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.
@ Fibinachi
It’s no coincidence. Me and the author of that site both picked those books because they’re some of the best books about tribal violence. None of these books have been discredited as that site claims.
@LBT – Thanks for that explanation. I checked out your website, and I think I understand much better. Wow! Your parents just couldn’t cope, and that was their mechanism for moving forward. That really stinks, but what can you do?
I’m happy for you, that all of you are so very much aware of each other. It’s problematic when alternates don’t know what’s going on, and they have holes in their memory, and no idea what happened when another alter was in control. It looks like y’all have a good system going.
In response to the idea that men have an instinct to rape and murder, ummmm, no. That’s not instinct. Instinct is all about how to survive. Rape is not a survival instinct. Self-defense could be considered survival instinct, but murder is not about survival, so, I’m still gonna go with no.
Mind you, I frequently have the urge to smack people who annoy me. I was just watching a movie, and told my Mom how I really wanted to smack the guy who turned out to be the villain. However, I have not actually struck another person in anger in **twenty years**. That’s because I have some measure of self control. However, I do know HOW to assert myself, physically, should it come down to self defense.
Speaking of which, as a woman, I can clearly say that I have never wanted a bad boy. I do like “badass,” men who know how to fight and defend themselves, their families, their country, but use that skill for defense, not attack. Like the old saying goes – Never start a fight, but if it’s unavoidable, finish it.
When my brother taught me self-defense, more than two decades ago, he told me that I should make sure my assailant could not chase me down and finish his attack. There are moves to incapacitate a person, so that even someone slow will still have plenty of time to get *well* away. I’m slow, so a simple distract and run tactic wouldn’t work for me. For a sprinter, on the other hand, distract and run would probably be just fine.
So, I’ll say it again – instinct is about survival. Self-defense, and defense of those whom you hold most dear. Rape and murder? Absolutely not.
And please stop with the “primitive tribal” stuff.
The “sensible” thing being resorting to simplistic biological determinism and unverifiable “just-so” stories.
Nope. This one’s just getting reaction gifs.
Funny thing – a society’s overall rates of violence can be high while still having rates of rape that are quite low, and vice versa. It’s almost as if this stuff is heavily gendered or something.
Huh. I read a chunk of Pinker’s book some time ago, and found it wildly speculative and unconvincing. It’s not just that he’s a non=historian trying to write history, he really doesn’t seem to know how history is done.
also, Fibinachi, thanks for the link!
Primitive *lawless* societies? Are you kidding me?
Any group that is large enough to be a “tribe” will have laws. Families have house rules. Tribes have tribal rules.
So, if the men are raping and murdering with impunity, it’s not because there is no law, it’s because they have laws and/or culture that allow them to get away with it.
In our Northwestern Civilization, we have laws against rape, but people still rape all over the place. Why? The laws alone are not deterrent, because the laws are not ENFORCED. Men will brag to their buddies how they totally raped that bitch last night, but she was drunk and slutty and asking for it, so he just gave her what she deserved, and the buddies will laugh it off, instead of taking the man down and making a citizen’s arrest. They won’t report or stand witness in court. They laugh at rape jokes, thereby giving the secret rapists among them the comfortable feeling that *these* friends are safe and won’t rat them out, even if they should be witness to an actual attack. Not to mention the law enforcement officers who flat out deny to even investigate charges of rape, and “unfound” it or re-write the report to make it into a misdemeanor. Read the news. Washington D.C. police, for SHAME!
It’s not a lack of laws. It’s a lack of compassion and the strength to stand up for the truth.
Look at Steubenville. Even after having it posted for all the community to see, was there any compassion for the victim? Nope. She was harassed, threatened, and generally treated horribly. And I’m sure than any other rape victims in the area learned their lesson: Don’t bother to report a rape in Steubenville. You’ll suffer way more from the backlash than the rape, itself.
RE: Nuclear Zimmerframe
The distinction between culture and biology is nowhere as simple as you put it. Culture is largely a RESULT of biology not something that works against it.
If that’s the case, explain why I’m gay. What’s the evolutionary advantage of that? Also, I really don’t think we have a gene for lolcats. You’re reducing the complexity of culture and biology into “everything is biology.”
I’m just giving out the facts but people don’t like it because they don’t conform to how they think the world should be.
No. I just gave you a fact too: that I have never felt any desire to rape people. You’re completely ignoring that part of it. Is it possible that you don’t like the fact I just gave you because it doesn’t conform to your disgusting ideas?
Or am I just lying to myself and everyone around me?
RE: Michelle C Young
Your parents just couldn’t cope, and that was their mechanism for moving forward. That really stinks, but what can you do?
In my case? Cut them off and never speak to them again. 😀 It has worked out great for me. One of the top five smartest decisions I ever made.
@LBT – Sometimes cut-off is the best thing. Sometimes, people can work through it. It all depends on the individuals involved and the situation in which those individuals find themselves. People on the outside rarely know the situation and people well enough to be able to advise well.
If I’m ever asked for advice about cut-off or stay and work it out, I usually go for time-out, which can either give the other party the wake-up call they need to work on the relationship, or just confirm that no-contact is working out just great, and should be extended to a cut-off.
Hopefully, you don’t have to deal with people telling you, “But, they’re faaaaaaamily!” and that you have to go back to them. Glad it worked out so great for you! 🙂
The whole ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ image of premodern human society is as outdated and debunked as Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ eyewash. Just So stories are a good description. The past may be a different country, but it’s still the same planet. Any human society in which rape and murder were common and normative would cease to exist in a few generations, for a variety of historically established reasons.
The ‘all men long to rape and kill’ argument says so very much about the men who make it, and so very little about anyone else.
Exactly, Robert. I find it really gross how these assholes generalize all horrible things to be something ALL MEN do. In this case, I really do feel the urge to go, “NOT ALL MEN ARE LIKE THAT.” Not even MOST.
RE: Michelle C Young
Yeah, in our case, our family was such a trainwreck, leaving was the good decision. I hope to reach a point where I can handle being in their presence without being upset, but if not, I can live with that.
WUT
@LBT – exactly. Most men are not rapists. Rapists are, in fact, a minority. However, they frequently rape multiple times, which is why the number of rape victims are so much higher.
What’s really sad, though, are the number of men (and even women!) who allow rapists to get away with it.
Likewise, abusers who treat their children and step-children are actually the minority. What is sad is the number of men and women who allow them to continue their behavior, and even try to explain or excuse it away.
Fortunately, I know that the cycle of abuse can be broken. It’s really hard to do, but it CAN be done. My family is proof of that. I was blest and lucky to have parents who broke the cycle. And hearing that it’s some sort of biological urge to abuse and/or get rid of your mate’s children just really upsets me. My Grampa Bill was a good man, and he took good care of his step-children.
Abuse is the fault of the abusers, not the fault of some animal instinct.
It is a coincidence – you mention them as I read about them. It’s not weird, the world is large and there’s many people in it, but it is a coincidence q:
——-
“Discredited” is kind of harsh though. “Challenged profoundly” is better.
The Fierce People – other ethnographs and anthropologists, several of which have lived or worked with them for 20-30 years dispute or refute the characterization of them as constantly violent and several more point to the fact that violence increase in relation to exploitation by gold miners and other ressource hogs, forcing problems into existence between the different groups by messing up the balance otherwise present. Several more point out that the Yanomama had been and are in contact with cultural influences from the outside world for longer than Chagnong assumed, and far more so than stated, so they’re not very good samples of isolated cultures being violent and nasty, brutish short.
(Also, they’re not, strictly speaking, even hunter-gatheres, but agricultural horticultaralists living off produce and gathering, which is very different and requires a certain centralized planning to make it work. If you too want to sound smart on the internet, I recommend the Cambridge Handbook of Hunter-Gatherer Societies – so they don’t represent the “Majority of human history” and “tribes”, but rather “pre-large scale slash and burn agricultural developments but post actual agriculture”, which rather bunks the whole “all tribes are”).
The Better Angels of our Nature is nice and charming and positive but statistically useless and really, really, really bad at averages. It’s true that the average chance of being murdererd has gone down, given the relative percentage of murders in society now and “in the past”, but it’s also true that the Holodomor, the Rwandan genocide, the Batan Death Marches and the nuking of Hiroshima were not events that happened in the past and merely saying “Ah, but statistically compared to total population, less people die!” is not going to get around the fact that the Khmer Rouge happened all the way back in… woah, 1978.
Shit.
I always get surprised when I remember that.
I’m sure the battle of Caenne gave it a bit of a bump upward, what with the hundred-thousand Roman deaths, but I’m also very sure that Pax Romana was nicely peaceful for a fair amount of people for just near 210 years. It’s a so-so mix, is what I’m saying, and just going “All those poor primitive folk didn’t have humanism, so they were all violently bad!” isn’t going to explain jack shit.
Nor does it even come close to being Pinker’s thesis that all men have the instinctual urges to rape and murder. That’s just so wrong i can’t even really come up with an answer other than slowly making the sound “whaaaaa”.
Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday, again, is decent and fun (but I prefer Collapse, because I felt it had more specific data to draw from, and more specific examples without extrapolation). He’s right about the diet and life-style changes, but he’s less right about the constant permanent violence and murder and death, and just claiming that he is sort of like saying that because the Spartans existed and trained their children from a young age to become warriors, then the existence of the Birhors or the !Kung is moot.
Some people have, through time, killed other people, but then again, since every human tribe so far have invented some form of clothing it must mean we’re all doomed to wear the trousers of oppression because it’s just a genetic fact that’ll they’ll come up at some point and form around the shapely buttocks of a woman and bring doom to the local area.
See, that sounds fancy because I used the word “genetic” and “buttocks”, but it’s complete bunk.
Hobbes did more damage than he ever intended with that “nasty, brutish, short” remark, and I will never tire of being irate, angry and upset with anyone who argues that:
as if, and I say this without intending to come across as some sort of blinkered superior white man decrying the poor primitives, the fact that a spear through the gut is also a pretty fucking good deterrent to rape. Or the lack of desire to rape. Or the lack of social structure that supports rape apologists. Or a communal lifestyle in which the people live in a sort of series of open huts that allow people to see other people and easily find help in small groups like, oh again, the !Kung.
“Law” and “legal” isn’t just what’s in the books, it’s just as much how people act and believe and think and much more importantly how they think they need to think and act and believe. You tell me what’s the bigger cause of murder:
Having plastic, medium density fibrewood and concrete?
Or being attacked by others?
(It’s a trick question with no answer)
So sod off with your little sad “Everyone wants to do it, it’s just that they’re scared to! And in the past, they all did it! Because they didn’t, and they won’t.
And go read The Natural History of Peace and Peace: A World History.
@ Robert
There’s plenty of societies today in which rape and murder are common but they survive just fine. 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.
Nature is just maths.
Oh, I dunno, that sounds like a pretty good answer to me.
Okay, Nuclear Zimmerframe, so tell us: you reckon all men just naturally want to rape and/or murder and are just barely restraining themselves ‘cos laws and so on.
Do you? Is that how you think? Do you have those desires? Because if you do, go to a therapist, NOW.
@nuclear zimmerframe
Okay. Like where?
I just noticed the implicit “rape and murder aren’t such big deals” in that bit about societies surviving “just fine”. What a nasty little specimen this troll is.
Nope.
Nope, but you keep thinking that.
The problem is that, in a wider scheme of things, such biological explanations are essentially excuses to say “Sure it’s bad, but it’s inevitable so there’s not much we can do.” You seem to believe that, if these biological explanations were widely accepted, then everyone would eagerly take the naturalistic fallacy into consideration and never, ever consider biological explanations of violence to be justifications for violence. But that’s not how society works.
In any case, your sociobiological nonsense is fundamentally incapable of substantiating the claim that rape, murder, patriarchy, etc. are biological in origin. So fortunately I have no reason to even worry about it.
God, I hate smug, disingenuous Stephen Pinker fans who babble about evo psych.
@ Ally S
Jesus Christ, you just said the complete opposite to what I posted.
I notice dude’s ignoring me. Whassamatter, Nuclear Zimmerman? Can’t handle the idea that some men don’t march to your bullshit tune?
Speaking of other men who aren’t cockwaffles, I had a big serious talk with my younger brother today. He graduated college! 😀 And I told him about some of the bad shit that went down in our family, and he was really supportive, and thank god, he DIDN’T get molested by any of our relatives. (In fact, it appears he was kept completely in the dark about all the fucking rape in our family; he was shocked and appalled to find out.)
So yeah. For all I know, he’ll be a huge ass about it tomorrow and I’ll have to cut him off again, but for now, I’ll take what I can get.
LBT: congrats to your bro for graduating and having a good conversation with you.
The assholes never take what you say seriously. I bet they think you’re a unicorn, because no dude could ever disagree with them.