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.
We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
@Anonymous
I’m sorry, but just asserting so isn’t at all convincing. Every person in the world (except maybe manosphere), if you asked them about lack of self-control, rape and violence against women, would say they are bad. That’s not the root of why these issue arise.
Oh, it absolutely goes both ways. There are also women who are violent and controlling in relationships. Desire to dominate another person isn’t something limited to one gender.
And yet. There’s not a 50-50 split in cases of domestic violence. It’s predominantly men.
I think there are several factors there, though I’m no expert by any means.
Patriarchy treats men being dominant over women as norm. If a man is controlled by his wife, he’ll be ridiculed as henpecked. If a man is controlling his wife, it’ll be excused as a sign of love and devotion. That alone causes men with violent tendencies in relationships to be somewhat socially accepted, so long as they don’t do something “unjustified”.
But primarily, I think it’s because women are not taught from young age that they can – must, even – use physical violence to defend their social standing.
Being rejected by a woman, from a patriarchal point of view, is a big blow to someone’s masculinity, one there’s no good recourse for, so it’s not surprising that emotionally stunted men resort to the only think they’ve been taught can get them respect and fear from others.
This is way long and I don’t blame anyone for skipping it, sorry.
Hey @John I appreciate you coming back and considering the responses you got.
Any form of racism everywhere is a bad thing for the world. Even if I was cool with incels being the victims of racism, (and I’m not, not really) incels who are escalating their racist behaviours towards other incels are definitely going to be increasing the racist harm they inflict elsewhere. So we can definitely agree that the increased racism in incel spaces is a bad thing :).
This is my attempt to explain why I don’t consider attempts to define a positive masculinity to be a beneficial exercise. Don’t know how successful I’ll be, but here goes anyway.
First of all, it is not because I think masculinity is inherently toxic. You’re right that some (generally) positive traits, like bravery, are coded masculine.
There are also many stereotypically masculine things that are, in a vacuum, neutral, and displaying those behaviours doesn’t prevent someone from being a positive force in the world. For example, being really into Scotch whiskey is, in a vacuum, not a harmful thing. I think, in practice, white men who inhabit the very male and very white space that is whiskey clubs need to think critically about the gatekeeping that keeps those clubs so homogeneous in the first place and what attracted them to a hobby that women are often not considered “serious” enough for, but just enjoying a dram is not in and of itself a toxic thing.
So that’s what I’m not taking issue with. Here’s what I am taking issue with:
“Toxic masculinity” was coined to define a set of harmful behaviours and attitudes that stem from a lifetime of men and boys being told that they have to remain inside a teeny tiny little box labeled “man” or else they will become like women, a lower form of human, and lose their vaunted status. Any attempt to define a positive masculinity in counter to toxic masculinity reads to me like, “Okay. So those are all the bad things that come from telling men they can only behave one way. Here’s a list of all the good things that come from telling men they can only behave one way.” And, like, no. Nothing good comes from trying to shove people into a tiny box no one can perfectly fit and telling them everyone outside of the box is inferior to them. There are some people who are a better natural fit for the box, and perhaps they’ll survive the process with less wounds. There are decent people who manage to transcend some of the messaging they receive. But the whole process is bullshit. It has no positives.
My other major complaint is that the positive traits and behaviours that are coded masculine are not inherently masculine, and viewing them as positive masculine things instead of just positive things is a result of and contributes to a culture that celebrates men and dismisses everyone else. Take your statement about needing brave men to build the world. This dovetails perfectly, if unintentionally, into the idea that men build all the things. Innovation, creation, construction are all male-coded. The reality is that non-men are often barred from participating in these types of activities, and the precious few who slip through, their contributions are minimized. It’s not that building stuff is just a man thing.
Anyways after that essay I wrote for no credit my point is that you can define yourself as being masculine and being a good person, and I’m 100% down with that. If you define yourself as being a “positively masculine” person, well then… hmm.
Also congrats on being really hot or whatever.
No John. He’s just a creep.
Beyond Ocean –
No disagreement with anything you say, but I think you are forgetting something.
One significant contributing factor to men being more likely to be the abuser in marriages is not any social attitude, but simply the brute fact that men are stronger than women.
Similarly, older siblings tend to beat up the younger ones and not the other way around. This is not because there is any social acceptance of this, but simply because they are bigger and stronger.
[Citation needed]
Being bigger and stronger doesn’t automatically make you violent and wish to beat up anyone smaller than you. The need for dominance is what does that, and that has nothing to do with physical strength.
I happen to be very strong, but that doesn’t make me violent, it just makes people want me to open their jars for them.
LMAO!
…
Umm..by the way, this jar…
@Viscaria, well said. So very, very well said!
@Jesalin:
*grabs jar and lid, grits teeth, twists
Here you go!!!?
Yutolia, I remember when I was very young, my three older brothers would roughhouse. Although I was by far the smallest, they never did it with me because they knew I didn’t enjoy it.
Viscaria – I view my own masculinity as almost accidental/incidental to my basic personality. It’s neither good nor bad in and of itself. I take pride in being a good person, because I developed those skills deliberately. When I was a young man, my basic social skills were not strong (according to a therapist, probably due to spectrum issues), so I practiced being the kind of person who *did* have them. A friend of mine joked that I’m the only person he knows who learned to adult before he learned to human.
This could help explain why I’ve been happily married for twenty four years.
Just here to +1 for @Viscaria.
All the best, folks.
I’m not a troll, nor am I a creep. I just don’t think that I can contribute usefully and meaningfully here.
It’s a fun forum, and I wish you all the best.
I’ve been thinking about the “positive masculinity” issue for a while, but haven’t been able to come up with any real answers.
For a time, I believed that gender was substantially meaningless.
However, I know that there are parts of my masculinity that I treasure. Being a father, a husband, a brother, and a son, means something to me in a way that being a parent, a spouse, a sibling, and someone’s child doesn’t. But, I don’t know why that is.
I also know that trans friends, family, and colleagues knowingly put themselves at risk everyday to express their gender identity. If gender isn’t important, I doubt these folks would go through the endless tribulations they face if gender was truly meaningless.
So, I think there is something important about gender. If so, I want my masculinity to be positive, but I don’t know what that means.
I certainly know that I attempt to teach my daughters virtues that are traditionally coded as masculine. I also know that I want to model for them a masculinity that doesn’t shy away from traditionally feminine virtues or roles.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have tried to pin down what a positive masculinity is that is somehow distinct from generally being a good person with a balanced personality. I haven’t found any indication of what that might be, but something, somewhere, in me tells me it exists. If anyone is aware of resources that could begin addressing this issue, or have their own opinions on the issue, I would happily accept suggestions.
@doethreetwoone
I was debating saying one other thing, and it’s not far off of your question…and I think this is good for anyone, regardless of plumbing or what you prefer to do with your plumbing:
Life is one big game, filled with a multitude of smaller games. You win some, you lose some. What matters most is how you play, as cliche as that is. Some games advance your goals better than others, to be sure. But play fair, if not nice.
To me, much of the fuel of toxic masculinity is throwing tantrums when you don’t win, and the rest is when you cheat to win. Donald Trump is the most toxic man alive, it’s insane that such a thin skinned person could ever reach the White House.
To those who do not like my redefinition….well, you win some, and you lose some.
So, to continue with your ‘game’ analogy… You’ve got a creep who tries to pick up women. He loses that game (because women are game tokens, in this analogy, so I guess she… wins?) Anyway, because he lost that game, he decides to play another game, one in which he kills someone.
He throws a child off of a high place.
Who won?
Defining interactions as pure win/lose makes sense *in a game*, where you can play for stakes. But in the real world, you don’t have to win or lose. Everyone can win, no one can win, but most importantly, *life isn’t a game*.
Kupo already went over this, above.
Why are you forcing all of life’s possibilities into an artificial win/lose binary?
@doethreetwoone – It’s weird, because I don’t know how to define positive masculinity either, but gender identity is still important to me as well.
What fun, haha.
@doethreetwoone, I read your comment and it really made me think about my own. I’m not done thinking, but I just wanted before I forgot to thank you for sharing your perspective.
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Women are agents, each with her own set of preferred outcomes.
I say plenty of things for you to poke holes in. Not this one, please.
@John:
He did it by cheating. Of course.
Whew, OK, that last point needed to be stand alone. If you guys want to run me off, that’s my pain point. I cannot have a shred of respect here if that’s not absolutely crystal clear. I am engaging in good faith, and do not want to waste anyone’s time. Vigorous disagreement is not necessarily wasted time! But people here thinking I think of women as objects (at least differently than I see men as objects) or thinking I think that women lack agency, that’s an absolute dealbreaker.
All models are wrong, but some models are useful.
Game theory gives purchase for analysis. Having a good understanding of the incentives of each player and the environment they find themselves in is one way of making sense of the world. Of course, pure rationality is purely impossible, but bounded rationality can get you a really long way.
Fair question. I’m guessing most women (since spam cold approach is part of the issue, we’re talking about women) would rank rejecting a handsome and friendly man who started a natural conversation over some creep who is hitting on women with no invitation whatsoever. She wins the interaction by swatting away the creep, but certainly is no better off having had the interaction, whereas with the welcome interaction, she arguably is better off, since we all like compliments and not being scared.
I despise spam cold approach exactly because it is a very subpar strategy. Not only it annoys women and poisons the well between the sexes, the fact that it doesn’t work just leaves one bitter.
In this situation, it all honestly breaks down. I mean, the guy seemed to have fed his anger until it snapped, and it’s hard to understate how much of a problem that is, to put it mildly. Everyone was left worse off because of this event, not least the poor child. I try not to look at his picture. It’s haunting as fuck.
@Cat Mara:
<clicky linky>
That variety of toxic masculinity goes back at least to the late 60s, and I can prove it with the following quotation:
I seem to recall armed security guards being needed to break up a major brawl that had developed within five minutes of the above.
@John: Oops! You didn’t stick the flounce. Too bad.
@Viscaria
If you come to any insights, let me know.
@doethreetwoone
This is how I’ve made sense of it so far. I’m agender so I have my blind spots; this is also a really difficult topic to discuss sensitively because the risk of innocently saying something that sounds like a thing terfs have used to persecute trans people is high, terfs are fucking tireless and they try everything. I am not a terf, if my views invalidate anyone’s identity it is a flaw not an intended feature and I will amend them.
Gender is inherently meaningless but we’re stuck with it for now. As long as it’s there, it will continue to be real and have real effects on people, and it will continue to be a part of their socialisation and at the core of most people’s self concept and identity.
You identify with one set of roles and don’t with another, even though they apply to you just as well, because we have historically defined most roles through their gendered aspect and don’t have the same kind of cultural language and accumulated deep psychological meaning for the new, non-gendered replacements yet.
This is what is important about gender. It’s a core part of our identity, roles, position etc., it informs our personal narratives, and so on, and so on. Existence is an amorphous cloud of meaninglessness unless you impose some sort of conceptual structure on it, yet there are infinitely many possible conceptual structures and we can’t even say which ones are more suitable than others without already having major parts of the structure already set in place. Children need to be given a culture in order to be able to even think. Gender is a way in which we grow to think of ourselves, and to most of us, it is irreplaceable. When the vast majority of what you’ve learned about being human throughout your entire life has relied on gendered concepts, language, and perspectives, gender has become a part of you. It won’t go away just because you now see that you could have grown into some different set of ideas instead, even if you’ve come up with a better set. Or if it does, maybe you were agender all along?
There is one thing that can be specifically positive masculinity: good allyhood and wielding your privilege for the benefit of others. The rest is just being a good person, but it’s specifically with regard to you or someone in a similar position, instead of a more general, impersonal, abstract idea. I’m in favour of still not calling it masculinity, but I can’t speak for how a person with a gender identity might want or need to think about it.
Re: Gender Identity being important
I guess I’m the opposite end of the spectrum? Honestly, I’ve given up and consider myself cis by default, and not due to any strong feelings one way or the other. It’s complicated by the fact that my androgen/estrogen balance is all sorts of messed up, which might account for some of my weirdness.
My gender identity only really matters to me in three cases:
(1) When people imply people of my gender can’t do a thing or are innately bad at a thing or that people of my gender doing the thing well are unicorns… especially when I DO THE THING. And then it’s like “Okay? I’m really not that special and I exist so I’m pretty sure other folks also can do the thing. Stop it.”
(2) When people of my gender start talking about the innate and nebulous thingy that somehow defines the gender and I’m kinda like… um… no clue what you’re talking about but you feel you?
(3) When people of the opposite gender are talking about their inner experience of gender and I find myself nodding along with an “I feel that” until they hit something that doesn’t track with my experience and it’s like “wait, THAT throws you off that much? Really? What?”
So yeah, case 1 is annoying, case 2 makes me feel like I’m somehow hugely inadequate, and case 3 reminds me that I don’t fit in on the other side either.
And then I get busy doing stuff, the world rolls on, and things are okay because the world really is a pretty cool place with a TON of stuff to work on.
And this was my ramble. Back to stinking solidworks and the last 2 weeks to get this crud done before graduation!
@John – Hm. I want to go over something, if you’ll indulge me.
You said this:
Which is not talking about game *theory*, but only about games themselves.
How do games work? You can have co-op games (those are my favourites!) where everyone is working towards a particular goal. Everyone is playing together, knows all the rules, and wins or loses together.
However, the basic everyday situation here of a man trying to ask out a woman, and being rejected being treated as a game is not a co-op game. He is playing, she is just living her life, doin’ whatever. In the context of defining ‘who are the players in this game’, you get the man as the player, and the woman as the non-player.
In a game, there is usually only a win/lose condition. Sometimes there is a tie, or a win/lose with conditions (you won the little prize, but not the entire prize) but typically it’s just win/lose. A man asks out a woman, there are lots of ways it an go. Here are a few, along with their win/lose results for the man, the one who is actually ‘playing’ this game while the woman is just going about her day –
-she says yes, unambiguously (win)
-she says yes, because he is scaring her and she doesn’t want to say no and get hurt (win)
-she says yes, but gives him a fake phone number because she just wants him to stop bothering her (loss)
-She says no, because she’s not interested/busy/he’s just not her cup of tea (loss)
-she says no, because he has violated one or several social norms and has frightened her (loss)
-she says no, emphatically, because he’s being a creep. (loss)
In most of these, a retry with a modification of behaviour will let someone see if their new, levelled up through experience of what doesn’t work skills will allow them to succeed.
Perhaps they will look online to learn more about how to ‘game’ women, so that they say yes.
This, what with algorithms being what they are, lead them to ‘Game’, pick up artistry, and the eventual manosphere and alt-right.
It’s strange how the people who insist that interpersonal interactions between men and women can be defined as a ‘game’, with the men the player and the women the non-player, fall within the alt-right, isn’t it?
You also say this, in response to me calling women in your analogy ‘game tokens’
What, then, do you call the other participant in the game, the one who doesn’t know it’s a game? If we want to go videogame, I can call her an NPC, but since that term is currently being assigned by ridiculous people to all people on the left, I went with the board game ‘token’.
Why do you want me to not mention how viewing others as the non-player characters in a game reduces them to NPCs or tokens? Why is this part of your theory (which is the main reason I have a problem with it, games are no fun if not everyone knows they are playing.) the one that you need to protect?
In the longer reply, you said that you staying here was contingent on us not thinking that you thought that women weren’t people. Cool, I guess. But you can consciously think something (women = people) and still, every so often, find little nuggets that society/upbringing/whatever has put out there in the world that you’ve internalised, and need to dig that out.
I mean, I know I certainly do. Sometimes I’ll have a thought, and then right after I go “what the ACTUAL fuck???” and also recognise that it was an old brain pathway, one that I hadn’t consciously thought critically about before. Hooray, I’ve found yet another bit of shit that I need to think through, read about, talk about, so I can balance what I thought with what I wish to think, in the future.
Perhaps this analogy is important to you, to how you live your life. Me pointing out how not everyone else is playing a game, and how framing others as participating when they are not is… Like, scary, has upset you… Because you (perhaps) thought this was a fine and unharmful way to approach the world.
Maybe it is. But maybe it’s reducing people in your mind to being NPCs.
Re ‘It all breaking down’ –
It didn’t. I mean, your win/lose analogy did, but the ‘be CAREFUL around men, because they are barely contained balls of rage and primal instincts’ thing that culture pushes on us tracks perfectly.
CW: for some Real Talk, including the obvious consequences of telling a man ‘no’.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
This is how AFAB people are taught it will go. “Let him down nicely, deflect softly, manage his disappointment, because if you don’t, HE WILL RAPE AND THEN KILL YOU. And it will be your fault. What were you wearing? What did you say to him? Did you just close your legs? Why didn’t you give him a pity fuck? He wouldn’t have hurt you if you’d just given him a pity fuck.”
(bonus points for “Were you existing in his vicinity? Then OF COURSE he raped and then killed you. What were you expecting? Men can’t control themselves, the horny beasts!”)
.
.
.
.
.
/CW
.
.
I hear about situations like the one that prompted this conversation, and my reaction isn’t “oh god, how could this happen?”
It’s
“Of course this happened. I’m so sorry it did, but we all knew it was coming. I won’t be surprised the next time, either, because this is the only way some men are taught they can deal with rejection. (or the time after that. Or after that. Or after that. x infinity)”
So, do I think that you think of women as ‘not-people’? No, it seems like you really are engaging in good faith. Who knows, you might be a troll, I’m a pretty trusting person. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve engaged with someone, only to have them throw a tantrum later. But I don’t think that’s you.
Do I think that you have bits of your mind that thinks of women as ‘not people’? Of course! We all do. That’s the patriarchy!
(price is right losing horn, in case that doesn’t embed)
And… I guess that was all I wanted to say. No conclusion! This isn’t an essay!!!!
(gets an internet mark of a ‘C’)
Awwwww.
ETA: It’s also interesting, re-reading my response here, how my win/lose conditions focused on how the woman would be feeling, from the man’s advances. Not exactly supporting my point of her being an NPC! I should have focused more on how the man approaches, but it basically boils down to
“Did I use the right techniques/social cues to get her to say ‘yes’? Did I succeed in invading her space (a transgression) in a way that doesn’t frighten her? Did I pick someone who was open to being approached?”
Basically “Did I do the right secret technique to get what I want out of this woman.”
AH TIMER RUNNING OUT AHHH
@ Rhuu, just a quick comment because I think you’ve nailed it:
There’s also the “no” that is accompanied by “I have a boyfriend/husband”, whether or not this is in fact true, because we know that appealing to our existence as another man’s property* might keep us safer.
(I feel like saying “no, I’m a lesbian”, again whether or not it’s true, might make the situation MORE dangerous when rejecting certain men?)
*note: I mean in the eyes of the PUA guy. I don’t think women who are married/partnered with men are “property”.