By David Futrelle
We’re awash in a wave of male political violence.
On Saturday, a man radicalized by the so-called alt-right online walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 mostly elderly Jews. On Friday, authorities arrested a man for mailing more than a dozen bombs to prominent Democratic politicians and other critics of Trump. On Wenesday, a white supremacist man shot and killed two elderly black shoppers at a Kroger supermarket after first trying to force his way into a black church, his real target. I’ve lost track of how many far-right thugs have been arrested in recent days and charged with violent crimes, but they’ve all been men as well.
The fact that these terrorists — and that’s what they all are — have all been men is not incidental. Men are far more likely than women to resort to extreme violence to “make a point,” either personal or political. The vast majority of terrorists are male. Almost all mass killers are male.
The alt-right, which inspires and commits most of the political violence in the Unites States right now, is an overwhelmingly male movement. While there are a few prominent women in and around the movement, most of the leaders and almost all of the footsoldiers, are male, like those in the male-only fascist street gang known as the Proud Boys.
You might think that all this might be cause for a tiny bit of self-reflection on the part of those who call themselves Men’s Rights Activists.
But if you take a look at the current top 100 posts on the Men’s Rights subreddit — the largest Men’s Rights forum online, with close to 200,000 subscribers — there is only one topic devoted to the recent wave of terrorist violence. And it’s a post complaining that men aren’t being given enough credit for being the ones who “stand in harm’s way” during such incidents because the vast majority of SWAT team members are male.
Meanwhile, the subreddit is filled with stories about female criminality and violence. In addition to the usual parade of stories about female sexual predators, there’s a link to a Daily Mail article about a woman in China who slashed more than a dozen kindergarten students with a meat cleaver, and another link to a sloppy blog post about a prolific female poisoner … who lived in Italy in the fifteenth century.
“She killed at least 600 men,” the OP says of her. “Sounds like a good candidate for a feminist hero.”
Yes, he’s getting mad in advance about the hypothetical possibility of feminists today ironically embracing a female mass murderer who lived nearly 500 years ago and about whom very little reliable information is known (including her actual body count).
What are some of the other issues that Men’s Rights Redditors have collectively decided are more important to discuss than the hate murders and attempted assassinations of the last week, all carried out by men? Here are a few. (Click on the screenshots to go to the discussions on Reddit.)
And here’s one that’s clearly a burning issue for millions of men:
To be fair, most of those commenting on this particular issue think it’s stupid. But it’s still there in the top 100.
But the discussion that stood out most for me was this one, less for the topic itself — cis men’s supposed “right” to abortion, a perennial Men’s Rights favorite — but because of the charming way the OP decided to frame the debate.
He goes on for a couple more paragraphs, bringing up the idea of “financial abortions” — that is, a legalized version of deadbeat dadding — but I do love the idea that providing for a child that you have sired is as traumatic as someone literally forcing you to abort your baby.
As a men, I think that’s bullshit.
I know it’s not news that MRAs would rather talk about their hurt feelings when comedians make jokes about men being big dummies than they would any topic that forces them to possibly acknowledge that there are aspects of masculinity that are, indeed, toxic. But I’m still struck, even after all these years of tracking MRAs, by just how relentlessly avoid even the barest minimum of self-reflection on these issues.
No men’s movement that doesn’t in some way address the problem of male violence will ever be anything but a reactionary boys’ club reinforcing the most poisonous parts of toxic masculinity.
Discuss that, dudes.
CORRECTION: I corrected some incorrect info about the Kroger shooting (I had misstated the day on which it happened and the gender of his victims).
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@Jesalin: But “perfect use” just means putting it on every single time. “Typical use” means taking a chance and going without from time to time.
I think those statistics can easily mislead people, because it’s easy to assume that “perfect use” means that you have some kind of rare condom technique achieved after years of practice whereas “typical use” means you put it on like a normal person would.
> I`m a wealthy Young Caucasian male
Essentially he just described pretty much every MRA ever.
Gonna try to bring together a couple of separate threads together, so bear with me here….
It’s remarkable just how petty so much of these little grievances they have really are, and how much they cling to them. Seriously, these people still post about “manspreading” as if that was all that feminism had to talk about. And I’ve seen plenty of YouTube arseholes ballyhoo that because there were a couple of ad campaigns on public transit and maybe a couple of thought pieces from Buzzfeed that mentioned how irksome it is (as a symbol of male entitlement.)
I can’t help but think of Carl “Blargon of Suckkad” Benjamin as the perfect example of this. When he debated feminist academic Kristi Winters (and was decisively defeated), what struck me in particular was that his talking points regarding feminism didn’t even rise to the level of discussing global current events, let alone the academic work of feminism. As I find with a lot of these casual YouTube MRAs, to them, feminism literally begins and ends with whatever handful of Tumblr posts, YouTube clips and Buzzfeed thinkpieces are being shared around Reddit or 4chan, often about things no more important than “manspreading” or Matt Taylor’s shirt. So while Kristi Winters was discussing the inadequacy of sexual assault definitions, the need for women’s liberation movements in the theocracies of the Middle East and Asia, as well as offering feminism as a framework for analyzing the dynamics of gender. All that Carl could come up with was “rainbow-haired uggos are the new Big Brother because they protest and deplatform people.” When he was asked by Kristi what his theoretical framework was for analyzing gender if it wasn’t feminism, Benjamin’s infamous response was “I don’t know, I don’t care!” Benjamin repeated this same routine at the recent Mythcon panel with Richard Carrier, where Benjamin continued to characterize feminists as “shouty blue-hairs that hate free speech” and demanded Carrier account for them (despite Carrier obnoxiously agreeing with him).
Now Carl Benjamin is an incredibly stupid man and any time spent thinking about him is time that could be better used contemplating the nature of navel lint, but I bring him up because he’s the perfect case study of the casual anti-feminist. He doesn’t really know or care about global emancipatory movements (short of “Muslims be evil”) or the scientific theory underpinning those movements, all he cares about is being able to play his video games and shitpost on the internet criticism free (and make some coin off it). And when a Buzzfeed thinkpiece written by a blue-haired woman tells them that their favourite game is “problematic,” they freak out and run for their YouTube safe spaces, awaiting the next “cringe compilation”.
That’s literally all feminism is to these people–BUT only to a point, and that point is where the danger arises. It’s bad enough that Benjamin picks out some teenage YouTuber with under 100 subs to sic his obnoxious fanbase on and if that was all he did, it would hardly be worth discussing. However, he does what a lot of the more grotesque YouTubers do, and it’s what had Richard Spencer citing Benjamin as a “gateway to the alt-right” along with the English Defense League giving Benjamin a shout-out.
He promulgates the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that began in Nazi Germany as “Cultural Bolshevism” and carried on following the work of the Frankfurt School, a group of mostly Jewish philosophers that worked on critical social theory. Now, I’ve never read the work of any members of the Frankfurt School, nor has anybody I’m aware of, but it’s consistent with the mindset that was highlighted in a video posted by Sam Seder this morning related to the Pittsburgh shooting as well as the fears of the migrant caravan: these people need an explanation of why a group they consider inferior continue to win against the theoretically smarter and stronger side, and the only explanation that will satisfy them is if there’s a shadowy cabal of wealthy elites backing them financially, and that shadowy cabal has historically been and continues to be Jewish. How is it that an organized caravan is making its way north? Must be George Soros. How is it that the left is organizing mass protests against the righteous ascendance of Donald Trump? Saul Alinsky and George Soros. How did a young woman of Armenian descent get a huge Kickstarter campaign and the ear of game developers? Cultural Marxists. It’s not possible that a group of people with nothing to lose banded together to keep each other safe or that a feminist cultural critic just happened to hit at the right time to look at video games. No, since these people are inferior to us, there’s gotta be someone else pulling the strings… somebody with wealth and power thinking long term… or *gulp* global!
So ultimately, it doesn’t matter what flavour of right-wing reactionary you are. White nationalist, GamerGater, anti-feminist, 4chan shitposter… you’re all at least flirting with anti-Semitism, if not open mouth kissing and dry humping it. And personally, I think it’s incumbent upon us to make these connections for people so they know what it is they’re seeing from Carl Benjamin or Jordan Peterson or the President himself. It’s a very old hatred, possibly one of the oldest, and it’s very ugly.
I have often thought of the dumpster-fire as being a lot like Joseph McCarthy….
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/joseph-mccarthy-meets-his-match
watch this clip of the junior senator from wisconsin and tell me you don’t see trump, sarah sanders, sean hannity and tucker carlson all rolled into one horrible man.
the most striking thing is how often McCarthy responds to a question by deflecting back to the be-scared-of-the-boogey-man of “illegal immigration”… no, wait, it was “communism” in his case….
the bottom line is the same… none of the other issues matter because “communists”; the rights of everyone should be disregarded because “communists”; the world is literally going to crumble around us because “communists”
and now the dumpster-fire thinks he can, by executive order, strip the citizenship from whoever he doesn’t like… because “immigrants”
His fictional counterpart Johnny Iselin from the Manchurian Candidate, too. That book/movie predicted Trumpism so well.
@ wwth…
There was another book that… kind’a predicted trumpism, but I ca — OH, YEAH, “1984”!!
one element of that story that has been VERY apparent is the association of George Soros with the “Emmanuel Goldstein” character from the book. Everything from supporting the migrant caravan to paying people to protest the dumpster can be laid at the feet of Soros…
there IS NO climate change… the reason the Northwest Passage is navigable for the first time in recorded history…? GEORGE SOROS is bribing the arctic ice sheets!!!
I’m reminded of the complaints from test audiences for the movie “Good Night, and Good Luck” that the actor playing McCarthy was over the top.
All scenes with McCarthy were actually archival footage of the real man.
@WWTH:
Maybe YouTube thinks you’re also a fan of mental gymnastics?
> No men’s movement that doesn’t in some way address the problem of male violence will ever be anything but a reactionary boys’ club reinforcing the most poisonous parts of toxic masculinity.
Is this news to anyone?
In my short two years of observing the movement, I’ve seen nothing except a classic right-wing bait and switch scheme using grossly over-exaggerated (and oftentimes even fabricated) issues that affect men as a smokescreen for reactionary anti-feminism. In the rare cases that they do indeed point out a genuine issue (male victims of sexual assault), they use them as pawns and don’t bother wondering whether their ”debunkings” of rape statistics and ”concern” about victims of false rape accusations just happen to include male victims.
They’re nothing but vile misogynists. Stop treating them like unintelligent privilege-blind people. They’re explicitly created with the purpose of waging class warfare against women.
oops, I hit “send” before I finished… 🙁
another concerning(-ish) development, though this makes my “conspiracy fantasy”-sense tingle….
At this time, the U.S., Russia, and China, the three major world powers, are all controlled by men whom I would classify as fascist dictators….
Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania….
ok, I’ll show myself out….
Hmmm. With fake (or possibly fake, who the hell knows) wars to keep the proles agitated.
I must say I thought this when the Orange Disaster announced he was ending the missile treaty – supposedly to have a go at China and Russia, but people were commenting it looks to be much more against China than against Daddy Putin.
Eternal war, eternal power, eternal lies…
You’d think that the dudes could just, I dunno, keep it in their pants? That’s a pretty good way to not have children. That’s a lot of personal responsibility, though, so I understand the difficulty.
(note: I do not understand the difficulty)
@WWTH, I keep the yootoob on in the background while I work and I pretty much never get alt-right talking heads on my strems. You have to train your algorithm by queueing up things you want to watch and avoiding things you don’t want to watch. Takes a little while but it’s worth it if you’re going to do the yootoob.
I suggest finding some nice playlists and putting them on, especially if they happen to be popular ones – videos with more hits have more algorithmic weight than those that don’t. And, well. Try to avoid political videos, they share semantics with the fascists sometimes. But if you put on playlists of figure skating or GoT reviews or video game playthroughs or something, it won’t be too long before the algorithm has figured out you aren’t interested in fascism.
Really does make me wonder why the right wing echo chamber echos so *loud*. I have to think it’s because of their relative obsession. Most progressive people I know have lots of interests, and the feminism / social justice / etc takes up a slice, the righties don’t seem to have that as much. Their interests all seem to align with that ideology. It all gets entangled.
I think that there’s also a certain amount of – I dunno the term for it. Cult members will frequently undergo almost ritualistic repetitive exposure to the same things, over and over. In a benign form it’s just traditions, like a prayer services. Keeps the meme alive in your head. Same mechanism as studying for an exam by repeating the thing over in your head for a few days.
These videos seem to have something similar going on in them. They all spend a lot of time basically saying the same damn thing, often even without different context. Just the same points, repeated over again, every week. The videos are produced on a regular schedule. Keeping the meme alive in the heads of the adherents.
I mean, we’ve always said it’s pretty culty over there, and this sort of self-reinforcing behaviour’s been mentioned time and again. So, no surprise. Just interesting to see how it dominates YouTube in a way that they can’t really seem to control.
That’s my ramble! I hope everyone is okay, and I hope all the Americans are looking forward to voting. Please do! And don’t just vote, bring a friend to vote with you! This one’s really going to have to be an all-hands situation to overcome the voter suppression. Good luck, folks!
No, perfect use means 100% proper use every time. As with just about anything it is quite possible to use a condom without using it properly.
Unrelated to the post but I had to share it: Some actual signs of the media growing a spine!
Part one: tweet thread about a reporter receiving news that Mueller is a sexual assailant, and wondering if it’s a hoax meant to discredit the investigation
https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/status/1057136275759611905
Part two, corroboration with other journalists, all of which have the same doubts:
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1057282814704566274
Part three, mothafuckin’ repercussions:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/special-counsel-refers-scheme-targeting-mueller-to-fbi/574411
Now to be clear: It’s absolutely true that Mueller might actually have harassed or abused people sexually. You can’t discount that of anyone. But it can also be used as a weapon, and it’s just the sort of thing that the Republicans and Alt-Right would gin up. The fact that the media stopped and considered that possibility instead of leaping on it to try to get a scoop is incredibly good. Thirty reporters and not one of them jumped on it!
Am I allowed to feel more hopeful about how this is going to all turn out?
Standard right-wing hypocrisy: do exactly what they previously had falsely accused the left of doing during the Kavanaugh shit-show.
Is there ever an accusation from the right wing that doesn’t turn out, eventually, to be pure psychological projection on their part?
No.
They always see in others what they themselves are guilty of. I’m convinced that the main reason most conservatives can’t seem to comprehend progressive positions, theories, and concerns is that they assume that progressives think and feel and act the same way they do, just filtered through a different ideology.
They don’t seem capable of comprehending that people can become progressives through logical, moral, and/or practical analysis and reflection. Or that morality is anything more than a rhetorical cudgel to wield against your opponents rather than a set guiding principles you apply to your own life.
There was an article in the Guardian today that spoke to that, about how Nazis insist they’re the real victims.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/30/trump-borrows-tricks-of-fascism-pittsburgh
Nothing really new to anyone here, but a useful reminder that right-wingers’ insistence that other people are the snowflakes goes back a long way.
@Gaebolga
Or they’re so devoid of empathy that they cannot imagine that anybody else wouldn’t do exactly the same thing they’d do were they in that situation. :/
Filled out my ballot the day I got it, mailed it the day after, it’s counted. Granted, a power outage during a roaring Santa Ana wind didn’t leave me with much in the way of diversions other than that, but still, thank god in CA you can do vote by mail. Hard copy of your ballot being only one of the good reasons to do so.
Distilled to essence, the two positions are, one side wants people to be left alone as long as they’re not hurting anyone else; the other side wants half the population killed or exiled. Conservatives cannot understand progressive positions because the idea of allowing someone to do something they don’t like is automatically wrong.
One side believes all people are important, and the purpose of society is to ensure that everyone is taken care of; the other side sees survival as a zero-sum equation, and believes if anyone has anything, it must have been taken from someone else (them, particularly.)
@Scildfreja, Scott Stedman’s twitter is a goldmine on that story! I laughed so hard at this retweeted thread. Little Jacob Wohl is gonna be so grounded over this.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes:
You realize, though, that the alt-right can score off this either way; if the accusation against Mueller is dismissed as–or even proven–to be a canard, they can then wheel about and say, “You see? False rape accusations are too a thing, neener neener neener!”
yeah, around 4% – ish. 1 in 25… or so…. Mueller = false
Kavanaugh = true
Weinstein = true
Moonves = true
Cosby = true
O’Reilly = true
Nassar = true
trump = …
… shall I go ON?!?!?!?
I’m going to stop by my local city hall tomorrow to vote before I head to Boston for the World Series celebration parade.
@Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
The weird thing is, libertarian-leaning conservatives in particular would insist that the first of those is their position. Get the guvmint offa ma back and all that. The thing is, it’s not so much that letting someone do something they don’t like is wrong, it’s that someone doing something they don’t like hurts them. They can’t leave those people alone, because by not being conservatives, they’re harming conservatives, and retribution is just. Therefore the non-conservatives should be killed or exiled, but remember, they started it (by existing). Letting them do their vile non-conservative things is wrong because it ignores the harm the vile non-conservative things do to conservatives.