Category Archives: domestic violence
The Wisconsin spa shootings: A conspiracy theory
I’m not sure how many of you have been following the story of the recent spa shooting in Wisconsin, in which an (angry, controlling, abusive) estranged husband murdered his wife and two others at a spa where she worked, before turning the gun on himself.
Unfortunately, stories like this are far from uncommon – domestic violence often escalates when female victims break off relationships with abusive men. (While dumped women often stalk male exes, they are far less likely to resort to violence.) All those studies that MRAs like to cite about how domestic violence between men and women is somehow equal don’t take into account violence that happens after the relationship is brought to an end.
I was reading this article, about the heroic efforts of Zina Haughton, the murdered wife in the spa shootings, to convince her ex to spare the lives of others in the spa at the time, when I made the mistake of reading the comments, which had degenerated into a bizarre “debate” over gun control. The, er, highlight of the discussion was this bizarre conspiracy theory:
Apparently gun enthusiasts can be as paranoid, delusional and self-absorbed as any entitled asshole in the manosphere.
Reddit Ugly: MRAs and others argue that a man allegedly wronged in divorce court should turn to murder
So there was a bit of ugliness over on the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day. No, scratch that; there was a giant explosion of ugliness.
A couple of days ago, you see, a Redditor with a nine-day-old account posted a story to r/menrights detailing the alleged ill-treatment he’d gotten at the hands of a vengeful ex-wife and an unsympathetic family court system. The story was filled with literally unbelievable details – among other things, he claimed to have been rendered homeless by the demands of the court, forced to pay $1000 a month in spousal support to his ex though she had a $60,000 a year job. Some commenters challenged the veracity of the tale – while the OP gave a case number in his post, no one has been able to find evidence that a case with that number actually exists. (The OP has not responded to the skeptics.)
But most of the respondents assumed the story was true. And why not? It seemed to reinforce every paranoid MRA fantasy of evil women and courts out of control. Despite its fishiness, the post got more than 700 net upvotes.
And that’s where the ugliness began. Not content to merely offer the man sympathy and advice, many commenters started talking murder, and some of the most violent comments got dozens of upvotes.
The whole world is watching … A Voice for Men “activists” making asses of themselves
Well,I got carried away there. It’s not literally the whole world. Only a teensy weensy portion of it.
The fellows at A Voice for Men, you see, evidently stung by criticism that they aren’t activists, have begun engaging in real, honest-to-goodness real-world activism, by which I mean that a handful of them, some in Canada and at least one in Australia, have been putting up posters advertising the AVFM website.
In other words, their activism consists of putting up posters for a website whose only activism thus far has consisted of putting up posters for itself.
Well, eventually they’ll get the hang of it, I guess.
GirlWritesWhat on “The Necessity of Domestic Violence”: “I don’t really find too much [that's] seriously ethically questionable.”
Yesterday, we took a look at Ferdinand Bardamu’s manosphere manifesto “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” a thoroughly despicable piece of writing that concludes:
Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.
I decided to take a look at Bardamu’s post yesterday after running across a discussion of it in Reddit’s new FeMRA subreddit, a forum ostensibly devoted to what “women can do to advance men’s rights as women.” It’s a strange little subreddit, started by a man and dominated by some of Reddit’s most unsavory MaleMRAs, some of them banned in the regular Men’s Rights subreddit.
Ferdinand Bardamu: “Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.”
We talked a bit yesterday about pick-up artists and domestic violence – specifically, Heartiste’s suggestion that aspiring alpha males look to Chris Brown as a role model. So today I thought I would take the opportunity to write about one of the skeeviest and most notorious posts the manosphere has generated thus far – Ferdinand Bardamu’s “The Necessity of Domestic Violence.”
Bardamu took down his blog In Mala Fide some months back – I found the text of his post up on Manosphere Copies, a blog set up by the even skeevier MRA who goes by the name Jeremiah (aka JeremiahMRA, aka Things Are Bad) to host posts from manosphere blogs that are no more. In Mala Fide, which combined elements of PUA, Men’s Rights activism and “Human Biological Diversity” style racism, had a great deal of influence in the manosphere in its day. Bardamu published reprehensible things with regularity – see here, here and here for examples – so his defense of domestic violence is hardly unexpected.
Heartiste: Chris Brown is a great role model for wannabe alpha males
Chris Brown, who’s convinced that he’s apologized enough for what he calls his “mishap.”
Over on his little chateau, otherwise known as a blog, the pick-up Heartiste Formerly Known as Roissy suggests a rather unusual role model for young and not-so-young men hoping to impress women with their alphaness: Chris Brown. Not for being a charismatic singer, but for that time he nearly beat Rihanna to death.
Oh, you don’t have to literally beat up women to be an alpha. Just work on making them uncomfortable and insecure.
Maxim #19: Making a woman feel a little emotional pain will reward you a thousandfold in returned physical pleasure.
You don’t have to be fists-of-fury Chris Brown to pick up a Rihanna and make her fall in deep, profound love with you, but don’t let the lesson of their relationship be lost on you. If you are a beta male — and odds are you are — you can superglue your relationship bond by instilling in your woman a calculated level of discomfort and insecurity. You won’t feel bad about this, because you will know that the discomfort you create is subconsciously DESIRED by your girl. Despite her outward appearance of frustration and timorous appeasement, you will know that inside, she is lit up like a vagina tree, with a squirting orgasm shooting out of the star on top.
In addition to everything else that is horribly wrong with this quote, let me just say that “lit up like a vagina tree” is not a phrase that I hope works its way into the vernacular.
So far, so good.
Men’s Rights Redditors angry that reality is reality. (Murder statistics edition.)
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, mgriff2k4 is angry that the picture to the right here showed up on his computer screen. Sorry, make that fucking angry. “Did this really just fucking pop up on my news feed?” he asks in the title of his post, adding in a comment: “sorry about the word “fucking” but im really pissed off about this.”
Why is he angry? Presumably, he assumes the statistic is untrue, and that it unfairly paints men as evil murderers.
Luckily, in this Age of the Internet it is trivially easy to find out whether statistics like this are true. It involves something called “Google.” mgriff2k4 did not bother to avail himself of this easy-to-use research tool.
But I did. In less than 5 minutes, I confirmed that this factoid is indeed true, at least according to the most recent figures on gender and homicide found on the Department of Justice’s web site, drawn from FBI data covering the years from 1976-2005. According to the FBI, 30% of women who are murdered are murdered by “intimates.” Roughly 20% are killed by husbands or ex-husbands; 10% by boyfriends or girlfriends. (In the overwhelming majority of cases the murderers are boyfriends, not girlfriends; men are ten times more likely to commit murder than women.)
While four times as many men are murdered than women, only 5% of murdered men are killed by “intimates.” Men kill women more than twice as often as women kill men. Women suffer far more serious injuries from domestic violence than men do; so it is not altogether unexpected that they are also far more likely to be murdered by intimates.
If you want to see what this means on a human level, I suggest you take a look at the excellent if depressing web site Domestic Violence Crime Watch, which links to stories in which men are the perpetrators, and in which men are the victims. There are far more of those in the former category than in the latter.
I should note that (as of this writing) one commenter in the thread also found his way to the DOJ site, and noted that men were more likely to be killed by strangers or acquaintances. But he didn’t bother to tell mkgriff2k4 that the sign in the picture was in fact accurate.
The Punch and Punch Show: Men’s Rights Redditors fantasize about how much easier life would be if they were gay
God made Punch and Judy, Not Punch and Punch
So the other day some of the fellas on the Men’s Rights subreddit were having a strange little conversation. One Men’s Rights Redditor posted a clip from Bill Burr, in which the comedian complained that when his girlfriend hit him, he couldn’t hit her back without getting himself into a lot of trouble.
Instead of pointing his fellows to, I don’t know, resources for male victims of domestic abuse, the OP joked “This Is Why I Wish That I Was Sexually Attracted to Men.”
Yep, that’s right. He wants to date other men so, if the need arises, he can punch them.
Naturally, this being Reddit, other straight dudes jumped in with their own fantasies about how much easier life would be if they were gay. After all, jacKofKats pointed out, dating a guy would mean you could play video games with the very same person you have sex with, something obviously impossible in heterosexual relationships.
Oneiorosgrip agreed with the original poster that life would be much simpler and easier if guys could hit their mates:
Dolanduckeroo expressed envy towards his gay friends, who apparently lead lives of ease and endless zipless fucks, all the while being appreciated for who they truly are.
A few actual gay men wandered into the discussion, hoping to inject a bit of realism, pointing out (among other things) that gay men actually face something called “homophobia” — look it up if you haven’t heard of it — pretty much every day of their lives. Naturally, they got fewer upvotes than the “wish I were gay” fantasizers.
Tommy Wiseau’s The Room: An unintentional MRA classic?
A rare non-misogynistic moment in The Room
You may have heard of, if you haven’t already seen, the stupefyingly terrible film The Room. The film is so bafflingly inept and nonsensical that you’re hardly surprised to learn that writer, director, and star Tommy Wiseau had never made a film before; indeed, you might find yourself wondering if he’d ever even seen a film before.
The Room (released, barely, in 2003 and available on DVD) is a mawkishly melodramatic, and deadly serious, drama about a man betrayed by his fiancee, which Wiseau has been trying to market as a quirky comedy because no one can watch the film without laughing at his hero’s travails. Rent The Room if you want to stare dumbfounded at your TV for an hour and a half some night. Seriously, rent it.
Seeing it for myself the first time not long ago, I was struck by the manosphere-style misogyny that pervades almost every frame of the movie. It’s not an MRA film, and Wiseau is no MRA, but somehow he manages to encapsulate every terrible stereotype about men and women that most MRAs seem to believe.
The film tells the sad story of Johnny (played by Wiseau), a good-hearted, long-haired banker with an unclassifiable accent who is betrayed at work (he doesn’t get his expected promotion) and, more importantly, by his “future wife” Lisa, who blithely cheats on him with his best friend.
Lisa is portrayed like the evil bitch villain in nearly every MRA urban legend: she’s a self-absorbed twit who, in addition to cheating on Johnny, falsely accuses him of domestic violence and fakes a pregnancy just to fuck with him.
Johnny, meanwhile, is supposed to be seen as a loyal, helpful, compassionate man who cares deeply about his friends and treats his adored “future wife” Lisa like the princess he tells her she is.
I say “supposed to” because Johnny is hardly the great guy Wiseau thinks he is. For one thing, everything he does and says is bit … off, as if his body has been taken over by a space alien who’s learned everything he knows about women (and human interaction in general) by reading comments on Reddit and watching Christopher Walken as “The Continental” on Saturday Night Live without getting the joke.
For another, he’s a rage-filled narcissist with a bad case of “nice guy” entitlement and absolutely no self-awareness. When his friend Mark tells him about a woman beaten so badly she ends up in the hospital, he responds with a hearty laugh. (“What a story, Mark!”) And when he confronts Lisa about her false accusations of domestic violence (“You are lying! I never hit you!”), he angrily shoves her down onto a couch. It doesn’t seem to occur to Johnny (or to Wiseau) that this too is a form of domestic violence.
When, after learning of Lisa’s betrayal, he trashes their apartment and [SPOILER ALERT] kills himself with a conveniently located pistol, Wiseau presents it as the ultimate comeuppance to the cruel Lisa.
While you have to see the whole film to truly appreciate its epic badness, the following clips will give you some idea of what I’ve been talking about.
First, the trailer, which tries its best to cover up the film’s true weirdness:
The infamous “roof scene” in which Johnny tells Mark (the guy Lisa is sleeping with) about Lisa’s accusations of domestic violence:
A compilation of some of Johnny’s best (i.e. worst) moments:
This one (ignore the misleading title) gives you some idea of Lisa’s oblivious evilness:
Here’s Hitler reacting to the film. (Note: Not the real Hitler.)
And here, if you dare, is the whole damn movie in its entirely. (If you’re pressed for time, you may want to fast forward through the film’s five completely unerotic sex scenes, set to the worst slow jams ever recorded.)
EDITED TO ADD: Oh, and here’s the scene the gif above is from. Johnny is the most efficient flower buyer and pug-petter in the world.
