Shit MRAs Say

And I get that that may still read to you as telling these women not to seek out love, but I read it as pointing out that you don’t have to settle for less than what you want or deserve.  You can be attracted to someone and still recognize that a relationship with them is not the best thing for your long-term happiness.

Also, it’s extremely difficult to convince a shitty person to change their shitty behavior.  If you’re dating someone who is treating you poorly, getting that to change requires a ton of work from BOTH partners, and my experience has been that men who treat their partner poorly don’t actually believe they’re treating her poorly.  If you’re in a relationship like that, the best thing you can do is to say “Actually, I don’t have to date this man!  It’s okay if I’m single right now.”

Hetero couples are not “more natural” than gay couples.  Homosexuality exists in nature.  Sex serves a lot of purposes besides reproduction, including pleasure and strengthening social bonds.

Claiming that heterosexuality is “more natural” than other sexualities is heteronormative and homophobic.  Don’t.

Hetero couples are not “more natural” than gay couples.  Homosexuality exists in nature.  Sex serves a lot of purposes besides reproduction, including pleasure and strengthening social bonds.

Claiming that heterosexuality is “more natural” than other sexualities is heteronormative and homophobic.  Don’t.

watching your child cry and screaming at them to stop and invalidating their pain and reasons for crying makes you an abuser.

staring at your child in disgust and contempt after they displease you makes you an abuser.

threatening to your child to take away their basic resources if they don’t give you exactly what you want makes you an abuser.

forcing your child to feel ashamed for not living up to your ideals makes you an abuser.

using slurs, hateful names and insults on your own child without any regard to what it does to their mental health makes you an abuser.

forcing your child to chase impossible expectations and making them feel like they’re worthless for not achieving them makes you an abuser.

acting like your child is a burden and a waste of space and blaming their illness/disability/depression on it makes you an abuser.

behaving like your child will never amount to anything and isn’t worth any resources and nurturing makes you an abuser.

making your child feel like they’re never good enough makes you an abuser.

if your child’s heart is hurting because they know no matter what they do and how hard they try they will always be a failure in your eyes, you are an abuser.

if your child can’t look at themselves without self hatred because they had to look at themselves from your perspective and all they saw is disgust and hatred, you’re an abuser.

If your child is struggling to believe they have the right to live and to be cared and loved, if they can’t stop hearing your hateful voice putting them down and using their every action to prove they’re worthless, you’re an abuser.

If you watched your child in pain and assured them they deserved it, you’re an abuser.

Also the 4th on the list about taking away basic resources, yes it is abuse to take away food, water and access to a toilet, but this one is problematic because of what different people define as a basic resource. Some of the younger kids think of their phones as a basic resource (fyi its not) or computers (still no) but a parent who takes away access to a phone, computer, or car is not an abusive person for doing that. I guess you could consider clothes a basic recourse but I can even think of some exceptions to that rule. For instance: when I was a young kid I would take hours to put on or pick out clothes and my mom didnt have hours to drop me off at day care so she grabbed an outfit and carried me out to the car in just undies, it was cold but I always put my clothes on on time after that. I don’t think I would consider that abuse. Or the time my cousin kept hiding his winter coat so his mom wouldn’t take him to school, she made him go without a coat. That’s not abuse.

(That said, I do also think you handled it wrong when the kid started crying over mac and cheese.  I tend to think that forcing kids to eat is the wrong move, and if it were me I just would have made it clear that this was what we were having for lunch today so if she was still hungry later she’d be eating these leftovers.)

For your comments on the fourth one:

Unless you lived in a place so cold that the ten second walk from the house to the car posed a frostbite risk, I wouldn’t consider it denying you access to clothes if she brings you to the car in your undies while also bringing an outfit for you to put on in the car.  She wasn’t making you go to school in your undies or putting your health or safety at risk.

Similarly for the friend who hid his coat.  The walk from the house to the car and from the car into the school may be uncomfortable, but it’s not a safety risk.  If it’s cold enough that recess requires a jacket, the school will either keep you inside for recess or lend you something from the lost and found.  You’re never going to be stranded outside in the winter without a coat just because your mom brought you to school that way.  The basic resource in question here is shelter from the cold, and that’s not being taken away.

But also, even if the use of “they” as a singular pronoun were a recent development, that wouldn’t make it invalid.  Language evolves.  The word “internet” hasn’t existed for more than a few decades, but I’d bet money it’s a word you use regularly.  The word “tumblrista” isn’t even in the dictionary, but you used it as a tag on this post.

On top of all that, it’s reasonably likely that you yourself have used “they” as a singular pronoun without even realizing it.  When someone you’re hanging out with gets a call from a number they don’t recognize and you ask “What did they want?” when the phone call is done, you’re using “they” as a singular pronoun. You’re not assuming your friend got a call from a group of people.

Plus the rules of academic writing do change over time and do get debated, so there’s no reason we should have to blindly accept this clunky convention.  (An example of a rule changing: Literally nobody cares at this point if you end a sentence with a preposition.  An example of a topic under debate: The Oxford Comma.)

But also, even if the use of “they” as a singular pronoun were a recent development, that wouldn’t make it invalid.  Language evolves.  The word “internet” hasn’t existed for more than a few decades, but I’d bet money it’s a word you use regularly.  The word “tumblrista” isn’t even in the dictionary, but you used it as a tag on this post.

On top of all that, it’s reasonably likely that you yourself have used “they” as a singular pronoun without even realizing it.  When someone you’re hanging out with gets a call from a number they don’t recognize and you ask “What did they want?” when the phone call is done, you’re using “they” as a singular pronoun. You’re not assuming your friend got a call from a group of people.

But also, even if the use of “they” as a singular pronoun were a recent development, that wouldn’t make it invalid.  Language evolves.  The word “internet” hasn’t existed for more than a few decades, but I’d bet money it’s a word you use regularly.  The word “tumblrista” isn’t even in the dictionary, but you used it as a tag on this post.

On top of all that, it’s reasonably likely that you yourself have used “they” as a singular pronoun without even realizing it.  When someone you’re hanging out with gets a call from a number they don’t recognize and you ask “What did they want?” when the phone call is done, you’re using “they” as a singular pronoun. You’re not assuming your friend got a call from a group of people.

Read Article Here: 11 Red Flags of Emotional Abuse to Spot in Several … - Psych2Go

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If you cannot trust your partner to respect the promises you’ve made to each other in your relationship, that is a problem in your relationship (either because of your insecurity or your partner’s behavior, but one way or another it’s a problem).

If you cannot trust your partner to set and enforce boundaries when other people try to flirt with them, that is a problem in your relationship (again, either because of your insecurity or because of their behavior).

I dated a guy in college who was vocally insecure about me hanging out with other guys, even going so far as to say that I was pretty enough I could turn my gay friends straight (because that’s totally how homosexuality works...).  He made it difficult for me to hang out with my friends who hadn’t been his friends first.  Once at a party I was hosting he got moody that I wasn’t paying enough attention to him (again, while I was HOSTING a party with a couple dozen other friends, all of whom were kind and welcoming toward him and all of whom he was at least casually acquainted with) and left the party so that I would have to go looking for him and he could try to make me feel guilty for taking so long to notice he had left.

Contrast that with my fiance: We went to two weddings together in July, both for my friends.  One was for someone he’d never met, the other was for someone he’d met once.  He made the effort to socialize with people alongside me until he ran out of social energy, then he quietly let me know he was going to find somewhere quiet to sit for a bit but I should stay and enjoy the party for as long as I want to and he didn’t want me to feel like we had to leave early just for him.  He was never upset that I was paying attention to other people.  When he didn’t want to dance I danced with other people, including my sister’s boyfriend.  My sister and my boyfriend were both fine with this, because dancing is fun and not a slippery slope to sex.  My sister asked my boyfriend to dance when she noticed he was at the table alone and he declined because he doesn’t like dancing, but he knew that if he had wanted to dance it wouldn’t have been an issue.

“My boyfriend thinks I should lose five pounds.” - Said to me by a really skinny coworker declining a Hershey kiss.  Her boyfriend was apparently in the habit of putting her on a scale and telling her how much weight she needed to lose to be attractive to him.

“My boyfriend doesn’t like it when I hang out with other guys.” - A ton of women in shitty relationships who end up distancing themselves from good friends because their boyfriend is insecure.

“My boyfriend doesn’t want me to speak to [specific friend or family member].” - A ton of women in shitty relationships.  One key feature of abusive relationships is that they distance you from your social support network which makes it harder to get out of the relationship.

If you have never had these types of experiences and cannot see how these sentence starters often accompany huge red flags, I am happy for you.  And obviously there are times when modifying your behavior for your significant other is totally reasonable and justified and not a sign of a potential abuser.  Like, if you’ve stopped eating peanut butter because your partner has a peanut allergy?  Good for you for looking out for your partner’s safety.

But every abuser thinks that they have valid reasons for telling you not to do stuff.  I don’t want you going out without me because I worry about your safety. I don’t want you talking to this friend because she doesn’t like me and that’s bad for our relationship.  I don’t want you hanging out with other guys because you’re obviously so attractive that they all want you and you’re deluding yourself if you think they actually just want to be friends.

It says that IF your idea of a successful marriage is dependent on the oppression of women, then that’s not a type of marriage worth preserving.

If anything marriage is an unnecessary scam, and you don’t need a worthless piece of paper to tell someone you love them or to move in with them.

Also, let’s be clear that most of the “marriage is a trap” jokes are about the guy being trapped by his wife.  There are a ton of “funny” cake toppers for sale online where the guy has a ball and chain on his ankle, or is facing a TV screen that says “Game Over.”  It may be something that people of other sexualities sometimes joke about, but the flavor of the jokes is very distinctly Straight Male Culture.

And I was like, ” Why does it matter that it was on the full moon?“ 

and he was like “Well, you know, the full moon… women on the full moon" 

and i was like ‘I don’t get it' 

and he was like “Periods" 

Let men learn.

Let men share out.

2. Even if they did all have their cycles synchronized, this man had no way of knowing that.  Heck, most of the women involved probably wouldn’t know it.

3. Literally nobody here is calling this dude sexist for this assumption.  Nobody seems at all upset by it as far as I can tell.  It’s just amusing that he appears to have confused menstruation with lycanthropy.

Not to mention quality of life indicators - being single is a risk factor for mental illness, most women still want a family as the priority for their life fulfillment, and single mothers do objectively worse and so do their children, so that’s clearly a non-ideal way to do it

Your graph indicates that over the long term, divorce rates and suicide rates tend to rise and fall together.  Right now, you’ve presented no evidence for why this may be the case.  One possibility is that both are influenced by society’s general willingness to accept people who don’t fit the “traditional family.”  We know that LGBT teens have higher suicide rates than their cishet peers.  We know that making divorce easier lowers the suicide rate in married women.  A focus on “traditional family” simultaneously demonizes divorce and LGBT orientations.  This, to me, seems like a more plausible explanation than simply “divorce leads to suicide.”  If you want to claim divorce leads to suicide, you need a stronger argument.

You next claim that being single is a risk factor for mental illness.  This would appear to mean that you think being single causes people to be mentally ill.  Do you have any data to back this up?  Would it not make more sense to claim that people who are mentally ill have a harder time finding and maintaining romantic relationships (due to some combination of societal stigma against mental illness and the way the mental illness affects a person’s ability to function in social situations)?

“Most women still want a family as the priority for their life fulfillment.”  Honestly, this may be true (though again, you’re missing hard data) but that doesn’t mean that any woman wants to be trapped in an unhappy marriage.  Making divorce accessible doesn’t mean you’re required to get divorced, it just means that people who are in unhappy marriages don’t have to be stuck there.  I don’t see why you think that’s a bad thing.

“Single mothers do objectively worse and so do their children.”  Okay, sure.  What causes this?  My guess would be that the main cause here is that single mothers have to work longer hours to provide for the family, which gives them less time to actually spend with their kids, which then leads to their kids having fewer opportunities for enrichment (meaning that if mom doesn’t have time to drive junior to soccer practice then junior can’t do soccer and misses out on the positive physical and mental health effects of team sports).  What do you think would happen if we as a society actually made a point to support single mothers rather than constantly fighting over whether poor children deserve free lunch at school?  Do you think the negative effects of being or having a single mother would persist as they currently are?  If so, do you have any data to support this?

Someone presented two decontextualized phenomena like “more divorces” and “less female suicides” (correlation) and another person jumped to general causation - assuming that the cause of the decrease in those suicides had been the social acceptance of divorce. By generalizing this, they justified a negative view of the traditional family altogether. Namely, the message is that the more divorce is normalized (the less social importance the commitment of traditional marriage is perceived to have), the better for women’s health and lives. 

I pointed out another correlation in the opposite direction and then stated:

Did you miss the sentence? 

That’s the entire point. Raw data can’t be thrown around omitting other contradictory data to push a pre-conceived value judgment of the traditional family. Which, by the way, is not mutually exclusive with legal divorce, but would stand against the erosion of the value of commitment. Namely, the more social importance commitment has, the less divorce is normalized (it’s more “exceptional”), and less divorces take place because of social pressure. 

We have to base ourselves off objective, global assessments and good-faith critical thinking that does not lean towards any particular ideology or sentimentality. If some aspects of the traditional family are negative/toxic, changes in them are good. But if the same or other aspects are good/protective, then misconstruing, eroding or bashing them is irresponsible.

Your response has several things worth mentioning:    

You next claim that being single is a risk factor for mental illness.

It’s not my claim, it’s general knowledge established and studied all accross health institutions in the world. A mentally ill population includes less married people and a healthy one more married people; also a healthy cohort of single and married individuals would not have the same incidence of mental illness, being superior in the group of singles. 

I’m not sure of what your concept of a “risk factor” is, though, because you seem to assume risk factor means “cause”. In biomedical statistics, risk factors do not need to be either main, necessary or sufficient causes. The core idea is that their presence/absence is responsible for an increase in the likelihood of something happening, so that acting upon that presence/absence has an impact on the outcome. For instance, arguably the cause of cervical cancer is a virus (HPV), but smoking is a risk factor, and quitting smoking, a protective factor. So an intervention on tobacco helps. 

Bear in mind that one thing is the phenomenon, and another our attempts to explain the phenomenon. How we classify and conceptualize a causal chain in terms of first, second, necessary, sufficient, synergic, direct, indirect, etc, cause, does not negate a causal link that has already been established. Though science is dynamic, and an established fact can change if you find a previous correlation was due to a confounding factor, this is how the understanding of any causality starts and holds (evolution can be wrong, for instance, if we find out all the fossils were placed this way by aliens).

Assuming the opposite without force of reason to do so, based on what abstract interpretation is regarded as more “logical” because of its consequences, is both unscientific and fallacious (consequentialism). 

The observation right now is, in general, that divorce rates correlate positively with mental health epidemics, and that in particular, being single is a risk factor for acquiring mental illness during your lifetime.    

Do you have any data to back this up?

Yes, I gave a talk on this a month ago. it can easily be found in google, google scholar, PubMed, medical literature, psychiatry journals, etc. 

Have you not found any or have you not looked? You seem to be basing your response on the “logical” or “plausible” appeal of explanations that take, as an epistemic default, a sole direction (OP’s) for how women’s well-being and the traditional family correlate (ie negatively).

If you want to claim divorce leads to suicide, you need a stronger argument.

All I had claimed at the point you replied was that there was raw data with both a positive and negative correlation of suicide in women, that one interpretation was as valid as the other one (ie, invalid), and that contextualizing was key for looking at the positive/negative aspects of traditional family integrally. 

Some of the earlier replies, though, had taken a correlation and said “this is why the traditional family defense is a negative thing”. Is that a strong argument? I’m confused by the standard of argument strength here, since you’re not presenting any data either.

Making divorce accessible doesn’t mean you’re required to get divorced, it just means that people who are in unhappy marriages don’t have to be stuck there.  I don’t see why you think that’s a bad thing.

I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, ie either accepting the traditional family is toxic or ilegalizing divorce. I don’t fall in either of these boxes. 

I support legal divorce, but I also think that the legalization of divorce has been a star in a constellation of phenomena that also included the erosion of the value of commitment. Even the most pessimistic statistics for quality of life before divorce was legal would not have had 50% of the female population mentally ill or committing suicide, I assume, which is the divorce rate in some places.

In light of this, I do not support forbidding divorce, but I do support normalizing commitment as opposed to normalizing an unscientific all-negative value judgment of the traditional family’s defense in itself. And I oppose attributing it decontextualized correlations to defend that value judgment, which is why this post got a reply in the first place.  

To wrap up the rest, after reading your other opinions, I gather that:

It makes sense to you that mentally ill people have a harder time getting married and this explains why single people are over-represented in mental illness. 

It makes sense to you that the group of women who want a divorce kill themselves less when divorce is legalized

It makes sense to you that single mothers’ kids do worse because they have inequality of opportunity for enrichment.

A factual response: 

That is indeed accepted but not the explanation, since not just prevalence (total of cases) but also incidence (new cases over a period of time) is higher, meaning that the correlation is not based on the mental illness happening before but also afterwards. This is why it is a genuine risk factor (congruent temporal sequence is part of the concept). If the stress of a cancer made you smoke more afterwards, tobacco would not be a “risk factor” for cancer - cancer would be a risk factor for smoking. Which can be simultaneously true, by the way, in these cases it is.

You’re assuming that a woman’s choices in a relationship and to terminate it are independent of the social view towards commitment, which I’m sure you know to be false, since otherwise there wouldn’t be so many efforts for cultural changes. Strictness in one direction always means laxitude in the other. When we’re speaking of populations in general, a number of individuals in toxic relationships benefitting from an easy-going society, entails another number is not benefitting from an extra pressure to put effort into a relationship that may work because of that effort, and the reward in the social reaction to that. Taken to either extreme, the consequences are terrible: marriage as a prison to toxic situations on the one hand, instrumentalized to normalize abuse; and social apathy towards meaningful bonds and good decisions on the other, favoring mental health epidemics. What I oppose is only looking at the damage in one side and saying the other is unrelated, unimportant or inexistent. People also get hurt when their community neglects to value their well-being over their immediate emotional satisfaction. 

You’re making a lot of assumptions there. I live in Spain which is a welfare state and single mothers get help. I’m okay with that in general. Monoparental families are still overrepresented in a long list of social and psychological issues that are not attributable only to equality of opportunity. Equality is not parity - equal opportunity does not entail equal outcome. Artificially forcing an equal outcome, known as “affirmative action” (we call it ‘positive discrimination’ officially), is a measure with pros and cons as I mentioned before. For example, to integrate women into the police force, their height requirements were placed lower than mens’, which meant that a male taller than a given female, ceteris paribus, would be discriminated against because of their sex for an alleged greater good. My problem is when these situations are turned around to say that no, it is not actually a “lesser evil”, it’s even a good thing, because only one side of the problem (one issue, one type of peoples’ rights) truly matter. The “wage gap” is often summoned, but for instance no one is seriously campaigning for parity in the workplace accident/death gender gap.

But beyond that, and more interestingly, have you noticed the three of your positions in this have a common pattern to their “appeal”? 

According to your intuition: (1) single people have problems only because they’re already “disabled” to do what married people do, (2) to-be-divorced women are a definite group of victims, for whom divorce is a key to liberation, and (3) single parent kids do not enrich to the level of their peers because they get less opportunities

In all of these, there is an external locus of agency. There are definite, monolithic groups (single people, to-be-divorced women, single moms and their kids), who have little to no agency, and social factors are the ones responsible for their differential outcomes.

I already said why the first was not the explanation (incidence, cohort thing), but at least a priori, it is possible, for instance, that women who will or won’t get a divorce aren’t monolithic groups, independent of their decisions, and that some of those have failed marriages because of non-external factors (so not a husband’s abuse, for example). It is also possible that a single mother raises a kid badly not because they’re single and this has social stigma attached, but also because the kind of behavior that led them to remain single associates bad parenting choices in other areas of life. 

Further, the comment about the bullshit of worshipping the “traditional family” was not necessarily a claim that nobody can ever be happy in that arrangement.  I read it as recognizing that there are other family structures that work just as well or even better for some people, and making those socially acceptable would be preferable to insisting everyone should strive for the traditional family.  You chose to read it in a way that came off as ridiculous.

There is no such thing as objective critical thinking.  You and I have different life experiences and different perspectives on the world.  Your version of critical thinking here is going to differ from mine.  Please don’t try to claim that your argument is somehow superior just because you don’t recognize your own bias.

Also, it’s not my responsibility to find sources for your argument.  If you wanna argue, you link the studies.  Otherwise you’re just making baseless claims.  And before you jump on me for also not linking any studies:

My goal wasn’t to prove you wrong, it was simply to point out the bias in your argument.

Since you want sources, a quick google search for “happiness marriage vs single” (which I hope you can agree is a reasonably unbiased way to phrase the search) had this article as its top result.  It’s a blog article, but it links to sources on PubMed.  The upshot is that over the long term, marriage doesn’t correlate with increased happiness, life satisfaction, or relationship satisfaction.