This lovely meme, found in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, pretty unreadable even at full resolution. But it’s not too hard to see what point the meme-maker was trying to get across.
Naturally, Reddit’s MGTOWs have many thoughts on this subject.
Like these:
And these:
Wait, am I reading this correctly? Has the legendary Chad Thundercock been replaced by his brother Chuck?
I feel kinda bad for the models who posed for the stock photos MGTOWs love to appropriate for their memes. No one wants to discover one day that they’ve become the focus of a MGTOW two-minute hate.
Having raised 2 kids (boys!) with NO father at any point (donors due to being a lesbian), AND completely on my own I have always taken a keen interest in the sociology of lone parenthood, and the attitude of mainstream society.
Poorer outcomes for lone parents have a lot of factors. Growing up in poverty is a big one.
Another big factor is the continued relationship with the father of the child/ren. This is very often a source of conflict, esp if the relationship ended due to abuse. Other areas of conflict often emerge when either partner has more children with someone else.
Attitudes towards lone parent women clearly have a part to play. The above bile being on the extreme end of the neg scale, but there is an awful lot of stuff in between – a lot of it based on the assumption that women are weak and incompetent. Not an issue a lone parent father has to contend with.
I have known only 2 lone parents who were men. Both had partners who had mental health issues. One of these women suffered chronic and severe abuse from her husband, but he got custody of the children when she ‘lost it’. This violent man got LOADS of support from social services, and socially did not suffer because he was a saint for looking after his own children. No one rejected him because he had abused his ex wife – no one seemed to care. The other man had daily practical help from his parents, primarily his mother.
Though I say it myself my kids have come out lovely. I know by MRA standards they are beta cucks of the highest order, but this can only be a good thing – if MRAs hate you you know you have done something right.
I didn’t find it easy, and we have lived in relative poverty. But I know that having no ex partner has been a positive (from anecdotal evidence of women I have talked to), and because I am assertive and educated I have not suffered too much of the other stuff I have mentioned.
People always assumed that I had been left by the father/s of my children. I didn’t put them right – I did not care, and I did not want my children to be negatively marked out as having a lesbian mother (I live in a fairly progressive part of London, but there is still plenty of homophobia) – no point in giving bigots ammo!
I love the part where if a man abandoned a woman and his child, it is her failing.
If his child grows up and commits a crime, it is also her failing.
Men are never responsible for their actions, according to MGTOW.
Meanwhile, those grapes are so sour. Just because this guy couldn’t get a single mom to give him the time of day, he hates single moms and the men they do choose to date.
These douchebags want pregnancy to be a way to force women to stay in abusive relationships with men like them. That we can survive without them really pisses them off.
I get a sense that people (esp. in US) who complain about single moms tend to be extremely (and sometimes deliberately) sloppy on what they mean by single mom.
It’s like all mothers are stereotyped as either conventional married-all-the-way mothers or welfare queens who haven’t met the father since conception. Maybe about half of mothers actually are the former and everyone else is held suspect of being the latter.
It seems weird, considering how many families don’t fit these stereotypes.
I forgot to mention that Wesley Clark Jr. is at Standing Rock. He’s the son of the former supreme commander of NATO’s military forces, General Wesley Clark Sr.
@ Kat
Unfortunately the company behind the pipeline seem to think they can carry on regardless.
http://ir.energytransfer.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=106094&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2227348
Thank you to whoever posted the Gofundme link for supporting the vets at Standing Rock–I can feel like my donation really did do something useful.
For people who talk about prizing logic over feelings, they sure do keep wearing their feelings on their sleeves while utterly failing at logic.
It’s not only graphic designers that the meme will have weeping, but statisticians too. I mean, these things are generally backed up by research that on closer inspection doesn’t turn out to have actually proved what they think it does, but on this occasion the stats fail is right there to see in the meme itself.
SeaB already said it, but telling us what percentage of people with problem X were brought up by single mothers doesn’t tell us anything about the relationship between being brought up by a single mother and problem X! We need to know the percentage of people who were brought up by single mothers who developed problem X and the percentage of people who were brought up in other kinds of families who developed problem X. (And then we need to control for a whole lot of stuff before anything causal can be concluded, but that’s back to the more usual issues MRA citations tend to have*.)
That’s the biggest and most pervasive error, but there’s also this gem:
Assuming for the sake of argument that the cited reference does indeed show that, and that all other possible explanations have been correctly controlled for, the problem here is that they are stating that as though obviously this is further evidence that single mothers are evil. But actually there are multiple possible scenarios that are equally consistent with that description; let’s pick out two of them:
(i) Abusive violence against children is frequent in homes with single mothers no matter what their income level, while it’s infrequent in homes with well-off single fathers and frequent in homes with poorer single fathers – this is presumably how the meme-maker read it, if they actually stopped to think about what it was saying at all rather than just going “aha! eeeeeevil feeemales!”
(ii) The same thing except abusive violence is infrequent in single-mother homes – which runs contrary to their message about single fathers being so much better than those awful unsupervised females
So yeah, without more information that really doesn’t tell us anything about whether single mothers are better or worse than single fathers.
*Note that the issue is that their citations don’t prove what the MRAs say they do, not that they don’t show what the citations themselves claim they show: I’m blaming the way MRAs use the sources rather than necessarily the sources themselves.
@Ohlmann
I don’t think Scildfreja was disputing the biased nature of a collection of anecdotes: hence why she said “[b]iased, unfiltered, raw data, but still!” Nor do I think she was necessarily recommending that you use them to conclude anything about the topic they relate to (as opposed to the way people think about or talk about the topic). I think she was simply saying that data are multiple pieces of information, which the collection of anecdotes is: it’s a selection from all the possible pieces of information which only includes those which are noteworthy in one direction or the other, but that’s still information.
(It’s a good point, and that saying is going to annoy me from now on too!)
@ Kat
That story about the veterans apologising is amazing!
Yeah. My mum sure is a piece of trash, seeing as how she chose a man who drowned while I wasn’t even born and then spent the next 18 years of her life giving me everything she could. That sounds logical.
The mind, it boggles.
A few days ago my 9 year old son asked to sleep in my bed. I said yes and he gave me a hug and said “you’re my best friend.” Clearly those feelings should not be tolerated.
I’ll be sure to tell him immediately that he needs to stop raising money for charity and baking cakes for homeless shelters and that he needs to start practicing crime and drug taking. Such a shame, he likes baking.
I love how women are expected to evaluate men’s fatherhood potential before choosing a sexual partner, while men have no such constraints. So that when a relationship ends (and there is a child involved) the woman can be shamed and punished for making a poor choice, and the man can be congratulated for having dodged a bullet.
It’s a never-ending game of Double Standard Calvinball with these guys.
10 PRINT ‘Go to bed’
30 INPUT STALLINGTACTIC$
40 PRINT ‘Error: Illogical ‘; STALLINGTACTICS$;’ Request Detected. Response Denied.’
50 GOTO 10
…As any extensible parental superclass can tell you, child-objects raised by emotionless machines definitely grow up to be well-adjusted non-criminal adults with zero attachment issues. (And all possible states of men and women can be stored inside binary variables.)
@Ohlmann, Neremanth,
Neremanth is right about my intentions. There’s a certain … fetishization of the methods of reduction in science which is most strongly felt in “hard” sciences, like physics and chemistry. It’s been very successful for them, and it’s given them six-sigma accuracy, which is incredible. They look at the results of the “soft” sciences with their much less sure results, and they say “well, reduce your problem, idiots!”
In doing this, they forget that the problems of the soft sciences are incredibly more complex than the problems of physics and chemistry and engineering and whatnot. Their methods fail, spectacularly, when applied to the ‘softer’ sciences.
“Anecdotes are not data” is a hard-science attitude which applies poorly to soft sciences, because an anecdote is a wealth of data, and in (for example) a social science, or medicine, it’s often the only way you’re going to get any useful information at all.
Further (and I love to point this out to the ‘hard’ scientists), every one of the data points on their graphs is an anecdote. “I was in the lab, and I did this thing, and it was late and I was tired, and I set up my equipment and ran the thing, and I looked at the dial, and it said 312.5 degrees.” That’s the anecdote. They scrub everything out except the 312.5, and then do statistics to predict error, etc, etc. But in the end they can’t hide from the fact that each one is a story about a specific even happening to real people, with its own quirks and details which are important to the results.
The anecdotes of the things they study are very simple. The anecdotes in the soft sciences are incredibly complex. The scrubbing they do of their data points just doesn’t work for anything more complicated.
The bridge between qualitative and quantitative analytics is vast and complex, and it’s sort of the area I live in – I do statistics on rich data sets with unsure and varying models. There’s no way to ignore the fact that uncleaned, fragmented anecdotes are really all you have to go on.
Everyone has that internal, unconscious censor, it’s inherent to how our brains construct our perception of the word. Their fabrications may or may not have exceeded it, and there’s no real way to know beyond them saying so, but everyone’s as capable of being just as blind as they are.
The fact that manospherians can unironically yell at women for using emotions when raising their children, is only further proof that the buzzwordification process of the words logic and emotions has rendered manospherians incapable of using these words in a way that makes sense to normal people. In their universe, logic now just means “good” and emotions means “bad”.
I’ve met a number of guys who have been married to and/or had children with women who ended up being awful to them; I suspect some of that is in there. One is a friend of mine who’s managed to avoid being a horrible misogynist despite the fact, but I can imagine someone in the same circumstances turning in the same direction. I just wonder whether that’s a significant number of these jerks or not.
@msexceptiontotherule, your job sounds like the most stressful job in the worrrld. I’d dissolve into a weepy puddle in the corner. I’m glad for people like you who can stay int he ring and keep fighting for the kids’ right to stability and happiness, even when a parent (or two) is being awful. I’m not sure if you can say, but how often is it that the father is the one being horrible being the mother? Or both? I’m sure you’ve seen your fill of all of the above :p
@rugbyyogi, I’m glad you got away from that guy. Being a single mom is not so bad, and it can be wonderful. I hope it’s the latter for you, even with all the exhaustion and trials.
Oh, yes, and PAS is utter bullshit.
@Scildfreja:
Well, ‘anecdotes are not data’ is also a very medical science attitude, and medical science is a lot softer than most doctors like to admit due to the complexity involved; not to mention the ethical problems involved in a lot of the testing.
In that case, though, the statement is more against the whole idea of ‘I did miracle woo X and now I’m cured! Miracle woo X is great!’. No, regression to the mean is a thing, spontaneous remission is a thing, the fact that you discovered you were cured after taking the magic pills does not necessarily imply that the magic pills had anything to do with the cure.
The guy selling magic smoothies may have lots of great testimonials on his website, but the people who died despite what he was selling them aren’t going to be making any complaints, now, are they?
With my vision, the only parts of this I can read are the title and the words “ABUSIVE VIOLENCE.” Which makes it look like they’re threatening abusive violence against the woman.
… The point behind this mess is way more gettable for my legally-blind ass than it is for people who can actually read the damn thing, huh.
I was widowed last year.
TIL that now I’m an evil bitch, raising criminals who feel too much.
Nice.
My husband was a wonderful father, partner and friend and we all miss him very much.
When I worried how I would cope when he passed, he said, “Look, you’re working full time, looking after two school-aged kids and a very sick man – you’ll do fine.”
I think I trust his assessment rather than MGTOWs
Oh, I agree, Jenora – you don’t get six-sigma results in medicine but it’s very rigorous. I don’t mean “all anecdotes are equally valid”, either, I mean more “anecdotes are useful and should not simply be discarded when studying a thing.” Qualitative analysis is the foundation of understanding any phenomenon that doesn’t have an airtight model behind it. That’s all.
I’ve never read these angry rants by MRA’s and then see them as being logical in any sense of the word. They are MRA’s because of their feelings. They got their feelings hurt by all the women they’ve ever come in contact with, so they’re venting on Reddit or 4chan.
@Scildfreja:
Yes, I suspect we’re splitting hairs pretty finely here. Violently agreeing?
I mean, for a lot of pain management, anecdotes are really all you’re going to be able to get, and people just have to work with that. There isn’t really an objective measurement of pain; just measurements of some of the things that tend to cause it.
I understand the original annoyance being that ‘the plural of anecdote is not data’ can be and sometimes is misinterpreted to just dismiss anecdotes rather than seeing them as possible starting points for investigation. As you say, there are people that fetishize the methods involved. (I’ve heard the term ‘methodolatry’ bandied about at other blogs.)
I guess my original point was as much that even some of the so-called ‘hard’ sciences can be a lot softer than people think, and there’s no bright dividing line between hard and soft that won’t have things like medicine sprawling across it.
Medicine is such a fascinating topic. So many of the techniques developed there have spread out into other areas, and there’s so much wonderful cross-pollination of concepts between medicine, psychology, biology, sociology…
http://static1.fjcdn.com/thumbnails/comments/4786934+_e8a67e3969b4bea3612441b9946b1e6a.png
One of my favourite techniques is propensity score analysis, which comes from medical researchers trying to suss useful correlations out of studies while allowing for the high ethical requirements of that research. My work in educational psychology analytics has similar ethical requirements, so it’s really a godsend – despite the deep and inherent flaws in the process.
Ramble, ramble. It’s sort of funny, really. Look at the statistical measures most “hard” sciences use and they’re really quite basic – most of their work is about how to actually make the measurements. Once they’ve got those measurements, the statistics are simple compared to the mind-crushing complexities required to clean a modern “soft science” data set. And they brag about that!
You’re very right, in that there’s no hard line between the “soft” and “hard” sciences. It’s all just normal people tryin to figure out things as best they can, with whatever tools they can get their hands on.
My partner is now the stay at home parent (wonder what that makes him in MRA terms – he confessed recently he was finding it harder than he had thought possible). When he worked his soul destroying job, he had a coworker who had been raised by psychologist parents in an attempt to create a ‘logical’ person.
The idea was to give the kid a nonemotional jump start in life and teach them analytical thinking. My partner described him as ‘Not so much well balanced as finely tuned’. The poor guy creeped everyone out and couldn’t handle the majority of situations, whether social or work related. He was profoundly fragile but very locked into his mindset since it was the foundation of his whole personality.
There’s absolutely no possible way that statistics like 39% of inmates had single mothers, while only 4% had single fathers could be remotely related to statistics like these from this article:
I mean, I’m sure they were smart enough to control for the correlation between poverty and inmates. /s
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
In my experience*, 70% are men (being horrible), and 30% are women – a lot of it seems to be due to the financial inequality (men having higher paid jobs and the privilege that comes with it turns them into monsters when suddenly ‘that bitch’ decides to leave with ‘his children’.)…however, I have had male clients who have been denied access to the children, has tried to make the split as fair and equitable as possible, but his former spouse has used the courts, law enforcement, and CPS to make his life hell.
*I deal with a lot of cases where DV is involved. It is something I’ve personally experienced and helping other survivors is deeply meaningful for me.
So… there’s an alleged link between single-parent households and people who land in jail/ prison?
What if, say, there were a link between raising a child on your own and having a lower income? What if there were a link between having a lower income and getting a negative outcome in a criminal trial that was, IIRC, stronger than the link between actual guilt and the crime of which one stands accused?
Such a thing could not be, because that would make the meme-maker subject to imperfect logic. It’s a female conspiracy to make him look bad and keep him from the sex that being perfectly masculine has, dammit, earned him, obviously.
ETA: In the interest of full disclosure: my ex-husband had physical custody of my daughter, because it made sense in our situation (I’m kind of a workaholic, among other things), and I paid child support and went to great lengths to have her stay with me as much as I could.