Men’s Rights Activists and their MGTOW fellow travelers would probably be a lot more effective in fighting male suicide if there weren’t so many of them who think suicide is kind of cool.
In the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit today, a fellow called Zombocom1911 posted a link to a story about a man who slashed his own throat with a straight razor while sitting at the kitchen table in front of his wife and kids.
To Zombocom1911, the obvious question raised by this deeply unsettling story was this: “Can suicide be considered MGTOW?”
Chillingly, some of Zombocom1911’s compadres on the MGTOW subreddit seem to think the answer is “yes.”
aanarchist, while acknowledging that the man’s actions were “really f*cked up,” couldn’t quite contain his admiration.
“what a badass to do that sh*t in front of his own family,” he wrote in a comment that actually got upvotes from his peers. “it’s like looking them in the eye and going all f*ck you, death is preferable to slavery.”
Yes, I’m sure his wife and children benefitted enormously from this lovely message.
aanarchist went on to suggest that large numbers of men killing themselves could strike a powerful blow against women and feminists.
i’d say that suicide is letting feminism win but in reality the worst possible thing for women and feminism is a reduction in the male population. women’s comforts are built upon an abundance of manpower. if you cut down the population of men enough they go through some pretty strifey periods cuz no one’s there to provide for them.
You may recall a gentleman at Return of Kings making a strikingly similar argument not long ago — although his preferred method of man-elimination was to send as many men as possible to die horribly in wars.
You may also recall how, several years ago, Men’s Rights activists turned a fellow MRA who burned himself alive outside of a family courthouse in Maine into a sort of Men’s Rights martyr, celebrating him in song and doing their best to disseminate the frankly terroristic manifesto he left behind, in which he urged other men to take up his cause by firebombing courthouses and police stations.
There are, to be sure, some MRAs and MGTOWs who are genuinely concerned about male suicide, though very few of them have actually done anything at all about it. They might start by trying to convince their ideological compatriots that suicide is not actually cool.
How low can they be ? It’s to the point where the concept of low stop really making sense.
I don’t think it’s very fair to take a couple of examples of unpleasant people committing suicide unpleasantly and extrapolate from that to writing off all suicides as “not cool.” People kill themselves for all sorts of reasons and its not fair to lump them all together so dismissively.
Mnemni, WTF are you talking about?
Are you sure you want to ask that question, chief? You’re running the very real risk that Mnemni will answer it.
My reaction to stories of men who kill themselves as a fuck you to women is “At least they didn’t murder the woman and kids first…”
True story: My ex’s brother’s wife beat me to filing for divorce by a week or two.
The night I had screwed up all my courage to tell my verbally abusive drug abusing manipulative husband I was leaving him he came in from where he’d been on the phone in the garage white faced and said his little brother Tracey had just shot himself in the face (in his truck in front of the house so the kids and wife would be sure to find him. Six year old didn’t speak for a YEAR after).
I must be a bad person because all I could think was “DAMMIT AMY” because I knew what happened next.
Yep, four more years of the asswipe threatening to kill himself every time I hinted I wasn’t happy, while escalating to physically abusive drug abusing manipulative rapist husband.
Finally I told him if he was serious to just do it already.
(He didn’t. I got away. Atypical!)
You take two examples – of a guy deliberately traumatising his family and guy who was potentially a violent terrorist – and from that you conclude that suicide is A Bad Thing and the people who do it are Bad People.
Sure, the people celebrating this particular pair are “not cool” but the reality of suicide is a bit more complicated than that.
There are no “cool” suicides, Mnemni. There are necessary ones – I am a vocal advocate for assisted suicide and am very grateful the law is changing in Canada should I ever find myself in that position – but they’re not “cool”.
There’s cool-as-in-stylish and cool-as-in-acceptable. When people say without elaboration that such and such is “not cool” it’s a condemnation, not merely a statement that it doesn’t smoke gitanes or wear sunglasses indoors.
Saying suicide is A Bad Thing (which in many ways I think it is, or at least the result of Many Bad Things) is not the same as saying people who do it are Bad People.
Saying something isn’t cool is not the same as saying any person who does it is a Bad Person, just a regular person who did something Not Cool.
Suicide is not bad because of the way you do it or whom you choose to engage. Suicide is bad because it is the result of a lot of physical and/or emotional pain (again, Not Cool stuff) and nobody should ever be through such an unbearable amount of pain. Period.
Saying suicide is bad is closer to saying “suicide is bad because it means people are put through horrible stuff in life and have no means to deal with it” than to saying “suicide is bad and people who do it are Evil”.
When I saw your title, I jumped to the assumption that this was going to be about committing suicide when near death so that your (ex?) wife wouldn’t be able to collect life insurance.
And yet it was somehow worse.
@Mnemni
Considering this post is about MGTOWs romanticizing suicide as a way to “get back at” their wives and kids for the crime of existing, which one of these meanings do you think David was going for?
He didn’t say anything about suicide being “A Bad Thing” or people who commit suicide being “Bad People”. These are things you’ve made up. Stop doing that.
Luzbelitx,
That’s fine as it stands but I don’t think that’s what David is saying. I think what he’s saying is that suicide is bad in itself.
Mnemni,
I don’t see where David is saying being suicidal is a bad person. He’s been open about his own struggles with depression so I’m sure he understands how someone can feel suicidal. He’s saying it’s deplorable for MGTOW to praise someone for killing themselves because that’s a punishment for evil wimmenz.
I think it’s pretty obvious that the people this post refers to are not committing or advocating suicide as an escape from unbearable suffering but as a means to make others suffer. They don’t drift off into the wilderness to pass away quietly, they violently and bloodily take their lives in front of others. It’s just a performance, not a heartfelt attempt to find peace. These atrocious asswipes aren’t bad people because they commit suicide or goad others into doing it, they’re bad people because they calculate everything they do to be as painful and awful as possible for everyone around them, whether that includes suicide or not.
Huh. I admit that all these years I’ve been kind of wondering whether it’s true that no one knows why my father killed himself, but it never occurred to me that it might have been to reassert his masculinity, which clearly was threatened by a younger wife, two kids and a promising academic career.
This seems to put everything in perspective. It’s all so clear now.
@Mnemni
My gut feeling on the finishing sentence is that David meant the sunglasses kind of cool when he wrote “not actually cool”. Because the sunglasses kind of coolness of suicide was the topic of the post.
Well, I read it differently. To me, it came across as judgemental.
…Holy crap, Mnemni. I don’t even know what to say. It is possible to want to reduce the incidence of suicide without condemning people who kill themselves as bad people. Nowhere in here does David condemn suicide victims. I’m honestly stupefied and disturbed by your comments.
Moving on to the actual post:
Nobody hates children like the goddamn manosphere, do they?
If David clarifies that he doesn’t think there’s anything essentially wrong with committing suicide I’ll withdraw my comments.
Same. I’m glad you got out, Paige. As someone who has battled with depression her entire life and deals with the very real thoughts that killing myself is my only option, I hate hate HATE when someone uses threats of suicide as a way to either garner sympathy or to control someone else’s behaviour. It feels like it’s trivializing my struggles, and I no longer feel comfortable talking to anyone about my problems, because people will just dismiss them as attention-seeking.
Yes, indeed. What a badass. Totes amazeballs. When it comes to people like aanarchist, I’m at a loss for words. How much of a sociopath do you have to be to champion someone killing themselves in such a violent way in front of their wife and kids? Comparing marriage and child-rearing slavery… like, really? I understand that the original story was from a time when getting married and having kids was just something that you did, but I’m pretty sure that both of those things are optional now.
Guhhhh, these people. People are fucking dying and they get excited at the thought of how it will hurt women. (At least not a lot of Migtowers are commenting or upvoting, but it’s a fairly young post so who knows.)
Also, to laugh loudly at how these dudes think women won’t be able to cope if there’d be fewer men. Uh huh, of course, no woman has ever been able to take care of and provide for herself or her family in the history of everything ever.
(Trigger warning: discussion of suicide statistics)
@Mnemni:
The thing about suicide is that many people misunderstand it.
The overwhelming majority of suicides are not people who have thought it over and come to the conclusion that they don’t want to live; they’re people who have experienced a momentary urge towards self-destruction which tragically went unchecked. This is why suicide rates drop whenever it gets more difficult, and why many suicidal people will generally choose to live if even nominal safeguards are put in place.
Across almost every data set, 90% of people who survive suicide attempts never reattempt it. This number has remained constant as suicides have fallen, suggesting that those who don’t survive would also have chosen to live. Suicide can therefore be said to have happened not because of the desires of its victims, but despite them.
Because of this, I think it’s true to say that suicide is a problem, not something we can ever condone. We shouldn’t blame its victims for it, but should instead try to help them. We should certainly never say anything that would encourage suicidal ideation, especially in isolated people like MGTOWs or MRAs.
(I’m not a mental health professional, so I shall not say anything about mental health here. I went through my own periods of depression and suicidal fixation, and I’m very glad that’s behind me, but I have no formal training with which to discuss it.)
And nobody hates men like the manosphere.
Speaking for myself and myself only, I want to build a world where the conditions that lead to suicide among children and adults who have many years of life still available to them occur less frequently, and where, as a result, less people choose to kill themselves to alleviate those conditions. I want less suicide to happen, because I want people to have different, better options. I want people’s lives to improve. That doesn’t mean I am making a moral judgment against those who are exercising their right to choose whether they do or do not continue to exist.
I am similarly in favour of reducing rates of starvation. That doesn’t mean I condemn those who are starving.
EJ (The Other One),
What’s your basis for saying “[t]he overwhelming majority of suicides are not people who have thought it over and come to the conclusion that they don’t want to live; they’re people who have experienced a momentary urge towards self-destruction which tragically went unchecked.”?
@Paige Hamilton,
sorry you had to go through so many years of that. I’m glad you’re finally out of there.
I had an ex-fiance who tried to win me back by threatening to kill himself more than once, and that was a tough situation even without being tied to him legally.
Re: thread; that some MGTOWs think suicide is somehow a badass move reminds me of when little kids threaten to hold their breath until they die in order to get their own way.
Still, better to go alone than take a bunch of other people with you (something else my ex-fiance threatened to do).