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redqueen

(115,164 posts)
Thu Jun 19, 2014, 12:50 PM Jun 2014

White Hot Rage

...

But Kimmel’s explanation for the men’s rights movement—a bit of economic disenfranchisement here, a bit of unfair divorce law there, mixed with the disinhibiting effects of the Internet—is cobbled together and unconvincing. Ironically, he’s got a pretty good explanation of the men’s rights movement hiding in his insightful and disturbing chapter on domestic abusers. As Kimmel notes, abusers lash out when they are challenged, when they feel most insecure about their masculine authority. For them, Kimmel writes, “[v]iolence is restorative, retaliatory .... When [their] sense of entitlement is aggrieved, they don’t just get mad, they get even.” At its root, the men’s rights movement is driven by the same logic of abuse.

The rhetoric of men’s rights activists is steeped in the notion of “restorative, retaliatory” violence. Elam once wrote to one opponent that “the thought of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.” (You may recall Jaclyn Friedman’s report on her encounter with Elam at the Prospect.) In another post, he fantasized about replacing Domestic Violence Awareness Month with “Bash a Violent Bitch Month”:

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.


Though nearly as virulent in their hatred as the white supremacists, the men’s rights activists don’t seem to feel the same sense of economic dispossession. Many are young, in college or in their twenties, and (at least in my own encounters with them) they seem to be heavily concentrated in male-dominated science, technology, engineering, or math fields. They are, in other words, some of the men least affected by the so-called “end of men” that you can find.

What they are reacting to, I think, is more of a cultural dethroning of male entitlement. Over the last several decades, largely as a result of feminist activism, we’ve seen a dramatic change in attitudes toward and laws about date rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. We’ve also, not coincidentally, seen significant drops in all of these things. But what these changes have meant is a curtailment of certain kinds of male behavior that used to be considered normal. Men have to think twice before making crude sexual jokes in front of female coworkers; they can’t take advantage of women incapacitated by drink and pretend they don’t know it was rape. And all this makes some men furious.

...

http://prospect.org/article/white-hot-rage


Really worth reading the whole thing. Excellent piece.
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Tuesday Afternoon

(56,912 posts)
1. "What they are reacting to, I think, is more of a cultural dethroning of male entitlement."
Thu Jun 19, 2014, 01:00 PM
Jun 2014

The 1% throws everyone under the bus. The 1% is an equal opportunity destroyer of the world.

Get used to it, men. and don't get mad at the wrong people.

Upper Middle Class White Men of a Certain Age are the highest rung on the Ladder to be taken down by the 1%

The men of this subset are just now feeling the sting that women and POC have known throughout the ages.

I am not discounting that Women are Standing Up For Their Rights as Human Beings.

Just noting that all is culminating to a point of volcanic proportions.

redqueen

(115,164 posts)
2. He discusses Kimmel's analysis of the misdirected anger earlier, now and before, in the piece.
Thu Jun 19, 2014, 02:44 PM
Jun 2014

I want to read that book now.

ismnotwasm

(42,443 posts)
3. It's a great book
Thu Jun 19, 2014, 03:59 PM
Jun 2014

I got it on my iPad and read it as soon as I heard about it

Excerpt: if men increased their family time, it’s not because they were marching to the beat of a male drum and bugle corps. Indeed, many men resisted for decades. It’s been women, and especially those working mothers inspired by feminist ideals of workplace equality, who have been imploring, cajoling, insisting, yelling, and otherwise pleading with them to do their share. The dual-career, dual-caregiver family form—the family form that is becoming the norm in American society—is, let’s be clear, a feminist invention. So it’s a bit ironic, and a lot disingenuous, for these same men who have stepped up and become more active fathers to now declare they are doing so in opposition to feminism. Theirs is the other half of gender equality in the public sphere, and this massive cultural transformation, this blending of the public and the private, is partly the result of a relentless campaign by feminist women.

Instead of thanking women—and especially those feminist-inspired working mothers—for enabling and insisting that we spend more time in our families, the fathers’ rights movement spends a lot of time attacking those same feminist women. They take their grief and confusion at the dissolution of their families and transform it into rage at their ex-wives, their ex-wives’ lawyers, family-court judges—and, of course, the feminist women who seem to inspire”


Excerpt From: Kimmel, Michael. “Angry White Men.” Nation Books. iBooks.
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