Check out my piece in the Washington Post on the Atlanta spa killings

Perhaps they should look into some more effective ways of controlling their desires instead. I’ve heard chemical castration via cyproterone acetate works quite nicely, although sadly it has not been authorized for use in the US.

@Bookworm in hijab:

And add the idea that if you’re white, male, straight, cis, adult, abled, American, culturally Christian (and above all if you’re all of the above), it’s the rest of the world’s job to babysit your feelings and appease them with tribute—lest you Hulk out.

(You are also somehow and simultaneously the embodiment of Supreme Reason and Objectivity—possibly because you’ve handed your emotions off to proxies to manage, the way a wealthy family might hand off a child to a nanny.)

Edited to add: when they use mental illness as a way to exempt white Male cis straight Christian Americans from blame. Sorry if that was unclear.

Anyone else with mental Illness, or PoC, or both, gets chucked under the bus.

To paraphrase Jake Peralta:

Bullshit motive, still murder.

Also, the idea of Miniskirt Power is such crap. Men are not powerless to desire. What I feel someone like Warren Farrell is feeling is the message that society tells a man that he is entitled to any woman he finds attractive bumping up against the knowledge that NOW there are sometimes (but only sometimes!) consequences of acting on that entitlement.

@Bookworm in hijab:

Thank you for the necessary clarification; mental illness and neurodivergence serve as Get Out of Consequence Free passes only when doing so serves privilege.

The rest of the time…Bonecouch on Tumblr puts it rather well: 

horror writers use the dsm 5 like a dnd monster manual 

And the same is even truer of crime dramas, down to the assumption that people with X mental illness will always and inevitably follow Y magical rule. 

(Which is, in fact, a commonplace Othering and dehumanizing device: Others are a People of Hats who, like vampires, werewolves, and fairies, can be defeated by infallible magical counters. No doubt you’ve encountered the Pork as Magical Muslim Repellent notion, which has precedent at least as far back as the Pork as Magical Jew Repellent scene in Ivanhoe.

Interestingly, there used to be a Magical Other Repellent belief about police within American hippie circles: if you asked an undercover cop three times whether they were a cop, on the third try they’d be automagically compelled to tell the truth. That version of the legend carries a distinct whiff of Celtic Faerie lore; here’s a sex worker variant, requiring only a single query: http://www.snopes.com/fact-check/are-you-a-cop/)

It galls me how in societies where men are considered powerless over women’s sexuality, men are nonetheless considered the more “reasonable” sex. Oh, patriarchy.

@ Ful Metal Ox,

mental illness and neurodivergence serve as Get Out of Consequence Free passes only when doing so serves privilege.

Thank you, you put that much better than I did! There’s a comic to this effect of someone holding a paint-chip up to show gradations of skin colours; the labels on these ranged from something like “criminal” to “unfortunate mentally-ill victim of society”. Guess which shade was which. ?

It bothers me so fucking much. It’s not like our societies generally have much time or interest in actually helping people with mental illnesses; it’s such a contemptuous act to use them as handy ways to excuse white men of crimes.

No doubt you’ve encountered the Pork as Magical Muslim Repellent notion

Indeed; not as much as the references-to-Jesus-as-magical-Muslim-repellant, though (um, dudes, we like him too!)

@Alan, I will have to see if I can find the Trollhunter film! Can you provide more details?

Thank you for sharing this, David. However, your article is paywalled, at least for me. How can I read it?

@Bookworm in hijab:

This one? Or close to it?

Thanks for that FMO.

David, now I’ve had a chance to read the full article; I offer further congratulations. It’s brilliant. You explain the issue so succinctly and persuasively.

This bit especially caught my attention:

The idea that women have some sort of nefarious and overwhelming sexual power over men is widely accepted as gospel truth in what is called “the manosphere.”

Coincidentally, I’m doing something at the moment that shows there’s nothing new there. That’s perhaps unsurprising; it’s probably as old an attitude as we’ve had societies.

But in Renaissance paintings there was a motif that was understood to be shorthand for this concept. It was a group of men circled around a woman. They’d often be doing things that showed they’d lost all reason and were ensnared by the sexual power of the woman.

@ Redsilkphoenix, that’s the one, though I remembered the words differently (maybe the one I saw had been…is photoshopped still a thing). It was in the context of a Dis/Ability Studies class, so my prof might have adjusted it.

@David, seconding Alan: your article was spot-on.

@Naglfar

I add the qualifier because I have no idea if he was a sex addict

He wasn’t, because there isn’t any such a thing outside the minds of puritanical devotees of sex negative religious sects.

@Bookworm in hijab:

From what I could tell from what came up when I searched for it, that screenshot has been photoshopped quite a bit. And since I have no desire to watch Family Guy I have no idea what the original wording on that card was. Given the apparent plot of the episode in question had the father guy (the one pictured) getting involved with an Islamic-ish worship group, the original wording may have referenced the darker colors as ‘terrorist’.

Regardless, that screenshot covers a lot more racial ground than its creators likely intended, hence why it’s been ‘shopped so often.