Category: violence against men/women

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antifeminism Jared Loughner misogyny Uncategorized violence against men/women

>Is Jared Loughner a misogynist? Does anyone care?

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We’ll probably never know exactly what toxic mixture of emotions and beliefs led Jared Loughner to gun down Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, killing six; there is obviously a lot going on in that shaved head of his. But did misogyny play a role in his choice of target?

It’s an important question. But it’s one the media has by and large chosen to ignore, despite a number of clues that seem pretty clearly to confirm that Loughner, the attempted assassin of a female politician, held deeply misogynist views.

As I pointed out in a previous post, Loughner made seemingly misogynist comments online, as the Wall Street Journal noted, and investigators reportedly found the phrase “Die Bitch” scrawled in Loughner’s handwriting on a letter Giffords’ office sent to him. Now, buried near the end of a long profile of Loughner in the New York Times, we hear about the impression Loughner made on the employees of a local bank:

At a small local branch of a major bank, for example, the tellers would have their fingers on the alarm button whenever they saw him approaching.

It was not just his appearance — the pale shaved head and eyebrows — that unnerved them. It was also the aggressive, often sexist things that he said, including asserting that women should not be allowed to hold positions of power or authority.

One individual with knowledge of the situation said Mr. Loughner once got into a dispute with a female branch employee after she told him that a request of his would violate bank policy. He brusquely challenged the woman, telling her that she should not have any power.

“He was considered to be short-tempered and made people at the bank very uncomfortable,” said the individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Emphasis added.

If this report is true, and Loughner really feels that women should not be in positions of power, it’s hard to see how these beliefs could not have influenced his seeming obsession with a female politician, an obsession which ended in mass murder.

So why is this issue not at the center of discussion of Loughner’s actions? So far, only a handful of commenters, most notably Amanda Marcotte, have even taken up the issue. (For more on this, see Jezebel’s discussion of the misogyny discussion.)

In Slate, Tom Scocca notes the evidence suggesting that Loughner is a misogynist, and asks, quite reasonably:

Suppose the story said that Loughner “grew contemptuous of Jews” and went around “asserting that Jews should not be allowed to hold positions of power or authority,” even blurting anti-Semitic remarks to strangers. And then he went out and shot Giffords, a Jewish congressperson. Would his motives have seemed quite so incomprehensible? …

Yet as it is, there are only glancing and scattered references to Loughner’s burning hatred of the kind of person he would allegedly choose to try to assassinate.

As I’ve said before, misogyny has consequences. Unfortunately, too few in the media seem to want to even admit it’s part of the story.

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incel Jared Loughner men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny rape rapey sluts Uncategorized violence against men/women

>The Giffords shooting: Misogyny has consequences

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Reason #1538 it’s not such a good idea to spend time online nursing your resentments towards the opposite sex because no one from that sex seems to want to have sex with you: Because that kind of, sort of, makes you a little bit like Jared Loughner.

The Wall Street Journal managed to track down what are apparently some comments Loughner made on a gaming site; they’re full of his usual conspiratorial nonsense (his lunatic theories on grammar and currency) but they’re also, as the Journal notes, “peppered with displays of misogyny.” One posting

titled “Why Rape,” … said women in college enjoyed being raped. “There are Rape victims that are under the influence of a substance. The drinking is leading them to rape. The loneliness will bring you to depression. Being alone for a very long time will inevitably lead you to rape.”

This is the dark side of the “incel” mindset. (That is, those who turn their “involuntarily celibate” state into an identity.)

Another time, the Journal reports, Loughner

started a thread titled “Talk, Talk, Talking about Rejection.” He solicited stories of rejection by the opposite sex. The next day he wrote, “Its funny…when..they say lets go on a date about 3 times..and they dont….go…” Three days later, he wrote, “Its funny when your 60 wondering……what happen at 21.”

There is other evidence that Loughner nursed anger towards and hatred of women and authority figures: he apparently scrawled the phrases “die bitch” and “die cops” on a letter he’d gotten from congresswoman Giffords.

As Amanda Marcotte points out, there are a lot of people out there who’ve responded with anger at the very notion “that misogyny might play a role in the choice of a young man to shoot a powerful woman in the head … .”

But the fact is that misogyny has consequences, and one of its most common and most predictable consequences is violence towards women. Misogyny plays a role, as Marcotte notes, even when the perpetrator of this violence is “crazy.”

What I’m seeing here is that Loughner, mental illness or no, completely absorbed society’s teachings about male entitlement and female sinfulness, that men have a right to have needs filled at women’s expense, and that women give up their rights to bodily autonomy if they do things deemed unladylike, like have sex or drink alcohol.

And just as those who spew hateful political rhetoric — filled with talk of guns and targets and “second amendment solutions” to political “problems” — shouldn’t be surprised when someone takes that rhetoric seriously, so those who spew misogyny online shouldn’t be surprised when someone acts on that misogyny and attacks a woman. As Marcotte puts it,

just because someone has a mental illness rarely means that he’s completely unaware of the world around him.  Loughner’s ability with a gun or his thoughts on rape didn’t spring fully formed from his brain, but are the product of an individual interacting with a specific environment.

Those who contribute to that toxic environment — whether they’re Sarah Palin talking about “reloading” or some random woman-hater talking gleefully online about bashing “bitches” — share in the responsibility when someone pulls a gun and shoots down a female politician he’s convinced himself is a “bitch.” 

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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douchebaggery misogyny MRA violence against men/women

>How to get upvoted in MensRights on Reddit

>So a restaurant owner in Hamilton, Ontario decided to delight his male patrons by installing a urinal shaped like a woman’s mouth with bright pink lips.

The urinal sparked a protest from a feminist organization, and after receiving more than 1000 letters on the subject, the restaurant owner removed the urinal.

The regulars in MensRights on Reddit heard about the incident, and the following conversation took place. You may want to note the numbers of upvotes and downvotes each comment got.

(Yes, the last guy did use the obnoxious term “retard.” There is some irony there. Somehow I suspect that is not why he was downvoted.)
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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comments policy violence against men/women

>Comments policy: Cool it

>Folks, some of you need to cool it with the gratuitously nasty personal attacks in your comments. I’ve been cutting some people slack because they are new to the comments here, and because I like to practice relatively hands-off moderation, but I will start deleting comments if this continues, and repeated violators will be banned entirely. Regardless of which side of the debate you’re on. If you haven’t already, read the comments policy.

Also not ok: Justifying violence against men or women. For example, this recent comment from witman suggesting it might be “patriotic” to shoot feminist elected officials. (I’ve screencapped it because I will be deleting it, but for now you can go see it for yourself to confirm I’m not making it up.)

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antifeminism douchebaggery Jared Loughner MRA the spearhead violence against men/women

>Misogynists attack Daniel Hernandez for saving Gabrielle Giffords’ life

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Daniel Hernandez

I made the mistake of posting my previous post about the failure of empathy in the reaction of many misogynists to the Arizona shootings without first stopping by The Spearhead. There, below a post lauding the heroism of Daniel Hernandez, the gay congressional intern who ran towards the gunshots to assist the fallen Giffords and literally save her life, I found some comments even stranger and more vile than the others I have quoted in my last post. Instead of lauding Hernandez’ lifesaving act of heroism, they attacked him for helping a woman.

One commenter calling himself Traveller put it this way:

The “hero” saved a female politician, Democrat, probably some sort of feminist getting affirmative action at stellar level, and following some sort of feminist agenda. That “hero” probably until that day went around breaking the legs of working men who hesitated to pay 99% of their income to a feminist government.

Lower down in the thread, Peter-Andrew:Nolan(c) went further, saying

When men STOP being stupid arseholes and STOP saving the lives of ‘women andchildren’ THEN the women might notice how much we do for them.

In some ways Hernandez is also a traitor to men. IF he had just stood by and let this woman bleed to death because he was ‘afraid that she might accuse him of sexual harassment for touching her when she was unconscious’ and then been willing to take the heat of the lies and hatred and bile that women would throw at him for doing so? THEN he would have contributed to remedying the situation. And we would have one less female politician passing hate legislation against men. A net GAIN for men. …

Hernandez did something akin to a Jew helping a Nazi SS officer who will gladly throw him into a gas chamber. How is this ‘heroic’?

A few comments down, anonous agreed that:

The best thing any man can do is NOT step up to the plate and act heroic, but simply shrug ones shoulders at a time of crisis and say, ‘not my problem’. Whilst walking off to the nearest strip joint.

Men coming to the aid (especially of women) only get demonized anyway (Titanic anyone?) and never get a given a break in feminazi countries like the us/uk/aus. …

When men start being indifferent to wimmin … will men be truly free.

On The Spearhead, readers can upvote comments they like and downvote those they don’t. All of these comments had multiple upvotes (the latter two getting a dozen or more each) and only a handful of downvotes. 

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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douchebaggery Jared Loughner MRA violence against men/women

>A failure of empathy: Misogynists respond to the Arizona shootings

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One thing I am struck by again and again as I read the blogs and the message boards of the manosphere is how little basic human empathy I see there, towards women in general and towards feminists of both sexes. We see it in the routine references to women as “whores” and “cunts” and other terms that reduce them to their genitalia.

We see it in the profound lack of empathy for women injured or killed. You may recall my recent post about an MRA blog that basically celebrated the possible death of a missing Las Vegas dancer. The body of the murdered woman, Deborah Flores-Narvaez, has since been found. The news inspired a moderator of the Happy Bachelors Forum to start a topic entitled “Dirty skanky whore found dead.”

And of course we’ve seen similar reactions to the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six others. While many in the manosphere responded to the shootings like normal human beings (displaying honest shock and horror) and others responded like typical internet paranoids (wildly speculating on how this meant the government would take away all our rights), there were others who found ways to blame women for the shootings or to twist the issue into one of men’s putative oppression. On NiceGuy’s MGTOW Forum, one commenter found an ingenious way to blame women for the shooting:

He [was] probably dumped by a girl and that’s what started him on the road to crazy batshit loonery. I can’t think of any other factor that could more quickly drive a man to violence than women.

Others complained that the news coverage was slanted by evil feminism. From the MGTOW proboards forum:

it pisses me off when i see all this outrage on the news and from the public knowing that if it was a congressMAN who was shot, everyone would be wondering what he did to deserve it.

this really shows you how society values women over men. and she’s not even dead!

Over on NiceGuy’s MGTOW forum, one member complained that Giffords was getting most of the news coverage and that the six others who were murdered in the attack, most of whom were probably men, were being ignored:

This is yet another example of how Femerica values female lives more than male lives. In the eyes of most Americans, men are less human than women.

The male judge gets a mention because he is a lackey for the interests of the elite. Even though he is dead, since he is a male, his death is presented by the media as less of a tragedy than the non-lethal shooting of a female politician with a good chance for recovery.

The death of the young girl was portrayed as third in line in terms of level of tragedy. By American standards, it was a tragedy because she possessed a vagina, but since she was not grown enough to be a full-fledged feminazi, her death was less of a tragedy than the non-death of the female politician.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the four unnamed dead people were men. If they were men, they would be considered less human than the others. They are not even human enough for the media to investigate and name. Their death, by American standards, was a tragedy but less of a tragedy than the non-death of female politician.

This comment is jampacked with an assortment of bad assumptions. To correct the most obvious of them: Giffords has gotten most of the coverage because this was not a random murder, but an attempted political assassination. Gender has nothing to do with it. When people talk about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, they rarely mention the three others who were also wounded that day. (Except for James Brady, and that’s because he has gone on to be an influential gun control advocate.)

The male judge has gotten a good deal of attention, but isn’t the main focus of the coverage because he was not the target of the assassination attempt. The girl has gotten attention because she was a child. The other victims were not named at first because authorities had not yet notified their next-of-kin. There were three men killed in the attacks, two women, and one girl.

Meanwhile, on this very blog, a regular antifeminist commenter who calls himself Random Brother has made clear that he doesn’t extend basic human sympathies to feminists. Asking whether or not Giffords is a feminist, he explains:

I want to know if she has spent her whole career passing laws that harm men. I want to know this before I commit any sympathy to her. If she was a great politician who tried hard to help her constituents, was fair and just then she has all of the sorrow in the world from me. …

If she was a typical politician, a bigot or a man hater, why should I care?

Setting aside for a moment the fact that there is precisely zero evidence that Giffords is any any way a “man hater”: Because she’s a human being?

Sadly, this failure of empathy isn’t confined to the manosphere, as Marianne Kirby notes on The Rotund:

Empathy is, in its simplest form, the ability to acknowledge the thoughts/reasoning/emotions of another person as valid. It is, so to speak, being able to see where they are coming from even if you do not agree. … Empathy is, I think, coming to the realization of our own humanity and the humanity of other people – we are all simply people. …

[W]hen politicians depend on hate and violent rhetoric to stir up their followers, no good can come of it. … It teaches them that these people who believe different things are “the enemy” – that they are a danger and must be eliminated.

Is it any wonder that some people reach a point where the literal elimination of those who are different becomes the end goal?

For a long time I labeled the MRA/MGTOW blogs I’ve put in my sidebar as my “Enemies List.” It was a partially tongue-in-cheek reference to Nixon’s famous “enemies list.” But many people took it literally, and some (even if they didn’t) worried that this kind of terminology could lead to precisely the sort of dehumanizing of the “enemy” I’ve been criticizing here. In the wake of the Arizona shootings, and after pondering several eloquent emails sent to me on the subject, I’ve decided to change my “Enemies List” to, well, a “Boob-roll.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “boob” as “a stupid or foolish person; a dolt.” The people I write about may be — at least in my mind —  wrong, and foolish, and sometimes hateful assholes, but they are people.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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douchebaggery Gunwitch PUA rapey violence against men/women

>Gunwitch Update

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From the Gunwitch,com forums

Some updates on the Gunwitch story. (Here’s my original post on the subject, “Gun-loving pick-up guru allegedly shoots a woman in the face.”)

The woman he (allegedly) shot is apparently doing surprisingly well. The most recent news story on the incident I’ve found — posted on the 6th — says she was about to be released from the hospital:

April Lagasse, the mother of 20-year-old Amber Tripp, who was shot in the face with a .357 caliber handgun on New Year’s Eve, says her daughter has “recovered miraculously.”

Tripp, who was initially treated at Sky Lakes Medical Center in Klamath Falls before being air lifted to Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, underwent surgery Wednesday and is scheduled to be released and return to Klamath Falls Thursday.

On what is evidently her Myspace page, the status update now reads: “Hello wonderful world i got shot and im still sexy.”
 
Meanwhile, on Gunwitch’s message board, someone claiming to be Amber Tripp’s sister has posted her account of the incident:

Hello my name is Meagan Tripp. My sister is Amber Tripp , the young women that wS shoot in the face on News Years Eve. It is a pure mircale that she is alive. Allen Ryese shot my sister in the face after he had been grabbing and touching her inapporite and my sister pulled her knife out and told him to leave her alone. My sister then put her knife away and went into a bedroom for about fifteen minutes. When my sister came out of the room Allen walked up to her and shot her in the face with a 357 magnum . The bullet that came out of the chamber was the only 38 bullet in the gun. The other two bullets were 357 s. This man had plenty of time to decide to shot her or not. This awful evil man deserves to rot in prison

Later, in response to some of those who responded to her, she added:

My sister is alive. No I personally was not at his brothers house when it happened. I did not know Allen personally but yes I do recognize him and his name. No it was not drug related and yes he shot her in the face point blank .

One of the regulars on the board responded to her original comment with this “hilarious” remark:

Post pics of her face w/ timestamp

boobs optional

Another posted:

honestly, she was pulling a knife on him. It wasn’t going to change her oppinion to show her his gun after shit like that. Not even sexual state would have helped him there.

Still another:

Self defence against meth-addict crackwhore!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And one more:

I like that it was in the face. Super disrespectful.

Some discussions of the case on other message boards:

PuaHate

Personal Development for Smart People Forums

BorisPoker.com

Sample comment from the latter:

to be fair to him though, shooting a bitch in the face is a pretty solid neg

Some blogs that have posted about the shooting:

On Feminist Critics, Hugh Ristik discusses some of the reactions to the incident, and critiques feminists (including some commenters here) for generalizing about PUAs. He ends with this:

Gunwitch, if you really shot an unarmed woman, then fuck you. Fuck you for putting a bullet in a woman’s face. Fuck you for fueling many women’s fears about male sexuality. Fuck you for contributing to a stigma against harmless guys who are trying to study pickup to improve themselves.

As for the small subset of PUAs or MRAs who are making excuses for Gunwitch, and the feminists who are trying to paint Gunwitch and the people excusing him as representative of PUAs, or of men? Stop, just stop.

Max on FKIN, a PUA blog, offers a blunt assessment of Gunwitch:

He embodies all of the worst traits of the seduction community.  I sincerely hope he rots in prison for the rest of his natural life.

On Love Letters in Hell, Amanda talks about the creepy, date-rapey aspects of his technique.

On Love Bites, Clarisse Thorn expresses her ambivalence towards the PUA subculture and her disgust with Gunwitch:

The diverse pickup subculture freaks me out a lot of the time, and frankly I’ve had hours of pickup artist research where I have read what these men have to say and felt like I wanted to take a vow of chastity rather than ever risk having sex with one of them, ever. … I think there’s good in the subculture. … But, damn. News like this is awfully hard to stomach.

You said it.

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reactionary bullshit Uncategorized violence against men/women

>Congresswoman shot, six others killed: The predictable outcome of violent rhetoric

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Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot in the head at a public appearance today. Six others were killed in the attack; one a judge, one a 9-year-old girl. Giffords is reportedly recovering after surgery to treat her wounds. The suspect is in custody; he’s apparently a conspiracy nut.

As a number of observers have already pointed out, this kind of violence is the predictable outcome of the sort of violent rhetoric we’ve been hearing for years from Republicans, Tea Partiers and others on the right. And of course there have been numerous instances of right-wing activists bringing guns to public events. As the Daily Beast notes:

At a town hall at another Safeway store in Arizona in August, Giffords called the police when an angry opponent of the legislation dropped a gun on the floor during the event. After the bill passed, Giffords was one of several Democratic members to have their office windows vandalized.

Giffords was also included on Sarah Palin’s “target map,” released in March of last year, which featured gun crosshairs superimposed over her target’s districts on a United States map. The graphic was removed from Palin’s website today. Giffords’ Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, held a campaign event in which he invited supporters to shoot a machine gun. “Get on target for victory,” an ad for the event read.

Blogger Echidne of the snakes observes:

The Republican right has been using explicitly violent language for more than a year, encouraging people with guns to insert themselves into politics, in the case of Sharon Angle, explicitly advocating the use of guns when politics doesn’t produce the results they want. There is nothing ambiguous about it, this is the open advocacy for assassination. This isn’t a tragedy, there is nothing mysterious or unintentional about it. This will not be the last. Sarah Palin was the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sharon Angle was a Republican candidate for the Senate, many, official Republican candidates clearly advocated the use of guns in politics during the campaign. The killing has started, the time to let them off the hook for the results of their policy just ended, people are already dying.

I think Echidne is overstating the intention of those talking about guns. But at the same time I think any politician who claims to be “surprised” that someone with a gun took their talk about guns seriously is being disingenuous at best.

But we shouldn’t just talk about the Republicans and Tea Partiers. While they may be the ones who are primarily to blame for introducing violence into mainstream political discourse,  those fringe-dwelling conspiracy-mongers who talk in similar terms, and fill their readers’ and listeners’ head with apocalyptic nonsense, may have been the primary influence in this particular case.

This is one of the reasons that I’m troubled by the violent anti-women rhetoric I sometimes see in the mansophere. For some people, it’s merely rhetoric. But the fact is that some people take this sort of rhetoric all too seriously — as those who use this rhetoric know or should know. All those who’ve engaged in it have blood on their hands.

EDITED TO ADD: Below, a graphic (now taken down) from Sarah Palin’s web site:

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creepy men who should not ever be with women ever sex violence against men/women

>Very, very, very bad Santa

>

Hey ladies!

Let me ask you: does this dude — you know, the one to the immediate right of these words, with the intense stare and rakishly tousled hair — look like the kind of guy who might, in a burst of inspiration, fill a vibrator with “gun powder, BB shot, and buck shot from shotgun shells,” then give it to an ex-girlfriend as a Christmas gift in hopes that she would place it inside herself forthwith, at which point he would cause said vibrator to literally explode his ex?

Well, to me, he sort of does, and apparently he did as well to the Waseca, Minnesota police, who arrested the mulleted (alleged) vibrator bomber, Terry Allen Lester, after another woman he had been staying with alerted them to Lester’s undelivered gift, which he’d (allegedly) left behind with her, along with a bunch of bomb-making equipment and another vibrator, upon which he’d written “Merry X-mas Bitch” with a black marker, and which he apparently had intended to give to yet another ex.

There was still another vibrator in Lester’s bag, with no gunpowder in it and nothing nasty written on it; he’d apparently intended this for a third ex. No word on why he was being so much nicer to her than to his two other exes. Or why he hadn’t actually given any of the gifts to any of his exes, though Christmas had come and gone by the time police were alerted to Lester’s little gift bag.

More on the case, along with the official “statement of probable cause,” at The Smoking Gun.

Thanks to Joe for tipping me off to this story.

Categories
antifeminism feminism misogyny MRA violence against men/women

>Excellent rebuttal of some standard MRA arguments

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ECHIDNE of the Snakes has written an excellent post titled “Eight Anti-Woman Principles of The Most Extreme Types of MRAs.” 

It goes through a number of standard MRA arguments and offers pretty persuasive rebuttals of most of them. Among the topics covered: life expectancies of men and women and why this actually isn’t a feminist plot; higher rate of on-the-job accidents for men and why this isn’t a feminist plot; the higher rate of male death in wars and why this too is not a feminist plot; male prisoners; homelessness; and stay-at-home dads. The post also comments on child custody and domestic violence, but without providing real rebuttals on those two issues.

I’m adding this link to my “further reading” post on general critiques of the MRM.