Men’s Rights activists — or a good portion of them, anyway — seem to suffer from what we might call “Male Responsibility Bypass Syndrome.” Whatever terrible things a man (or a group of men) has been shown to have done, MRAs have a remarkable ability to find a woman to blame for it.
Nowhere is this clearer than when it comes to excusing violence. If a man is violent, MRAs tend to argue, it’s because he was provoked by a woman unaware that “equal rights mean equal lefts.” Or it’s the fault of his mother for not raising him right. Or the fault of his female ancestors for “choosing” violent men to “mate” with.
And if a stepfather abuses a child, it’s the fault of the mother for inviting him into the home. Take this generously upvoted comment from DavidByron2 in the Men’s Rights subreddit, who attempts to give a “scientific” — that is, an Evo Psych — excuse for the abuse:
In a later comment, Byron explains that he wasn’t really “blaming” the “females” in question, just saying that “the female is causal. She/it makes the decision to get a new mate or not.”
Oh, yeah, that’s much better.
But it’s that last bit, borrowed from Evo Psych, that’s even more remarkable, based as it is on the notion that male violence isn’t really violence if someone somewhere has come up with a genetic explanation for it.
Really? Animals need to survive in order to propagate their genes and “maximize genetic transfer to the next generation,” and they need to eat to survive. But I’m pretty sure that if I went to the middle-eastern restaurant on the corner, punched a customer in the head, and ran off with their Lamb Kabob entrée the cops wouldn’t be very sympathetic to my evolutionary argument. Biology doesn’t excuse bad behavior.
In the part of Byron’s comment I left out of the screencap, he links to summaries of the research of evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who’ve written a good deal about what’s come to be called the “Cinderella effect,” that is, the fact that child abuse seems to be many times more prevalent in homes with stepparents than in those without.
While empirically this is true — though often overstated, and more complicated than “evil stepfather” theories would have it, given that studies often include other men, including uncles and grandfathers, in the same category as stepfathers — we still don’t actually know why this is. Are human males really just wired like male lions, who kill cubs fathered by other lions when they link up with new mates? Or is it that, say, men inclined to abuse children target vulnerable single mothers in order to get access to their kids?
Or could it be that child abuse and neglect — which takes many different forms, from emotional abuse to sexual abuse to physical violence — is a complicated and messy subject that can’t be reduced to a single explanation?
I’m guessing the latter, but leave it to the MRAs to jump on an explanation that gives them an excuse to absolve men of responsibility for their actions BECAUSE GENES.
h/t to LieBaron on Reddit.
283 replies on “Men's RIghts Redditor: When stepfathers abuse children "it's not about men being violent. It's an adaption to maximise genetic transfer to the next generation."”
Is it dropping-random-links-without-explanation time already?
randomposter, say what you’re linking to and how it’s relevant, if you want anyone to read it.
well, I’ve got some terribly important* links to drop too!
terribly important gif.
other much important thing.
most important.
*not
I have a very, very important video to share: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssh71hePR8Q
My goodness gracious, can’t anyone read the links themselves? And can no one keep track of the replies to posts anymore? You wanted real life citations, I give you Googles top hits proving my point.
Shut up and watch Ronald McDonald creepily dancing to Touhou music while making bizarre sounds instead.
omgidodas;lk thats hilarious.
“googles top hits” to prove your point XD
that’s not very scientific XD
This video will tell you all that you need to know about how women, represented here by the cat, oppress poor unfortunate betas like RP (represented by the duck).
@cassandra
D”awww it’s the cat dressed as a shark riding a roomba chasing a duck video! : D
(I mostly had to type that cuz it’s so fun to type. Best video ever tho.)
…That’s how we oppress men? I would’ve thought the feminist hivemind would’ve had a little more direction.
RandomPest: Once more, you miss the point.
Peer reviewed studies. Not news stories about a single case, here and there. Single cases prove nothing. You can find a couple cases of people doing almost anything, that doesn’t prove that there is a trend. I’m not even sure what you’re trying to prove at this point. That there are men out there that father many children? Yes, that is a thing that can happen.
It doesn’t prove that “rednecks” and people from the “ghetto” are more virile or fertile. It doesn’t that those people “broke” Britain or are destroying “western civilization.”
wow.. much citation
a news article talking about men sleeping with women and having children
*clearly* this proves that all women want men who treat them badly. a couple examples prove this.
I also want to link to documented proof providing that men love to stick impractical things up their butts and then going to the ER.
http://researchonmedical.com/2013/02/20-objects-found-stuck-in-a-rectum-in-an-er/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/shocking-x-ray-image-shows-bottle-man-rammed-buttocks-article-1.1575538
Hey, Random Poster, “and can no one keep track of the replies to posts anymore? You wanted real life citations, I give you Googles top hits proving my point.”
This is funny for two reasons, 1) you never responded to most of the posters who actually took the time to refute the ‘points’ you brought up in your first ridiculous screed & 2) three links about three men and their numerous children with different women proves nothing about men or women in general
Saw this quote, needed to post here mostly in relation to the racist ‘primitive violence’ bull shit.
“The high status of women in Native societies did not escape the notice of white women either. White women often looked to the Native societies as models of equality from which the white society should base itself, often to the dismay of white men. Even in war, European women were often surprised to find that they went unmolested by their Indian captors. Mary Rowlandson said of her experience: “I have been in the midst of roaring Lions, and Savage Bears, that feared neither God, nor Man, nor the Devil … and yet not one of them ever offered the least abuse of unchastity to me in word or action” (Rowlandson 1974, 108–109). Between 1675 and 1763, almost 40 percent of women who were taken captive by Native people in New England chose to remain with their captors (Namias 1993, 25).3
— Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples ANDREA SMITH
So it’s no wonder our trolls and men like them feel the need to tear down and smear the reputations and histories of POC and their indigenous ancestors. They are a threat to white male supremacy because women will get a new context within which to call them on their hateful shit.
Yes Fox New really paid people to comment on websites.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/10/20/fox-news-reportedly-used-fake-commenter-account/196509
@weirdwoodtreehugger
Wow. That’s really weird.
I’m dying to know what Random thinks his last link has to do with the subject:
AAAAUGH he’s the serial killer from Dollhouse!
I’m beginning to wonder if RP is a real person or some bot programmed to post random words and links. If artificial intelligence is a thing, why not artificial stupidity?
He’s proof that an AI still can’t pass the Turing test, isn’t he? I knew there had to be some reason for his existence.
katz,
At least he didn’t say, “Okey-dokey”.
http://popgoestheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/500full.jpg
I still say that RandomPoster is totally performing right now. Nobody can be that smug AND stupid at the same time.
“Man chooses to father dozens of children. It’s everyone else’s fault.”
You did just read the other thread, right?
@emilygoddess
that paraphrasing had me cracking up. XD
You’re babbling incoherently after being handed your ass. Don’t you ever stop? Or, failing that, listen to how idiotic you sound? Because, trust me…you are an idiot on all counts. Why don’t you just fuck off? Nobody’s interested in your self-centred whinings, anyway.
RE: cassandrakitty
You did just read the other thread, right?
I prefer to believe that he’s committing elaborate performance art. Some personification of failure or something.
I like to call it Anger Displacement Syndrome…..part of some of the oldest form of misogyny, religion,The great myth of creation and the fall of eve…..otherwise known as Pandora’s box. Blah blah blah, all of man’s problems are the fault of women.—- Way to accept responsibility for oneself, jerks!!
RP, I know it must hurt that no woman wants anything to do with you. But still, to prescribe to such fairy tales as these:
“to point out the obvious fact that bad boys are the most virile and reproduce the most because chicks dig them, as shown by all the single mothers who got knocked up and then ran out on?”
Citations? Where are the citations? Without them, you sound like an asshole who hates single mothers. “Bad Boy” isn’t a scientific or biological term, you know. It was created by manchildren who are afraid and pissed off at women’s right to choose their own sexual partners. Your fears are noted, however…your fear of not being good enough to gain a woman’s attention. “Bad Boys” is your version of the “big bad.” Women don’t realize how awesome you are, right? Well, actually, they can see you quite clearly, hence they shun you.
“Just as religious fundamentalists have too much heaven and hell on their minds and see sin everywhere, secular fundamentalists have too much narsicisstic paranoia from their eternal victimhood complex and see oppression and persecution amd discrimimation literally everywhere. Or is this just in the “Western World” especially America, once upon a time the so-called land of the free and home of the brave?”
I don’t think you know what the word “secular” or “fundamentalist” means. Everyone here knows you clearly don’t read enough books to post here. And you mentioned “victimhood.”
Sweetie, you’re practically soaking in it.
I prefer to view all of the trolls here as attempting performance art. Really lousy performance art.
Fair enough, but this man shouldn’t be taken as representative of evo-psych theorists as many people in this thread have seemed to. Evolutionary psychology only seeks to explain human behaviour in biological terms
It fails. I just tried to read, “Before the Dawn”. A more rampant case of, “my ass is full of facts” I’ve not seen in some time. Apalling levels of Victorian moralising masquerading as science. In the first chapter we have “we must assume” about things which aren’t presumtive, as well as some significant palming of cards and blatant distortions of actual facts, married to intellectual dishonesty to hide a gaping flaw in an argument.
And this is pretty par for the course.
Look, be sensible. These behaviours are seen in all societies and throughout all of history. They are simply part of the human condition and they must have evolved to fulfil some biological purposes.
Just like that pile of blather.
Lots of people have freckles. Lots have predispositions to cancer, or atherosclerosis. The idea that all behaviors/traits are part of some biological imperative driven by evolution is a fallacy. Evolution has no purpose. It just is. Sometimes what it makes is a useless side-effect. It won’t leave the system unless it’s something which prevents reproduction. Imputing “purpose” is complete nonsense.
I had a sudden image of George III there – fifteen children he and Queen Charlotte had. He was anything but a ‘bad boy’. No, I have no idea why I thought of him just then.
Notice how the idiot troll phrases it as if it was the women’s fault – “the single mothers who got knocked up”. Not “the women these ‘bad boys’ got pregnant and then deserted”. The passive phrasing is all about not placing responsibility for pregnancy on the man, at all, ever.
A population of people can be murderous, chaotic and immoral but as long as they reproduce fast enough to replace those that die that population will persist.
Nope. In a non-agrarian setting such a society is unstable,and will fall apart. The only way to make it persist is to have a structure which forces the victims of the bad actors to stay and take it. In a hunter-gather society there is no such compelling force. Which means all it takes to collapse the group is for the offended to leave. Once enough have left to reduce the people they are ostracising themselves from to bare subsistence (because successful hunting and gathering has forms of surplus, even in such difficult areas as the remaining groups have been marginalised to; in the past when there weren’t as many people/there weren’t urban/agricultural groups preventing free movement there was even more situational surplus in the times of non-migrational living: think the plains indians of the US), there will be collapse.
And the replacement rate for a hunter-gathering group is slow. That is part of why it took so long for humans to hit the levels of density which probably sparked the shift to agriculture.
At roughly 2-3 years to reach semi-independent status from parents, another 5-10 years to become moderately productive members of the society (as opposed to a moderate drain) and another 4-5 years to become able to reproduce the rate of replacement is slow. Given that in non-agrarian cultures the interval between children is 3-4 years, it’s a good twenty years to have a stable (as opposed to growing) population. Throw in some infant mortality, accident, disease, etc., there isn’t that much leeway for intra-group conflicts which lead to murder. The social instability which rape creates is also a significant inhibition.
Inter-group hostility/rape is more common (but still far from “common”) in non-agrarian societies, but that falls outside the scope of, “all men only restrain themselves because of powerful central authorities handing down laws,” which is the core of your argument.
As to the HG groups you mention, none of them are in “a state of nature”, i.e. all of them have had significant outside contact.
Even the “best case” of the Highland Interior of New Guinea suffers from a massive artificial constraint: the people there were geographically contained, and fairly close to the carrying capacity of the landscape. And the violence in which they engaged was amazingly stylised; so that only a small portion of the population was at significant risk of being killed.
In short, the evidence fails to support any of your claims.
“In short, the evidence fails to support any of your claims.”
I’m shocked, shocked I say, that racist, misogynist dude is full of crap