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.
I thought (and so I did it because I have excellent impulse control) that the addition of vanilla caramels might be good and it was. Those little square ones? I minced them and then distributed them on top of the apple mixture just before rolling. I used 8 candies. Fucking glorious.
The things I do for you in my test kitchen…
You are truly a shining light of hope in a benighted landscape… (must buy vanilla caramels tomorrow)
My friend [insert clever codename here] and I call various things “health food” as per the totally real and not made up at all (ie pulled from our asses) science of food science. I told her I had learned that one could add apples to cinnamon rolls and we both said “HEALTH FOOD” because we are adults.
It’s a wonder that our hearts can pump the butter through our veins with all the “health food” we eat.
Aaaand the troll has been banned!
THE DARK LORD HAS SPOKEN
*throws confetti*
kids name is still in the messiah’s last comment, can we get that edited?
Was also quoted by WWTH.
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/27/is-the-mens-rights-movement-driven-by-the-rage-of-the-rejected/comment-page-6/#comment-626803
Hope my link works right.
Yeah, can we try our best to protect the kid from the stupidity of his shithead parent?
@kittehserf
http://i.imgur.com/ckPxeAN.gif
PRAISE BOOTSY!!!! (no, really. praise Bootsy NOW)
Praise David, too, in this case, and the judge.
not joking here (for once) – Yes, cassandrakitty. Praise them both.
Praise them all!
I think I binned the comment where troll named his son. I chucked about three of his most recent teal deer in the trash.
Kitteh, you got the original comment where John the martyr named his son, but WWTH blockquoted it. Kids name is still posted. Can you please edit or delete WWTH’s comment. The link I put in is to that specific comment where “I’m not an MRAhonest” John’s sons name is highly visible.
And thank you for all the work you do here. You are appreciated.
Took a look at Allman’s blog – agreed that all a third party agency or judge would need to do is read it to conclude that he’s unfit to care for a child. He also has a woefully obvious sock-puppet guest-blogger “gaggeddad” whose post surely skates awfully close to contempt of court by describing family court proceedings – two year-old’s contact stopped with “homophobic” dad.
I know the request was pages ago but
Sloth rental service: http://www.benaysanimals.net/exotic_animals.htm
Also, I finally figured out why John is here – he’s making a late run at Troll of the Year.
Shaun, thanks for that note! I’ll go find it.
Kim you are my hero!
kitteh, thank you so much. <3
When I goggled, I found someone else asking the same thing. So, you’re not alone 🙂
@tigtog, I’m gonna donotlink for the comment section alone on that piece. Ugh. Trigger warning for homophobic nastiniess and ‘facts’ pulled from the sky of backwards land. Creepy John is creepy.
http://www.donotlink.com/cac3
Honestly, I think a lot of it is that their worldview is based a lot on the media they consume (due to their lack of genuine human contact) so they assume the world is the way the media presents it. The movies, games and comics designed to pander to them tell them that they deserve a supermodel girlfriend who has sex with them all the time solely because they exist (look at all the stories that end with the power fantasy protagonist ‘winning’ the girl).
The thing that stuck with me from Elliot Roger’s Youtube video was the part where he says that college is a giant sex party that he wasn’t invited to. He got that idea from the American media (who always present it that way) and he just couldn’t accept that life wasn’t what the TV told him.
That’s a bug, not a feature. Fixes have been available for some time.
Late to this, but I have to say that as a white British male only a generation or so younger than John, if I found him skin-crawlingly creepy I can’t imagine what effect he must have had on the rest of you.
And not just creepy but utterly oblivious. I doubt he’s ever seriously put himself mentally in the shoes of another person in his entire life.
It was the passivity of Rodger’s “manifesto” that I found most striking. Given the way he’d write about everything else in laceratingly masochistic detail, it strains credulity to the limit to assume that he wouldn’t have described a rejection from a woman at similarly self-pitying length – but I don’t recall a single one.
Similarly, he seems to have made no effort to broaden his cultural interests beyond passive consumption of whatever the current mainstream craze happened to be at the time – [i]World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones[/i] and the like. So if mistake number one was never to make the first move, mistake number two was not to make himself interesting in any way, despite living in a world of privilege (wealth, travel, you name it) that’s completely denied to the vast majority. Based on the evidence presented in his “manifesto”, who would want to go out with him, except for the kind of stereotypical ulterior gold-digging motives that apparently all women favour?
John Allman, have you not noticed that you’ve been banned? Kittehserf announced this last night and nothing you’ve posted since has appeared in the comments. Move on.
Kittehserf, thanks for removing his son’s name from the comments.
Awwww…And here I still have a bit of teething to do.
(Gives an enthusiastic one-finger wave bye-bye)