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.
Sometimes, I ever wonder if these folks get a sudden jolt and think to themselves, “Jeez, I’m talking like a Disney villain”? I mean, I dunno, it just seems like it’d be something they’d notice, Disney being the owners of our childhoods and all…
Typhon Blue clearly aspires to be Maleficent, but she’s just not cool enough.
And even more brain bleach.
The CGTOW is wonderful.
Shameless self promotion of my brain bleach archive — http://www.feministborg.com/silly/brain_bleach/
The critters in the header are LBT’s handy work, thanks LBT!
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_laly51HbCi1qanigd.gif
Just dropping further brain bleach.
http://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/cutest-cat-gifs-kitten-playing.gif
tw for violence:
In my high school a kid survived a murder suicide by his father. the father came home from work and shot his mother and 2 younger sisters before shooting himself. the kid survived because he jumped out a window and went to a neighbor’s housd to call the police. his older sister survived because she was already away at college.
his father was trying to regain control after the younger sisters reported to school guidance counselors that he was raping them.
people who do such horrible things to their families are pieces of shit. no excuse. none.
I am sure that MRA’s would have said that the father never would have killed his family if those girls never tried to ruin his life by reporting him for rape…but MRA’s are kind of high up in my p.o.s. list.
What the actual fuck is up with my pictures?
Also kitteh loves watermelon. http://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/cutest-kitten-gifs-watermelon.gif
TyphoidBozo is criminally stupid. Don’t anyone tell her about this other divorce case, in which a father threw first his son and then himself off a building in New York to try to ruin his soon to be ex’s life. She’d probably just say the horrid fucker deserved a posthumous medal for morality, or some shit like that.
And did I hear the words “brain bleach”? Oh hai, my kitteh decided to try her catmouflage on her grandhumans’ Persian rug.
Last one. I need sleep (like that’s gonna happen). TW When my mother got the farm in the divorce settlement (after my father had drained all the bank accounts, mortgaged everything to the hilt, taken loans out at every bank against my grandfather’s cattle, and taken out loans from my parents’ friends, and then sold my grandfather’s cattle, a herd he had bred from the time he was a teenager and they were a separate breed of cattle, at auction after having been unemployed for two years) he rigged the furnace so that it would explode. My mother ended up in hospital for a few days, had to wear bandages for weeks, and some of her hair never grew back. I hate MRA’s.
And now for the brain bleach.
http://www.ohmagif.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/cute-kitten-kicking-legs-in-the-air.gif
And Bina, that kitteh is the queen of camo.
Yup…she’s a torbie. Stripes AND spots. In about four different colors. She’s gonna be a mighty hunter, she caught her first mouse just this week and she’s only 8 months old.
Torbies are definitely rule at catmoflague. Fribs (who’s cream and blue and white) can almost disappear on anything. Doesn’t do her much good, though. She’s been sat on a few times because of that!
http://i.imgur.com/3wnHwGU.jpg
Mads, on the other hand, has to cheat.
http://i.imgur.com/OrFSy5R.jpg
Gods… I’ve had murder suicide touch my life twice and I can’t express the rage her comments provoke.
Was my friends husband moral for killing their two young sons because “It’s better for them to be dead than have divorced parents”?
Was my girlfriend’s ex more moral for killing her then himself because he couldn’t deal with the end of their relationship? Would it have been extra extra moral if I had been home when he came looking for me before he offed himself?
Ok, time to go play videogames or something… thank you to those who have supplied bleach on this one.
“I’ve yet to figure out how old a boy has to be for them to give a shit about him.”
Since when do the MRAs give a shit about other men? They are just props they use to bash on women.
Calling Typhon Blue a taint with lint is the softest insult in my vocabulary right now. Taking advantage of a man’s death to spout misogynistic drivel is low even by MRA standards. She might as well feast on his corpse, which she is basically doing except not literally. Futrelle should have represented her with this picture instead.
http://www.thedevilsdemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ghoul.jpg
Would Stupid care to find the good in the case of Dmitriy Kanarikov, who chucked his kid off a Manhattan high-rise and has yet to kill himself?
Because according to her, that’s something women do, not men, and it’s totes OK for men to try to kill their kids because they aren’t very good at it so the kid survives and they kill themselves too, which, women never do because they’re evil and just kill their kids for funzies.
TB (I call her TB because that’s what an awesome asset to the world I consider her) really isn’t much better than these people killing/trying to kill their kids she’s defending.
Poop. I mixedup cases. I’m pretty sure that dad killed himself after killing his kid (GIVE THAT MAN A TROPHY) so men really are way better than women, making sure to kill themselves after murdering their kids in an act of extreme morality and super-ethics. Going to find the case I was thinking of…
Ooooooh, what about Allan Schoenborn? See, TB has told us extreme mental distress is not the case if you don’t off yourself as well as your children. But Mr. Schoenborn was found to be criminally insane! How can that be when he forgot to kill himself? Everyone knows you’re only under extreme mental distress IF YOU KILL YOURSELF TOO. That’s how we know women who kill their kids AND NEVER KILL THEMSELVES, unlike men who kill their kids AND ALWAYS KILL THEMSELVES, are just terrible people and not even a little bit mentally ill.
Here are some awful comments in defense of the man who threw his son off the building in New York. No, really.
Thomas Walker Lynch · The University of Texas at Austin
@Angela McKernan –
And if you are to speak with such certitude, .. what would you have done with your children were you Jewish and the Gestapo was coming to haul them off to a concentration camp to be experimented on and then to die?
So then what if the father believed that the rest of the child’s life the child was to suffer while being used as a tool of exploitation by a corrupt family system? Endlessly for years being torn apart in the fights, just to grow up a very screwed up person after a joyless childhood?
Now we also don’t know the history here, but what if this father came from a place where life was a gift that could be taken at any time. Perhaps as a parent to some of the 15,000 children in Iraq or similar number in Afghanistan who died in bombings?
Talk is cheap, if you really make judgment, do you send money to parents in Fallujah? [rhetorical question]
In my opinion it is a tragedy independent, but there are too many such tragedies happening to keep blaming this all on the the divorcing spouses. Statistically this many sociopaths don’t exist. Yes these are less than perfect people, as most young people are, all people for that matter, but especially young people who are emotionally wrapped up in a divorce. There is a systemic problem.
We must look beyond those imperfections most all people have to we see the next most obvious problem. Notice at the top of this article, the lawyer is speaking. Let me ask you, 1) who stands to gain when people fight? 2) Who runs these affairs? Could it be that the fox is in charge of the hen house and that is why there is so much tragedy?
Reply · 1 · Like
· Edited · December 24 at 7:55am
Ooops, link to the above: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/24/mom-of-tot-thrown-from-nyc-building-heartbroken/4187515/
Oh, and I’m not doxxing the guy – he signed his comment as it appears above.
I go back and forth on feeling sorry for the FeMRAs, because how much internalized misogyny does one have in order to cozy up to men who hate women? Then I hope they kicked out of the clubhouse and get a taste of their own medicine.
I’m wondering if typhonblue got downvoted because she’s affiliated with avfm. Other anti-fems remember the whole Occidental incident, after which Paul Elam told anyone who didn’t agree with the spamming to ‘fuck off’
Either way, typhon is an MRA tool, just like a bunch of other female anti-feminists.