By David Futrelle
Last Friday, a man walked up to a mother and her five-year-old boy who were standing outside the Rain Forest Cafe on the third floor of Minnesota’s Mall of America. Without saying a word, he grabbed the boy and threw him over the balcony.
Luckily, the boy survived the fall, and is being treated for multiple severe injuries at a local hospital. His assailant, a 24-year-old man named Emmanuel Deshawn Aranda, was captured as he tried to flee the mall, and has confessed to the crime, according to police. He’s been charged with attempted murder.
As unsettling as all this is, what makes it even more unsettling is the apparent motive for the attack. According to the Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, Aranda was driven by rage over being rejected by women.
A statement put out by the Attorney’s office says that
Aranda told police he had come to the mall on Thursday intending to kill an adult, but that it did not “work out,” according to the complaint. He returned Friday and chose the boy instead. He told police he knew what he was planning to do was wrong. Aranda said he had been coming to the mall for years, tried to speak to women there and they rejected him. That made him lash out and act aggressively.
According to the complaint itself, Aranda had been previously banned from the mall “for throwing water in a woman’s face and destroying property. He has a warrant for his arrest from Illinois for assault. …”
It’s not clear if Aranda had any connection to the incel “movement,” such as it is, or if he was inspired by previous incel acts of violence like Elliot Rodger’s 2014 killing spree or the van attack in Toronto a year ago. But he was clearly motivated by the “aggrieved entitlement” that is rampant among men in America and throughout the world today.
On the Braincels subreddit, the site’s main forum for incels, the regulars seem most concerned that they will get “slammed” for the brutal attempted murder. While no one in the desultory discussion of the case there is glorifying Aranda the way that incels have glorified Elliot Rodger, one commenter is offering him a certain degree of sympathy.
“I think not getting pussy does something to the brain,” writes BBCislaw, “it’s a legitimate issue that will be ignored in favor of mocking the afflicted.”
On Incels.co, the largest incel forum off of Reddit, they don’t seem to have discovered the story yet, though the regulars are currently celebrating the pain suffered by a 22-year-old “Stacey” who apparently fell from a clock tower while attempting to take a selfie, and voting in a poll on what they see as the proper punishment for couples who kiss in public. (At the moment, “torture/death by soldering iron” is in the lead.)
The incel ideology is pure poison.
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Boys are told not to hit girls. But when boys/men hit or otherwise hurt girls/women, they are very frequently excused. The message is more “don’t hit girls…unless she has it coming.”
That message usually also gets combined somehow with “he’s just doing it because he likes you” as well.
@Doethreetwoone
I am uncomfortable with this sentiment –
Violence whole being locked up is not part of the punishment, being locked up is the punishment. Violence on top of that is just abuse, and it often (from my admittedly limited understanding) goes into sexual abuse.
When people talk about this, especially about crimes dealing with children, ‘violence’ is usually code for ‘don’t drop the soap’.
I don’t think you meant it like that, but that is often how it is used, so…
I just… don’t like the idea.
@Rhuu
Not always. They also kill a lot of people. Child rapists or abusers often don’t live very long in prison when their crimes get out because the other incarcerated men kill them. It’s not always sexual abuse even though that’s normally where the joke goes ,which is disgusting. A lot of incarcerate men in there are fathers and they aren’t there for being abusers. A lot are there for like drug chargers or things like that.
When my uncle was in prison he told me about how if a guy was a child abusers or child rapist but he was rich there would be a lot that would go into protecting his identity because a gang of other prisoners would kill him if they found out he hurt a child.
I understand completely why you are uncomfortable. I would rather being locked up be the punishment and I hate jokes about and kind of sexual abuse as well.
I agree that, regardless of their crimes, inmates shouldn’t be humiliated, beaten up or killed by other for the exact same reason that outside of a prison, self-proclaimed vigilante shouldn’t humiliate, beat up, or kill criminals.
Outside of moral considerations, I would also add that we want the sentence to not decrease too much the odds that the inmate can be rehabilitated afterwards. Prison by conception will often make people go even worse, but adding abuse on top of loneliness and unsocialization make it even worse.
(and, yes, I hope that that guys will one day realize the horror of what he did and become an acceptable lad. I won’t hold my breath for that tho)
From a link from the comments a couple posts back on this site, I finally found a good discussion of positive masculinity. As someone who has wasted far too much time both on the manosphere and anti-manosphere sites like this, it shouldn’t have taken so long. But I think I understand why, and it’s a story as old as time.
When confronted with a dangerous situation, there are three basic choices: engage carefully (read: fearfully), engage recklessly, or disengage (from a situation one could handle). It’s pretty clear that the first choice, bravery, is positive masculinity, while the other two choices are toxic masculinity. I cannot speak for all men, but the times I have disengaged from situations I could have handled, I felt shame, a deep, abiding shame that I cannot believe is mostly cultural.
Please do not straw man this argument. I’m not just talking fights. A firefighter entering a burning building….project finance negotiations with high stakes…..the birth of one’s first child….a hard math test. All of these things are dangerous situations which one can face correctly or shrink from.
So, the reason we don’t hear about positive masculinity is because it is built into the fabric of our society, and that’s a good thing. You want cops & firefighters, right? You want brave men striving to build the world. You want men to be ashamed of failure.
The insight from the link, the results of which I bought immediately and completely as they line up so well with my life experiences, is that men who find success are by far the least toxic in their masculinity. But we don’t spend much time on the manosphere, or on normal message boards like Yahoo!, bitching about life. We’re too busy rocking it.
One problem is that we all won’t find success. I have read a lot of really healthy advice in the manosphere: become the prize, become exceptional at one or two things, do you even lift, bro? If you have a good enough aura and a v-taper to boot, you’ll never make an unwelcome approach again (eye contact + smile = hi, nice day today, isn’t it?) What to do with the losers who will never get there? I don’t know. Porn & video games, I guess.
Incel ideology is really often just learned helplessness. I have seen this over and over again. “Dude, are you doing X, Y & Z?” “No, none of it works, wah wah wah.” OK, then, whatever. I guess I’m part of the problem, but if you’re not working to better yourself, then fuck off, loser.
By the way, the dude in the OP has been pretty harshly rejected by the manosphere. His “real” (read: Muslim) name has been bandied about. I know this view will find little sympathy here, but I lament the rise of overt racism in the manosphere. A couple years ago, the brothers were still brothers, but that has changed. And the cross pollination of that into places like Yahoo! is more than troubling.
@Rhuu
It is appropriate to be uncomfortable with the facts I pointed out. Jails and prisons SHOULD do a better job protecting inmates. Further, I whole heartedly support your position vis-a-vis not adding prisoner-on-prisoner violence as part of an inmates ‘just deserts’ (Chief Justice McLaughlin summed up the sentiment along the lines of “prison as punishment” as opposed to “prison for punishment”).
That being said, and in this particular case, I can’t help but take some comfort in the fact that this guy is going to have a rough time in county.
He wanted to be the big, bad, violent alpha? He wanted to show how important he was by hurting a child? Ok. Let the guys who are desperate to see their own kids, who are worried about their own kids during their absence, and who can see the face of their own children in this shit’s victim teach him how big and bad and important he really is.
@Doethreetwoone
Am I understanding you correctly that you’re comforted by the thought of this guy being violently attacked in prison?
@kupo
‘Comforted’ was probably a poor choice of words. I won’t be losing any sleep over it though.
@Doethreetwoone
Ok, then can I ask that you please adhere to the comments policy? In particular, this part:
OT: Something of a palate cleanser, perhaps, after the horror of this story: highlights from a Reddit thread where men were asked what the most ridiculous act another man pulled to assert dominance over them. Some real howlers here. Toxic masculinity at its most pathetic.
@Kupo,
My comments:
A- did not threaten anyone; and
B- were not violent.
Acknowledging that a guy like this is going to have a tough time in custody, and not being concerned by this fact, is a far cry from saying he is better off dead or should die in a fire. I trust you can appreciate the difference.
Doethreetwoone,
Can you please just drop it?
You can think/say whatever you want at home -and in public, but on a private blog where multiple folks have already expressed discomfort with the implied condoned violence…
Can we drop it?
Please.
@Cat Mara: those threads are delightful, particularly the drunk push-up one.
You know, in some lizards push-ups really ARE a sign of dominance. Maybe drunk kid just forgot he wasn’t a lizard?
@contrapangloss:
Now I have a mental image of a bunch of gym-rat lizard-bros in ripped T-shirts strutting about with that splayed-leg waddle lizards have going, “bro, do you even lift, bro?” and doing random push-ups ?
Now I have an image of the lizard being the Geicho gekko. 😀
@Weird Eddie:
Ohhh, that explains this twitter thread of the doofus as various muppets:
https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1118361554737491968
@John I’m interested in the assertion implicit in your comment that there are no women/binary cops or firefighters. Care to elucidate?
Because if there are in fact people of other genders doing this job, your point that the existence of these professions supports a “positive masculinity” is invalid.
Yeah, how is bravery a gendered masculine trait? It is coded that way, but it needn’t be. Any one of any gender can be brave.
We should be getting away from labelling personality traits, behaviors or emotions as gendered.
I also completely disagree that successful men are less likely to display toxic masculinity. They’re just less likely to face negative consequences for it. I mean, look at Washington D.C. It’s full of rewarded toxic masculinity. The most obvious example being Trump, but it hardly begins and ends with him.
Tree hugger –
The question is *why* men who are violent are let off. You suggest it is b/c society *justifies* their violence as what women deserved – “he did it because he loved her”. I think it is more that society *excuses* their violence b/c it no longer values self-control – “he did it because he couldn’t help himself”. Of course, we may both be right.
@ John –
What? No! People who are ashamed hide their failure. People who are ashamed of failure never admit that they failed. People who are shamed for failing never try.
Each failure is a data point, and now the person that failed has learned something that didn’t work. Now take that information, and try again!
It’s like watching a bad guy in media kill subordinates for failing him. Pretty soon he isn’t going to have any subordinates left, right?
You also have a bit of a contradiction here. You start off with –
And end off with –
You include yourself as someone who is positive in your masculinity, but talk about how you don’t have time to hang out on message boards. (You might not have meant to include this site in the second comment but…)
Trying to tease out ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ has become a bit of a challenge for me, actually. I’m not sure how to even define them, honestly, because so many of the ‘traits’ are either things that were decided by advertisers, or patriarchy pushing ‘desireable’ outcomes for men to be ‘providers’ and women to be ‘nurturers’.
I honestly don’t have an answer here, and it is something i find frustrating.
I just don’t think that you’ve teased out an example of positive masculinity.
I think maybe it’s because you give three options –
But then artificially limit the choices to one. Some times disengaging is the right decision. (I’m not reading about Alberta politics right now, for example.) Sometimes pressing forward is the best decision, because who knows what will happen? Make mistakes! Get dirty!
I don’t know. Those are my musings. *le shrug*
@ Moggie:
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
@ Crys T:
Ahhh… “gender rolls”… mmmmm, good.
Re bravery, I’m gonna throw a little more gas on the fire, and say that IME women are less likely to freeze up in a crisis than men. I suspect it’s partly acculturation, and partly how we already have to function through random adrenaline surges multiple times a week.
(Likewise, my most crisis competent friends tend to be the ones who have anxiety disorders.)
@Anonymous
I… don’t think that’s what she was saying. Also, patriarchy is not self-consistent.
And this bit about self control is especially a thing where you see a lot of hypocrisy and inconsistency, IMO. We’re supposed to praise men to the skies for having the self control not to take advantage of us, and at the same time shamed for not “seeing to their needs”. The same dudes will talk about self-control and not indulging impulses on the one hand, and about how men have their “needs” on the other, and get praised for both.
It’s not about how and why men are excused for their behavior. It’s that ways will be found to excuse them, because they are men.
There’s a lot going on in your comment, @John. I want to speak particularly about a couple things.
Sure. But they’re not inherently masculine. Unless you think I am being masculine when I solve a math problem? I don’t.
This is a complicated question! I don’t want people’s homes to be on fire. I will grant you that much.
I think it takes lots of different people to build our world.
As Rhuu said and for Rhuu’s reasons, I super don’t want this.
I’m not sure I understand. Do you think folks here are happy about rising racism?
I didn’t mention this!!! Like, were you happy with it when it was covert racism? Did you think there wasn’t any racism? Because I can tell you there super was, like, all the time.
@Visc –
…. OMG I AM D Y I N G.
“You want cops, don’t you?” He asked the group of anti-fascist feminists, completely seriously.