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 don’t think you’re a troll, John. I kinda feel sorry for you, TBH, after reading your blog a litte more. I have no opinion of your legal case with your youngest child since obviously no one here can know all the facts. But you fathered him out of wedlock in the latter half of your 50s… even in the best case scenario that arrangement was always unlikely to play out like a midcentury watercolor fantasy, and I suspect your unwillingness to deal with that makes things much more difficult than they’d otherwise be. If you are a fit parent, I sincerely hope the courts will see to it that you get equal custody or whatever they call it in the UK. If not I hope they keep him safe no matter how mad it might make you.
Personally, I don’t really care to bring Big Patriarchy back ’cause I think it largely depends on people lying to themselves, and each other, nonstop: about everything from religious belief to sexual orientation to career aspirations to domestic violence and beyond. To my 80s-born ear, that sounds totally, totally exhausting. And for what? Conformity to a dream someone else concocted 50 years ago? No thanks.
Bullshit.
Again you are talking out of both sides of your mouth, confessing to ignorance with one line of text, but signaling clearly that your internal logic does not concede to any ignorance at all with another.
I really like how you “attempt to concede” that a bunch of dudes who hate feminists with the burning hatred of a thousand suns might not be representing feminism accurately or giving you the whole story …
… and then the next second you give us this:
You’ve clearly internalized the MRA notion that it is feminism’s job to look out for men’s problems, and feminists who concentrate on women’s problems are doing feminism wrong.
Considering how well men who challenge custody do in court, when a dude sues for custody and doesn’t get it, there’s a very strong likelihood it’s because he shouldn’t have it.
I’ve yet to encounter a feminist arguing “Women should have default custody of children”. I’ve seen lots of “The parent more capable of providing the child with day to day care and love should have custody of children”. Never that other notion though.
Since John seems to think that all it takes to refute generalizations is one example, I’ll gladly donate my story.
My dad insists to this day that mom turned me against him. I was the alienated child, mom was the alienating parent.
They divorced when I was little more than a baby and I spent most of my early childhood in shared custody, very happy to spend half the week with one, half the week with the other.
Dad had been dating different women since I was little. When I turned eight he started dating this one lady… who emotionally abused me, who scared me, who berated me when I got my period at 11, who’s daughter kept telling me how glad she was to be blonde and thin and pretty unlike me… I spent about 4 miserable years, trying desperately to hold on to whatever relationship I could with my dad. My mom hated all of them. She was also kind of abusive herself, but pointing at them and their way way more obvious and worse abuse helped her ignore this.
At about 12 I finally gave up. I started seeing my dad only on weekends and started seeing less and less of him as time went by.
He always gave as little money as he could possibly give for my care, other than school tuition. I was largely fed and clothed by my mother. When I went to college both of my parents got into a huge fight about child support. My mom threatened to bring in the lawyers. But she never went through with it, because she realized that since I was 18, I was going to have to be the one to sue my dad. She didn’t want to make me go through such a harrowing experience, she didn’t want to permanently damage my relationship with my dad.
I have a friend who wasn’t so lucky. She was pressured by her mom to sue her dad for money. They got nothing. For extra awesome perspective, this friend was raped by her dad when she was a little girl. Still the courts gave did nothing.
Today I live on my own. I’ve managed to fix my relationship with both of my parents, but that is largely because I am no longer dependant on them and at their mercy. They help me out when they can and they’ve really become pretty decent people to be around.
Where are the evil courts? Where is the feminist conspiracy? Why didn’t our evil mothers profit from my and my friend’s abuse? How come it was BOTH of our parents, moms and dads, who screwed us over?
I don’t even think I have a point here… but honestly I don’t see John having one either. Not all MRAs. Not all feminists!
Whatever man. Sexism exists and it harms both men and women, and yeah, it is all way more complicated than evil!men or evil!women… And I think everyone here is arguing just that. Every criticism or ablism and racism and all the other isms… every point about toxic masculinity harming men as well as women is arguing exactly what John seems to want to argue…. It’s all way more complicated…
But honestly, I think the only people trying to simplify this are the MRAs, not the people in this blog.
John,
Of course life under the status quo is idyllic and nostalgic for you. You appear to be a white cishet middle or upper class man. That the way things used to be is something you look at fondly, you are very privileged. You really lack empathy if you don’t care that the old days were bad for everyone else.
@ FromAfar2013
“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.”
I am indeed displaying a version of aggrieved entitlement over not having the ‘proper’ level of ownership over my son. The UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child says that my son has the “right” to my “ownership” of him (although I wouldn’t have chosen that word), in the sense of my role in his upbringing.
I do indeed wish that I could “force” control over one particular women, and one particular child. I do indeed have a sense of nostalgia, in the sense that the day before my son’s mother unilaterally stopped all contact of my son with his dad was a better time than the day after and every day since. However, I do not consider that nostalgia to be “misplaced”.
I would like to “force” control over my son, because at his age, there is a need for somebody to control him for a lot of the time, to stop him getting run over by a bus, and it would have to be me when he was under my control, unless he was never with me.
I know how my son feels about being with me, and therefore under my control, as regards his being safe. He told me. He’d like that. I know that I’d like to have that “control”, which his mother has all the time now, regardless of her wishes to have control all the time, and for me to have it none of the time.
So far, you are right. However, you have put a rather jaundiced spin on the truth, to insinuate that my aspirations are sinister, when they are not, in any way. His mothers aspiration to bring up our son without a father are what is sinister.
I glory in a “system” that wasn’t in the least oppressive, within which I have raised four children already. I call it “patriarchy” in the sense that fathers (Latin pater) have authority over their children (-archy), along with their mothers. That is the child’s right, according to the UN declaration.
I have the profoundest concern for the “feelings and experience” of my son. He is likely to suffer lifelong disadvantages if he is subjected to paternal deprivation. That is what his mother wants to damn to. He is entitled to better. He is innocent. He has done nothing to deserve his terrible fate.
I did not come here for sympathy. I came here to rebut David’s cruel rhetoric, about the driving force behind the MRM being the same as the driving force behind a certain mass shooting. David’s “argument” is absurd. It consists of nothing but bigoted innuendo. I pity you if you cannot see that for yourself. The driving force behind my own fast-waning temporary attraction to the MRM was the search for answers that would empower me to rescue my son from his cruel mother’s monopolising of his upbringing, which I expected the state to help me to curtail. The MRM provides an answer – which may be a wrong answer – as to why the state is so wrong-headed. Mallory Millet provides a similar answer. David has not even realised that there is a question. Nobody, but NOBODY, has a thoroughly convincing answer.
The least unconvincing conspiracy theory, pathetic though it is, is that all this pointless, destructive gender war is whipped up by the ruling class, as a thoroughly durable “divide and rule” tactic to oppress the rest of us. However, I am expecting that throw-away quip to go down like a lead balloon here. This is a viper’s nest of gender warriors, all on the same side. I do not think that it useful at all for men to hate women, or for women to hate men, so much so that neither side can see the wood for the trees. I am not a gender warrior. I am for peace, not war, between men and women.
Yeah, in my state, (USA) you apparently have to fail pretty hard at life for the court to deny you access to your own kids. Which is a good thing: even a moderate fuckup of a parent is better than none, though obviously there’s a line there somewhere. I don’t know anyone personally who’s managed to cross it, though, and I don’t hang with an angelic, “politically-correct,” particularly well-heeled crowd.
I do know people whose exes drop out for months/years at a time chasing drugs/girls/boys/toys and are then cheesed off that they don’t get a standing ovation when they do turn back up, but that’s a somewhat separate problem…
“If feminists talked about my son’s problem and mine on their sites, I could well be calling myself a feminist by now.”
And if a kangaroo talked about your problems you’d be a marsupial. Got it.
“If feminists talked about my son’s problem and mine on their sites, I could well be calling myself a feminist by now.”
And if a sloth talked about your problem you’d have been asleep for this entire conversation and saved the rest of us a fuck tonne of bullshit.
And yet with every comment you prove it correct. You came here to present yourself as a counterexample, and I treated you as such at the outset. Others saw right through you immediately, and now I do as well: you are full of entitlement, feeling like you deserve certain outcomes by virtue of your being male and no other reason, and full of rage at the fact that these outcomes have not been dropped into your lap this one time.
You prove the point of this post.
Anyone know where I can hire a sloth?
Yeah, funny dat. And you not only know little or nothing, you pontificate at great length and bore me to the point where my eyes glaze over. And then you come out with this:
…which might just be the most inadvertently hilarious thing I’ve read all day.
Self-reflection, try it. PLEASE.
“If feminists talked about my son’s problem and mine on their sites, I could well be calling myself a feminist by now.”
If an elephant talked about your problem you’d be in favour of the great matriarchy and sending all males far far away (elephants actually do this, they are the prime example of a feminist utopia).
@Shaun DarthBatman Day
Indeed. Feminism is only useful and good if it services his personal concerns. Feminists are not allowed to be concerned with things that don’t have anything to do with him. If they are worried about things that don’t involve guaranteeing toxic men the ownership of children, they’re doing feminism wrong.
Uff.
John, I know it must shock you greatly to learn this, but trust me, this is for your own good:
NOT EVERYTHING IS ALL ABOUT YOU MENFOLKS.
You’re welcome.
“Feminism is only useful and good if it services his personal concerns. Feminists are not allowed to be concerned with things that don’t have anything to do with him.”
EXACTLY! What is wrong with the feminazgul?!? Why are they not dropping all that boring talk about equal pay etc in order to guarantee John everything his heart desires? It is high time someone contacted FHC. WILL NOBODY THINK OF POOR JOHN?????
“NOT EVERYTHING IS ALL ABOUT YOU MENFOLKS.”
Bina, I hate to tell you this but *you are the reason nobody likes feminists*!
Congratulations, your feminist killjoy trophy is in the mail.
Here is the possible reasons the courts granted custody of your son to his mother:
1. You were unable to prove you were the better choice of custodial parent WRT the best interests of the child.
2. You were unable to prove his mother was an inappropriate choice of custodial parent WRT the best interests of the child.
3. His mother was able to prove she was the better choice of custodial parent WRT the best interests of the child.
4. His mother was able to prove you were an inappropriate choice of custodial parent WRT the best interests of the child.
5. Traditional gender roles (those in patriarchy) have led the court to believe that the mother is inherently the better choice of custodial parent WRT the best interests of the child.
6. There is a vast feminist conspiracy to paint all men everywhere as inappropriate choice of custodial parent WRT the best interests of the child.
To be honest, it seems like the only reason to choose 6 is because you are angry, and any one of 1-5 do not fit with your view of patriarchy as inherently beneficial and the best choice for any situation.
(Anyone can feel free to add to this or correct me if they feel like I missed a possible reason or got it wrong, this is just off the top of my head tbh.)
Criminy John. Male violence is the greatest human rights crisis the world has ever known. And you didn’t effing notice?
How many times did she ask you to stop, John, before she gave up and went no contact?
I shall treasure it always!
oops. Just for clarification…
Not for John, anyway. And for these guys, they themselves are the only people who really matter at the end of the day. They long for a zero sum world that is not in the least oppressive to them, but only because it is highly oppressive to someone else, namely women.
Non-zero, John. Non-zero.
I’m really getting a serial killer vibe from John. I’ve got a feeling there’s a lot more to his custody case than he’s telling us. Although that probably goes without saying.
I can’t pretend to know anything about the British laws, but where I live fathers will typically get joint custody, or at the very least visitation if they ask for it. Things usually have to be pretty bad for them to get completely cut out.
In any case, I can’t help but notice that John never offered any evidence that there is systemic discrimination against fathers. All we get his anecdote. His side of the story.
David: We don’t care about this stupid shit with your wife and son. Well, let me rephrase that: First of all, most of us probably don’t believe your version of events, since it’s almost as if you’re going out of your way to present yourself as unreliable a narrator as you can, and because it’s taken the form of an especially common and especially unconvincing victim narrative. (Your internal logic even fails, because, in the absence of pre-existing issues with women, there’s absolutely no reason why you would look your wife having custody instead of you and attribute that state of affairs to the fact that your wife is a woman. That’s a gross leap of logic you’re completely unaware of making and especially unaware of how telling it is.)
But the main thing is: like…. you are aware that something can be a big deal to you and simultaneously not a social problem of great import, right? Even if you WERE in some kind of Kafkaesque legal nightmare (which you’re not), in the absence of that being common and built into the system, it’s not really relevant to any sort of social movement. It’s an issue for you and your lawyer and that’s it. (Also, your wife probably doesn’t want to bring up your son without a father. She seems to want to bring up your son without YOU. You’re not all mankind.) People as individuals can have sympathy for you, your son, and yes, even that horrible terrible wife of yours, but that doesn’t have anything to do with social change.
It’s like how you think it’s some grand social trend that your parents had a good marriage but you didn’t. And it’s also like how you think that your own interest in the MRM is somehow evidence against the driving force being rage at the being rejected.
I’ve figured out your problem, dude. You think you’re at least a hundred thousand people. You have the distinct air of a regressive who dislikes how the world seems to be changing its values away from what he was comfortable with and has spent way too much time in echo chambers of like-minded people complaining about it. You think it gives you power and lends dignity to your suffering. It doesn’t. It makes you look like a self-centered jerk who thinks his own personal problems are the most important things in the entire world.
Oh, have we gotten to the “women were never oppressed under patriarchy” portion of the proceedings?