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.
God dammit I’ve been ninja’d about six times.
But that doesn’t make you any less right, sunny.
Yeah, I think virtually everyone has been disappointed in love, (yes, even pretty girls in their teens and 20s!!!! omg)
I think it’s partly the fact that a lot of dudes are not socialized to express a full range of emotions so they fall back disproportionately on rage and self-serving pseudo-rationality to cope instead. “Anger is an emotion too, boys.”
Women get angry over break-ups and rejections too but I think we are less likely to have rage be our only emotional outlet.
And people don’t take women as seriously anyway, especially visibly angry ones, whereas angry men seem likelier to be rewarded for a public display of rage by people who feel like we should “try to figure out where he’s coming from.” (just like we are doing right now!)
So I think it’s one part socialization, the belief that men “aren’t emotional” so manly anger is therefore by definition logical, and one part plain old male privilege, where both men and women take men more seriously no matter what they are doing.
If we socialized boys to display a wider range of emotions, I don’t think that necessarily make much of a dent in the male privilege angle, but I could be wrong… maybe privilege is partly upheld by norms that encourage men to channel their own feelings of vulnerability outward into a ragey or faux-logical direction.
Still, I’d rather we saw more male crying in public than mass male shooting.
@. Because women aren’t going for them in the way (they think) women are going for these other guys, they conclude that they are worth less than those other guys and that the stuff about being considerate, hardworking, smart, or anything other than muscular and athletic was just so much bullshit.
Part of it is one’s aptitude for socialization – most people date inside their social circle, and if you’re bad at socializing, then you aren’t going to have a social circle to date inside of. But there’s the rub. Considerate, hardworking, smart (and not just book smart, charm, wit, humor are aspects of intelligence as well) people tend to have a good amount of friends and aquaintances of both sexes, and assume they reach minimum standards of presentability, some of those will find said Considerate, Hardworking, Smart person attractive because believe it or not, people are attracted to good personalities not so much as muscles. Granted, school hiearchies and the like muddy the waters but not everybody gets into that thing.
I think what’s happening is that these kids watched too much TV and other media where the guy formulaically gets the girl, and assumed they’d “get the girl” too, but never bothered to develop any attractive or interesting qualities about themselves or put effort into being a person people want to be around (though because of the Dunning-Krueger effect they’d never realize that) so they feel like they’re being cheated when they don’t have women beating down their door.
Amen, ceebarks (re: more crying, less shooting). It’s funny, my daughter is very prone to express herself in anger whenever she’s actually afraid. She herself says she doesn’t know why she’s so male that way . . . I don’t think it’s male or female, just one way of dealing with something uncomfortable.
lol! seems like a lot of us were thinking about the same thing.
I have to disagree with you, sunnysombrera.
It’s not that a subset of boys aren’t taught how to handle their emotions. It’s that most boys are not taught how to handle their emotions. It really takes a (preferably male) adult to go out of his way to make emotional upsets a learning experience for the boy. Our society certainly does not have any kind of formal mechanism for teaching boys how to have and deal with emotions in a healthy way.
However, there is likewise no formal mechanism for girls either. Your point that girls learn from peer groups isn’t necessarily a good one. Learning emotional intelligence from peers is not any better than learning sex ed from peers – the information your friends know and can teach you is kind of crappy. Again, it really takes a (preferably female) adult to go out of her way to teach a girl how to experience and handle emotions.
I actually think that girls suffer greatly from this peer-group learning, because they learn to never stick their necks out, never be the smart one, never be “better” than other girls lest they be punished. That sort of attitude works fine if the entire culture values conformity highly, but Western societies usually do not.
I think that Paul Elam would just like to punch women in the face a lot. I don’t think it matters what they have done to ‘deserve it’. Anyone who knows anything about violent partners know that it might be burnt toast, or being late, or having a different opinion. It’s the HITTING that’s so satisfying!
I have been pondering the pain of rejection recently, seeing as how some seem to think that it is fine to indulge in murderous rampages, or more commonly setting up blogs or uploading videos washing ones dirty linen in public. It is never NICE to be rejected, but whatever happened to getting a bit drunk, or doing something else, meeting someone else, or finding a distraction? Not wallow, rage, violence! This is DEFINITELY not about an individual, having a personal bad reaction – these are entrenched attitudes about entitlement and ownership.
POM: I’m sorry, I should have clarified better what I meant by female groups and communities. I did include “mentors” in that last post but I should have expanded – I was thinking of not just peers but female adult figures such as mothers, aunties, grandmas, or even school counsellors/teachers.
Excellent points though.
@Daeran Zemaitis, I cannot stand that “boy gets the girl” trope. Once it’s pointed out, you start seeing it everywhere and realizing how pervasive it is. Even otherwise great movies suck in my opinion if at the end random Hot Girl Prize swoons over The Hero. I go out of my way to actively avoid anything that looks like a woman is a prize at the end of a movie.
Of course it’s not male, it’s just “fight or flight”. And, since women are socialised to be more fearful and are punished if they opt for “fight”, society labels “flight” as feminine and “fight” as masculine.
I just read the below on the page here exploring Free Northerner and his….urm…opinions. The link there is to an article in Psychology Today by Dr. Gray and I believe it speaks to the “rage of the rejected” and their responses very well.
One of the responses they have is to try to legally prevent women from having civil rights, the protection of the law as far as rape and harassment goes, and the right to leave abusive men whenever they want to. It is worth a good read, so I am re-posting Kay Cee’s post here.
I’ve never encountered anyone with an obviously lower self-esteem than Elam. His self-loathing oozes out of every pore. He’s a middle-aged man stuck in a young adolescent’s emotional/sexual maturity. He’s to be pitied. Not excused, though. Millions upon millions of men have “grown up” after starting out just like him. Get a clue, Paul.
JB is just a nasty person. Sometimes, it’s just assholes.
Aha, I see.
I actually do think that boys have an equal probability of being adequately mentored. I say that preferentially a male adult should be the mentor to a boy, but women are also capable of it, if they want to take the time.
The fact is that in Western society adults frequently do not take the time, for children of any gender. We’re so focused on math-English-science in school, and parents are encouraged to also focus on math-English-science. Most boys and girls grow up into emotionally intelligent men and women anyway. I think it’s a testament to the resiliency and adaptiveness of human beings that so many kids do learn even though they are not taught.
I do it too: I’m not sure if it’s something I learned from my dad or if maybe there’s a heritable component there, maybe something completely different.
Like even when I had PPD, it manifested more as rage than depression (I’d yell and slam doors, not shake the baby, thank the FSM) and there are a lot of different times in my life when I was sad or disappointed or heartbroken but expressed it as anger or logic or indifference or comedy… despite not actually feeling much like laughing. It’s incredibly limiting and I know I’ve lost some deep connections with important people ’cause I just wouldn’t respond appropriately in challenging relationship situations, even when people reached out to me in good faith and made themselves vulnerable. 🙁
It’s hard to give up because it’s protective and you aren’t quite sure what’s down in that layer under the bravado, but it’s frighteningly tender… and a little bit itchy.
OTOH, my dad got away with a LOT more rage displays because he was a huge dude and no one wanted to get in his face when he was being really inappropriate, so it probably felt even more rewarding and protective to him. Eventually, people in your life more-or-less silently give up on you though. Cue MOAR RAGE
@vbillings
You must not go out much. Isn’t that the basic plot of every movie?
I agree. I know that was a moment of maturation for me. When I was much much younger (like 8) I got stuck on the idea of prettier girls being treated better than me. it made me very resentful, too. It wasn’t until I began to question why the attention of men was so important to me, that I began to stop being angry at the women I thought were prettier than me.
After all, they got taught the same thing I did. That a man’s attention is the most important thing in the world and trumps everything. They just happened to luck into a set of physical attributes that men liked and it wasn’t their fault they got treated differently. From there, I began to listen to stories women told me about their lives and also began to realize how fortunate, even blessed, that I had been in mine. That I hadn’t experienced nearly the amount od pain that some of them had gone through.
It began to occur to me that if you’re a pretty woman with a shitty life, all the male attention in the world is not going to make your life less shitty. Even beautiful women take their own lives. If male attention for being pretty doesn’t make your life any happier, then what purpose does it serve?
Somewhere along the way some of these people probably need to ask themselves that question? But I do understand that questioning the status quo is not their strength.
titianblue, you are so right.
Re: mentors, example-setters, there is a lot to be said for the influence of mothers on their sons in terms of modeling positive relationships and responses to women and girls.
Iwonder too, in the age of social media and instant communication, if kids are using those to look for support rather than more face to face encounters with peers and parents. I find it terribly sad in this case when the reports of his state of mind are from that area and nobody seemed to know what a crisis he was i in.
Lots of things in this reminded me of that “Confessions of a former Misogynist” blogpost – should be interesting reading for those who haven’t come across it: https://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/confessions-of-a-former-misogynist/
I took a class on Germany in the 19th Century as a junior. When describing Nietzsche, he came up with the term “heartbroken misogyny.” We need to start using this more because it describes the driving force behind much of the MRA so well.
So many good thoughts here that I (as a cis man from a middles class bacground) learns so much from. Thank you all and thank you David for mocking these MRA bastards and creating this community like message board.
If it’s true that being taught traditional gender roles limits men’s emotional intelligence and leads them into inaccurately prompted fits of anger, then that gives us a glimpse as to why these same people are so defense of these destructive, unadaptive male gender roles. They’ve had to give up SO MUCH because of these roles, it’s incredibly threatening to confront that it wasn’t worth it.
One of my lay psych theories that’s on my list of Stuff I Really Want To Research When I Get Tenure is the idea that everyone has an idiosyncratic bad feeling that they default to whenever they feel upset. They won’t get something they want (disappointment) or they won’t be able to do something they want to do (frustration) or they won’t like what someone else has (envy), but they jump to an assumption that they’re really feeling X.
For me, it’s anxiety. I notice all the time that I won’t get something I want, and I just instantly start feeling like something’s wrong and potentially dangerous somewhere…. even though that has nothing to do with the situation I’m actually in. I have a friend who defaults to guilt. My favorite: a colleague and friend admits that she actually defaults to existential angst.
But yeah: Anger. “I’m feeling bad! Therefore, I’m feeling angry!” I think it’s plausible.
I am happy to see this subject raised. There are psychosexual underpinnings to misogyny, to sexism, to violence against women, to harassment of women online – it seems likely that those are the same underpinnings of the rage that propels the MRM. This should be explored more.
Speaking of which, you know who was an awesome mentor a lot of kids had for emotional intelligence? Mr. freakin’ Rogers. One of his big, big things was the two-part lesson: 1. Feelings are important, everyone has them, and you should know what they are when you have them. 2: But expressing your feelings can be either good or bad, depending on where and how you do it, so be aware of the way your feelings make you act.