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.
John is getting creepier and creepier with every post. If he’s not a troll, I genuinely fear for his family.
I think he is mainly afflicted, to use a phrase coined by another Mammotheer, with a poor grasp of how the world really works, along with a consuming nostalgia for a better time that never was.
In an actual patriarchy, I doubt you’d have any rights at all to a child born out of wedlock, so I don’t see how that solves your problem WRT your youngest child.
“I believe in equality. Obviously that means that I am against abortion.”
Good. Get a fucking uterus and have many babies it’s your body you can do what you want with it. But understand that your beliefs create rights only to the barriers of your own body. Glad I could sort that out for you. Buh Bye!
John Allman,
In your time of glorious patriarchy, both my great-aunts suffered abuse at the hands on their husbands. One was able to get out and supported her children–who are happily married with good jobs–by working as a teacher. The other died of kidney failure from being beaten so often, and it sure as hell wasn’t a paradise for her children either.
Then, like now, happiness in marriage is dependent and good luck and good sense–but under patriarchy, there are no second chances for women to get out if their luck or sense failed them. (And lets not discuss the problems with expecting everyone to get married in their early twenties and what that does to the chances of finding someone you are compatible with.)
o.o I really don’t get how someone can describe what they consider a wonderful and idyllic childhood and in the same breath decide they are not priviliged at all…
@ Sparky
“you’re here, on a post about mass shooters and the sense of enraged and aggrieved entitlement that drives them and how a lot of men in the MRM also display this sense of enraged and aggrieved entitlement – and you’re talking about how your ex-wife and the courts are screwing you over”
That’s right. To refute a generalisation, one only needs to provide a single counter-example. (That’s the trouble with making generalisations. They are that easily refuted.) David attempted to “argue” (although it was more insinuation than argument really) that the “rage of the rejected” motivation of mass shooter was also the “driving force” behind support for the MRM. So I explained that the “rage of the rejected” wasn’t MY driving force, and said what MY driving force had been, that had caused me, on one occasion, to put my hand in my pocket, to support one MRA site, once. QED.
People are reading a LOT into my comments that isn’t there.
I know the problem I’ve got. I’m not saying that the MRM provides a fix for that problem. I’m not even saying that feminism is my problem’s main or only cause. What I am saying is that mine is a common problem and a serious problem, and that people with that problem do find the MRM, and possibly help to “drive” the MRM, to solve that problem. They might well be deceived. But that isn’t what I am denying. I am not even denying that “the rage of the rejected” that motivated one mass shooter once, might also be A driving force behind the MRM. I am PROVING that it isn’t THE driving force. The ONLY driving force. That really is all I came here to say.
What I’m getting is the sort of response that is found all over the internet, whenever anybody steps out of the groupthink consensus of a corner of the internet they have strayed into. This is generating more heat than light.
I absolutely agree that my point of view expressed could be flawed. I agree that all the points of view that are obviously flawed, attributed straw-man style to me, speculatively, are flawed. But, however flawed my point of view might be, it definitely isn’t the same point of view of the mass shooter. It isn’t “the rage of the rejected”.
The MRM exists for a reason. I’m not telling you what that reason is. I am telling you that it isn’t as simple as David made it out to be, that the reason for the MRM is the same as the reason for the mass shooter. There’s more to it than that, even if I cannot explain what that is to everybody’s satisfaction. I am saying that David is wrong, not that I, or MRM, is right.
John Allman
That…you…”entrusted” your “seed” to “in good faith.” That’s how you view the creation of child? “Entrusting seed” to a woman so she can, what, provide you with your property? The end product of your biological matter, which is yours?
You may want to rethink the wording there, Johnny, because that is deeply creepy.
As it happens, I’m several years older than you. It may surprise you to learn that my husband and I have been blissfully, joyfully married for almost 40 years. And there’s no patriarchy in sight.
We’ve alternated at who earned more than whom. He’s the one who taught our kids to cook. We “shared” caring for the kids when they were small, though he got the short end of the stick because I was too unwell to do what we’d originally thought would be a fair share. Our children embarrass us by bragging about how marvelous we were as parents and about us as “soulmates”.
However, this only happened because both of us were able to get out of our previous, very unhappy, marriages. If we’d both been imprisoned in the marry once, you can’t get out of it, arrangements favoured by this patriarchy you think so highly of, none of our happiness or those happy children would have been possible.
So, phooey to you.
No, Johhny, we can all read the rage in your posts. We can all read the rage against your ex-wife and the “state” that’s conspiring to keep you down. You’re not an exception, you’re an illustration.
@John Allman
You still haven’t explained what prompted the “good feminist/bad feminist” distinction, if you acknowledge that you aren’t qualified to judge that and do not have the authority to do so.
I have noticed this evasion. You’re saying things like:
But then proceeding in a manner that demonstrates no entertainment of this possibility at all.
John,
‘Cause you say you do? That seems like a pretty solid give-away.
What a teal deer!
I am only trying to explain to you that not every man who hates feminism and endorses the MRAs is motivated by rejection by women.
You do have a problem. You’re a misogynist jerk, and your ex is afraid that will rub off on your son. You prove this every time you open your mouth. You might stop digging that hole.
(I meant the second line to be a tl;dr of his previous post.)
“If he’s not a troll”
Of course I’m a troll. A troll is just somebody who posts content that he realises might annoy somebody, where the person who would be annoyed would be likely to read it.
One cannot respond to a post like David’s without risking annoying somebody, even if that’s only a lurker who never posts, but comes along to just spy silently on “the enemy”, a read-only subscriber, and then blogs somewhere else about how awful (for example) this blog is. Is that what you’d prefer?
The alternative to trolling, is to restrict one’s comments to online communities with whose groupthink one is in sympathy. That way, nobody would learn anything from anybody else.
One man’s troll, is another’s refreshingly original thinker.
My dad is sometimes referred to, jokingly, as “The Powerful Patriarch who Must Be Obeyed”.
We shorten it to “Powerpuff” because getting little honorary grand-baby (baby of a close friend and the closest my folks will get to having a grand baby anytime soon) to pronounce the full thing is a losing proposition, and “Powerpuff” is at least feasible.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to look at patriarchy theory and say “Yay! Patriarchy rules, because Father Dearest Powerpuff!”
I’m lucky to have an awesome powerpuff, who doesn’t actually have to be strictly obeyed, even though he’s never given any order that my mother would have disagreed with. Patriarchy would only work well if EVERY POTENTIAL POWERPUFF was as extremely awesome as my father. Otherwise, you end up with lots of abusive powerpuffs and a bunch of women and kids who can’t get away because patriarchy.
Then again, if every potential powerpuff was like my dad, we wouldn’t actually have a patriarchy.
Hm….
If anything John here is proving David right. He’s displaying a version of aggrieved entitlement over not having the ‘proper’ level of ownership over his son. He’s trying to force control over women and children in his life to help him relive or regain a lost sense of misplaced nostalgia. Regardless of what they want or how they feel about it. The fact that he glorifies a blatantly oppressive system while simultaneously insisting that he has no privilege makes it clear that he has no concern for the feelings and experiences of others.
It’s the same desire to control women(and children) that causes men and boys to lash out violently when that control is challenged or questioned. Even more so when the person challenging men’s’ control is a woman, as was the case with the school shooter as well as with John.
Seriously, this guy is serving as an interesting case study and is correlating extremely closely with the concepts I’m reading about today. It’s like he’s reading along in the same book and getting ideas about what creepy controlling behavior he can exhibit next.
“One man’s troll, is another’s refreshingly original thinker.”
Says dude who states everything we’ve heard eleventy billion times before. What a refreshing constant!
John, I can see where you tried to do that, but the fact is, you also came here attempting to get us to agree with your point of view and feel sorry for you for your story. If your story is just as you say, I do have sympathy for your son’s situation. I react with skepticism about your story because people lie, to themselves and to others.
But you also came into a feminist space and tried to convince experienced, knowledgeable feminists, feminists who actually know and understand feminism, that your one poor source encompassed the entirety of the feminist movement. You are wrong about feminism, by the way. If you follow the link I gave you to feminism 101, you’ll see that.
LOL he thinks glorifying patriarchy is refreshingly original!
“One man’s troll, is another’s refreshingly original thinker.”
Since we haven’t seen the tiniest shred of original thought in your posts — only a mishmash of obvious statements and outrageous misrepresentations — I guess we know how to choose between troll and refreshingly original thinker.
“The light side of feminism?” Methinks somebody has been watching Star Wars a bit too much. Though it’s kinda fun to imagine us as the Jedi (with mind control powers, of course). I have an urge to drop my voice down to Darth Vader levels and say “Come to the Dark Side! We have cookies.”
On the original topic, if you think Paul Elam’s writing is icky, try checking out Chuck’s new novel where all the women disappear from public life, because they’re busy with their fantastic new vibrators.
No, I am not making that up.
In fact, one of the opening scenes is about a woman character being raped by frustrated men, while the other frustrated men stand by and watch. Why? Because she’s one of the few women ventures out on the street, not having a vibrator and all.
No, I am still not making that up.
Yeah, it’s supposed to be absurdist satire, but there’s depressing evidence that Chuck really believes that men are marginalized, that feminists are evil, etc.
What makes it all the more depressing is that Paul Elam is a fringe figure, while Chuck is a famous, well paid author. *sigh*
>> You still haven’t explained what prompted the “good feminist/bad feminist” distinction <<
It was actually one of the kinder comments, to the effect "not all feminists are like that" that prompted me to adopt that distinction, as a paraphrase of theirs. One MRA approach seems to be to expose the more vicious things that are said by those who purport to speak for feminism, and to allow people to infer that that is all there is to feminism. I was attempting to concede that feminism was not necessarily as monolithic as the rather negative MRA view of what feminism in its entirety is. Please don't read into this that I have clear-cut preconceived ideas as to who are the good feminists, and who are the bad ones. I don't.
“Oh, why why don’t women love me like my family did when I was a small boy” is… not particularly original, sorry.
QFMFT