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.
@ Alex
Part of the reason I’m assuming this is that experience has taught me that if an MRA is complaining about being prevented from doing something, the “something” is usually “sex with a non-consenting person”. Could also be “not being legally allowed to hit someone”, of course, but as time goes on their movement is morphing more and more into Occupy Vagina, and that’s exactly how they see women’s right to withhold consent, as being an unfair system imposed on them by a predatory elite.
At first glance, I read this as “love and cake”. Which would also be nice. 🙂
Er…lemme see if I can tease out some MRA ManLogic™ here:
Abusing (and maybe even killing) your stepkids will automatically reset the woman’s biological clock to Virgin, forcing her to mate with and become pregnant by you and only you. She will never think of leaving you because she’s so impressed and/or cowed by your superior strength and alpha assholishness. Thus, your genes are propagated. Science!
(And on that note, I am thankful that law is so misandric. Also, hugs to all the evilly-stepfathered folks here. And good luck to Canuck, too!)
Lea, that image (plane full of chimps) is quite striking. Yes, it’s the differences that make us human.
Ken L., a nit I feel the need to pick:
I appreciate the scare-quotes, but I still feel the need to stress that evo-psych is NOT science; it’s a pseudo-science, which dresses up in the language of actual science, but then fails to perform as one. Evo-psych has as much to do with the scientific method as creationist science.
This, of course, means that it’s tailor-made for the MRAs, who do the same thing with social-justice language, using terms like ‘privilege’ and so forth with a cargo-cult level of understanding.
I mean, evo-psych is, in theory, a perfectly legitimate thing to study.
But if you were actually going to study it the first thing you would need to do is develop rigorous testing to find trends that stayed true across cultural bounds.
…
I can’t think of a single study that has ever bothered to cross that low bar.
But I’m not out there reading the cutting edge science, either.
But given how plastic humans are, how very much we can adapt… if you aren’t measuring that first, then any attempt to delve into evo-psych is Just-So stories that reveal more about the biases of those who wrote the study than anything else.
(my god, has anybody ever tried to form a Grand Unified Theory of Kanazawa yet? Because ALL his biases are SO WELL DOCUMENTED)
@Alex: I am sorry to hear that about your stepfather 🙁 Closer to my life there is so quite awful stories with blood fathers as well as stepfathers…
@Kim: He does cook all the time! 😀 I don’t remember him making cake (I’m not a sweet tooth, so I don’t remember). But he can make some killer savory pancakes!
I’m going with this explanation.
I don’t think anybody’s mentioned this in the thread, but I really “enjoyed” the “I’m not blaming women; women are causal” argument.
Isn’t claiming that it’s the woman’s fault that their child is abused by definition blaming them?
The mere existence of non-abusive adoptive families totally discredits this entire argument – have any MRAs ever dealt with this issue? Their apparent obsession with genetic “purity” seems like it would preclude adoption. If their Evo-Psych arguments were even close to accurate, adoption wouldn’t exist as an institution.
Now my brain hurts.
OT, but jailariously cute. Be sure to read all the comments!
I’m reminded of a conversation with a person who insisted it was not possible for anyone to love anyone they weren’t biologically related to. They insisted, vehemently, that no adoptive parent would ever sacrifice themselves for their child, and that no pereson would ever sacrifice themselves for their spouse.
Ignoring how easily that could turn into promoting incest, every single person there(the speaker included) was part of a blended family. This person’s spouse was a step-parent and had raised their children from a previous marriage as their own. My sibling was adopted. The other woman present had been married three times and had children from the first two marriages – due to various factors, her third husband was the primary father figure for both these children.
You’d think that all that evidence would lead one to rethink one’s conclusions. Apparently not.
“I mean, evo-psych is, in theory, a perfectly legitimate thing to study.
But if you were actually going to study it the first thing you would need to do is develop rigorous testing to find trends that stayed true across cultural bounds.
…
I can’t think of a single study that has ever bothered to cross that low bar.”
Oh, there’s mounds of cross-cultural work; even articles exploring evolution on psychological differences between cultures…. though a lot of that is genetic psychology stuff and I barely understand it.
While it’s hardly the biggest problem with this guy’s, uh, theory, is that he seems to have missed the point that adaptive evolution is about adapting TO something. If the situation changes, like it has since neanderthal days, then those traits or behaviors might not be adaptive anymore. It’s actually a mystery whether a lot of these pop-evo-psych guys misunderstand evolution or psychology more.
That is a phrase you hear so rarely these days.
“it’s not about men being violent. It’s an adaption to maximise genetic transfer to the next generation.” -DavidByron2
This kind of stuff should get shamed, not just mocked. This is terrible. Should we do something to child abuse apologists like him, as an adaption to improve what is meme-wise (idea-wise) transfer to the next generation?
I don’t actually think that evolutionary psychology itself is an inherently “wrong” field. If research in evolutionary psychology facilitates new therapeutic techniques and genuinely helps people, then I’m totally cool with it. It always helps to dive deeper into the etiology of mental health issues.
But within a heteronormative scientific framework that dichotomizes biological sex and frames it as a priori rather than socially constructed, EP is bound to be biased against women and anyone who isn’t straight. It uncritically accepts social categories such as race and sex, and that is why so much EP research is nothing but pro-oppression nonsense.
I always find it interesting that MRA’s think men are superior, yet will be the first to run to genetics/instinct to explain away bad behavior. Men are just “wired” that way. Their conclusion seems to be “Men are superior but also are victims of their own biological make up.” They’re superior but have not control over their most basic impulses?
From what I can tell, the biggest problem with people who are into evo-psych is that they look at the culture of a their own specific time and place and decide “this is how we’ve always been. We evolved this way.”
Cross cultural studies can help eliminate that bias. However, we don’t know enough about how humans who lived before written language lived to make assumptions that any behavior has always existed. It’s only speculation.
Evo-psych, conceptually, might be a valued field of study. But right now, the entire discipline adheres to rules that would embarrass alchemists for being too slipshod. And yes, lack of cross-cultural studies is part of it, even to the point of being a case of ‘lack of whole cultural studies’–by which I mean, the culture most often studied in evo-psych is largely middle-to-upper-class white Westerners. So they don’t even study the entire population of, say, the U.S. or U.K., let alone the culture of mainland China, or the islands of the South Pacific or wherever. They get one tiny SUB-culture and that’s it.
And then they ignore anything that still doesn’t fit their theories.
Even cross-cultural evo psych studies, which are far more reliable than most other evo psych studies, should be approached with caution and skepticism. Every single evo psych study I have read takes for granted the sex binary, the concept of biological race, and the assumption that those and similar concepts exist before all society. Putting aside the question of whether evo psych is a useful and reliable field of research, I believe that evo psych studies are fundamentally incapable of proving the existence of biological bases for white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, etc. Evo psych as it stands today is nothing more but an effective ideological justification for oppression so that straight white cis dudes can feel that they deserve to be called “normal”.
Well, I woke up to this lovely article in the Daily Kos, and it looks to me as though the mra dudes are beginning to get a larger share of the media attention…and that is NOT a good thing. While this is a relatively small percentage, I fear that with the current political/economic and environmental problems, it may get larger. Hate does seem to be on the rise, fueled by fear and a sense of “encouraged” helplessness and hopelessness.
Fox News wonders if alpha women are destroying men’s lives:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/05/1296986/-Fox-News-wonders-if-alpha-women-are-destroying-men-s-lives?detail=email
The link to the original article is:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/05/04/fox-is-just-asking-are-female-breadwinners-a-pr/199162
Ewwww….but true. I need to find an all-purpose antibiotic.
JJ and Alex – I am so sorry to hear this. I’m late to this thread, but I do have a stack of virtual hugs right here.
Curses suitable for this kind of bull… well, bullshit I believe is good fertiliser… this kind of abuse excusing and enablement – I love the racoon in the sock drawer and the clothes smelling of tomcat pee. But I’d like to add “may they come to the attention of the authorities” – and for anyone who thinks it’s OK to excuse child abuse, the sooner they do the better.
There have been some convicted paedophiles whose approach was to target single women with young children. I knew one in my youth – a colleague of my Dad’s – who attached himself to a recently widowed woman in my parish. Years later it turns out he was a prolific abuser who preyed on her sons, among many others, and also assaulted my 10-year-old brother. Who ran home to find the guy on the phone to my Dad about the Times crossword – an obvious excuse to check my bro would not talk.
A lot of these evo-psych arguments seem to be circular – this happens, therefore it must have an evolutionary purpose, therefore our ancestors must have done it (usually when we know jackshit about whether they did or not) therefore they must have benefitted from doing it. I don’t know to what extent there is ever any genuine science in it somewhere, but so much of it is just unfalsifiable speculation.
But this guy – did you ever read a more transparent “whatever us guys do must be good and necessary because we’re us, and if it isn’t good and necessary, then we only do it because a woman makes us do it, so blame her.”
They also haven’t noticed that women have also evolved, but why worry about yet another way MRAs have of being wrong.
@ cassandrakitty -So did I. After all, given the premise, that makes “sense.” Now I feel all slimed…
Mouseling families are very nice to each other. A baby mouse from another Daddy is taken care of my other males. For example:
” Every single evo psych study I have read takes for granted the sex binary, the concept of biological race, and the assumption that those and similar concepts exist before all society.”
I haven’t read a psych study in years, evolutionary focused or not, that discusses race as a biological fact. They may be out there, but this criticism doesn’t apply to anything that people take seriously.
Biological sex is a pretty fair cop, and it isn’t helped by the fact that adding in biological sex as a covariate will almost always soak up error and help your data get more strongly significant (I have seen the lamest, most clearly post-hoc justifications for it in published articles, and it drives me batty)..
I’m not a neuroscientist (my fiance is, so this is mostly second-hand through her), but another issue is that biological sex overwhelms almost every effect you might be looking for in any imaging study, so it’s just standard to use sex as a covariate or to only recruit one sex. This practice has its critics, and given the fact that people don’t really even know what the mechanism is, the field might be pushing itself so some new paradigm.