe badly, using comparison’s. I Was not stating facts. but making suggestions. I never said nor suggested that Feminism is “better” if if helps men. You don’t know either how I identify myself, but I’m not ashamed to say I am sensitive or compassionate and to even barely imply that makes me part of the patriarchal norm is insulting.
I respect Your right to shutdown on sexists. But in my opinion) it does matter what happens to people blinded by an entrenched hostility to others because they’re human. don’t give a damn if someone decided to drive a motorcycle so fast that they wipeout. l’m not going to just walk past them with the attitude of,” well, you asked for it hUh, ?”
Again, I apologize fo writing.errors..
Yup. And in TB’s case, it’s got an additional obnoxious admixture of “oh, just get over your rape, you whiny bitches…*I* did!” Paradoxically, I think she’s not over it at all. This “I am superior to all the likes of you” posturing reeks of a defence mechanism, or a case of “fake it till you make it”. You can’t fake your way past a trauma. But until that realization catches up to her, along with the fact that she’s not a Special Snowflake, and MRAs really do despise all women, INCLUDING HER…well…it won’t be pretty. Self-hate dressed up in self-regarding self-delusions never is.
Except that’s not what anyone here is doing. We’re all pretty much agreed on the fact that she needs help and that feminism would be a good tool for her to analyze what has gone awry in her life. And if she came here asking for help, no one would hesitate to answer her questions or direct her to the appropriate experts, if she needs that kind of assistance. But here’s the thing: Realizations can’t be forced. Even with the best intentions and efforts on our part, she would be simply unreachable until the truth dawned on her. She has built her own walls; it is up to her, not us, to tear them down.
And I speak from experience here: I had the same thing happen to me when I tried to “rescue” a boyfriend who was sliding into alcoholism. He resisted my every effort and denied every word I said about how he needed help. He was not totally unaware that he needed help, because he told me he’d gone to Al-Anon as a teenager, over his drunk and abusive father. But it never really sank in with him that he was going the same way as his old man, and trying to point that out to him was futile. He hurt and insulted me awfully. There was no reasoning with him. In the end it got so depressing and awful that I needed rescuing myself…and the only way I could do it was by breaking up with him. I regret a number of things about that relationship, but not the breakup; I only wish I’d done it sooner. I owe a large part of my sanity to that. The idea that women have a sacred moral duty to “rescue” lost souls who don’t want our help is dangerous, because we often end up drowning ourselves in the process.
It’s funny how you don’t realize that you’re illustrating all the stuff people were saying. Yes, you’re sensitive, whereas other people are so…
But that’s not the context of what’s going on with TB (at least, not from what I can see). Bina’s comparison to alcoholism has far more parallels. And if we’re going to go with the motorcycle theme, then TB is the person who once had a motorcycle accident and says ‘see, I didn’t die! Helmets and safety rules are stupid and repressive!’ She’s not currently on the side of the road, injured; she’s the one out there saying people who get injured deserve it.
Looking at TB and *just* seeing the tramatized victim is seeing only part of the picture. And defining her by her wounds (that we can’t actually diagnose, since we simply don’t have enough information) is sort of like ableism. It devalues surviving and recovering. It limits people who have gone through trauma and made it out the other side.
Okay, I’m a little more irritated by this than I thought, gonna go back to work now!
In this particular analogy she’s also insisting that it would be better if more women died in motorcycle accidents, and suggesting that the reason that they don’t is that they’re selfish cowards.
Vitriolic private party initiated.
Kilik: you’ve missed the point that all the responses here are not about you. You raised a very common idea about women being the nurturers, or naturally nice and people like TB having been brainwashed and needing to be looked after. People here were pointing out just how common and yes, how sexist that idea is, and the broader notions it connects with.
None of this was an attack on you but on the societal ideas about women that are the context of your comments. Also, as was pointed out, feminists hear this “but if you were nice to them” line about male misogynists all the time, same as victims of racism hear it about racists, and so on.
Why should anyone be nice and sweet and healing to people who hate them, who wish violence upon them, who would remove every human right they’ve struggled to have acknowledged?
And not only that…didn’t one or another of her male cohorts actually say that he wasn’t going to bother rescuing any rape victim, or save a girl from drowning because she might grow up to be a “feminist cunt”? I seem to recall seeing it all here…
The idea that any woman could not be put off this sham movement by talk like that is awful enough, but to actively endorse those sentiments with her presence and support? Ugh.
I’m sorry, who are we supposed to be saving, again?
I dunno, kittehs, once we got to the stuff about how could you call my ideas patriarchal you vitriolic blah blah all the dogwhistles starting giving me a migraine.