By David Futrelle
On Sunday, the Australian “Fortnite” streamer known as MrDeadMoth was arrested after inadvertently broadcasting an argument with his wife that ended with him — just off camera — allegedly hitting her in the face while one of their children screamed in the background.
Naturally, some of the internet’s worst people are defending him and blaming his wife for “provoking” him into hitting her.
“MrDeadMoth didn’t do anything Wrong,” declared someone calling himself Burrito6920 on Reddit’s UnpopularOpinion subreddit.
Let’s say he did hit her. Guess what, she fucking deserves it. She’s a loud, shitty wife. She throws shit at him and acts like she’s more important than him. If your man tells you to leave him the fuck alone, you leave him the fuck alone. … If he hit her it can be justified as self defense from her verbal and physical harassment.
And even if it’s not legally justifiable, she’s a fucking bitch. Just because she’s pregnant doesn’t make her better than or special over anybody else. … [A]ny person that’s that much of a c*nt needs to be taught not to be such a c*nt.
While this opinion has indeed proven to be an unpopular one on r/UnpopularOpinion, with other Redditors voting the post down to zero, similar arguments have been getting a much more welcoming reception on KotakuInAction, Reddit’s main forum for reactionary gamers, a subreddit that still officially describes itself as “the main hub for GamerGate on Reddit.”
“She was abusing and violent towards him,” someone called Gathrax asserted in a comment in a KotakuInACtion discussion of the incident.
Everything she did was to make it sound as bad as possible on stream. This was classic female vindictive abuse.
They both suck but I am sick of people saying it was his fault when all he did was a simple Sean Connery to get her to stop abusing him and maybe even abusing the kid.
This comment got 77 upvotes from fellow KotakuInAction readers.
“I don’t want to say she’s ‘asking for it’ but she’s basically asking for it,” another commenter called tosi-ebin opined.
A classic case of “how long can my man take abuse and try and de-escalate the situation before he loses his shit”. The “crying” stops real quick and she comes back for more each time.
Tosi-ebin got 38 upvotes for this, er, wisdom.
“Ladies, at this point, can we all just admit that an ass whoopin’ just doesn’t fall out of the goddamn sky?” wrote yet another KotakuInAction commenter called astonwave.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re both horrible fucking people for putting their child in this situation, but she essentially instigated this by throwing shit at him, and people are surprised he’d had enough and retaliated?
A commenter called spliffcitycanada joked “Save yourselves, go mgtow.”
All of these comments also got upvoted by the KotakuInAction gang.
Meanwhile, over on the internet Nazi tip sheet the Daily Stormer, one of the site’s regular contributors offered a strikingly similar, if somewhat more colorfully worded, defense of the alleged wife beater — then worked some anti-Semitism into the mix.
“Twitch Streamer MrDeadMoth Arrested for Defending Self Against Hysterical Aggressive Fronthole” the headline blared.
In the article itself, the Daily Stormer’s “Luis Castillo” attacked the wife for not being properly appreciative of her husband.
“This man apparently gave this woman a place to live and have kids, and bought her some food for her to cook for him, which she cooked as a service to him,” he wrote.
Then she went full aggro on him for not eating the food she made for him. …
Women will do any sort of shit they can get away with. This used to not even be a problem, because our grandfathers used to not let them get away with stupid shit. This continues to not be a problem outside of the West, because non-Westerners continue to not let their women get away with stupid shit.
This is only a problem in the West, now, because the Jews created Feminism and pushed it on us through their control of our cultural institutions and legal system.
Most of the Daily Stormers commenters agreed.
“This is the perfect example of a psycho wife using psychological assault,” declared a commenter called ashenone.
“The pimp-slap heard aroud the world” someone calling himself Xbowjoe1 joked.
“He should have fucking punched her in the mouth and locked her in a room and told her to think about what she did,” declared bossn*gger.
But not every Daily Stormer commenter was quite so impressed with MrDeadMoth. Someone called Alt-Reich attacked him as a “f*ggot” — not for beating his wife, but for playing video games in the first place.
That guys is a fucking f*g and a disgrace as a dad, how many hours has he been playing that game …
[A]re you seriously defending this f*ggot! A lot of men seem to know all there is about how fucked up women are now (they are), but they need to take a good look in the mirror, because they too have become absolute disgraces as Men…
Jews own most guys now, they have fucked up the men as much as the women … .
It shouldn’t be much of a shock to see commenters on Reddit’s “main hub for GamerGate” in close agreement with Daily Stormer Nazis — that last anti-gamer comment notwithstanding.
The Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin cut his political teeth — and learned how to troll — in the fetid misogynistic and anti-Semitic swamp that is 4chan’s /pol/ board. 4chan also helped to birth the GamerGate movement and the reactionary gamer culture left in its wake; GamerGate was steeped in fascist (and often blatantly antisemitic) imagery even before the resurgence of the far-right in 2015 and 2016.
Of course, during the heyday of GamerGate, commenters on KotakuInAction at least generally tried to pretend that they weren’t raging misogynists. They don’t seem to feel the need to bother any more.
You can see the whole incident these lovely people are arguing about here.
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @0utofBeta for tipping me off about this.
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Nothing like putting the “fun” in “dysfunctional”.
Jesus wept.
I hope his wife finds a safe way to leave him.
WOMEN SHOULD BE PUNISHED EQUALLY FOR VIOLENT CRIMES BECAUSE THEY’RE EQUALLY PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS
EXCEPT THEY SHOULD ALSO FEAR PROVOKING MEN BECAUSE THEY’LL REGRET IT
Isn’t there something about fascism making enemies simultaneously weak and strong? I guess that’s only possible if you first are brainwashed into believing alt-facts, truth isn’t truth and science is a liberal conspiracy
These people, the alt-right, are such narcissistic violent savages that it is literally a danger to one’s physical safety to extend empathy to them.
Does it make me a horrible person to think that? Maybe, but I’d rather be on guard at all times, ready for the worst that will most likely occur, that continues to occur every day, than be a martyr for a pointless, academic cause of decency that won’t ever change people who are too far gone.
They choose to act like animals, every day of their lives. It would be just as delusional of me to ignore that as the ideology of the alt-right itself is. And that, I think, is why the left has been utterly impotent and incompetent in combating fascism.
That’s a very depressing situation. While these people are trying to pass terrible political comments over a domestic incident, I think this incident is a one minute condensation of domestic violence in general (at least in my limited experience). Emotionaly unavailable people who harrass each other and make their respective life miserable until one of them gets actually violent is fairly common in cases of domestic violence. The worst part about domestic violence in general (not necessarily that case) is that those who commit it feel so easily justified to use violence. We all know (or at least we should) that violence in a couple is never justified, but we all got irationaly angry at some point and could very well have committed terrible things and worse of it all feel justified about them. Being nagged, insulted, ignored, dismissed and cheated repeatedly are no excuse to attack someone or even seriously threaten them physically, but that doesn’t mean all of those things aren’t truly painful and poisonnous. In the end, solving serious conflict in a couple can be very hard, sometime it’s just better to leave, but hindsight is always perfect. Add in that elements like the sunken cost fallacy and conflicting emotions and we can see why domestic violence is so difficult to solve.
In my opinion, the largest onus of domestic violence rest upon men who have been raised in a society that doesn’t equip them well to talk about their emotions, their pain and their sadness in a profound fashion. Talking about this is hard. It’s alsways hard no matter your gender or your education. Trying to do it with a poor education, few good models and probably no intimate example is extremely hard. This linked to the fact that our society still has a higher threshold of tolerence for male violence then other leads to bad situation to become terrible ones. Note that doesn’t mean women and more accurately the culture that shaped many of their beliefs and behaviors are without blame or room for improvements. Many are still enthralled by this idea that a woman’s greatest accomplishment is her family and/or her couple, leading many to setup ridiculous standards of behavior and attempt to control their spouse (and children) in an effort to reproduce this ideal of success that is completely devoid of the human part of a relationship. In the end according more importance to expectations than to people and reality itself causes immense harm in couples.
I just want to know what “a simple Sean Connery” is when it’s at home.
@ Austin G Loomis
As I understand it, Sean Connery caught his then wife enjoying the intimate charms of a hotel waiter. On their honeymoon. From what I heard, Connery then put her over his knee and spanked her.
Just looked up the incident as best I could in a hurry, and I’m not sure about the honeymoon bit. The marriage appears to have lasted just over a decade.
Right-wing scumbags: Use clever (sic) phonetic spellings of the phrase, “didn’t do nothin'” as a slur against people of colour
Also right-wing scumbags: Awfully fond of making, “____ did nothing wrong!” pronouncements about them and theirs
?
Short version of these responses: Women keep tricking men into beating them.
Follow this train of thought, “we men can’t control themselves, and are violent animals with no control over our actions”. And yet they think they are superior?
Jackasses, stop making the rest of us look bad!
@epronovost:
the whole “almost all abusive relationships are reciprocal” is not only a millennia-old excuse for victim blaming
citation:
http://stoprelationshipabuse.org/educated/avoiding-victim-blaming/ )
it’s also literally exactly what MRAs peddle themselves, including Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan
citation:
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2013/01/25/abused-women-demand-their-abuse-how-mras-make-the-abusers-arguments-for-them/#comments
As well as Erin Pezzy (who thinks violence can be consensual), warren farrell (who thinks date rape is just a little “excitement”), etc etc
So no, bothsidism isn’t the magical cure pill to domestic violence, because that’s exactly the misogynistic impulse society has been capitulating to for literally thousands of years and, earth to epronovost, it hasn’t helped.
Come back when you have some data to back up your old-as-dirt bullshit.
P.S.
Uh, no, it’s really not that hard to not beat the shit out of people. Most people are perfectly capable of avoiding doing this for their entire lives. Just like rape. If you can see yourself easily doing something terrible, that’s a you problem
These doods aren’t like animals, they aren’t like animals at all. Animals mind their own business, stay out of trouble as best they can, and avoid fights or confrontations wherever possible, outside of very specific ritualized behaviours.
These doods are way below animals.
@Jane Done
My comment isn’t about cases of bidirectional abusive relationship (which do exist of course), but about the fact that domestic violence is more common then one could expect and, while women are more often victims of it, they are also guilty of it too. Some women have killed, threaten, assaulted, manipulated and even tortured their spouse. That it doesn’t happen as often as in men doesn’t mean that nothing should be done or said about them. The most common statistic I have seen about domestic violence is that 70% of its victims are women and 70% of the perpetrator are men (roughly). Thus, as I say the largest part of onus should be on men, but that doesn’t mean that one should ignore or downplay the remaining 30%. Furthermore, toxic gender roles both in men and women are playing an important role in domestic violence and child abuse in my opinion.
I think we all agree that women can be abusers and men can be victims, but is there any particular reason why, in a post about a man abusing a woman and a bunch of other men defending him there is a need to do the what about the menz thing?
@wwth
Enlightened Centrists gonna enlight, I guess. Though maybe the word is “gaslight”.
@epronovost
Could you please, stop carrying water for the australian fortnite streamer and pregnant wife beater by saying that some women beat up men too?
@epronovost
Also give us the damn citations for that percentages you spewing.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes: That is a very good point. One of the most powerful messages that I ever remembered from a nature documentary was the simple factoid that the overwhelming majority of animals never fight to the death, because it’s too risky, provides no benefit, and any simple mistake, a tiny scratch, can still be fatal, even for the “winner”.
Funny how real animal science is nothing like toxic masculinity makes it out to be.
@epronovost:
Your opening statement is in fact the definition of bidirectional abuse, and implying how it’s more often the case than most people think. If you don’t want your statement to be read as meaning a thing, don’t use words that mean that thing. Because words mean things.
Also, yeah, as wwth said, responding to a man beating his wife senseless and calling his own toddler-aged daughter a c**t with “whattabout teh menz” is the most disingenuous response you could have. Because context, in addition to words, mean things.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
Because I thought it would be pertinent to talk about domestic violence in general. Considering the fact that the reaction of reactionnary mysogynists to any case of domestic violence is as dishonest, filled by hypocritical indignation and casual exaltation of violence as it’s expectable. Really, at that point, I think David could just invent the posts, comments and reactions of these people and we would be none the wiser. I don’t think its possible for them to sink even lower (but, depressingly, they will probably prove me wrong next week, just like they did in the past).
After watching the video of the agression linked in the blog post, it reminded me of how difficult it can be to solve or even talk about couple problems before some degenerate to violence. We are so ill equipped to deal with them, especially men. There is such a shame surrounding the issue. I personnaly passed through a patch in my current couple life that could be considered as domestic violence. Nobody got hit or threatened to hit anybody, but there was insults, passive agressive comments, accusations and even one, fortunately, short shouting match. Under some definitions this falls in the category of “light domestic violence”. From my point of view calling it violence even though nobody was physically hurt or threatened to be physically hurt isn’t inaccurate. Domestic violence, even of that sort, hurts… a lot. I never was more miserable and scared sometime for myself, sometime from myself then during that period of my life. It’s my greatest joy and pride, that I and my spouse managed to get out of that spiral before it was too late and are now living a happy life together; that despite all that hapenned neither of us lost track of our situation and capacity to be reasonnable and loving. Please understand my allusion to men suffering of domestic violence broadly through the spectrum of a man who want to share some of his personal story and experience on the subject but is naturally uncomfortable talking openly and easily in public. so I have a tendency of approaching it sideway or by turning around the flower pot. (BTW, I don’t regret being pressured at all on the subject, I do need to get over that discomfort)
On a more academic note though, I think, in general feminism has done a great job at dismanteling a lot of the elements that fostered domestic violence amongst women by breaking the ideal that the sole value of a women wasin her family and her couple. That she had do “live through them” to feel any form of success and validation if you know what I mean. That sort of toxic view of feminity and women’s value openned the door wide to abuse of people, especially children in that case, but also of being abused. Traditional expectation and gender roles in a couple are poison. We need to keep on the pressure and push back against those misguided ideals.
Why do you find that pertinent to talk about here, in this context, on this thread?
Back on the actual topic, an actual human being actually formed this thought and then decided to share it publicly.
Dude, if she was throwing shit or whatever, you take the kid(s) and leave for a while. You don’t fucking hit her. Him hitting her was not self-defense. It was not an inevitability. Period.
And then there’s this bullshit.
@Kupo
I just wrote an entire paragraph about it but if you want a TL DR version of it, I’m a man who lived through a bidirectional violent relationship and watching the video of the incident reminded me of my own experience of it, but being still rather shamed and shy about this issue as its a painful one that reflects very negatively on my character and that of the woman I love, I tend to approach it in an obtuse way in general.
eprovonost
If you’re genuinely interested in domestic and partner violence, you should perhaps use the backing of a couple of experts, men, who know more than just about anyone.
Jackson Katz https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue?language=en
Lundy Bancroft
“Why Does He Do That?” https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/0425191656
Get these under your belt for your 101 entry course showing that it’s not about people controlling their emotions and then read some more.
OK eprovonost, your comment wasn’t showing when I did mine.
You could still benefit from absorbing Katz’s and Bancroft’s material. Bancroft at least gives you some hints about recognising abusive behaviour in anyone, but resetting presumptions about how such relationships degenerate into overt violence is worthwhile regardless.