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.
Someone took this comic strip WAAAAAAY too seriously.
I’ll be sure to tell hubby while I’m banging the bejesus out of him that I’m doing math to him.
Re: both Inner city ghettos and redneck backwoods podunks in the 1st world and the urban slums in the majority of the 2nd and 3rd world would objectively prove my point. For instance, why do you think the UK is now being called ” broken britain” with it’s booming population of chavs of all colors, eh? The entire world is not one big gated community suburb , you know.
Yeah, not getting any less racist, dude.
Remind me why David doesn’t ban trolls for being boring?
Sometimes I do. Random Poster is skating near the edge.
It’s the fact that he’s usually leaning into rape apologism when he’s not being boring that kind of seals it for me.
And when have I ever done that, eh? One again, you’re confusing me with somebody else. I’m a gender separatist, if anything , and now I’m a rape apologist. Doesn’t compute at all. Boring, eh? Is that some feminist euphemism for those who they can’t refute? Nobody likes a truthteller, people can’t handle the truth.
To me, it’s the fact that none of his comments bear even the most cursory connection to the rest of the conversation. It’s like trying to hold a conversation with horse_ebooks.
Hahahhahahahah – pauses for breath- hahahahahahahhah!
For rape apologia, try reading your latest posts on the “Amy” thread, you pathetic misognistic pisspot.
I’ll take leading questions for 200:
That would be because the people calling it that are right-wing racists like the UKIP party or the Daily Mail, who are trying to garner support or money (or both) by appealing to entitled white men.
See? Even when he’s outraged he’s dull as dishwater.
Britain being called “broken Britain” – you’re about 15 years behind the times, RandomTroll, as that was a slogan used by the right-wing British press (we have practically no other) to claim the then Labour government was failing on law-and-order and other social issues such as teen pregnancy, anti-social behaviour and such.
It hasn’t been heard for a while, as violent crime in Britain is now lower than it has been for 30 years, and has fallen consistently throughout that period.
There is certainly a problem with crime statistics (especially for rapes and sexual assaults, which are no-crimed at an astonishing level in at least 13 police authorities) but given that the murder rate has fallen in line with the fall in general violence, and given that it is extremely hard to make murders turn into something else, being as how a corpse is a bit of a giveaway, the stats are pretty robust on this.
The main explanations are the rise in the price of alcohol, the generation which is now going into their 40s having preferred ecstasy to alcohol as their intoxicant of choice, and the drop in the birthrate of unwanted children since the late 60s with the legalisation of abortion.
I note also your use of the word “chav” – an expression which has also gone out of fashion after its role in the demonisation of the working class and its use in a specific right-wing agenda was exposed (the Owen Jones book “Chavs” details this in some depth).
Nowadays the term of abuse of preference is “welfare scrounger” – an economic rather than a class-based term as the current Tory scapegoats are the unemployed and disabled – purely coincidentally at a time when their lives are being made harder than ever by government policy.
Do keep up old chap.
No, they’d all run away to join the circus!
RandomPest reminds me of NWOSlave, only way less entertaining.
There’s an online symposium about male violence coming up soon. It should be good.
http://carta.anthropogeny.org/events/male-aggression-and-violence-human-evolution
Way less indeed. This one would never inspire something like the Big Book of Learnin’.
Random signal boost! This woman is due to be executed for killing her rapist in self-defense. This org wants to send a petition to the UN to stop the execution.
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Catherine_Ashton_Ban_Ki_Moon_Ahmad_Shaheed_Save_26_year_old_woman_from_being_hanged_in_Iran/?fbss&mobile=1
Signed.
Signed
@random pester
lets see what we got here, 1) racism 2) classism and 3) more racism. It’s a trifecta! Kinda!
Oh. Oh wow. Wow. The irony. It huuurrrtsss.
Its also fucking hilarious, so keep talking, because I could use the entertainment.
@Cassandra
Signed.
Signed
Racist? Huh, liberals overuse that word so much it’s rapidly losing any real meaning; why, 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?
Or you could accuse any one of this single mothers deliberately get knocked up so they that they could get child support or they cheated on their ex and denied them any access to their children or from gaining child custody because they’re hypergamous sluts?
Which is why some random guys thinks it is reasonable for a man to choose less experienced girls because they might feel insecure that these girls might comparing them with their past bad boy lovers?
Or maybe they get it from the sperm bank or spermjacking from any nice guys out there who shall be victimised from the child support ruling…
Fuck off, RandomPester. You’re ignorant and you’re boring and you’re disingenuous and you’re cowardly. You could at leat own you shit, instead of this saying something meant to stir shit up and then claiming that you didn’t actually mean what you imply. It’s old.