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.
The DaVince Code would be a terrible romcom with Vince Vaughn about him trying to sleep with a book nerd or something ‘hilarious’.
Didn’t they already make that movie about 15 times?
The Brz Code would be about a guy who walks around babbling weird conspiracy theories at inappropriate moments, thus bringing conversations to a halt so that people can stare at him with barely veiled contempt.
What makes her comments especially screwy and ignorant is that the events under discussion happened in Japan, which has a specific cultural history of mother-child murder-suicides that runs so deep the phenomenon not only has a specific name, but ‘failed’ cases are rarely even criminally charged (though it’s pretty easy to guess what the MRA take on that would be).
From here: http://www.japanpsychiatrist.com/Abstracts/Shinju.html
“Most cases of shinju (murder-suicide) are boshi-shinju in which the children, who are too young to decide on suicide themselves, are killed by their mothers”
“According to Japanese logic, the suicidal mother cannot bear to leave the child to survive alone”
“since the 1960s the number of boshi-shinju (mother-child) has become the most common (form of murder-suicide)”
So if we decide to play along and whole-heartedly accept her argument on proper child murder etiquette, this guy is actually a rare exception in his culture of a male following the (apparently) laudable example of women. I’m not touching the MR Reddit with a ten foot pole, but if anyone wants to wade in and pass on to her that she’s actually argued for the moral superiority of (Japanese, at least) women in this regard, feel free to do so.
Figures. Blech.
Sorry you had to deal with her in person, Barb.
That comment really needed the context that I, myself, live in and have spent my life in Calgary.
OT, but look at what AVFM just churned out: http://www.donotlink.com/cEM
Talking over trans women in order to make a cheap, ill-informed argument that misandry exists? Such human rights activists.
Ugh, Ally, that post was condescending and silencing and awful.
I wrote a comment on the related r/mr thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1tvbzt/another_stunning_hard_hitting_avfm_expose_sure_to/cebyuc7
I hope I don’t end up regretting it.
I’d like to see your sources for this assertion. All the research that I’ve seen indicates that tribal societies are vastly more violent than state-based societies. For example: Over 40% of Yąnomamö men die in warfare.
Ally, I thought your comment was great.
Someone nymed Whiic is making terrible, upvoted comments on AVfM that are both transphobic and homophobic, and Dean Esmay argues with a straight face that the plural of anecdote is data. Also, NWOslave is of course pooping on the r/mr thread, because he can’t help himself.
The MRA’s have their own special brand of science…and logic for that matter. The author of that article just out right dismisses anything biologist and doctors have to say on the matter of transexualism and just asserts that his theory is automatically correct because it fits his worldview.
For example, in the article he states:
“Many would suggest that the cause of transsexualism is inherent and genetic. They point to differences in the brain structures of transsexuals, prior to any treatment with hormones or surgery, as evidence of these inherent differences. Transsexual brains appear to be more like those of the sex they identify with, rather than those of the sex they are associated with by virtue of their chromosomes, hormones, and primary and secondary sex characteristics.”
and then goes on to conclude:
“These studies are problematic…”
Why? Because the idea that transexualism is inherent and genetic does not fit into his Weltenshaung and much like the Ahnenerbe before him, it suits him to dismiss science and create his own science to fit that worldview.
I think i won the Godwin award for this thread.
@Viscaria
I live in Lethbridge now, but I was just up in Calgary over Christmas. If you’re into speculative fiction, I can really recommend the IFWA writing group. I can’t guarantee it’s MRA free, but it’s MRA-light since 2006.
(TRIGGER WARNING FOR RAPE)
I had some suspicions about her attitude. They’re really quite personal. She’s written about rape hysteria before (I would link to her post on rape “hysteria” and how she’s a victim of the hysteria itself but not the rape, but it outs her real, real name and not the name she uses for MRA stuff. It links her real name to Typhonblue, so…it’s not a secret but I don’t want to out her?) so I think it’s the person who abused her was so important to her life that the rape itself had to be no big thing. And if she can make rape be no big thing, than any woman who allows herself to be victimized was allowing the “hysteria” of being raped be the issue.
So not the knowing if this is going to be a rape and murder or just a rape, not the violation of someone else imposing their will on your body, not the idea of a person taking your autonomy from you, all those are just what women are supposed to feel, and because she didn’t feel that way, no one should. But they do, so women are obviously inferior.
I was lucky enough to have fought back and got away even though he had a knife and broke into my bedroom, but it didn’t mean all those thoughts and more weren’t flying through my head, too.
I know there’s no wrong way to be raped, but there must be checks and balances in place to say if you deal with your rape by condemning women for it, you can’t expect closure.
Again, I’d feel sorry for her if she wasn’t hurting other people so much.
ETA: (MORE TRIGGER WARNINGS) the thoughts flying through my head were about how no woman wakes up and thinks this is the day some guy is going to be over me in my bed with a knife, not the rest about being inferior for assuming that rape is a bad thing that people shouldn’t do. I realized my post was implying I was agreeing with TB in her thoughts of women and their worth.
Oh wow, my comment got 7 upvotes and is now the top comment in the r/mr thread. Color me surprised. I wonder who exactly is upvoting that comment, though…
Nepenthe — I was referring namely to Native Americans versus the rest of the US, as I know those rates off the top of my head, and generalizing that to the world at large. Here’s the first citation I found for the US rates though — http://www.ncadv.org/files/Tribal.pdf
Also, I wasn’t referring the death by violence, but violence in general, I’d expect the former to be higher wherever medicine is less advanced for the same reason death from disease decreases as medicine advances. I’ll see if I can dig up anything on general rates of violence though, now I’m curious if this is unique to the US // places where tribal societies and industrial societies intersect frequently (and where racism is abundant)
http://timesupblog.blogspot.ca/2013/12/lies-of-fathers-rights-groups.html?spref=fb
Just thought I’d share.
Was it that annoying Joe dude who claimed feminism was started by the CIA? He may need to revise that theory. /r/badhistory is one of my favorite subs, they regularly debunk misogynistic bad history (feminism destroyed the Roman Empire, anyone?). The bad historian in question makes an appearance in the comments using 1-3 different alts, and deletes a bunch of his comments when he gets downvoted, and then starts PMing the OP. Good times.
Dear gods man, translate this out of the raw results from your program and into words! Yeah, this is so mathy that it annoys me, but the conclusion is clear at least — http://www.mega.nu/ampp/rummel/smith.art.htm
In short (and I mean epically short), it seems the more groups, be they ethnic or religious, in an area, the more likely there is to be violence. Granted this says fuck all about indigenous or industrial societies (and the data itself isn’t exactly fresh and shiny), but I found it both interesting and unsurprising that having different groups in close proximity increases violence.
Oh and despite the horrid HTML, that was published in a legit journal, the horrid HTML is just the non-paywall version listed on google scholar.
Cloudiah — I know Joe linked the C1A and feminism and 1sl4m and argh no I can’t do his weird l33t bot avoidance shit.
Anyways, Joe linked Islam and the CIA and Marxism and feminism, but I can’t quite remember how those links went. Something about gender neutral pronouns just further dividing us and hurting our cause or something. I think he eventually realized he was an asshole for that, but after his claim that saying we need more suicide preventation resources targeted towards men was victim blaming…yeah, I give zero shits, he’s a stain on humanity.
Heh…I heard that the CIA tried to infiltrate the National Organization for Women, with an eye to provoking disruption and destroying it. Betty Friedan denounced them for it repeatedly. That alone makes Troll Boy Joe look like an ass.
The CIA-invented-feminism “theory” isn’t a new one, and pops up fairly regularly amongst the MRAs. Sometimes the Illuminati are involved as well.
I loves me some conspiracy theory. -_-
I actually do like some of the harmless ones. Like the one about the bug jars with runes on them in Skyrim. Fun times. MRA ones? Not so fun.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VovZLF0LmAc/UCrssm5upOI/AAAAAAAAASE/B17UtRikpTA/s1600/giorgio_DRAGONS.jpg
O