Was Marysville school shooter Jaylen Fryberg trying to exact revenge on a girl who had rejected him? Various news accounts suggest that Fryberg was reeling from a recent breakup; a number of angry, anguished, and frustratingly enigmatic recent comments on Fryberg’s Twitter account seem to back this up.
So it may be that the shootings on Friday were yet another reworking of an old story.
It’s no secret that many men, for an assortment of reasons, react badly and often violently to romantic and sexual rejection. This can range from self-described “nice guys” of OkCupid sending vicious messages to women who say no all the way to angry men who stalk and harass and sometimes kill ex-wives and girlfriends. Women who leave abusive relationships often suffer greater violence at the hands of exes unwilling to let them go.
I’ve written before of the striking ways that Men’s Rights Activism recapitulates the logic of domestic abuse; it’s no coincidence that so much MRA “activism” consists of harassment of individual women. So the question naturally follows: does the rage that drives so many MRAs come from the same dark place in the psyche as the rage that so many romantically and sexually rejected feel towards their exes?
Think of the fury many divorced MRAs feel towards their exes and women at large. Think of the self-pitying rage of “nice guys” MRAs in their teens and twenties who feel they’ve been unfairly “friendzoned” by stuck-up women.
As I pondered the tragedy in Marysville, I found myself thinking again about a disturbing short story written by A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam several years ago (and which I posted about recently).
In the story, you may recall, a jilted husband tells the other men in an anger management group session just what had landed him there. His story, as rendered by Elam, is a melodramatic and often mawkish tale of a man betrayed by a narcissistic “hypergamous” wife who left him for his business partner while he had been out of town at the funeral for his father. Oh, and she stole all his money, to boot. (Elam is not what you’d call a subtle writer.)
When the story’s hero finally confronts his ex, whom he finds ad his business partner’s house, she comes to the door in a nightie and tells him she left him because he just wasn’t cutting it in the sack. Then she makes a point of refusing to kiss him goodnight (and goodbye) because, she tells him sadistically, he probably wouldn’t like “the taste of another man’s cock on her lips.”
And so, the hero tells the other angry men in his group, he punched her in the nose so hard he broke it.
It’s clear Elam identifies wholly and completely with the hero, and we are supposed to see his punch as a form of righteous justice administered to his sadistic, emasculating ex.
There are a lot of angry divorced men in the MRM – including some with several divorces in their past. The standard MRA explanation is that these men come to the Men’s Rights movement after being “raped” — their word, not mine – in divorce court, or kept apart from their children by angry exes.
But I don’t think that’s it. Many of the angriest don’t even have any children. I suspect that the rage they feel is more like the rage of Elam’s hero – a rage borne out of a deep sense of sexual humiliation and the loss of control over the women who have rejected and abandoned them.
The anger of many younger MRAs seems to have a similar psychosexual source. These are the young men who rage against “friendzoning” and wax indignant about “false rape accusations” and “yes means yes.” In their mind, women are the “gatekeepers” of sex, and this frustrates and sometimes enrages them.
On some level they feel that women are collectively depriving them of the sex that they deserve, and they feel resentful they have to, in their mind at least, jump through so many hoops to get it. Some, I suspect, think that there’s no way they can actually “get” sex without cutting a few corners, consent-wise, and resent feminists for making this harder for them.
The self-righteous rage of the rejected is a dangerous thing. It’s dangerous when it’s directed at individual women. And it’s dangerous when it’s directed at women at large.
@ KirbyWarp
“way back John described the ‘threat’ he felt his child was in as a dire peril by describing his ex as an ‘alienator’.”
That’s right. I am glad to receive a comment on something I said for a change, rather than words somebody else has tried to put into my mouth. Thank you.
“And red flags spontaneously sprung out of the ground all across the land.”
Karen Woodall told the class at one of her Family Separation Clinic workshops I attended, that the prevalence of fathers who attempt to alienate their children from their mothers is roughly equal to the prevalence of mothers who attempt to alienate their children from their fathers. The chances are that there are mothers here who have, and whose children have, been subjected to this type of abuse. They ought to recognise the problem of an alienating parent easily enough.
The only possible “red flag” is that it challenges any entrenched notion in which people are emotionally invested, that alienation is a type of abuse that men inflict upon women, but not vice versa.
The workshop had quite about 25% female attendence, even though this particular one was hosted by the charity Families Need Fathers. The prevalence of alienating behaviour isn’t gendered, apparently, although the official recognition of the problem, and the efforts to combat it, does seem to be gendered.
You, or at least those who have experienced parental alienation, might find the following post (not one of mine), helpful:
Alienation as a gendered experience
Karen Woodall
http://karenwoodall.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/alienation-as-a-gendered-experience/
@cassandrakitty, I was more reminded of the dude in the later Poltergeist sequels.
Awww, John still thinks he has things to teach us. Isn’t that adorable?
Well, creepytrollAllman, you got the validation you wanted here (feminists are evil and don’t care about you), so please fuck off.
@ SarahRocco
“I am asking you to back up your claim that women are more likely to get custody in all cases”
I haven’t made that claim.
John’s basic claim is that he IS NOT ANGRY HOW DARE YOU SAY HE IS ANGRY HE WOULD TOTES BE FEMINIST IF THE FEMINISTS ADDRESSED HIS PERSONAL VENDETTA, ABOUT WHICH HE IS NOT ANGRY.
Which is obvious bullshit, but then John thinks he’s clever and civil. Probably because most of the people he’s ever spent time with have not been allowed to swear at him.
What you know, John, is the possible truth of one woman and her attitude about whether or not to end her pregnancy. You do NOT, and cannot, know the truths of any other women. As I have accompanied a number of women to the clinics for abortions, I do know that each and every one of them agonized over the decision. And now the religious right wants to take contraception away. Which is better – to end a pregnancy or to prevent one? According to many of the MRA’s and religious right, neither. Every woman should HAVE to have every child a man wants her to have. I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, believe that an embryo is a person. Even the Catholic church, until the late 19th century, agreed that whether or not a pregnancy could be terminated depended on the quickening – usually 4 to 5 months along.
And I still maintain that it has to be, in the end, a woman’s choice. Only she can know the circumstances of her life, the state of her readiness and willingness to be a mother, and her general health.
I remember, as a teenager, reading very frequently in the newspapers the stories of women who had died from self-induced or back alley abortions. Many of these women had already borne as many children as their bodies could handle but, due to restrictions on birth control, the illegality of medically safe abortions and the fact that women were considered the legal property of their husbands and could not say no to sex, they died.
You speak in glowing terms of patriarchy. Try to live as a woman under the rule of a man. My own grandmother – a loving and kind woman – told me that it would be better for me to be a highly paid mistress than a wife…and she loved her husband. When I asked her why, she told me that a woman is always the property of her father first and her husband for the rest of her life. If I wanted to be free to choose who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live, never marry.
Oh yes, you did, Johnny.
From your first post here:
Emphasis mine.
@ WeirWoodTreeHugger
“his ex, despite being young did in fact know her own mind and didn’t acquiesce to his glorious patriarchal manliness”
Wrong again. Please stop guessing.
Thanks sparky, I’m on my phone right now and couldn’t c/p.
John, what Sparky quoted from you: how is that not saying that the courts favor women even when fathers bother to ask for custody?
I really have my doubts about parental alienation even being a thing. I think there are a lot of people out there who basically have incredibly inadequate relationship skills, resulting in broken relationships with their partners, (which of course is purely other other person’s fault.) But then they are surprised when their poor relational skills also result in poor connections with their kids later.
Let’s just say, I’ve got a difficult parent who thinks it’s the other parent’s fault that the (adult) kids don’t call or visit, but the difficult parent has strained even their extended family ties past the breaking point, due to shockingly poor behavior over at least a ten year period. Everyone in the family has struggled with the decision to limit or cut ties to this destructive person, but none of us has been brainwashed by some diabolical mastermind.
You can’t tell that to a difficult person, though, and not expect a hailstorm of abuse. So everyone just quietly slips away
@ weirwoodtreehugger
“This is a blog about mocking misogyny. It’s not a forum for respectful debate. It’s not a social justice education space. We mock misogyny. The top of the page makes that very clear. If you come here spouting MRA nonsense, expect to get mocked. If you can’t deal with it, by all means, leave.”
LOL! Thank you!
You simply MUST watch this. Immediately. Everybody watch it, please!
John, no one would deny that parents sometimes do very stupid things when acting out in anger/hatred toward an ex, and some of the stupidest things they ever do is use any children involved as tools of revenge. It does happen, and it’s not the exclusive domain of mothers or fathers.
That said, I doubt that the “alienation” you’ve experienced from your child is so simple as his mother practicing a policy of alienation. Your blogs, past and present, provide compelling evidence that you do and/or say things that quite reasonably have resulted in an imposed lack of access to your child. You have blamed this “alienated” situation on “the state” and your ex-girlfriend’s (obliquely suggested) lack of mental stability, but you really should turn that gaze upon yourself. Undoubtedly that won’t happen, but there it is.
Yeah, John’s problem is pretty clear: his view of himself will not allow him to accept even the possibility that he might actually not be the best choice to raise the kid. That is not even conceivable, therefore vast feminist conspiracy. But he’s totes not angry about it!
Oh, you mean Julian Beck, who played Cain? The guy who stood outside the door calling “Let Me INNNNNNNNN!!!!
(shudder) He was so wonderfully creepy!
John: We identified your posts as a misogynistic crock of shit right from the first paragraph. We don’t need to guess about things that scream out from every sentence you write, even though you don’t seem to realize it. We were willing to tolerate you as a chew toy for our amusement for a while, but you have become extremely tedious and boring, constantly repeating things that we have heard hundreds of times and rejected decades ago, so it is time for you to go pester someone else with your puerile argumentation.
Aroint thee, bilgewater!
It really is a shame that holy water only works on vampires, not assholes.
This is a very sketchy first thought, but my immediate response to such things as the Buffy reference is that it slides very easily into shaming suicidal people, and has to be done really well to prevent it becoming something like “Everyone has as much pain as you do and nobody ELSE here is suicidal.” Sorry to be so sketchy but I may go back down that path myself if my life can’t regain some kind of normalcy soon.
Exactly. At least he was just an actor, and not a modern personification of creepiness, like this troll is.
Since feminists spend so much time shaming men for their dating preferences and even going so far as describing them as oppressive I would say rejected women form a quite big part of feminism as well. The total rejection of all theories of sexual selection seem to hint at that as well. as does all the talk about oppressive beauty ideals and gender norms (which is mostly what’s considered attractive in each sex).
Being rejected make both men and women angry, it’s just that they join different movements. Here MRA:s and feminists have something in common.
“I shall have to leave soon, because I am becoming the focus of too much attention, much of it unreasononingly hostile. There is a limit to how much I am going to able to teach or to learn anything here.”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!DON’TLEAVEMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hm. As a feminist I’ve always accepted people can and will reject me for whatever reason and that I’m not entitled to an explanation why or a second thought or them examining what influences caused them to reject me. I can and will do the same to others.
Never met anyone who identifies as a feminist because the quarterback won’t date them.
Never met a feminist who wrote a manifesto about how they were going to go shoot up a frat house because the young men who lived in it wouldn’t date them either.
@ Josh
+1
That +1 from John makes your post troo, Josh!
(No, Josh, it really doesn’t.)