White Hot Rage

[redqueen]

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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.

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

Really worth reading the whole thing. Excellent piece.