At 5/26/14 07:48 AM, MrPercie wrote:
Im only going on your word here, but you seem convinced he went on those kinds of sites.
You don't have to go on my word, it's all over the news reports and blog posts and he wrote about it himself in his manifesto. Not to mention that a lot of the shit he said in his rants was pretty much typical "manosphere" boilerplate.
I don't care about MRA, its just another dumb group to me, but you feel as if their partly responsible for this for perpetuating this mindset.
Lemme put it this way: our entire culture has some deeply fucked-up attitudes towards sex, in which we teach boys that their worth as men is determined by their ability to attain sex from girls at any cost and as much as possible, an environment in which men often develop a perceived sense of entitlement to sex and in which women are objectified and otherized. "Manosphere"-types (of which MRAs are a major component) are an extreme outgrowth of that attitude, where that otherization of women turns into resentment and hatred. People like this killer are an extreme outgrowth of that extreme outgrowth, where that hatred boils over into actual violence.
Again, I'd encourage you all to read Chapter 8 of this Film Crit Hulk piece from last year. He's much better at explaining all this stuff than I am.
Anyway, the reason why I keep harping on this point, @NeonSpider, is because it's been very frustrating to see the media (and many in this thread) largely frame this as the work of a lone aberrant psychopath acting outside our values with no discernible logic to his behavior, when in reality it's quite the opposite: horrible shit like this is the inevitable logical conclusion of our present values.
This is hardly the first instance of a man enacting violence against women over sex. Look at what happened elsewhere in California just hours after the shooting. Or about a month ago when a Connecticut boy stabbed a girl to death after she refused his prom invitation. Or how nearly 1 out of every 5 American women in this survey report having been the victim of rape or attempted rape, or how 1 out of every 3 women worldwide are the victims of physical or sexual violence.
This kind of behavior isn't aberrant, it's downright commonplace. And I don't think you can separate the implications of the killer's actions from those of all these rape/DV stats because they all so clearly stem from the same attitudes. And again, in their reactions to these events women have clearly identified this connection as well. So obviously within this event there's something more fundamental that is deeply, deeply wrong here, a fact that women are acutely aware of and trying to speak out about all over Twitter and the blogosphere and forums like this one and in real fucking life, but that men have largely failed to recognize because we refuse to listen.
I wan't to know how true that is, whether this guy really was converted into believing into that stuff which in turn would cause this crime or whether were just using this as an excuse to hate a group we dislike.
I'm not saying he was "converted" or trying to assign blame for what happened or anything stupid like that. Obviously he was already deeply troubled and starting to hold his misogynist views long before he ever joined those groups. But in joining them he found those views validated and bolstered. Had he found a place that could actually help him rather than one that simply fed his growing resentments, then maybe all those people would still be alive. That's all.
My point is that our present cultural attitude towards sex is not only misguided and sexist in nature but outright dangerous for women, that the "manosphere" groups to which this killer belonged are emblematic of that culture, and that horrible events like this are not going to stop until we're willing to seriously reevaluate and change these things. If this isn't the proper time and place to talk about it then I don't know what is.
At 5/26/14 06:20 PM, Manly-Chicken wrote:
So, that means if a mentally unstable feminist goes around and massacres men because she believes all men are sexist assholes, women's rights are therefore evil?
It's not comparable. I already addressed this in my response to Spooky a few pages back and the Prospect piece I linked to. Hatred, resentment, and violent sentiments towards women make up the primary activity of even the most mainstream and popular MRA spaces. You can't say the same of feminism at all.
There are certainly societal issues that uniquely effect men, but they're actually one and the same with feminist issues. The problems that effect men are caused by the same patriarchal system that causes problems for women (for example: the disproportionate treatment of men and women in divorce settlements and child custody hearings - something MRAs bring up a lot - has nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with traditional patriarchal notions that only women can care for children and only men can be financial providers). And as you can see mentioned in the Prospect article, there are actually plenty of feminist organizations devoted to helping resolve those problems (like support networks for male victims of rape).
The "men's rights movement," on the other hand, does nothing to resolve these issues, they just exploit them in order to antagonize women. You guys keep talking about some theoretical reasonable mainstream of the men's rights movement that these extreme outliers divert from, but it's nowhere to be found.
