Category: threats

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antifeminism misogyny MRA oppressed men threats violence against men/women

Amanda Marcotte on the Thomas Ball suicide, and MRA haters

Amanda Marcotte, feminist blogger and Friend of Man Boobz, has been taking a lot of shit from MRAs – and I mean a LOT of shit – for a comment she made here on the Thomas Ball suicide.

As you may already know, Ball burned himself to death outside a New Hampshire courthouse. In a lengthy manifesto he wrote shortly before killing himself, he portrayed his suicide as a protest against a corrupt family court system, and went on to argue that MRAs should quite literally assemble some Molotov cocktails and “start burning down police stations and courthouses.” (You can read the whole manifesto here.)  Despite his calls for violence many MRAs have hailed him as an MRA martyr.

Marcotte, in her comment here, suggested that there might have been other, more personal reasons for his suicide – namely, the desire to hurt his ex-wife:

I’ll point out that setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell, and if your anger at losing control over her overwhelms all other desires. Which is common enough with abusers, who will ruin their own lives and their own shit and turn their children against them in an effort to hurt the woman they’ve fixated on.

One MR blogger declared this comment “pure feminist evil”; a conservative blogger compared Marcotte to the Beast of Babylon.  Still other MRAs resorted to assorted variations on the c-word.

Marcotte has now responded to this, er, “criticism” with an excellent post on Pandagon. As she points out, correctly,

suicide and threats of suicide are common tactics used by abusers to hurt their victims. Abusers dramatically self-destruct all the time in their desperation to control and hurt the objects of their obsession.  There was just recently a big story about this, in fact: Jason Valdez of Utah, who had a long criminal record that included domestic violence, held a woman hostage in a hotel room for 16 hours and kept updates about the situation on Facebook. He eventually committed suicide.

The notion that suicide can be a hostile, aggressive act designed to hurt other people is hardly a controversial one, whether the person committing suicide is male or female. Threats of suicide are often used to manipulate other people; suicide itself can be an act of revenge.

Marcotte goes on:

Apparently, I’m supposed to pretend that suicide isn’t a disruptive, selfish act in many cases (especially when the suicide victim commits it in a public and destructive way), and that people who do it, while yes victims of their own mental health problems, are also thinking that they’re going to make everyone pay for not indulging them.  In fact, not only is this true in Ball’s case, but he spelled it out in his suicide note.  The “make the bastards suffer” theme of his note is the reason that wingnuts are supporting him.

But you don’t have to take her word for it. Read Ball’s entire manifesto, to the end, and ask yourself if this man is an appropriate “martyr” for any political movement.

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antifeminism crackpottery evil women MGTOW misogyny MRA oppressed men the spearhead threats victimhood violence against men/women

Arms and the Men's Rights Movement

Democracy is not a First-Person Shooter

Good news, ladies and manginas: Apparently some MRAs don’t think it’s time to go out and start shooting people. At least not quite yet.

Some background: In recent days numerous MRAs have taken up the cause of a man named Thomas Ball – who burned himself to death outside a courthouse in Keane, New Hampshire in a protest against what he saw as unfair treatment in family court. Ferdinand Bardamu of In Male Fide has declared him “a martyr for the cause of men’s rights, a casualty of feminism’s stripping one half of the population of their humanity.”

Before killing himself, Ball wrote a long manifesto outlining his grievances and suggesting that the time had come for men “to start burning down police stations and courthouses,” describing  the inhabitants of such buildings as “[c]ollaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War … So burn them out. “ (He offered specific advice on how best to do this, including tips on how to select the proper bottles to use for Molotov cocktails.)

All this has inspired some in the MRA to start talking ominously about violence. On The Spearhead, W.F. Price has responded to this talk with a piece suggesting that the time isn’t quite right for the MRAs of the world to take up armed struggle. Not just yet, anyway. As he puts it:

It is never a good idea to pick up a gun and start shooting to address some vaguely defined injustice — that is savagery. Before the American Revolution, for example, patriots took pains to spell out a long list of grievances that justified rebellion. …

We have to make our own lists, air our grievances, and give the state the opportunity to redress them. … Before anyone resorts to the same methods the state uses against us, we must put every reasonable effort into working with the law and the political system we have. Because this effort is still in its infancy, any calls for armed resistance are entirely premature and counterproductive, and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Obviously, the flip side of this argument for delay is a justification for killing people if these “grievances” aren’t dealt with in the way that those in the MRA would like. Price’s reference to the American Revolution is an interesting one, because of course the central issue of that struggle was, you know, taxation without representation. The colonists couldn’t vote out the king if they didn’t like his policies. In case anyone has forgotten: we actually do have the vote now, which was kind of the whole point in the first place.

Of course, many of Price’s readers are a bit more impatient than he is. In a comment that drew (last I checked) more than 40 upvotes and only two dissenting downvote, Taqman took issue with Price’s call to delay the armed struggle:

Tell that to men who are facing imminent imprisonment for failure to pay child support.

They don’t have the luxury of time and can’t wait a couple of decades for the manginas of the world to wake up and decide that a gentlemanly form of armed resistance is now acceptable.

The ironically named Firepower, meanwhile, took a little swipe at Ball’s own actions, but didn’t challenge his advice for the rest of the men of the world:  

What IS crazy is having to point out that setting YOURSELF on fire is a ridiculous way to “win” anything.

 Set your enemies on fire. To even have to remind this questions the long term chances of victory for such a pathetic lot.

Jean Valjean suggested that political action was pointless — due to all those damned women who vote:

No amount of “stoic logic” will make politicians see our point of view.

Politicians are in the business of getting re-elected rather than the business of good governance. So long as women are the majority there will only be tyranny of the majority.

Peter-Andrew:Nolan(c) — you knew we were getting to him, right? — expressed his profound disappointment that more Spearheaders weren’t willing to embrace a violent solution:

Gee you guys are whimps and tiptoe around the ‘use of force’ like freaking ballet dancers. Are you so scared to speak about this when it is CLEAR the guvment LOVES using force against you and lots of other people too?

And he made the argument personal, explicitly denouncing, by name, the judge he claimed had “criminally abused” him with his rulings:

Judge [name redacted’s] life is now in my hands. He lives by my consent and my consent alone. …

And, like Ball, he declared judges to be essentially treasonous:

These judges pretended to be your servants. They are evil, evil people who deserve the kind of treatment reserved for those who commit treason.

There is more to Nolan’s comment(s) than that, but to get into it would require going down the rabbit-hole into his particular brand of crackpottery, which seems to involve him setting up his own courts to try judges he doesn’t like. (I frankly don’t understand his belief system and don’t care to.)

Now, it should be noted that a few Spearheaders actually objected to Nolan’s violent talk. But the last I checked, the comment I just quoted had more upvotes than downvotes. W.F. Price took more flak for suggesting men wait a little longer before taking up arms than Nolan did for, well, you saw what he wrote. That tells you a lot about The Spearhead, I think.

EDIT: Added quote from Ferdinand Bardamu; removed similar quote from The Spearhead.

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antifeminism evil women misandry misogyny MRA rape rapey reactionary bullshit sluts threats violence against men/women

Blogger: SlutWalkers deserve to be raped

From the website of the Edmonton SlutWalk 2011

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the most odious misogynist bullshit I have seen thus far on the topic of the Slutwalks: a post on The Third Edge of the Sword, a blog that seems to go out of its way to be offensive and “edgy,” that takes victim blaming to a whole new level. Here’s the basic, er, argument of the post, which the author has put in giant pink letters so we won’t miss it:

Every woman marching in the Edmonton Slut Walk is publicly declaring herself a slut. This means every woman there desires sex with any and all partners. Any sexual activity you initiate with them comes with implied consent. They cannot say no, and if they do understand all their ‘no’s mean yes. They are all asking for it. They want it bad. Now. From you. Go get ’em!

Some other highlights:

[I]f you … dress slutty, men are going to stare at you. We’re going to catcall. We are going to tell you all sorts of sexual things we want to do to your body. And if you dress slutty and wave your ass in our face, we will do them. The organizers of this event are not oblivious to this point: what they want is a fake sexual revolution. They want to be able to impersonate sluts without actually being sluts, and that’s unacceptable. If you don’t want to be treated as a piece of meat, don’t marinate and grill yourself and sit perched on a piece of garlic toast. You dress slutty, you show off the goods, you try to get a reaction, you will get one. Hint: it’s not always going to be the one you want. …

The “reaction” he has in mind is rape. By calling rape a “reaction” instead of what it is — a criminal assault on someone, an act of sexual violence, a violation — he of course is attempting to switch the blame to the victim. He spells out his “logic” in more detail:

[W]hen you impersonate a slut we don’t fine you, and we don’t throw you in jail. There’s really only one punishment for dressing like a streetwalker when you aren’t one: you do have to endure the occasional rape. You should really suffer it in silence. Accept the character flaw within you that caused this, and move on. Police and court resources are already busy enough with real criminals: like actual rapists who do nasty things to their niece or the homeless native chick passed out under the bridge, or a conservatively dressed urban professional walking to her car, or a girl out jogging in a track suit. To equate the act of actually violating and raping one of these people with having sex with a girl who’s every square millimetre of public persona screams anybody who wants to can screw me right now is ridiculous.

Once again, this brand of misogyny leads to some conclusions that are pretty misandrist – namely, the notion that men are at heart rapists who can’t control their violent urges:

If you go out on the street in an outfit that would make Britney Spears feel uncomfortable, you do so knowing that your ultimate aim is to make men want you. Well, they want you now. Congrats. Oh, wait, you mean you didn’t understand what that implied? That in the great Bell curve of sexual congress you’ve just pushed everybody on the right-hand side of the -2 std devs line past that imaginary barrier that says “there is no power in the universe powerful enough to stop me from sliding my finger inside your panties”? I call bullshit. You do know. But you want to be a virginal slut, to dress in ways that makes men helpless to their urges but still leaves you fully in restrictive control.

The blogger concludes by arguing that the Slutwalkers are all “lying bitches” because they dress like they wasn’t to be raped, but do not actually want to be raped. Then he makes this lovely suggestion:

If your wife is one of them, I’m very very sorry. Maybe a good rape might make her a little more manageable around the house.

Now this post is an atmittedly extreme example of a misogynistic response to the Slutwalks. But the basic “logic” of this blogger’s would-be argument is essentially identical to that of many MRA and other “manosphere” pieces I’ve seen on the subject, the main difference between them being that this guy embraces the logical conclusion of his argument — that Slutwalkers deserve to be raped — while the MRAs who make essentially the same argument (and fling the same sorts of insults at the Slutwalkers) make a show of saying that they don’t really think the Slutwalkers “deserve” it. And maybe they’ve convinced themselves that this caveat means something . But in that case the extreme reaction that manosphere misogynists have had to the Slutwalks – the insults thrown at the Slutwalkers, the “jokey” references to rape, the prurient sneering – makes little sense. If you argue that women are “asking for it” when they dress like “sluts,” you’re essentially saying they deserve it. You’re making the same argument this guy is making, but pretending you aren’t.

NOTE: The graphic above is taken from the official web site for the Edmonton SlutWalk 2011, which took place a week ago. Here are some pictures of the march.

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douchebaggery internal debate misandry misogyny MRA MRA paradox paul elam threats violence against men/women

Internet Inactivism and the MRA Paradox

MRA in action

As I’ve pointed out before, the vast majority of Men’s Rights Activists aren’t really activists at all, if by “activists” you mean people who occasionally get off their asses and try to engage in political activity in the real world. As I put in in my piece for the Good Men Project on misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement,

Men’s rights activists aren’t much like any other activists I’ve ever run across. For one thing, for supposed activists they are almost completely inactive. Sure, they complain endlessly about things they see as terrible injustices against men. They just don’t do anything about them. While some of those who consider themselves fathers’ rights activists—a slightly different breed from your garden-variety MRAs—try to influence laws and legislatures, MRAs do little more than cultivate their resentments.

MRAs seem to be good at one thing, and one thing only: posting angry comments on websites, whether their own or on those of their many enemies – whether that’s on blogs like this one or in the comments section on various mainstream media sites they consider “misandrist.” (Actually: that’s not entirely fair – on a few occasions, MRAs have been moved to make threatening phone calls as well.) They don’t raise money for anything but their own web sites and their pet projects. They don’t organize demonstrations that involve more than a tiny handful of people.  Like, for example, this one, involving one dude dressed like Batman who climbed up onto a highway sign:

Or this one, which involved a dude dressed up as Batman and a dude dressed up as Robin, climbing up on a bridge.

If your protests typically involve fewer people than, say, the line of people waiting to use the Redbox video rental kiosk outside your local supermarket on a Friday night, I think it’s safe to say that yours is not a mass movement, at least not yet.

Am I being unfair in demanding MRAs actually, literally,get off their asses before I consider them to be activists? Perhaps.

But, as it turns out, MRAs aren’t much good at sitting-on-your-ass activism either. Case in point: For quite some time – weeks? months? — MRA elder Paul Elam has been urging readers of his blog A Voice For Men to sign a petition to disbar a District Attorney he and other MRAs have decided is corrupt. But despite his repeated pleas to his readers to sign the thing, it has not yet garnered the required 1000 signatures, even though at least a few of his readers have talked about signing it more than once. [Edited to add: it has now gotten more than 1000 signaturesd.]

Today, this particular example of internet inactivism prompted Elam to lash out at his non-signing readers. Declaring himself “tired and frustrated” and “sick of this shit,” he once again begged his readers to sign. Then he went a step further, suggesting that he might limit commenting on his site to “activists that are contributing to this site in one way or another” as a way of encouraging activism and discouraging those who are “sucking up air and doing little else.”

I don’t think further exhortation on his part – or limiting the comments there to “real” activists only – is likely to make much difference. [Edited to add: Nagging a few more people to spend two minutes signing an online petition is one thing. Actually transforming them into real activists is another.]  Elam is running up against the inherent paradox of Men’s Rights “activism” – the fact that most of those complaining the most about alleged injustices against men are not in fact interested in changing anything. Their “activism,” as it were, is little more than an excuse to wallow in their own bitterness, and to blame others for their own problems.

If MRAs really cared about domestic violence against men – as opposed to using the issue as a rhetorical weapon against feminists – they would be raising money and devoting their time to actually building shelters, like the (mostly) women who built the first shelters decades ago, and the (mostly) women who keep these shelters going today. If MRAs were really interested in stopping prison rape, instead of simply complaining about it, they’d be donating money to or working with the advocacy group Just Detention or other groups concerned about the treatment of prisoners. If they were really interested in helping those falsely accused of rape or other crimes, they’d be working with The Innocence Project or some other group fighting for the falsely accused or convicted. Or they would be starting real organizations of their own.

But that’s not, at heart, what the MRM is about. For all but a tiny handful of real activists, it’s not about changing the world. It’s about creating a space where men can kvetch and blame and cultivate their own sense of martyrdom. Actually trying to change the real world would involve , well, going out into the real world, a place where their assertions about the alleged oppression of men are seen as the nonsense they are, a place where their bitterness and hatred of women is seen as bitterness and hatred rather than the righteous anger they like to imagine that it is.

When MRAs do venture out of their self-created bubble they tend to either make fools of themselves – like Batman on the highway sign in the video above – or to reveal themselves to be the angry fanatics they are. Elam, for his part, sometimes even has trouble making his case in the relatively sympathetic environment of the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit, and is quickly reduced to sputtering rage when anyone disagrees with him. In the end, sputtering rage seems to be what the MRM is really all about.

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antifeminism douchebaggery manginas MGTOW misandry misogyny MRA oppressed men paul elam threats violence against men/women

>If you don’t agree with me, angry dudes will kick your ass

>

Anyone who’s seen Taxi Driver will remember Travis Bickle’s late night soliloquy on the “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, [and] junkies” he saw every night driving his cab. “Someday,” he told himself, “a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Of course — SPOILER ALERT! — what he really meant by “a real rain” coming was that he, Travis Bickle, would lose his shit and start shooting people.

Bickle wasn’t the only one to mix his predictions with a heaping helping of threat. Those who predict the end of the world at the hand of gods or men or some vague terrible cataclysm are all too often rooting (secretly or openly) for the civilization-destroyers they are ostensibly warning against. We saw this the other day amongst those MGTOWers who are now talking giddily about how complete economic collapse will serve to put foolish women and their “mangina” pals in their proper place.

And we see it again and again in the Men’s Rights movement, when MRAs sternly warn their detractors that if people don’t start listening to them, and pronto, the men of the world will rise up and, well,  kick the shit out of everyone who opposes them. This is a warning only in the sense that a mafioso telling someone that, if he doesn’t pay what he owes, his legs just might possibly get broken, is a warning; by all reasonable definitions, it is a threat. As opposed to the leg-breaking, the threats of these MRAS aren’t very specific threats, but they’re threats of violence nonetheless.

I ran across one recent example of this sort of “warning” in the comments to Paul Elam’s piece on misandry — or at least what he labels misandry — in the Good Men Project’s package on the Men’s Rights movement. (My own contribution to the debate is here.) Here’s “Factory,” responding to another commenter who pointed out that some of his wording in an earlier comment had been awfully violent:

Who said I was interested in proving I wasn’t violent?

In point of fact, I continually warn people that if these issues are not MEANINGFULLY addressed, and soon, there will be a LOT of violence (see: Middle East) that we MRAs won’t be able to stop.

And frankly, if it comes to that, society (and all the women in it along with the men) flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.

Your hubris as a movement is causing a lot of men to be angry. You all vastly underestimate both the anger, and the ubiquitous nature of this anger.

We MRAs do nothing except act as weather vane and map. That’s why we have no central authority, or funding, or organization of any kind. We are average guys mad enough to stand up like we do. There are a LOT more guys that are just as mad, but content to let others lead.

And there are a growing number of men that take Feminist (and ‘official’) dismissal of mens issues as indication that ONLY violent revolution will lead to change.

And speaking for myself, if it ever comes to violence, I will stand aside, and feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done…but I won’t lift a FINGER to stop it.

Just like people like you are doing right now.

Notice the not-so-subtle, and rather thoroughly bungled, rhetorical sleight of hand here. Factory paints the violence as something he won’t indulge in (but won’t stop) — forgetting that in the very first sentence he admitted that he was himself violent. He refers to MRAs as little more than a “weather vane” for male emotion — but somehow later in the paragraph they are leading things. He claims that he will “feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done,” but this is only after stating in no uncertain terms that he thinks “society … flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.”

So, yeah, this is as much a “warning” as the hypothetical mafioso’s reference to broken legs.

Naturally, Elam himself stepped up to second Factory’s emotion, declaring that “[m]en, when disenfranchised and pushed to the edge, have frequently become violent.”

On his own site, Elam has been much more frankly threatening. Recently, telling off one commenter who had the temerity to actually question the gospel according to Elam, he finished off a long rant about male anger with this:

I would not suggest that treating half the population, the stronger half at that, with too much continuing disregard is a very good idea.

Thinking they will never come out swinging is a stupid, stupid way to go.

This kind of logic might best be called the Appeal to an Ass-kicking. The structure of this argument could be broken down as follows:

1) Source A says that p is true
2) If you don’t agree that p is true, Source A (or perhaps some other dudes) will do you bodily harm.
3) Therefore, you’d better fucking agree that p is true.

This is probably the oldest and crudest form of logic there is, and one that is popular amongst many animals as well. (My cat is a master of it, at least when p = “you will give me treats now.”)

Perhaps the best way to respond to it is the way that the commenter calling herself fannie responded to Factory on the Good Men Project:

You’re arguing that men are going to be so angry they’re not going to be able to control their rage and are therefore going to start inflicting mass amounts of violence upon others.

I’m not sure a feminist could be more defamatory of men than you are being.

MRAs sure are misandrist.

I, and feminists like me, think men are better than that.

Me too.

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