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.
Seahorses! I shall now think only happy thoughts for the rest of the night…
[From OP]
I think this is more on point than most anything else. I’ve given this a bit of thought, so I’m going to do something I do rarely – try a concise, reasonable post that makes sense.
I’m not sure that most MRA sentiment is about rejection as much as it’s about aggrevied pride.
The rejection of women isn’t neccesarily the point. Feeling that what they offer isn’t accepted is more a symptom of their anger than the cause, I think. The mental flip isn’t that “Why don’t these women love me?” it’s “Why do these women make such bad choices?“.
In the “real world”, the one not corrupted by feminism and socialist marxism and liberalist fools and blue pill betas, women would be making the right choice of spending their time dating these people. They’d give them attention, sexual availability and presence. All this “Progressive” stuff is an aberation that’s twisting the “real world” into a dystopic hellscape. See hypergamy, socialism, “The Decline”, dark enlightenment and so on.
A lot of red pill stuff is about how all of culture lies to you to keep you in a subordinate position reliant on women. It’s a neat hijack of the old “Opiate of the masses” conversation, so instead of “capitalism” or “Socialism” or “the king” it’s “evil women who don’t want you to know how the world actually works”. So what you get is people who make that claim, then try to set out to A) prove it and B) repeat it a lot to other people to mark up their point, while censoring everyone else because everyone else is ideologically compromised. Hence the “Never ask a woman what she wants” and “Feminist always lie”; it’s not that these people can’t say useful stuff, it’s that these people are literally the enemy who are out to destroy you.
They aren’t being rejected by other people. They’re being denied by unthinking herd-drones of a monolithic culture that censors them for “being men” and wants to “Destroy masculinity (and monogamy and culture and western society and the family)”.
Which is why when trolls show up here (or on Reddit) and make claims that women never worked in mines, never did real jobs, should be in the kitchen, all men want sex, and women only go for bad boys, they get angry or confused when someone contradicts them. Because we’re obviously lying, right? We’re clearly only putting on a polite facade to maintain the affinity of our feminist peers, and if we were really real people, we wouldn’t actually care about “intersectionality” or “racism” or “income inequality” or anything else.
And because they refuse to acknowledge the validity of these concepts, and think on how their actions impact the lives of others, they get angry and confused when they get rejected. In their mind, they’ve done nothing wrong, because they aren’t wrong, so the rest of the world is clearly out to cheat them.
Also, when norms change and things become different, and people actually start talking about priviledge or power differentials or how some women want sex and some don’t and how men don’t have to be X or Y or Z, these people feel like something is being taken away from them. Because they tend to identify with a very limited set of actions and acceptable definitions.
Name me one guide to being an alpha that doesn’t mean testosterone or “Going to the gym to get jacked, ’cause that’s what men do!”.
In order for someone to be upset by being rejected, they have to consider that those who reject them are capable of doing so.When people reject MRA’s, the MRAs get angry. There’s that old Heartise post about the viceral gut level loathing and distaste he feels when looking at happy couples in the park?
They aren’t angry people being rejected by women, they’re angry people being denied access to a pivotal part of their assumed right, and they get angry because who the fuck are these fucking feminists to tell them they can’t have X or Y or Z?
It’s not rejection, it’s aggrived pride.
( In my opinion, anyhow)
@WWTH
Re UK abortions, yes, it’s really just a formality. It’s pretty hard to argue that a woman’s mental and physical health wouldn’t be more at risk if she is forced to carry to term.
And yes, for Irish women who can afford to, we’re a place to come and have the needed abortion. There are a number of charities supporting them.
The death of Savita Halappanavar hit a lot of UK women hard.
@Fibi: I think the logic is fairly easy to figure out.
(1) All Real Men(TM) are irresistibly attractive to women and entitled to their sexual favors.
(2) I am a Real Man(TM).
Therefore, I am irresistibly attractive to women and entitled to their sexual favors.
Oh, but clearly the women aren’t finding me irresistibly attractive and showering me with their sexual favors. What could be wrong? Since I know that (1) is unquestionably true, it can only mean that there is some evil conspiracy which is depriving me of what I am clearly entitled to. (Remember that “entitled” means that I deserve it just for being what I am.) But what if it is (2) that is wrong? What if the reason that women are not showering me with their sexual favors is that I am not good enough at being a Real Man(TM), a beta rather than an alpha? No, no, no, I cannot accept that thought (though it will always remain as a hobgoblin to seep into my thoughts in unguarded moments). So, yes, it must be a perverse, wicked conspiracy which is leading all these women astray — and now they even want to deprive me of my beloved pixelated boobs.
Most people who have some understanding of how the world works realize that (1) is wrong, even ludicrously so. It seems to me that most of the greater MRA world buys into (1) rather strongly, and that sense of entitlement enhanced by the hidden fear that they are not really good at being Real Men(TM), causes them to buy into the evil conspiracy (i.e., wicked feminism) theory.
@fibinachi, @GrumpyOldMan, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.
Besides, isn’t it weird how these people always seem to be the same ones who moan about stuff like ‘everyone gets a trophy just for existing these days!’ and ‘women expect respect just for existing, the fiends!’ when they themselves seem to see the respect and affection of a hot, subservient woman who ‘knows her place’ as something they’re entitled to just because. And since women won’t give them that, they’re bitches and whores and there’s a great big matriarchal conspiracy to prevent them from getting what they’re owed.
@ Shaun DarthBatman Day
“feminism really isn’t about men at all”
Define “about”, please.
You see, my experience of feminism so far has been entirely of women complaining about men, or at least about phenomena for which men are blamed. Apart from complaining about men (including the phenomena for which are blamed), I haven’t yet witnessed anything else at all that feminism involves.
Is women complaining about men something that is “about” the *women* doing the complaining (and therefore not at all “about” the men)? Or is women complaining “about” men actually “about” the men about whom the women are complaining? We trolls need to know what you mean by the word “about”, simply to become able do a reality check on your claim that “feminism really isn’t about men at all”. Might you be able please to femsplain that to us what the word “about” means, in femspeak?
What are you still doing here? Don’t you have some hydrants to piss on or something?
I hope John keeps whatever promises he may have made to the court better than he keeps the promise he made to us that he was going to go away.
Go away, John.
He is just JAQing off now, wanker.
Maybe the mods should help him out with that whole pissing off thing he isn’t very good at.
Oh no. The trolls are still here.
http://ohbriggsy.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/poltergeist_theyre_back1-300×178.png
John, your visits here have made us understand very well why your ex won’t let you mentally abuse you son. You DO understand that you’re getting exactly as far with us as you did with her, and for the same reasons. What part of “bugger off” do you not understand?
John, you are on a thread about Zoe and Gia, both of whom are children, being dead at the hands of a guy who claimed to be their friend. This is neither the time nor the place to reduce objecting to the murder of our children to “women complaining about men”.
I think that the part where other people don’t have to do what he wants is the bit John is struggling with.
Go away. Bugger off. Piss off. Shoo. Scram. Skedaddle. Leave. Vamoose. Beat it. Get out of here. Be off with you. Fuck the hell off.
You seem to have a problem with words, but you should know what at least one of those means, right?
And, as we all know, Johnny’s experiences with things are objective, universal truths.
Forgive me for jumping in, but what you say you have experienced about feminism does not jibe with anything I or anyone I know to be what feminism is about.
You say all we do is complain about and blame men. That I find particularly funny, since feminist women and men have been working together for almost sixty years (in this wave) to end war, create equality in the home and the workplace, find real world solutions to the problems of poverty and the despair and crime that accompany it, create safe places for victims of domestic violence and counsel those, female and male, who have been raped. And those are just for starters. The modern environmental movement grew out of feminism and is supported by feminists. And women even agitated to be included in the draft, if it should ever be re-instated, because many of us feel that it is unfair to ask only men to risk their lives in times of war, which we would rather their not be. An early feminist poster protesting the Vietnam war had a picture of a lovely young woman saying “Girls say yes to boys who say no.” I really liked that one.
You either have some peculiar ideas about feminism or feminists in the UK come from another planet. We have not always been as successful as we would like, but we, women and men, do try.
I think it might be time for a troll challenge. John has to make 5 consecutive posts in a row that don’t contain any anecdata about his experiences. 5 posts that can’t be about him. Think he can do it? I don’t.
Wow. Every time I think that John has reached the bottom of his barrel of toxic personality, he proves me wrong by going lower.
Fellow mammotheers, it’s totally unfair for any of us to ask John to spend 5 minutes on Google. That’s misandry! We must give him several days in which he can bore with us with a hundred teal deers first!
Can someone please just mod the evil bastard out of existence? He’s never going to go away on his own.
Which is probably part of the reason why he’s not allowed to see his son.
… If the phenomena I can blame on men is among others stuff like “denies me access to education”, “wants me to do nothing but raises babies” and “Assume my choices of clothing or interaction are theirs to decide”, my complaints about men is pretty warantes :b
@Jenny, GrumpyOldMan,
Yep. Also, Paul Elam’s story there isn’t about rejection (it was the characters wife, yeah?). It’s about the lack of control and the ceding of power over an object to another entity, which is embarrasing and shameful, a mark against the character in the eyes of the
other menworld.His property didn’t reject him, his property rebelled against the rightfum order of things.
LOL he thinks it’s nasty here, that’s adorable. *pats John’s lil head* Dear boy, if it’s nasty here, you’ve had a remarkably sheltered life. Consider me surprised. No really, I’m deeply surprised.
Bring those numbers whenever you please, there’s no time limit at all. I’ll give you the rest of your life to find them. But please, don’t come back until you do.
” How nastier could this mob make things for me than they already are?”
Not nasty enough, apparently, so far. We must all try harder.
I can do that.
John, you look like a vampire bureaucrat. Are you in fact one of the undead, or is it just your tedious personality that helps to give that impression?