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.
@cassandrakitty
Signed
It still works just fine to describe someone who thinks non-white people are “breaking” Britain.
Protip: black people have been living in Britain for a long, long, LONG time. Before there even WAS a Britain, in fact.
@random pester
uh, you probably only hear ‘liberals’ over use that word because you can’t go more than three sentences without spewing some racist shit. The common denominator is you, kid.
RP,
You really are just the most awful sort of idiot.
I’m a little bit of a trashy redneck, myself. I have friends in the hills of Tuckasee. Those “backwoods” are beautiful and you do not know the first thing about poor folks in rural US. Not every backwoods redneck is like the ones you see on TV. That seems to be a serious problem for you. You think fantasy = reality.
Here’s a few songs for my redneck ladies:
Yes, RP, you scumsucking sack of hairballs, you are as racist and classist as you are stupid.
RE: RandomPoster
Nobody likes a truthteller, people can’t handle the truth.
Yeah, yeah, you’re just unloading all sorts of truth. I assume ‘truth’ is your personal name for your dick, of course.
I suppose the teeming masses of single mothers all over the world of all races and classes who experienced unplanned pregnancies are all the result of immaculate conception by spirits instead of their babydaddies running out on them after knocking them up, no?
…soooo? Single mothers exist. This isn’t a thing. I don’t even get your point here. Single mothers become such because of the action of a guy having sex with her. This is supposed to be earth-shattering… how?
My husband was brought up by a single teenage mother. She did a fantastic job.
RE: Kittehs
No, they’d all run away to join the circus!
*is so disappointed*
Have you checked your middle- to ring-finger ratio lately?
So. Much Racism.
So. Much. Classism.
Go. Away. You. Ass.
Because a lot of people are racist and anti-immigrant?
How would you know? You’ve yet to try.
BB, when you use a semicolon, the thought on either side of it are supposed to be related somehow.
Also, I’d still like to know what species of women RP is planning on fucking, now that he’s done with “human women”.
RE: emilygoddess
Have you checked your middle- to ring-finger ratio lately?
I thought it was supposed to be pointer to ring finger?
Emily,
I’d bet dollar to doughnuts that he’s eagerly awaiting the advent of the sexbot.
LBT, I think you’re right.
Signed.
RP – If you have a valid point, I suggest you make it quickly. All this pussy-footing around is leaving us confused. Come, now. What do you *really* think?
Except that no, they actually don’t objectively prove a goddamn thing, except that you’re an idiot who knows no sociology and can’t be bothered to try.
And gated suburbs aren’t exactly crime-free mini-Utopias, either. If anything, they hinder the police from policing, and actually aid and abet all kinds of crime. My best friend and his hubby lived in a gated suburb of Phoenix, Arizona…and a fancy SUV just down the street from their house was stripped of its tires and left up on blocks. The owners had to stick a sign on it reading THIS WAS THEFT!, so no one would think they had done it themselves. And to alert the neighbors that nope, fences and gates do NOT, in fact, keep criminals out.
So, that’s one of your stupidities shot down with actual objective fact. How about another?
On the contrary, we here can handle the truth just fine; we deal in it daily. It’s YOU who are having all sorts of trouble with it, to the end that you’re now (hilariously) calling yourself a “gender separatist”. Which is like a white supremacist calling himself a white separatist and congratulating himself that he’s not really a racist, when in fact he is, and it’s just a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. Same shit, different toilet.
And yes, you did write rape apologia:
You said that about RAPE and MURDER, you disingenuous sack of fucking shit.
Petition signed, and passed along.
Wow, talk about putting words in my mouth. That last quote was not me at all, and if any of you actually bothered to pay attention to the poster names highlighted in black on the top of the posts you would clearly see who it was. They say feminists are delusional but I always thought that was just figurative! And how is it racist and classist (noticw i never specified even a single disrinct race or class) 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? 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?
Fuck off, RandomPest.
Thanks, random pester! I needed a cheer up, and laughing at you will do.
Feminists made one mistake, therefore they’re all delusional!!!
You do know that there are different people posting here, and we’re not a hivemind, right? Just because one person misquoted you doesn’t mean we can’t check usernames…
1) I think you’re mixxing up what people are saying to you. People called you racist and classist for different things you said.
2) it’s not obvious. You’re a douchenozzle with no evidence.
3) there are plenty of reasons people are single mothers. And you don’t blame the women for men ditching them. That would actually be the men’s fault. Cuz they were the ones doing the action. It’s not that hard.
All atheists are evil!!!!!eleven Also, you do realize that not everyone who posts here is an atheist, right?
PS: citation needed. You can ramble all you want about ‘victim complex’ and saying oppression isn’t real, but the fact is, you’re still talking out of your ass.
omigod. omigod. omigod. That’s hilarious. um wow.
so people getting more rights makes america less free? Nice logic. Keep trolling.
auggzillary:
Yes, RandomPest is that stupid.
RandomPest:
We’ve been through this. This is not a “fact,” this is your uninformed opinion. You’re going to have to find some actual peer-reviewed studies – not tabloid tv shows or works of fiction – to back this up.
But you don’t have any. Because you’re just not that bright.
And using words like “redneck” and “ghetto” – these are freaking dog whistle words and you know exactly what you’re doing by using them. Stop being so cowardly and disingenuous and own your shit.
Randompest is sounding more and more like one of those people Fox news pays to troll liberal sites.
On the topic of single mothers: Does anyone know how ‘single mother’ is defined? Does it mean not married to the father of her children or does it mean not living with him? Getting married takes a lot of time and money and a lot of lower income people don’t get married for that reason but it doesn’t mean the father ran out.
@weirdwoodtreehugger
Wait, they actually do that? O_o
Further on the definition of ‘single mothers,’ my mom raised my brother by herself beginning just before he turned 13. Does this qualify her as a single mother? Spoiler alert: my father was a good man whose body ran out on him.
How do you describe that on your resume? Professional Troll, lots of experience in lying, manipulation, and annoying people?
If you list Fox news on your resume, “lots of experience in lying, manipulation, and annoying people” is probably assumed
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100054718/the-man-with-15-kids-by-14-women-the-welfare-state-has-turned-back-the-clock-to-one-million-bc/ ; http://theblacksphere.net/2013/06/18-kids-by-17-mothers/ ; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2159476/Tennessees-deadbeat-dads-The-men-81-children-46-different-women–theyre-paying-child-support-them.html ; http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/man-fathered-30-kids-needs-break-child-support-140439765.html
It was nice of RP to provide us with examples of angry sexist trolls in the media, since we were talking about the ones who work for Fox.