Here are some reactions to the Depp/Heard verdict collected from the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Let’s start out with a comment from someone with very old school ideas about the proper relations between men and women:
From someone without much self-awareness:
A reply to someone who suggested that Amber Heard needs mental health treatment. From someone who thinks 36-year=old women are “girls.”
From someone else who agrees that Heard doesn’t needs mental health care; his idea of what she does need is a bit more drastic.
From someone who has given up entirely on “western women.” Or perhaps the other way around.
From a more verbose someone who also thinks “westernized women” are the problem.
From someone who thinks it’s all about female “accountability.”
This comment from someone called mindset_grindset is too long to simply embed, so here’s a slightly shortened version of his mini-manifesto on the benefits of treating women like children.
i think if this were talked about more it would come out that this behavior is what almost ALL women do at some point, most men have probably experienced it. it’s gotten taboo to say sweeping statements like that bc it’s somehow considered degrading to women, or to even hit women even if it’s only hitting BACK is essentially outlawed- but let’s be honest- amber wasn’t acting like something none of us have ever seen before- she WAS acting like a child.
And there it is.
that’s not degrading, that’s factual. because she could. tantrums punching hitting. your ex did it my ex did it.
Speak for yourself.
we’ve all seen that behavior before, it’s what young spoiled brats do when they receive no consequences for their actions, that’s why it’s considered socially acceptable to spank children in public if they tantrum. .
I’m pretty sure it’s not considered socially acceptable at all.
and once it was the same for women
It was socially acceptable to spank women in public?
I’m not saying i agree with this-
Yeah, but you kind of do, don’t you?
but in times past- women were treated like children. contrary to popular belief there has never been a place that i know of where it’s acceptable in polite society to beat your wife to a blody pulp halfway to death – they just disciplined them like children when they acted like one with a quick slap or a grab and shake when she tried to get violent and tantrumy with you , like Amber did, to remind them that they couldn’t just bully their husband’s physically and get everything they want.
So the solution is to start spanking women again?
“keeping your woman in line” just like you were expected to “keep your children in line”.
I don’t know about you but it seems to me that the notion of keeping women or children “in line” is just a tad creepy and backward.
it wasn’t discrimination and hatred, it was because that’s how they tended to act at times and everyone knew it and accepted it
So you are defending public spanking of children and women.
until it went too far on EITHER side, man or woman. if a man beat his wife hard enough to actually leave any marks or blood then he’d get 10x worse by the public, her father or brothers.
Some people have a very strange take on what counts as “good” in the allegedly good old days. Apparently it involved a lot of casual violence that Mr. mindset_grindset just considers to be the cost of keeping women and children “in line.”
nowadays men are expected to sit there and take punches from women and people figure it’s justice bc they imagine the past as all one sided men beating women for fun.
How sad that men can’t keep their women in check with violence.
so JD had to get his finger sliced off, beaten for years, financially raped and humiliated before we finally decided “ok maybe that’s a little too far, but you still shouldn’t have tweeted that she did those things.”
Depp didn’t tweet anything I’m aware of; at issue were statements from one of Depp’s lawyers.
can you imagine if JD ever did actually hit her back and even ONE of her bruises was believable ?
Huh. Because the evidence suggests to a lot of people, that he really did hit her, repeatedly, and without provocation. That’s why the result was rather different in the original British lawsuit, where a judge unswayed by six weeks of anti-Amber Heard memes and other propaganda found Depp to truly be a “wife beater.”
stuff has gone too far. I’m not one to hit women
I’m not sure I believe this.
but our justice system needs to be wayyyyy more high consequence for women hitting men if we’re going to keep moving forward
Huh. Because it sounds a lot more like you would prefer us to move backwards, rather dramatically.
Let’s just say that Men’s Rights Activists have a rather peculiar take on what it means for us to move “forward” on gender issues.
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I’m used to thinking of spanking as a fun activity done between consenting adults. The idea of using it as genuine punishment – especially on children – is major ick. Even ignoring that punishment shouldn’t be traumatizing, I’m glad that this mostly doesn’t exist anymore. At least not in the social circles I frequent, and I would very much hope also in general.
The jury wasn’t fucking sequestered. THE JURY WASN’T FUCKING SEQUESTERED. Can we stop pretending the verdict is indicative of anything but the effectiveness of coordinated misogynist online bullying campaigns?
It really disturbs me that so many people are reducing this entire issue to “she’s an angel and he’s the worst” or “he’s an angel and she’s the worst” without considering the possibility that the truth might be in the middle somewhere and they’re both probably toxic and engaged in abusive behavior.
TERFs base their entire ideology on “woman always good, man always bad”, same as MRAs base theirs on “man always good, woman always bad.” Nothing good ever comes of deifying one party at the expense of the other. Abuse of women by men is real, and abuse of men by women is also real (men also abuse men and women also abuse women). Both may be disbelieved and discounted for different reasons that all still boil down to “because patriarchy”, and that’s bad no matter who the abused party is. Can we maybe not pretend this thing isn’t the messy shitshow it actually is and not SOLELY the result of a coordinated misogynistic campaign to smear a single innocent party? A lot about a trial like this is about presentation and Amber hurt her own credibility repeatedly. Maybe she was being deceptive, maybe she was just nervous, maybe her counsel wasn’t as good. I don’t know.
Of COURSE MRAs are going to be jerks and twist the narrative to suit themselves, they do that with everything.
@ Seth S
Did you miss the bit about a British court finding that JD did beat and otherwise abuse AH? So she occasionally hit him back and isn’t perfect, that doesn’t change the power dynamic in the relationship. No one here <i>is</i> saying that AH is some innocent saint, but her lack of sainthood doesn’t preclude her having been abused.
Just as you think you couldn’t find a worse take on the trial…
Did you miss where I never said Depp was a saint either nor made any claim that he never abused her? He probably did. He was probably a drinker and controller. He absolutely said unconscionable, unforgivable things that TAKEN BY THEMSELVES should be worthy of both public scorn and divorce several times over, too. But it looks like she told some lies, as well, and who knows how far some of those extended or who started the whole thing, because she discredited herself with her lies and her own abusive behavior (pushing and hitting) toward at least one former female friend of hers (who the hell gets physical with a friend because they’re arguing about PLATES?) This is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s MESSY and really, we the public have no idea who instigated what, and we will never know.
But it’s cool, you’ve already decided she’s entirely justified in everything she’s said and done, I guess. I can’t change your mind. I’m sure that train of thought can’t possibly backfire or morph into “women are categorically victims, men are categorically violent, anything bad a woman does to a man is therefore justified” gender essentialist propaganda, ever, even though it already has in other spheres and gives fuel in different ways to horrible people like MRAs and TERFs….
I agree, it is messy. But I think Amber Heard has ended up as The Villian on social media to an incredibly callous degree in a way that is only facilitated by kneejerk misogyny. As someone mentioned in the last thread, if she had sent texts/emails like Depps, it wouldn’t have been forgiven in the mind of the public to anywhere near the same degree as he has been. Her behaviour in the relationship is taken as unforgivable, his as an understandable slip up when one is provoked. People think she is a lying, harpy bitch (and that her behaviour undermines ALL WOMEN because it shows them what for they really are) while Depp is just a fun guy who’s been wronged, despite recorded evidence of him being a washed up, vindictive on/off addict who very clearly made her life hell.
Like, there is nuance to this trial, but I 100% do think a misogynistic and coordinated campaign from Depps media team (later gaining its own momentum because of his frankly Michael Jackson level of delusion fans) has been the driving force behind the way the trial has been perceived by most.
@ Seth S
No you didn’t claim JD was a saint, but neither did you say he was at least equally culpable, the only <i>specific</i> claims you made were about AH, all the other things you said read as if they were about abuse in general, not obviously about this case. Perhaps you should take more care to write what you mean, particularly in circumstances where one party is getting all the hate and the other all the cannonisation.
Why just links instead of screenshots?
Spanking = ick
Infantilizing grown adults = ick
Rittenhouse = ick
Depp apologists = ick
I also have to admit I’m deeply uncomfortable about this trial and the way the narrative around it has developed. As soon as it became a referendum about how our entire society treats abuse, I think abuse victims lost.
Because both sides (regardless of the actual truth) can claim and be believed by a significant number of abuse victims, that a ruling against them In Particular is a blow against abuse victims.
Amber Heard lost (with penalties that, yes, do seem sketchily large) and therefore it proves that abuse victims cannot speak out about their abuse, or their abusers will sue them for more than they even have.
If Depp had lost, it would be be proof that abuse victims, no matter their power and status, can never escape abusers who rein them in with promises that “I can ruin you, just by saying you did this, and no one will ever believe you.”
I know people who have been abused who fit squarely in one or the other or both.
I wish it hadn’t happened. Now that it has, I wish Depp would friggin tell his fans to knock it off (because some of them are being actively terrifying) and go “okay yeah, I don’t actually need this money” and let Heard keep her “Much tinier than his” nest egg.
Just take the win, dude, don’t keep ruining people’s lives. Move on. You can’t control your fans, but at least ask them to stop with the death threats and trying to get everyone who testified against you fired or disbarred. At least ASK them to stop!
Neither of these two people were excellent people, they both harmed each other, one of them is probably a more terrible human than the other but I Honestly Don’t Know because I know appearances can be super deceptive…
…one of them is absolutely better off in the financial and current social status though, and I’m thinking that guy has the current responsibility to address the current awfulness happening in their name.
I’m gonna go crawl back under my rock.
Not feeling great, and this is bad brainweasel material for me. Amongst all the other bad brainweasel material out there, of which there is indeed a surplus.
@Contrapangloss
Recommended treatment for all brainweasels: Fricot A La “Belette” (Weasel Fricot/Soup)
(Note: requires no actual weasels, and is vegan friendly with a butter substitute)
Fine, then; I’m no fanboy. Depp IS at least equally culpable, based on what I know. I think they’re both toxic and in gross need of intensive therapy, quite frankly. They’ve done themselves a huge disservice being as wealthy as they are and yet apparently putting no effort or money into getting the help that they actually have the means to get, even though a lot of us peasants have been waiting years or put ourselves through financial hardship to get that kind of help.
And I also agree the judgment against Amber was weirdly large – she can’t pay that.
And the media circus and memes over the whole event have all been frankly disgusting. There’s a lot of people who should be ashamed of themselves.
It’s just been bizarre because SO MANY people have such a deeply polarized view of those two, and often for really weird reasons. One is an angel, the other a demon. Nooo. These things are rarely black and white, ESPECIALLY when both people making up the couple make big bucks and the expense of escaping the relationship isn’t a barrier to them leaving… it’s a completely different situation when we’re talking about, for instance, a stay at home mom being abused by her husband and trying to retaliate _because she doesn’t have the means to leave him._ I mean FFS, they don’t even have kids with each other, do they? It’s dead easy to walk away when you don’t have kids with someone, vs when you do, I’d know!
Oh, look, Ben fucking Shapiro is involved: The Daily Wire Spent Thousands of Dollars Promoting Anti-Amber Heard Propaganda