Anti-Male Propaganda: Understanding Feminism’s Use of Atrocity Narratives

Posted on | May 24, 2016 | 39 Comments

Left to right: Kelsey Annese, Matthew Hutchinson, Colin Kingston.

In the pre-dawn hours of a January morning, Colin Kingston, 24, crept into the home of his ex-girlfriend, Kelsey Annese, 21, and stabbed to death both her and her new boyfriend, Matthew Hutchinson, 24. Kingston then committed suicide. The New York Post reported:

Kingston and Annese had been together for more than three years, and he took their recent breakup badly. . . .
Kingston . . . had been making suicidal statements in recent days but had not threatened Annese.

Annese and Hutchinson were both seniors and student-athletes at the Geneseo campus of the State University of New York, Annese was a guard on the women’s basketball team and Hutchinson played defense on the hockey team.  The Buffalo News interviewed an expert:

“A knife is a pretty personal weapon to kill someone with,” said Charles P. Ewing, a forensic psychologist and University at Buffalo distinguished law professor. “It’s not easy to kill someone with a knife.
“Usually, there’s something very emotional going on when someone kills someone with a knife,” added Ewing, an expert in domestic violence. “It’s not the cold, detached kind of killing that you see with a gun.”
Without knowing the details about the Geneseo killings, Ewing also suggested that the kind of weapon often says something about how planned or spontaneous an attack is.
“I think the knife suggests impulsivity and lack of planning,” he said, speaking generally. “That sounds more like a crime of passion than premeditation or calculation.”

The phrase “crime of passion” enraged feminist Meghan Murphy:

What we are to believe, in case it’s unclear, is that “love” caused this man to kill a woman. This is a message we hear so often, it probably seems reasonable to many. But it’s not reasonable. Men do not kill out of “love,” they kill out of a desire to control. “If I can’t have you, nobody can,” is a common refrain we hear from abusive men. And, often, they mean it.
Every day, three women are killed by their abusive partners or ex-partners. It is known that women are in the most danger of injury or violence when they leave or try to leave their abusers. Are we to believe that these men are killing their ex-wives or girlfriends because they are “heart-broken” or “distraught over the break-up?” Or can we tell the truth, and say that men kill their partners because they want power over these women — because they want control, because they believe they own their wives and girlfriends?
Men who kill their partners tend to be possessive, jealous, controlling men — they feel entitled to “their” women. And so when these women escape, their last ditch effort at complete control is murder. “You cannot leave me, I own you.” They would rather see these women dead than accept rejection or the idea that women are free to make their own choices about their lives.
The media and the police want us to believe this was a “crime of passion,” but showing up with a knife at your ex-girlfriend’s house . . . doesn’t sound like a “crime of passion” to me. It sounds like an entitled, possessive man sought out his ex-girlfriend in order to punish her for the crime of being free — free from him.

Let me begin by saying that I am anti-murder. It should not be necessary to say this, but when you criticize feminist rhetoric, you may find yourself accused of being in favor of rape, murder and oppression. So, to be clear, I’m anti-murder, as well as anti-“possessive, jealous, controlling” and also generally averse to all manner of “abusive” behavior. However, as I suppose every person reading this shares my aversion to abuse, violence, jealousy, etc., this disclaimer shouldn’t be necessary. What I wish to criticize is the profoundly dishonest way feminists like Meghan Murphy use atrocity narratives as anti-male propaganda.

 

A classic example was feminist reaction to the May 2014 Isla Vista massacre, where Elliot Rodger killed six people and then committed suicide. His rampage prompted an Amanda Marcotte rant with the headline, “How ‘Pick-Up Artist’ Philosophy and Its More Misogynist Backlash Shaped Mind of Alleged Killer Elliot Rodger.” This was arrant nonsense. Rodger had a profoundly antisocial personality — the classic “moody loner” type, or what psychologists call an injustice collector:

An injustice collector is someone who magnifies trivial “injustices” (real or imagined), believes the injustices are “intentional and purposeful” and collects them until he forms an encompassing perspective of himself/herself as a victim of bullying, discrimination and disrespect.

This is a phenomenon of criminal psychology, and you cannot indict an entire group of law-abiding people as complicit in an atrocity committed by one deranged and evil person. As I said at the time, feminists were deliberately misrepresenting the evidence about Elliot Rodger:

As his manifesto makes clear, the Creepy Little Weirdo had been overwhelmed by resentment and a sense of failure since he was in middle school, and he didn’t start ranting on PUA forums until after he had already decided on his “Day of Retribution.” So he acquired from PUA culture a jargon (“Alpha males,” etc.) but this was not the source of his anger, nor did it exercise a determining influence on his actions.

What feminists wanted, you see, was to make Elliot Rodger a symbol of misogyny, a term feminists deploy with such haphazard frequency that it serves as a synonym for “anything a heterosexual male says or does.”

Was John Hinckley a misogynist?

Hinckley became obsessed with the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which disturbed protagonist Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) plots to assassinate a presidential candidate. . . . Hinckley developed an infatuation with actress Jodie Foster, who played a child prostitute in the film. When Foster entered Yale University, Hinckley moved to New Haven, Connecticut, for a short time to stalk her. He enrolled in a Yale writing class, began slipping poems and messages under Foster’s door, and repeatedly called her. . . .
Eventually, he settled on a scheme to impress her by assassinating the president, thinking that, by achieving a place in history, he would appeal to her as an equal.

Why didn’t feminist make Hinckley a symbol of misogyny? Because he tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and feminists hated Ronald Reagan. Feminists show a tendentious selectivity in the choice of atrocities they use in their propaganda campaigns, and expect us never to notice any crime that doesn’t fit their narrative.

Who gets murdered in America? According to the FBI, men were 9,246 (77%) of the 11,961 people murdered in the United States in 2014. A man is more than three times as likely as a woman to be a victim of homicide. Among female murder victims, 62% were white and 33% were black. When we look at the race of offenders, we find that 37% were black, 31% were white, 2% were of other races, and 30% were committed by persons whose race was “unknown.” These are just raw numbers, of course, but the reality of crime in America is that black males are disproportionately over-represented among both murder victims and murder perpetrators. White females were less than 14% of U.S. murder victims in 2014, but the number of white female murder victims (1,664) seems quite large. About 4.6 white females are murdered on a daily basis in the United States, or 32 per week, which gives the producers of Nancy Grace’s nightly show plenty of dead white women to choose from when they’re looking for their next Tragically Murdered Blonde Girl case to discuss.

Certain victims are considered more newsworthy than others, and certain perpetrators are considered more newsworthy than others. Because I’m not a TV producer, I have no control over which cases Nancy Grace considers newsworthy, but a definite pattern can be perceived. TV coverage of crime is selective, and the selection factors are non-random. Otherwise, somebody at CNN might mention that 245 people have been murdered in Chicago so far this year, and another 1,185 people in Chicago have been shot, but survived their wounds. About 74% of the murder victims in Chicago this year were black, and males were almost 10 times more likely to be shot than females. Is Nancy Grace paying attention?

No, and neither are feminists.

The kind of routine violence that plagues Chicago (and Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., etc.) is easily explained away by liberals with two simple words — racism and poverty. Individual perpetrators, individual victims and individual crimes disappear as essentially irrelevant in the liberal worldview except in those cases which serve some symbolic function in the Left’s “social justice” narrative. The death of Trayvon Martin was such a symbol, as was the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Never mind those 177 black people murdered in Chicago so far this year, you see, because none of those victims had any symbolic value in terms of “social justice.” With this in mind, let us now revisit Meghan Murphy’s column: “Every day, three women are killed by their abusive partners or ex-partners.”

The source of that statistic is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, and I have no reason to believe that number is incorrect. There were nearly 2,700 female victims of murder in the U.S. in 2014, meaning that about 7.4 women are murdered every day in America, and no doubt many of them were “killed by their abusive partners or ex-partners.” However, the total population of the United States is about 320 million, of whom 50.8% (162 million) are female, so that an American woman had only about a 1-in-60,000 likelihood of being murdered in 2014.

The Law of Large Numbers means that, in a population as large as the United States, it’s easy to find examples that symbolize whatever “social issue” an activist type is looking for, whether it’s black teenagers shot by white cops or women murdered by their ex-boyfriends. Also, in a nation of 320 million people, there are plenty of psychotic weirdos running around and, from time to time, one of these kooks will commit a massacre. However, when this happens, liberals always blame guns, except when they can also blame racism (Dylan Roof in South Carolina), although the racism explanation becomes complicated when a black mass murdered like Aaron Alexis shoots 12 people. And no matter how many people are killed by angry Muslims, no liberal would ever blame Islam.

Generalizing on the basis of an unusual incident is an error of logic, but liberals do this all the time. When a psycho named Jared Loughner shot 19 people in Tucson, Arizona, liberals rushed to blame Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. When it turned out Loughner was inspired by a 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy video, liberals suddenly lost interest in Loughner’s motive. In 2007, a South Korean immigrant named Seung-Hui Cho killed 22 people at Virginia Tech; did any right-wingers use this crime to demonize Asian immigrants? Not that I know of, but nobody on CNN or MSNBC would ever notice the race of a mass murderer unless he was white, in which case racism might be suspected as a motive for his crime.

Has anyone outside Texas heard of Haruka Weiser?

The search warrant for murder suspect, Meechaiel Criner, has been unsealed. Criner is accused of killing University of Texas student Haruka Weiser.
The warrant states police believe 17-year-old Criner intentionally and knowingly caused the death of the 18-year-old student. Police said there were signs of “obvious trauma” to her body and evidence of sexual assault.
On the evening of April 3, Haruka called her friend as she was leaving a drama building around 9:30 p.m. to tell her that she was coming home. But Haruka was never seen alive again.
The next day, April 4, Haruka did not show up for class leading to a missing persons report filed with UTPD. Her roommate told police she was carrying a duffle bag with her laptop, phone, jacket and study materials.
Her body was found April 5 around 9:45 a.m. in Waller Creek near the campus’ Alumni Center.

Feminists who claim there is a “campus rape epidemic” can’t be bothered to notice the death of Haruka Weiser. It doesn’t fit the narrative.

Has any feminist mentioned Veronica Erin Staley?

A 34-year-old woman has been charged with murder after she allegedly gunned down her ex-boyfriend in a crazed attack outside a gym.
Veronica Erin Staley, 34, was taken into custody in Houston, Texas, on Wednesday morning after she allegedly shot telecommunications executive Aljosa Memovic, 30, multiple times.
According to police, Staley had been waiting for him outside the One 2 One Training Center for an hour when she noticed him leave.
She then walked up to him and is accused of shooting him three times near the entrance.
The gunshots didn’t force him to collapse, so he ran across the parking lot screaming: ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’
Staley is accused of following him and shooting him twice more. Realizing she had run out of bullets, she allegedly pistol-whipped him.
As Memovic’s lifeless body lay on the ground, she ran to her car and sped off.

Perhaps we could we could describe Staley by paraphrasing Meghan Murphy: “Women who kill their partners tend to be possessive, jealous, controlling women — they feel entitled to ‘their’ men. And so when these men escape, their last ditch effort at complete control is murder.”

Grant that men are more violent than women in general, but most of the victims of male violence are other men, who are three times more likely than women to become murder victims. The important point is that murder is actually a rare crime. It is irresponsible to exploit these atrocities the way Meghan Murphy does, as anti-male propaganda:

The more we talk about men’s violence against women as “passionate” or as something uncontrollable — attached to love or heartache, the more we excuse things like domestic abuse and male entitlement. . . . This kind of violence is a gendered crime and we must name it as such. Disguising the truth will only lead to more violence — this we know.

Violence is bad. Murder is wrong. But if Meghan Murphy is so concerned about “gendered crime,” why can’t she mention the murder of Haruka Weiser or the murder Aljosa Memovic? And what about Chicago?

A 13-year-old girl and her mother have been charged in the fatal stabbing of a 15-year-old honor student . . .
15-year-old De’kayla Dansberry was fatally stabbed [May 14] outside the Parkway Gardens Housing complex at 65th and King Drive.
The 13-year-old suspect has been charged with first degree murder. Her mother 35-year-old Tamika Gayden has also been charged with first degree murder and one felony count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Police say Gayden was identified as the person that provided the weapon used in the murder. . . .
The mother of 15-year-old De’kayla sobbed in court this afternoon as she saw her daughter’s accused killer for the first time. Her entire body shook with grief as she heard details of what prosecutors say happened on Saturday.
“She didn’t deserve to be murdered,” said Sheila Dansberry. “She’s a good kid and her life was stolen from her.” . . .
De’kayla was an honor student and standout in track and field. She was preparing for a meet downstate at the time of her death. What started as a dispute among teenage girls turned physical, violent and ultimately deadly.

De’kayla Dansberry is just as dead as Kelsey Annese, but only one of these victims of a fatal stabbing is of interest to Meghan Murphy because “a dispute among teenage girls  turned physical, violent and ultimately deadly” doesn’t fit the narrative of “men’s violence against women.”

 

Feminists seize on atrocity narratives to demonize males, deliberately exaggerating the frequency of “men’s violence against women” in order to promote an attitude of sexual paranoia (“Fear and Loathing of the Penis”) that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for women to form healthy relationships with men. One of the most common themes of recent feminist discourse is condemnation of “nice guys” — men who befriend women in the hope that this may lead to romantic relationships — as typifying “male entitlement.” In a column at Everyday Feminism by Suzannah Weiss, for example, she asserts that “there’s a notable correlation between guys who call themselves “nice” in their [online dating] profiles and guys with misogynistic entitlement complexes.” In fact, many feminists used Elliot Rodger’s 2014 massacre as an excuse to lash out at “nice guys”:

Call it misogyny. Call it misguided male entitlement. Either way, it’s dangerous for girls and women.
To be clear, “nice” is a social tactic like anything else. And it’s certainly not to be confused with “respectable” or “upstanding.” It’s certainly not mutually exclusive with “confident” and says nothing of “kindness” or whether or not someone is “interesting” or “attractive.” And even the best of these qualities cannot earn anyone affection; love, sex, attention are all to be given freely. Anything else is an act of violence.

Meghan Murphy jumped onto the feminist dogpile:

This is male entitlement. You’re looking at it.
Rodger was so enraged that he had not been given that which he deserves, as a man — sexual access to women — that he killed.
In a world wherein men learn they not only deserve, but have the right to women’s bodies, Rodger’s behaviour isn’t really all that surprising. From the time they are young, boys are offered women’s bodies. They are provided with pornography, told that this is what women are for: your eyes, your pleasure, your d–.
Men and boys learn that what they want, they should have. That their every fantasy should be fulfilled.

What? How can anyone generalize from such an extreme incident to indict the entire “world wherein men” — all men — learn from “the time they are young” that “their every fantasy should be fulfilled”? If this claim were true, why aren’t all men murderers and rapists? Why aren’t atrocities like Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista massacre happening routinely? And how can Meghan Murphy possibly claim that she is not anti-male?

 

Meghan Murphy is “anti-patriarchy, anti-masculinity, anti-misogyny,” asserting she is against “oppressive gender stereotypes.” To her, masculinity is a synonym for “dominance” and femininity means “subordination,” and she is against men having “sexual access to women.”

Gosh, Ms. Murphy, this rhetoric seems strangely familiar to me.

“The main problem for women trying to emulate male sexuality is that as a ruling-class sexuality, it is constructed around the fact that they have a subordinate class on whom to act sexually. Women are that subordinate class. . . . Heterosexual women cannot practise ruling-class sexuality on men because they are not the ruling class. All that heterosexual women are in a position to do is to accommodate male sexual interests. . . . In male supremacy men’s sexual access to women gives them power and status.”
— Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (1990)

“Men’s violence against women encourages women to bond with ‘kind’ men for protection against other men, setting the stage for men’s one-on-one oppression of women and the institutionalization of heterosexuality.”
— Dee L.R. Graham, et al., Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)

“Second-wave feminists argued that heterosexuality is an organizing institution containing multiple forms of oppression. Adrienne Rich . . . argues against heterosexuality as naturally occurring, asserting that heterosexuality is, instead, compulsory, constructed, and taken for granted. For Rich, the institution of heterosexuality serves the interests of patriarchy and male dominance. Monique Wittig . . . argues that heterosexuality is a political regime, again serving the interests of male dominance through the marriage contract.”
— Carrie L. Coakley, “‘Someday My Prince Will Come’: Disney, the Heterosexual Imaginary and Animated Film, in Thinking Straight: The Power, Promise and Paradox of Heterosexuality, edited by Chrys Ingraham (2005)

“According to feminism the role of heterosexuality is what structures the male-female relationship. Heterosexuality is the structure that keeps sexist oppression in place in the private realm; where sexism in general operates to also oppress in the public sphere. In other words heterosexuality reinforces the hierarchy established by sexism to keep women dominated in ‘sexual interaction, romantic love, marriage, and the family.'”
— “Heterosexuality: The Role it Plays in Feminism and Lesbianism,” 2007

“Feminists have long claimed that, in patriarchal cultures, rape . . . enacts and reinforces, rather than contradicting, widely shared cultural views about gender and sexuality. . . . A core dynamic of patriarchal sexuality . . . is the normalizing and sexualizing of male (or masculine) control and dominance over females (or the feminine). This dynamic finds expression in a number of beliefs about what is natural, acceptable, and even desirable in male-female sexual interaction: that the male will be persistent and aggressive, the female often reluctant and passive; that the male is invulnerable, powerful, hard, and commanding, and that women desire such behavior from men; that ‘real men’ are able to get sexual access to women when, where, and how they want it; that sexual intercourse is an act of male conquest; that women are men’s sexual objects or possessions; and that men ‘need’ and are entitled to sex.”
— Rebecca Whisnant, “Feminist Perspectives on Rape,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009)

You see that feminist theory — expressed through a rhetoric condemning “male dominance,” women’s “subordination,” and men’s “sexual access to women” as both cause and effect of patriarchal oppression — is not merely anti-male, but also necessarily anti-heterosexual. The constant reiteration of atrocity narratives, as propaganda promoting the belief that all males are violent and abusive, serves to rationalize and justify feminists’ hostility toward men, marriage and motherhood. Because they are unable to find happiness within “widely shared cultural views about gender and sexuality,” feminists conclude that “male-female sexual interaction” is inherently oppressive, “a political regime . . . serving the interests of male dominance.” If you disagree with feminism’s condemnation of “the institution of heterosexuality” — their War Against Human Nature — this means you’re a misogynist, a “rape apologist.”

Exploiting human tragedies to advance their inhumane agenda, feminists seek to silence all criticism and discredit all opposition. They use dishonest propaganda tactics to demonize men and, when called out on their hateful rhetoric, feminists claim to be victims of “harassment.”

Feminism is not merely wrong, but also evil. https://t.co/1bN2A6sLmz pic.twitter.com/fX2Jng8ERE

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 22, 2016

Feminism is the belief that masculinity is BAD, because patriarchy. pic.twitter.com/okhPKBKzM0

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 23, 2016

In other words, feminists make "oppression" a synonym for "this commonplace thing that I don't like." @vjmfilms https://t.co/Lm2veHcN7P

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 23, 2016

.@AmandaMarcotte You are completely wrong, both morally and factually, and you're trying to avoid the harm you've done by pointing fingers.

— Melissa Clouthier (@MelissaTweets) December 5, 2014

Evergreen. Amanda Marcotte is "completely wrong" on a daily basis. #tcot @MelissaTweets https://t.co/MDmvSDNku5

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 24, 2016

Feminists seek to eliminate male happiness, so
that everyone can become equally miserable. https://t.co/ubwVsaQ6ZZ pic.twitter.com/uAD0RWWRB5

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 23, 2016

What every feminist should receive on her first day of Gender Studies class. pic.twitter.com/lVLlTNcZ6K

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) April 11, 2016

 

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