The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
If you hope to make it through the day without losing all hope in humanity, you may not wish to read the following thoughts on Ray and Janay Rice from our old friend from The Spearhead, W.F. Price.
I know people instinctively and reflexively sympathize with the victim of a brutal attack, but …
Yeah, I’m giving you all one more chance to back out of this right now, because we all know that nothing good is going to come after that “but.”
… there comes a time when one has to ask whether or not the victim bears some responsibility for putting herself in this situation. Does Janay really think that will be the last time Rice gives her a beatdown? And even if she does, what statement is she making in marrying a man willing to treat her like that?
The statement is clear: she thinks the violence is a reasonable tradeoff for whatever she gets in return for her relationship, whether it’s sexual gratification, status or money. …
But feminists would have us believe that domestic violence is a patriarchal imposition, despite the fact that married women in patriarchal families suffer the lowest rates of domestic violence of all partnered women in the United States.
Price cites a previous post of his as evidence for this claim, though to declare it wildly misleading would be an understatement. While domestic violence rates among married couples are lower than among cohabiting couples, this isn’t a clean comparison; as Joanna Pepin notes on The Society Pages, it ignores “that selection out of cohabitation and into marriage – and selection out of marriage through divorce – creates an apples-and-oranges comparison between these two groups.” It’s also worth pointing out that as marriage rates have fallen over the last several decades, domestic violence rates have fallen as well.
In fact, study after study after study after study find that domestic violence rates tend to be highest amongst those with traditional – that is, patriarchal – values.
Let’s let Price continue, as we haven’t even gotten to the worst stuff yet.
Maybe feminists think the patriarchy has secretly implanted little chips in women’s brains that lead them to seek out men who will beat them up.
Somehow, instead of choosing granola-crunching lesbians, these women make a beeline for musclebound athletes, beefy bikers and ghetto thugs.
How many different types of bigotry can he fit into one sentence? I count three.
But maybe it isn’t the patriarchy. Maybe there’s something about female sexuality that defies feminist ideals. Perhaps it’s kind of a chaotic, anarchic thing that doesn’t pay attention to pronouncements about what’s right and proper.
Maybe, just maybe, the only way to really cut down on intimate violence would be to restrict women’s sexual freedom.
Well, aside from the fact that this is, uh, an utterly appalling thing to say, particularly in response to an incident in which a man knocked out his then-fiancee in an elevator, it’s also completely wrong. Indeed, studies show the opposite – that the more control women have over their lives, the less domestic violence there is.
Oh, but Price stops just short of explicitly advocating that men should be put in charge of women’s sexuality.
Would I advocate for that? No. As adults, women should make their own decisions in that regard. However, to blame men in general for the results of women’s sexual decisions is absolutely unacceptable.
As terrible as Price’s post is, the comments from The Spearhead’s regulars are, as usual, even worse.
According to the fellow who calls himself TFH,
The biggest error that Western Civ ever made was assuming that women could be ‘adults’. …
The woman’s brain-gina interface is obsolete. She is programmed to get gina tingles from men who were suited to excel in the world of pre-historic times, while she is programmed to be revulsed by the man who would have fared poorly then (the introverted STEM guys of today).
One cannot fully understand why women write love letters to serial killers and continue to get back with violent boyfriends, without also realizing the hate that women have for tech nerds, and how there is an obsessive push to divert tech money to women (i.e. they hate that money is appearing in the hands of men their gina does not tingle for).
Again, the brain-gina interface of women is obsolete. That is the most complete explanation.
I should point out that TFH – also known as The Fifth Horseman – is considered one of the leading intellectual lights of the Men’s Rights movement, with his loopy 2010 manifesto The Misandry Bubble winning praise from everyone from A Voice for Men’s favorite therapist Dr. Helen to self-promoting British MRA Mike Buchanan to crusty old Counter-Feminist Fidelbogen. Oh, and WF PRice, too.
Back in The Spearhead’s comment section, meanwhile, Eric J Schlegel trots out some evo-psych just-so stories to buttress a similarly backwards conclusion:
Women get the ‘gina tingle from the alpha male because, from an evolutionary perspective, those are the genes that contribute to survival. Trouble is, those same sociopathic thugs are not at all any use as protector and provider, so she takes the results of her selective breeding, along with her black eye, and finds a beta schlub provider to help raise them. … [P]erhaps others here have similar stories where female aquaintances chose assholes in their hormoned youth, only to settle for a nice guy with 3-4 thug bastards in tow. Women such as the one you’ve talked about here are those who have not overcome their animal instincts, every bit as much as the men who put them in ICU. The authority that a man used to have over his daughters as well as his sons used to act as somewhat of a check on this social dynamic, but we all know what happened to that…
I think it’s safe to say that if you ever run across a dude who refers to “‘ginas” instead of “vaginas” you should run as far away as your legs will take you.
Someone called Stoltz concludes
This is what happens when a society tells women they are equal – no,no – superior – to men. Movies and TV shows that show a female character acting like a hellish b*tch, goings around kicking everyone’s rearends. … Feminist and a feminist-backed government who tell women they have no responsibilities, and all the rights, so they believe they can do whatever they please to whoever (of course, the ‘whoever’ are men).
Meanwhile, another commenter suggests that the only solution is “to repeal the civil rights laws that prevent people from keeping ‘those’ people out.” Yet another declares that “Ray Rice triggers my gaydar pretty hard” and suggests that Janay “looks like a tranny.”
Price himself shows up with some comments even worse than his post, arguing that abused women stick with their abusers
because it feels good. Having a dominant man is a pleasurable feeling for a lot of women. It’s like a shot of dope for a heroin addict, who knows that he’s taking a big risk each time he injects the drug into his arm, but can’t stop himself from doing so anyway.
Just a couple days ago there was a power outage where I live due to some construction/maintenance in the area. I had to go to a nearby hotspot to do some work online and so did a few neighbors. One of my neighbors was an ordinary, middle-aged woman. She left her phone on speaker for some reason, and she got a call from her man that I heard as clear as day. He called, and then when she didn’t pick up immediately I could hear him yelling at her in a threatening manner for not answering promptly. Then, the guy demanded she get power of attorney over her mother so he could drain the old lady’s bank account, and when she raised reasonable objections to it he was insistent and angry. I was just shaking my head, but this mild-mannered, very plain 40-something white lady looked positively radiant upon receiving this kind of violent attention from her thuggish, scumbag boyfriend.
This is what English teachers like to call an “unreliable narrator.”
This is referring to men’s abuse of women as “the result of women’s sexual decisions” and saying men must not be blamed for it. Right? That’s so horrible I must have missed something…
That drivel requires a healthy “citation needed”.
Ah, once again we get into the misandry of the MRM. Seriously, these guys have such a lousy view of themselves and their fellow penis-bearers*.
*: They obviously are incapable of even considering, let alone properly evaluating, the sex and gender of individuals who are not 100% cis-, so in this case, the plumbing-specific designation holds.
That’s right TFH, women don’t like you because you’re so awesome and evolved. They’re just too stupid to be turned on by your amazing intellect. Keep telling yourself that buddy. If you believe the grapes are sour hard enough, maybe they will really become as sour as you wish they were. Dare to dream, douchebro. Dare to dream.
I’m getting to the point that I think that MRAs should walk around with body cameras.
OK, I had to stop reading — but then again, you did warn us, David. Jesus, they’re a bunch of fucked-up monsters.
Not going to read it. I have no need to start my day this way. Nope. Nope, nope, nope.
No misogynistic thinkpiece is complete without psuedo-scientific bullshit about how womens brains are “wired”.
This part also gave me the giggles.
Women are awful because some of them write letters to serial killers, but men are not awful because some of them ARE serial killers.
That’s an impressive double standard.
Sometimes I think it helps to eliminate most of the build-up after the “but…” and cut right to the hideous argument’s final conclusion. To that end, I offer Price’s statement pared down to its nasty essence through a simple bit of elision:
I guess an MRA would accuse me of cherry-picking.
The question that occurs to me is… do they see the mental hoops they’re jumping through to justify it being the woman’s fault? Or is every nutso step along the way just completely intuitive to them?
I don’t know which is worse, the dishonesty of first possibility, or the mental damage the second represents.
I’d like to take this evopsyche BS for a spin. Please bear with me.
So, in Caveman Days, women were attracted to the big, beefy guys who could bring down a mammoth single-handedly, and preferentially mated with them. Seems like those guys would be great providers, with the mammoth-killing and the big beefiness that could run off any other threatening … saber-toothed tiger, but for some reason the gene for “domestic violence” is on the same allele as the gene for “single-handed mammoth killer.” So she would get preggers, pop out 3-4 kids, then go find a beta schlub provider to raise them.
Why are the beta schulbs good providers here? This is one point where this story breaks down, because if the alphas have all the best genes for survival, making them preferred mates, it’s unclear what’s left over for the betas that makes them such excellent choices to help raise the offspring. If betas are sterling providers, seems like that is the trait that should be subject to positive selection pressure. That is the trait that should lead to improved offspring survival, which is the only thing that evolution really selects.
But let’s move past that. Women mate with alphas, then pair up with betas for help raising the kiddos. Since, in this story, everything is genetically determined, it should only take a few generations for the “beta” allele to become extremely rare.
If it’s a dominant characteristic, when the only people reproducing are the ones expressing the recessive “alpha-domestic abuser” allele (which must be homogenous to express, due to recessiveness) a selection pressure that is SO strong that a man with even a single “beta” allele fails to reproduce would make that allele quite rare in a short period of time.
It would be essentially a fatal genetic disease, and fatal genetic diseases tend to persist only in recessive alleles. If it’s recessive, you can (in general) carry it without harm, which allows it to persist.
So if it were recessive, alphas would represent the majority. If it were dominant, alphas would represent the majority. ??? This is an oversimplification of genetic inheritance, but it gets to the point: betas should have been largely weeded out of the gene pool long, long ago.
But let’s think of it a different way. Let’s think of it as a genetic arms race, in which only alphas reproduce, and so betas are, in fact, weeded out. Then only the most alpha of alphas reproduce, and yesterday’s alphas are today’s betas. This is, after all, how we get male birds with huge elaborate tails, and male lions with manes so heavy they have a hard time catching prey. In this case, since the “alpha” trait is huge beefy muscles, I see the end of this arms race being a human species with a degree of sexual dimorphism on a similar level to elephant seals.
In this case, it also remains unclear why ALL men are not domestic abusers, since the “not a domestic abuser” trait was eliminated by evolution long ago. Seems like this line of reasoning leads to misandry! And, if the beta traits are “good provider” and “low reproductive potential,” why do betas continue to persist? Yesterday’s alphas had few to no “provider” genes, so why do “provider” genes exist today?
Hmmm, I seem to have run this vehicle into a brick wall.
I’m sure that story about his neighbour like, totally happened you guys!
WTF is a “patriarchal family”, anyways?
The only thing my morning pop sciencey mind can come up with is that if all that is the case then beta’s still being around is because they are the results of alpha genes having been mutated. So they’re mutations?
@Policy of Madness
Thank you for taking the scientific perspective. I’d like to expand on your theory a bit, though. It’s possible that the beta gene is on the X chromosome. Since males get their only X chromosome from their mothers, the mothers could be carriers and beta offspring could still be produced even when mating with an alpha.
Just another example of everything being a woman’s fault.*
*Sarcasm alert!
Bravo, Policy of Madness!
@Policy of Madness
I think I can guess at where the spearhad types mental model accommodates the existence of “betas” and that they imagine prefeminist women would have pity sex with “beta” males to gain their steady income to take care of all their babies.(Whereas the “alphas” would dump the women after impregnating them)
They then envision feminism as stepping in and letting women support themselves which evilly killed the ability of “betas” to participate.
It still fails the genetic frequency test(why are there still so many “beta” males if it was clearly the inferior strategy), but in the longer term, in more subtle ways, that they can dismiss more easily without thinking about it.
Lord, this is so screwed up that it makes it really hard to comment.
So I will comment on the only thing that kind of makes sense which I think is this:
“It’s like a shot of dope for a heroin addict, who knows that he’s taking a big risk each time he injects the drug into his arm, but can’t stop himself from doing so anyway.”
I am not a therapist, but I have heard therapists use the drug-addict analogy when they talk of self-destructive behaviour, like excessive gambling, or joining a crazy cult, or regularly falling pray of con-artists, or staying with an abusive partner.
I don’t have much experience of these things, but it seems to me some sort of explanation of why it is so hard for so many people to remove themselves from toxic situations of different kinds.
Yes, I know, we should concentrate on punishing the criminals, not on how the victims should avoid them. But it is anthropologically interesting that so many people can’t find a way out. It’s heart-breaking, I can’t get my head around it.
I’m always curious as to why they assume the so called “alpha” traits are some sort of evolutionary advantage. Human’s succeeded largely because we were able to work together as a group, every single listed “alpha” trait I’ve ever heard of would make you into someone that would just be a nightmare to have to work closely with, much less rely on in a life or death situation.
Anyone else figure we’re giving much more thought to their Biotruths(tm) than they ever did?
*reads screed about how women are only attracted to burly, violent men*
*thinks of all of the lesbians in the world who aren’t even attracted to men*
*wonders how these guys get their head’s so far up their own asses*
Wow. TFH sure has a lot of projection going on there. And for some reason, he seems to think that “tech nerds” can’t be abusive, and that big, beefy guys (I’m assuming that’s what “men who were suited to excel in the world of prehistoric times” means) are violent and abusive. This is basically just the whole “jocks vs nerds” high school thing misaplied to evolution and human sexuality and relationships.
How pathetically immature.
I’ve seen some of them point to the level of sexual dimorphism men & women do have as “proof” of their “alpha fucks, beta bucks” paradigm. I have no idea how the dimorphism in humans compares to other mammals, and they probably don’t either. They just know that human men tend to be bigger than human women and that proves something or other.
“This is basically just the whole “jocks vs nerds” high school thing misaplied to evolution and human sexuality and relationships.”
Oh absolutely. The manosphere can be boiled down to one long whine about how chicks dig assholes.
The manosphere can be boiled down to one long whine about how chicks dig assholes.
—
Well, no. cause you are missing the half of the manosphere that thinks they ARE the hot shit, and just don’t want to be bothered with the bimbos cause:cooties (or, i don’t know, something…). those “alphas” love to invite the betas into their little circle jerk, so they can teach them their wily ways of alphadogging it. or … you know…. something