Domestic violence claims XBox Developer
Alexandr pointed me towards this story of the murder of Melissa Batten, a developer for the XBox team.
According to a Seattle Times report, Batten had obtained a protection order against her estranged husband on July 21, reporting that he had called her more than 30 times over July 19 and 20 and also broken into her Microsoft workplace on July 16, where he was apprehended by security guards. But her greatest concern stemmed from his ownership of a handgun, which she discovered on June 5.
“The biggest incident which clouds all his subsequent behavior occurred on June 5. He had, unbeknownst to me, obtained a gun,” she wrote in her request for a protection order. The couple were still living together at the time of the discovery, she said, which took place when she confronted him over an extramarital affair. Batten said that her husband “brandished the gun from the back waistband of his jeans and pointed it at me.”
Her husband killed himself after he murdered her.
It is hardly unsurprising that most of the comments on the gaming sites like Kotaku would dismiss this as an act of isolated nuttiness, even as others used it as a opportunity to ask why the U.S. has such a high instance of murder-suicides. But I shouldn’t just target the gamer community, they’re only reflecting a larger public consensus to tutt-tutt and look the other way when something like this happens.
But here’s the thing about murder-suicides.
Have you ever noticed that the murdered are almost uniformly women, and the suicides are almost uniformly men? Have you noticed how, in this article, his response to being caught with his pants down was to get a gun and shoot his wife?
Domestic violence and these sorts of “murder suicides” are not just isolated acts of insanity. They happen in patterns that are quite uniform and predictable. There is no doubt that mental illness is involved, but it’s a mental illness compounded by the big scary M word: Misogyny. This man believed that women were his property, to do with and dispose of as he liked, and when she called him on his completely inappropriate behavior, his response was to pull a gun on her, because what the hell kind of property thinks it can tell you what to do?
What’s worse is, you’re just as likely to see friends, family, and co-workers of man come out to declare what a decent, quiet, loving husband he was, as if Misogyny couldn’t possibly have a veneer of respectability… and the gun just magically materialized in his hand the moment he started and argument with his wife.
Look at the timeline — when he pulled the gun on her, she had 2 months to live. The first month she tried to just get away, but he kept after her. So she filed a restraining order and two weeks later, she was dead.
For all of the DV apologists we’ve had on this site, who want to put the responsibility for stopping domestic violence on the woman, “why didn’t she just get away,” “she could have left him,” I say fuck you sideways. This woman did get away, she even got a police restraining order. He broke into her office, and yet despite the fact that this is obviously a crime (breaking and entering), he was allowed to go free. She did everything a woman in a DV situation is supposed to do, and she’s still dead.
There are some people who feel that feminists should not prosecute low-level sexism, that we shouldn’t point out small, insignificant behaviors. That the dude is just an asshole, not necessarily a misogynist. That there is no harm in showing women as objects and we should throw all our efforts into whatever Big Scary Sexism the antifeminists tell us is worth our time (usually sexism in other countries and cultures, which belies their underlying racism).
But again, we’re sure to see reports about what a nice, quiet guy Joseph Batten was. What a loving husband he was. And I’m sure there are people in his life who have their doubts, who had seen misogynist behavior out of this guy, but who just wrote it off because he wasn’t dragging women into the bushes so he was just a bit of an asshole, nothing worse.
Veneers come off pretty easily. What can be seen as low-level sexist, quasi-assholish behavior can hide a misogynist monster. That’s why it’s important to go after all sexist behavior, even if it seems minor. If we don’t tollerate it, the culture won’t reinforce it. Mental illness will always lead to tragedies, but tragedies compounded by society’s implicit reinforcement that women are worthless objects to be dominated and discarded should be exceedingly rare, and definitely not uniform.
R.I.P. Melissa.
August 7th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Many condolences to Melissa’s family, and also to Joseph’s. I can’t imagine what they’re going through right now.
I think perhaps the best thing I can do to combat this sort of thing is to bring up any sons I may have to consider domestic violence a bad thing. Not that it’s the only thing, but I’m not going to have a greater impact on anyone than on my children.
I have a great jewel in my wife: She’s funny, she’s bright, she loves to play all sorts of games with me. She is also her own person, and if she were ever to want out, my proper response is to help her get out with all alacrity, not pull a goddamn handgun on her like I’m Leon Fucking Kennedy.
August 7th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Falconer — feminists who raise sons fight such an uphill battle. Teaching young boys to respect women as human beings when so much of our culture says that they aren’t worth respect must be incredibly difficult. It does my heart good to hear pro-feminist fathers of boys like yourself speak up.
August 7th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Okay, first condolences for Melissa Batten’s friends and family, and my sorrow for her, the victim of this horrible crime.
There is one thing I want to say, and I don’t mean to offend you when I say this MPG, or sound like Im somehow tying to defend the killer. Im just confused as to why you lay out the intentions of this killer; misogyny and feeling like she was his property - yet completely ignore the following suicide in light of that? If he was convinced enough by his misogyny to kill her, his supposed “property”, I just don’t see why he would kill himself afterwards with that kind of deranged thinking? Im just wondering if its really the right idea to forget all the people involved with this, and just use feminist ideology to explain this crime?
Like I said, no offence intended, and I can understand if my comment pisses you off, because Im not personally a feminist. But yeah, I said it all the same. Another thing though, the point you made about DV apologists was a very important one I think. I would say its clear what those DV apoplogists are really trying to do when they make insensitive comments like that, while horrible crimes like this one continue to happen.
August 7th, 2008 at 10:14 am
TheBends: No offense taken, it’s an honest question. If he wanted to kill himself, he should have just killed himself. Rather, he couldn’t take himself out without killing her as well. The article describes that when he pulled the gun on her on June 5th, he initially brandished it at her, and then put it to his own head and threatened to kill himself.
Rather, he had a fixation of her life as inextricably tied to his own, which is basically saying that her life was secondary to his own, that her continued existence is dependent upon his continued existence, etc. Put another way, ownership.
This wasn’t a “crime of passion,” in the classic sense where she did something so horrible that he was driven to kill her and then lost the will to live himself*. He’d been caught out having an affair and she left him. She didn’t properly forgive and take him back when he fucked up, which she was supposed to do, dontchaknow? She’s not supposed to have dignity, or the ability to set boundaries for acceptable behavior in her life partner. Where did she get off leaving him just because he didn’t respect their marriage?
No, this guy felt that his power and ownership over his wife had been violated because she left him for a compeltely understandable reason, and he couldn’t handle it, so he decided to have the last say and make sure that his belief that her life was only at his grace was reinforced.
(* not that those aren’t incredibly misogynistic as well, it’s just that there’s no “he was emotionally wrecked by her treachery” excuse for the sexists to hide behind like they love to do)
August 7th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Thanks for understanding me. I have a lot of respect for feminism, but not so much that I forget thats its still human ideals and ideas, and in my mind often not much different from any other mindset, or whatever you wish to call them. I personally think the different reasons for this crime could be anything or any number of things. To tell the truth I never really even fully trust what the professionals might say, since when it comes down to it I think the only person who truly knew is that mentally ill murderer who killed himself.
August 7th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Having spent a small amount of time volunteering on a DV hotline, and looking to become a father soon — I also applaud how you are educating your children. Not only are women socialized to keep to traditional gender roles, they are also socialized to accept the negative parts of misogyny as “par for the course”.
Out of just the small sampling of calls I took, the women really didn’t see the violence / abuse as abberant male behavior. I can’t tell you how many women were shocked to hear a man tell them “no, that’s NOT just how men are”. I feel this had a strong effect on them, and help them to realize that not only were there better options out there, but that they deserved them as well.
There’s incredible value in educating your son, because their generation will be much more willing to speak up against these sorts of misconceptions. I found myself ostracised when a youth on the football team in high-school — the few times I spoke up against the disrespect I heard I got the rubber stamped “fag” response, and eventually no-one listened to me at all.
I’d like to think that if I had a son, that he would be around someone like your son and others — and that with numbers, maybe this time around the voice of reason won’t get dismissed so quickly in the locker room. To hear these things from other guys gives me hope.
Removing the misogynist imagery, stereotypes, etc. . . is a strong tool for changing the mindset of men, but not as powerful as the strong examples of other men living the right way and interacting with women in a respectful way. Children copy what they see. Kudos once again.
August 7th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I think that if this happened completely out of left field, and no one has ever killed their wife before killing themselves, we could just chalk it up to a fluke, but when stuff like this keeps happening, and it keeps happening in the same way — where a man kills his wife — it’s important to zoom out and try to understand why the same thing keeps happening over and over and not say “well, he was mentally ill so who knows why he killed her.”
I think a lot of this belief is tied into the idea that mental illness happens in a void: that a person’s mental illness is gestated completely within the the person’s brain, and is not influenced by outside factors. That something snapped and the mental illness sprung fully-formed from some broken synapse that has absolutely no relationship to reality.
People who have psychotic breaks often do so in a way that reflects what’s going on in their world. They hear, understand, and develop according to the outside world, just like all of us do. And their mental illness develops in the same way.
Have you ever noticed how spree killings happen in batches? I believe that the media coverage of spree killings can actually create more spree killings, because a person who is mentally ill and heading for their first psychotic break will see the coverage and develop an obsession.
One thing that really saddened me was a few months after September 11th. A man on a plane sitting at the terminal in Florida suddenly got up and started shouting that there was a bomb in his bag. He wanted help, he was afraid the bomb would go off and kill everyone on board. His wife began pleading with the panicking passengers to tell them that he was mentally ill. He got off the plane and started running into the terminal, and a Federal Air Marshal shot him dead. This man was stressed out, flying after 9/11 was one of the most stressful things people had done in a long time, and stress is one of the best indicators of a psychotic break. But the psychosis was informed by what was going on at the time. He had been hearing about bombs on planes, shoe bombers, the government had been whipping us into a fear of suicide bombers and Al Queda and his brain couldn’t handle it.
The forms that people’s psychosis takes tells us about that person. A person doesn’t just completely jump off of their rails when they’re mentally ill, the mental illness is often a reflection of what’s happening inside, and what’s inside is often a reflection of what’s outside.
We keep seeing men who kill their wives before they kill themselves. I try to zoom out and then draw the lines backwards to say “why” this keeps happening. I honestly feel that these men were mentally ill… no doubt about it. But that mental illness was informed by sexism, and I feel that in a society that tollerates and reinforces sexism, we’ll continue to see tragedies like this play out.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Who had the affair? Cause the Seattle Times article that I read, said he confronted her about an affair she was having. Not that this excuses his actions, but I think your analysis should be tweaked, if this is the case.
But I am not convinced that her life was secondary to his own. Though, I imagine that you are right in that be believed his life was tied to hers, after all, marriage ceremonies usually instill that concept onto spouses, I just don’t see how we can immediately claim she was secondary. Men can and do often place much stock into the happiness and welfare of their spouses/partners. And her cheating would constitute has his failure to meet her needs. Obviously he doesn’t deal with failure very well. But the murder could have been selfishness, rather then ownership. “I won’t share her” is not the same as “I own her”.
It is reasonable that one could refuse sharing one’s wife with another man, without believing that you own your wife. Losing the primary person you live for, and placing all of your stock on that one person, who doesn’t love you anymore, leaves a large hole in your life, and often leads to a sense of hopelessness and meaningless life. He could have thought that she was his property, but it could also be an act of revenge or anger, or a combination of selfishness and inability to deal with failure.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:14 am
One thing Im not getting here is this talk about being careful with raising boys, like theyre some timebomb waiting to explode without careful handling. I had no such careful upbringing, yet I managed to grow up with respect for women being equals. Much of my upbringing was by my mother alone, yet she is no feminist. I can clearly see misogyny in a lot of the media that feminists point out (okay this is England Im talking about, but its not like its a whole lot different if you ask me), but I cant fathom this “special attention”. Is it really that pervasive? Okay, so Im only going by myself and perhaps my brother here, but as far as I can tell anyone, we did okay. And without any difficulties either, so from my perspective teaching boys to respect women doesnt really need some careful feminist upbringing.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:37 am
You know what this oh-so-common *pattern* reminds me of?
Ancient kings, having their wives and slaves and pets killed and placed in the tomb with them when they die - not just an Eastern tradition, either, it’s recorded with horror by an ancient Arab traveler to Europe, among the Vikings.
It is absolutely all about the entitlement, the feeling of ownership over inferior beings. The only new(ish) thing is that these men usually kill their kids, too, if they have any and can pull it off, where in antiquity they were supposed to leave their children behind to inherit their position, but these modern day patriarchal princes don’t seem to have any actual concern for their genetic legacy, it’s all about *them* as the Center of Their Universe, apres moi le deluge. A fist raised to society, I am the godking, you will not arrest me and put me in your petty prisons, I the Invictus will slay myself first before you take me - it’s right out of all our macho hero tales and movies, isn’t it?
There was a horrible story on gaming bbs a few months ago, remember, where the father tried to kill wife and baby son both but only succeeded in wounding the mother, who survived. But the ancient attitude of paternal ownership involving the right to kill your kids was always there, in Ancient Rome especially, so it isn’t *entirely* a new thing, either.
And no, I am horribly unsurprised that the male gaming community doesn’t want to consider this a systemic problem, since they are mostly very typical American males, and this is a systemic problem in our wider culture where you are, as a woman, more likely to be raped/killed by your husband/SO than by a stranger.
And absolutely, if you don’t stomp on the “minor” manifestations of this entitled, ownership, hateful-towards-the-uppity-women attitude, hard and fast, then it keeps on growing unchecked into ever worse behaviors. This is the first rule of animal training.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Absolutely terrific post on a tragic event.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Thebends, you do know that 90% of rape cases in England are dismissed, and over half of Britons think that a woman who wears a short skirt, goes out drinking, out by herself, is “asking for it” if she gets raped? That the law in Scotland, until a major scandal just a year ago forced an overhaul, did not say that consent was required for sex to be lawful and not criminal - that is, it was okay to screw an unconscious woman, and that didn’t count as rape? There’s a hell of a lot of systemic sexism and unprosecuted violence against women that is just taken for granted by society in Europe, no less than in the US.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Sucks that the gaming industry lost a female developer (sucks for the whole software engineering industry more since female developers are rare as is).
I will say I find it funny that you are making a leap to claim that the male in this situation was a sexist seems to close to the whole hey a person went on a killing spree and he had a video game in his house, games must have made him do it logic.
I personally think it could just as likely be a codependency issue and not sexism; for all we know he mindfucked himself into believing that she was the only one for him (no matter what mistakes he made/did/etc …) and that he could not exist without her … as such since she was leaving him and in the process taking away his existence he decided to react with violence … it could have also just been as easily as he was pissed that she was leaving him and he decided to kill the “bitch” (sort of speak) and than he was to much of a coward to take responsibility for his actions and so he killed himself.
Obviously without knowing him personally, his friends personally, and all of the facts I can’t truly claim that this is a case of codependency, sexism, or just a case of an asshole coward (though I’m going with asshole coward).
I also (like theBends) am confused by the comments of the raising boys as if they are ticking timebombs. I was at no point raised to be a feminist nor was I raised to be a misogynist … my mother never forced me to a bra burning parade nor did my dad take me out to the local titty bar. The Feminine Mystique was not requried reading nor was the Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (two books I do suggest people read) and yet some how I grew up understanding that women were not property, that hitting was bad (no matter what the persons sex was), and that to be truly happy I needed to find a partner that was strong independent and intelligent. Amazingly enough I have yet to ever hit my partner (though she has taken a couple of swings at me =) ) or treat her as property, a baby factor or anything else other than a friend and companion that I get the pleasure of traveling with.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
That’s horrid, Ponygirl. My condolences to both of their families. This is yet another crime that could have been prevented if the people Melissa ran to would have shown a little fucking sense and an awareness of how patterned these attacks are, and managed to get her someplace safe or him someplace he couldn’t hurt her, like a mental hospital or something. It’s not like there’s a shortage (unfortunately) of murder-suicides where the lead-up to the murder was punctuated by increases in violence and attempts by the men to assert themselves as being the “boss” of the relationship.
Falconer, as a teacher-in-training, I’ve got to say thank you for putting forth the example of parenting that is expected by us anti-racist and anti-sexist teachers, and for starting your boys on the path of respect and feminist ideals while they’re young. It takes a village to raise a child, but that doesn’t mean parents don’t have a strong initial imprint on what the child learns.
TheBends, I really do think that misogyny, sexism, and racism is pervasive in Western society, but it’s clouded over with ambiguity thanks to the “casual” and “soft” versions of these -isms that the patriarchy puts in there. Conditioning kids to think that boys rule the roost and are “destructive” by nature, and that women are subservient and are “caring” by nature starts very young. Consider television and commercials: toys are gendered to, say, show boys as being outdoorsy, while girls are pink and get toy kitchens and homes to take care of. Boys face a penalty when trying to be “equal” because everyone expects them to take charge, and using their privilege against themselves boggles the observers’ minds (e.g. walkyourpath’s “fag” example).
It’s great that your mother brought you up to consider women equal, and it’s a feminist act to do so. I myself was brought up in my teen years by my mom, and I had a sister as well to mind. It becomes natural to consider women as equals and “worthy of male respect” when you have them around you constantly. That she wants you to think of her as an equal becomes part of the progressivism that these last decades have given us.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Absolutely terrific post on an absolutely tragic event. It encapsulates for me exactly why we have to sweat the small stuff - every example of casual, unconscious misogyny that’s allowed to pass unchallenged helps build a culture that accepts that sexism as completely normal.
Obviously that’s not to say that Ivy’s costume in Soul Caliber 4 inevitably leads to men killing their wives, just that if you don’t see the little things you’re likely to be blind to the root causes of the big things. And that if you have a society that’s constantly telling men in a million tiny ways that women are lesser, that they exist for men’s amusement, that they’re property to be used and discarded, it’s horribly predictable that a few disturbed people will take that message to its most repugnant conclusion.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Apologies for the double-post. In my defence, a) I’ve got a horrible fever and b) I’m an idiot.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Wow… feel better!
TheBends, people who aren’t feminists are still capable of feminist acts, just like self-proclaimed feminists are still capable of anti-feminist behavior. Beyond raising you to be respectful of women, your mom obviously raised you to be an intelligent, open-minded individual… which counts for a lot. Regardless of whether or not she cares, how your mom raised you gets a feminist stamp of approval.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Psycho Bob: There must have been a correction–I had read it pretty carefully this morning when I wrote it up and it was definitely “he had the affair and she confronted him.” If she had the affair, it’s still a sense of ownership. You can’t “share” something you don’t have ownership over. If I’m at a drinking fountain and I’m not letting someone else have a drink, I am exerting ownership over it. If I find out my husband is having an extramarital affair and I shoot him, I am exerting ownership over him by “refusing to share him.” Furthermore, if he was as emotionally wrecked as all that, he should have just killed himself, not killed her too. To say “my life is not worth living anymore” and shooting yourself is an entirely different kettle of fish than saying “my life, and my extension, your life, is not worth living anymore.” And as far as “Men can and do often place much stock into the happiness and welfare of their spouses/partners. And her cheating would constitute has his failure to meet her needs” I’ll raise you “Men can and do often confuse their own happiness for the happiness of their spouse.” This is something our culture reinforces and frankly makes a lot more sense in a murder-suicide. If you believe that your own feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness are naturally shared by your wife because you come to believe that her emotions are mere reflections of your own, you’re much more likely to kill her when it’s time to take your own life because that’s what you want, so it naturally must be what she wants.
And Jeremy: if we saw a persistent pattern of gamers going on violent killing sprees, I would at least entertain a causal relationship between videogames and violence. As we do not see a persistent, uniform pattern, it is not something worth examining. However this is not the case. A persistent, uniform pattern of men killing their wives does exist, and it will continue as long as we just wave our hands and declare that each incident was separate and isolated and special.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Yes, Im well aware of that bellatrys. If you had actually read my post, I pointed out that while I am speaking as an English person, I dont feel that somehow changes all that much in regards to misogyny in society. I was also pointing out that Im able to recognise and be disgusted by such an absence of justice without any kind of serious attention to my upbringing or even identifying as a feminist.
Dont ever bother to try and educate me on England’s more fucked up areas of society, because Im more than aware of them, as Im more than aware its in keeping with the rest of this fucked up planet. Youre talking to someone who in some respects identifies as a nihilist.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
@bellatrys: Feh 90% getting dismissed means at least 10% see a trial that’s better than my glorious US Army, I would say a good 99% don’t ever see the light of day. The only hope for a female soldier (especially one in a combat zone) is for her male and other female soldiers to be so psyco that they would take care of an incident in house (usually it goes the other way they cover it up and take care of the male).
@pony I would agree if a massive murder suicide cases are prevalent and in most to all instances its a female/male combo (female murdered male suicide) than some more research is needed. Especially into is it a case of dependency (have we made ourselves truly believe that we must have another to be able to live) a case of misogynist (is the male so brain washed that he believes he has the rights to treat a woman as property) or what … I just haven’t noticed that many murder suicides, but then again I mainly stick to gamer news and global news (local/state level news is to damn depressing on how many people kill each other in a day, some for no better reason than they wanted too) …
August 7th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Jeremy — you don’t have to just have to trust the feminist that the statistics are very stark. Mother Jones has an interactive numbers chart for you. These raw numbers point to something greater than “coincidence,” it points to a systemic sickness in our culture, a failure to accept women as equals and a belief that they are objects without basic human rights.
August 7th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
@ TheBends
Your moms obviously did a great job — didn’t mean to imply that a single mother can’t raise an open minded and compassionate child on her own. More meant to imply that men speaking up against the sexist and misogynistic things they hear and see on an almost daily basis will speed the day that a real balance is restored beween the genders.
@ Jeremy / TheBends
The raising children issue is very pertinent, particularly when it comes to DV. As part of my training, we learned quite a few very disturbing statistics. One of the biggest trends when it comes to violence of all stripes, is that children who witness or are subject to abuse are more likely to become abusers themselves. This means there’s a great deal of responsibility on the parents, and I don’t see anything wrong with encouraging parents to be more proactive when talking to their children about male/female interactions, roles, relationships, etc. . .
I get that you all didn’t get these talks when you were kids and you grew up just fine — that’s awesome. Neither did I, so I also get where you’re coming from. I’m not implying that all male children will grow up to kill their wives if they don’t get special intervention from someone. I’m thinking you’re reading a little into my comment.
In the case of this game developer, he didn’t just suddenly snap — she took several steps to extricate herself from the situation as she saw his possessiveness and instability grow. This is in keeping with what we know about the causes of DV and abuse — it’s about power. In cases like this, women are often the targets because of the way that we have either conditioned, or in most cases, allowed others to condition people to believe that women are objects to be controlled. Ergo, as he saw his power over her slipping, he took actions to “correct” the situation. It’s not a huge leap to see that in part it was the result of it being in his mind “ok” to place himself above his wife, which comes from the inherent sexism that we all absorb through any number of medium every day — hence the need for people to counteract that influence by directly addressing the issue with their children to provide a counterpoint to the other messages they are receiving.
There’s a freakishly large about of data on the subject, and I’d be happy to recommend some sources of information if you really want to learn more about the role of sexism in DV, but there is a direct, measurable, and concrete correlation between the two.
August 7th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Extremely Dark Reaction:
This trend can only help alleviate the energy demand crisis.
Self-centered/Self-pitying reaction:
I suppose that one advantage of being a momma’s boy lacking the confidence to initiate a relationship is that one can never reproach oneself with having physically abused a lover. Creeped out a few dates, certainly, but never physically injured anybody.
Despairing reaction:
There was a time when this kind of thing could have inspired me to holy bloody rage and make me want to go out and find a few spouse abusers and snap them like twigs. Reflection now realizes that this is exactly the same impulse for power assertion as is manifested in said abusers, albeit at least channelled in a somewhat more socially positive direction. Or maybe I’m just getting old and tired.
Even the drive to establish a more just society is a manifestation of that primal monkey desire for control and authority.
I for one welcome our new silicon overlords, and would point out that as a certified loon, I can help them understand the irrational self-destructive behavior patterns of their carbon based wards
August 7th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
As a mother of a son, it’s not about him being a ‘time bomb’. It’s about trying to raise him to be a self-respecting, decent man in the face of bombardment with messages that female = inferior and stupid, real men despise women, sympathy toward women means you’re a queer or a wimp or both, and violence is merely an extension of how aggressive and possessive men “should” be.
I’ve had perfectly nice, decent, women-respecting men throw their weight around - grabbing my arm to steer me, or blocking my way when they wanted to talk to me - and they were HORRIFIED they were doing it. They weren’t even AWARE of it. That’s how deep the training goes.
Unless you’re talking about playful, totally harmless, we-both-understand-I’m-whapping-you-with-a-pillow type of swings, I don’t see that as particularly funny. Why is it OK for a woman to hit her partner?
August 7th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
What Mythago said, about the training and the conditioning. I like to think that I’m a feminist because, were I otherwise, I would be disrespecting if not downright hateful of my mom, my wife, my aunts, my grandmother, and all of my female cousins and every girl I knew in school.
And I’m flattered and pleased that everyone thinks I’m being a good father. I’ll keep that in mind for when I actually do have kids — because I don’t have any yet.
Even if it’s Melissa who cheated, then that’s no justification for her husband to blow her brains out. That would be taking punishment into his own hands, outside of the justice system. How is that different from murderous vigilantism or lynching? On the one level, it’s murder, and murder is wrong. The wrongness is just compounded by the domestic violence.
August 7th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
MPG: I share plenty of things that I don’t have ownership over. For instance, tools at work. I don’t own them, they are check out to me, and therefore I am responsible for them, but I share them all the time, yet I don’t own them. Some coworkers don’t share their tools, and yet they don’t own them. Your water fountain example only illustrates that you are exerting control over the water fountain which doesn’t necessitate ownership. If you walked up to a water fountain and someone stopped you from drinking the sweet nectar of H20, it’s possible that one is exerting ownership over the fountain, but what if the owner paid him to protect it? Or paid him to watch it? Or what if someone asked him to watch it as a favor? What if this it was one of those outrageous video filming scenarios where some fake government worker asks some random person that is walking by not to let anyone drink from the fountain because there is lead leaking into the water, and they need 5 minutes to shut it down? You can’t tell me that these scenarios consist of someone exerting ownership over the fountain, at best you can argue, and I would agree, that they are exerting control over the fountain.
Refusing to share something, doesn’t automatically mean you own it, or think you own it, or constitute as a form of ownership. There is a conceptual difference between ownership and control and one doesn’t necessitate the other. You might own a cat, but its highly unlikely you have any control over it. You might control a drawbridge or a Nuclear Submarine, but you may not own it. You might even control a water fountain, but that doesn’t mean you own it, or think you own it. Yes, ownership dictates rights and what one can do with the property, and it usually is the case where you have control over your property, but having control over something doesn’t mean you own it and it doesn’t mean you have to believe you are the owner of said property.
I don’t think a spouse is exerting ownership over their spouse by refusing to share them. If we were to extract this concept and analyze a parent child relationship, a mother exerts control over her child, but I doubt that most mothers believe they own their child like property. There are few parents that actually believe they own their child, like they own their clothes, cars, or I-Pods. I don’t think a parent is exerting or establishing ownership over their child by refusing to share them or by filtering out the negative influences. When mom and dad say “no” to buying little Sarah Hitman because her friend has it, that control is not out of ownership. When one’s wife says no to a threesome it’s not out of ownership. Refusing to share isn’t derived from ownership, but from relationship. There is an association between lovers and between parents and children, and that association is complicated and broad. With parents, it’s an association mostly out of responsibility of a child, not ownership that dictates their refusal to buy little Sarah Hitman, or disallowing her to go see Hitman 2 the movie. With a marital relationship there are expectations, and desire for and of their partner, commitments were made, expectations develop, and that isn’t because one believes they own the other, its because a relationship has formed, one that isn’t based on ownership, but (usually) on mutual goals, love, understanding, kindness and patience.
Now in the case of Joseph Batten, I haven’t seen any quotes from him which would allow me to assume that he believes his wife was property. Some men do believe this, but until his own words come to light, I cannot assume he believed he owned his wife, simply because he exerted control over her. Conceptually there is no necessary relationship between control and ownership, one doesn’t necessitate the other.
And I don’t think either of us can argue whether or not Joseph confused his own happiness for the happiness of his wife. It seems to me we are needlessly speculating and drawing conclusions about what he thought or what he felt. By no means am I justifying his actions, what he did was wrong, but I am willing to bet his pain was as real as her fear. There are always two sides to every story, if not more, and I just find it bothersome that we can just assume so many things about him, when none of it is based on his thoughts, only the action. I understand actions speak louder then words, but I also know that one can act in the same manner for different reasons.
Falconer: Her adultery doesn’t justify murder, but the original analysis, the speculation of why he acted I think needs to be reconsidered. Why can we just assume he owned her, and not that he was just angry with her? I am not questioning the ‘wrongness’ of murder, but I am questioning the reasons that have been assumed as to why he did it.
Admin Response: You’re arguments are extremely facile. No, you don’t own your tools at work, your boss does. And as he has lent said owned tools to you, you are expected to behave with them in a responsible manner in such a way as to be able to accomplish your job, as you would expect anyone to which you have leant a possession to behave. And yes, there are people who absolutely believe that they own their children, and not surprisingly, they use that point to justify all sorts of abuse.
While you’re obviously not here to argue in good faith, I do have to thank you for proving my point. I’m sure that you don’t come off as a complete misogynist assbag offline, and you may have even suckered some woman into caring for you and thinking that you respect her. But as you are honestly trying to argue that killing a woman for sleeping with another man can be done while still respecting her agency and autonomy, and not as an act of ownership and authority, that air of not-being-a-complete-sexist-asshole is in fact a veneer, one that apparently doesn’t even need a betrayal of trust to come off, it needs only the anonymity of the internet.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:38 am
I find it really strange that anyone here is surprised that a father who is a reader of this site is raising his son to consider domestic violence a bad thing. I mean, wouldn’t you expect as much? That seems the *bare minimum* I would expect of a male reader of this site.
I think it IS important to actively raise your child to hold such values. Sure, many of us may have “turned out okay” in absence of overt teaching on the subject of sexual discrimination, but the simple fact is there are a myriad different manifestations of sexual discrimination and misogyny in our culture (by “our” I mean North America, Europe).
A child who isn’t taught to look at things critically, to recognize even the most subtle omnipresent forms of sexism is going to be more likely to miss some of the bigger ones.
And no, male children are not “ticking time bombs”, but in a patriarchal culture, the status quo is misogynistic. So if you took a more laissez faire approach to child rearing, you could expect the average male child to accept at least some of these pervasive messages.
It’d be wonderful if every single child grew up questioning accepted cultural mores, but the reality is most don’t.
August 8th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Chris: I don’t think anyone here felt it was surprising that a longtime poster at feminist gamers would say that they would raise their son in a positive way so as to respect women, it’s more that we were expressing appreciation that this incredibly important (and often maligned) task was being performed.
August 8th, 2008 at 7:54 am
@Chris … I dont think anyone thinks raising a child to be against DV is a bad thing, I think or at least my main point is that a male child doesnt need some special treatment to be raised right (in fact to me if you raise one child differently from another based on sex haven’t you just proven the problem feminist have in our society).
@PsycoBob though I did like your argument and I can see some points in it, I do believe that most feminist will find your definition of ownership and control to be a very male oriented belief. Meaning the fact that you feel you have the right to control a partner places you in a position of power over said partner which in the end makes what you both have not a partnership.
@Pony … well 58 percent of victims of family murders are female at least its almost a 50 50 on female and males being offed in a family murder (not sure if that’s a win for equality or not) … I do find it messed up that 1/3rd of the abuse starts when a woman get’s pregnant …. I would think it would be the opposite that the abuse would drop because she’s pregnant.
@mythago …. the =) was meant to be a simile face to show that the swings she took at me where in a playful way ….
August 8th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Jeremy: It’s not a win for equality because it’s not equal, and I don’t really see how something like “murder rates” should be a contest. Not to mention the reason that it’s closer is because “family murder” includes sons. Men who abuse their wives often abuse their children as well, so you’ve got men also killing their male children (again, same sense of ownership there) evening out the numbers a bit. Family can mean non-biological, and men are much more likely to abuse and murder children that they did not father themselves–this is definitely an act of ownership over a woman… “children you love aren’t important because they didn’t come from my scrotum, so I’ll just kill off your existing cubs so I can start siring my own.” So that will even out the number a bit. The rest of the numbers, when you look at just partner violence, tells you all you need to know about the male/female murder ratio.
But getting back to men murdering their children, it’s the same pattern of ownership and domination that would cause a man to begin beating his partner when she became pregnant. A not-insignificant number of men view impregnation as an act of domination: “I made you pregnant, that proves to the world that I am fucking you and I have the power to make you pregnant.” This can happen at a conscious or unconscious level. Moreover, a woman faced with a pregnancy may begin to re-evaluate her relationship in a way that she didn’t before she became pregnant. She may have seen warning signs of potential abuse, or felt that the verbal abuse is not something that she wants to bring a child into. When she starts to try to leave, the man begins to beat her. Not to mention, there is the belief that if you can just beat the baby out of her, you can avoid being trapped into commitment — I mean, you just wanted a hole to fuck, not a baby… what gives her the right to ovulate when you didn’t feel like wearing a condom?* (Don’t believe me? Go watch that hi-larious Abortion man video. What a bunch of yucks!) Also, if you’re paranoid and believe that your partner is cheating on you (even if she isn’t), you may decide that the pregnancy is proof that infidelity has happened, and then you’re right up there with Psycho Bob trying to defend that beating and killing someone who dared to act outside of your control isn’t “ownership.”
What I’m trying to say is that hatred and ownership of women is extremely prevalent in our society, even if most to people (including yourself), it’s logically inconsistent. Of course, in a logical world, a man who impregnated a woman would look to reduce any potential harms to his partner and soon-to-be child. That’s being a caring and loving father. But as you’ve seen here, there are men who can “logic away” all sorts of sexist, misogynist beliefs, to the point where they might feel that beating their pregnant wife is actually For The Best For Both Of Them, and not at all an act of authoritarian ownership.
* you being the rhetorical you, not You Jeremy.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I’m not sure how many of the articles about this tragic event everyone looked at, but I found a few that stand out.
The first is from King5.com : http://tinyurl.com/6ky7hj
They indirectly place the blame on Ms. Batten at the end of the article by saying that women in a DV situation “also need a safety plan and in many cases where the threat is imminent danger, going into hiding in a special shelter may be the only way to keep a woman and her children safe” … To which I say, uhm? Women and children should give up and go hunker down in a shelter instead of continuing to live their lives and work at their jobs? Really? Ugh.
The second is from komonews.com : http://tinyurl.com/5hqta
Exact details of what happened are here. “Mellisa Batten died after she was shot eight times with a 9mm handgun” — forgive me if I’m wrong, but it does sound like her husband did this as a crime of passion stemming from his possession/ownership/control complex with her.
Last but not least, from nwsource.com : http://tinyurl.com/6eq6vj
This article details a lot more of Melissa’s life and points out some of the tragic flaws with restraining orders. The article details that Melissa spent two years as a domestic violence lawyer — she knew how the system works. To quote the article “[Melissa] appears to have done all she could – and the coward she called her spouse viciously stole her life” — a sentiment I share. Why would a highly educated woman simper and cower her way off to a battered women’s shelter in the face of her fairly well educated husband? It just doesn’t compute for me….
I wish I had more to say, but the last article sums things up pretty well.
PS - Psycho Bob — Out of all the articles on this murder/suicide other than one from the Seattle Times it was stated that the husband was the one in an extramarital affair. Besides, it wouldn’t change a thing if he’d stalked, harassed, and killed her because she had an affair.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Admin: The fact that I share what someone else owns casts PonyGirl’s claim that you can’t share something you don’t own into doubt. That was the point in bringing up my tool arrangement with my employer. The expectations my boss have are not really that important.
And yes, some people do believe they own their children, just as some people believe they own women. But that doesn’t mean that because some pimps think they own their employees, or because some parents think they can do what they want with their child, doesn’t mean Joseph thought he owned Melissa. We can’t just make shit up about what people thought or felt. Its not our place.
And I find it ironic that you claim I am not arguing in good faith, when in the very same paragraph you start twisting my argument into something its not. I never claimed, argued or implied that killing a woman for sleeping with another man can be done while still respecting her agency and autonomy. I have stated twice that his actions, and the murder was wrong. It cannot be justified, he cannot murder his wife in the cold blooded way that he did with any justification, and he certainly cannot do it while respecting her agency or autonomy.
And yes, I think it can be argued whether it was a case of ownership or not. It very well may be a case where Joseph thought he owned Melissa, but no proof of that is given, we are all just speculating, and I am merely pointing out that there are alternative explanations that can account for his actions. Actions speaker louder then words, but people can act the same way for different reasons, and this conversation is not about his actions, its about the reasons he acted, and that is what I question.
Jeremy: I didn’t say I had any right to control my partner. And I have no idea where you read that in my posts. Care to quote me and explain how you interpreted that?
August 8th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Eek! Second link is supposed to be this : http://www.komonews.com/news/local/26163179.html
The tinyURL got snipped.
August 8th, 2008 at 11:25 am
n3philim: I have read over a dozen articles and have never read any that said the husband was having the affair. Care to post one of those articles? But you are right, it doesn’t matter who had the affair, when it comes to his actions. His actions are wrong no matter what. But I think it would change some things if she was cheating on him. The possibility of anger being the reason rather then ownership is more likely if she was cheating on him. If he was the cheater, then his actions become less comprehensible, and more monstrous. I think he would be a completely different class of monster if he was cheating on her, and killed her, because she was leaving him. That is a completely different class of monster then a man that just kills his wife because he was angry and didn’t know how to deal with that anger. Now maybe from a feminist point of view, all monsters are the same, maybe for some people it doesn’t matter why he killed her, the fact that she was a victim of DV may be enough to classify him as a monster, and that’s the end of the story. I personally don’t subscribe to that philosophy,
But in relation to this conversation, the reasoning for his actions have been speculated and commented on, and I think if she was cheating on him, then it allows for other possible explanations. The initial speculations might be based on faulty facts, and so we should readdress that speculation if the facts turn out to be untrue.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
As a mother of a son, it’s not about him being a ‘time bomb’. It’s about trying to raise him to be a self-respecting, decent man in the face of bombardment with messages that female = inferior and stupid, real men despise women, sympathy toward women means you’re a queer or a wimp or both, and violence is merely an extension of how aggressive and possessive men “should” be.
Bingo.
And as well, it’s also important to educate our daughters to have self-respect, and to not succumb to the cultural messages that tell them their only value is in sexual and/or domestic servitude. In a world of Bratz dolls and pole-dancer fashions for five-year-olds, this is damned hard, but it’s still necessary.
On to a couple of other points:
1. I think a LOT of folks here (and elsewhere) are really confused about what feminism is and means. Far, far too many people, especially young people, have bought into the myth that feminism is man-hating, sex-negative, woman-dominant crusading. While there is a subgroup of feminists with such ideals, they don’t remotely represent the whole or even the majority of feminist thought. Denying that one is a feminist simply because essentialist radicals also use that label is like denying that one is against racism simply because of the existence of the Black Panthers.
In fact, the vast majority of modern feminists are people who understand that it is rigid gender role expectations–for both men and women (and trans folk) that is the underlying cause of the oppression of women.
As the saying goes, feminism is the radical notion that women are people. That’s it in a nutshell. And if you believe that, then you’re a feminist. Don’t be afraid of the word just because some screwballs have run with it and think it’s supposed to mean Women All Good Always and Men All Bad Always.
2. The idea that one’s partner can be “shared” is in itself defacto ownership ideation. Romantic partners are not objects that one has control over. They are independent people. Obviously, anger about cheating is warranted, but the anger should be directed at the breaking of agreements and promises and damaging trust, not at the idea that one’s partner has been somehow tainted by being with someone else.
If your agreement is that you won’t see other people, and your partner breaks that agreement, then of course that’s reason to be upset (though it never, ever earns violence or emotional abuse.)
But if your anger feels more like being mad that someone else played with your toy? That’s an ownership thing. And you need to get over it.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Tal: “2. The idea that one’s partner can be “shared” is in itself defacto ownership ideation.”
I don’t see how. Its common place to imagine that if one is going to share something, that they also own it, but the concept of sharing doesn’t necessitate ownership by the person sharing. Some Native Americans believed that no-one could own land, but they were willing to share it (at least with some settlers, or even if it was just the people in their Tribe.) Its believed that nobody owns Earth, and the strive for reducing Global warming is in part based on the necessity of everyone having to share the Earth, and at least some of its resources(oxygen, atmosphere…etc). As I previously mentioned, I share my tools at work, yet I don’t own them. Its entirely conceivable that one can share, or even refuse to share what they don’t own. And its reasonable and conceivable because ownership is independent from sharing.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Tal — I’m often uncomfortable with the “feminists aren’t man-hating, sex-negative, woman-dominant crusading” people, then to say that “radical feminists” are man-hating, sex-negative, woman-dominionists, and then drag the Black Panthers into the mix. I’m not trying to be confrontational, I just want to point this out because I’ve seen this brought up more than once (not by you, you just drew the short straw here
)
The vast majority radical feminists, are no more “man hating, sex negative, or women dominationist” than any other feminist. What radical feminism believes is that we should not tollerate sexism, in the same way the Black Panthers felt that blacks in America should not tollerate police brutality. I know radical feminists who are partnered with men. I know radical feminists who are subs in dom/sub relationships, and it is a very small percentage of radical feminists indeed who would prefer to “do away with all men,” but because they advocate such an extreme, scary viewpoint, their voices are amplified in order to speak for the larger movement.
There may have been a handful of Black Panthers who really wanted to kill whitey. In reality, the Black Panther party was interested in protecting the black people who lived in the ghetto from police brutality, and creating a strong interior economic system so that people in the ghetto could support one another. They did train for violent encounters, but so that they could exchange force for force. They weren’t interested in going into white neighborhoods and starting shit. They accepted white people into the organization, and frequently, when other white protest groups (like the Weathermen, for example), were interested in attempting to co-opt the Black Panther movement into a larger movement to overthrow the American Government, the Black Panthers pretty much told them to go fuck themselves, that they weren’t going to engage in “Custeristic” tactics (ie, knowingly lead the blacks in the country in a suicide mission against overwhelming forces).
Me, personally, I don’t see anything wrong with this. When you examine what the police were doing in the ghettos in the 60’s and 70’s (hell, even today), you have to ask the question: “when the police fail in their duty to protect the people, and the system itself is corrupt and stacked against you, you have to find a way to keep your people safe.”
And frankly, that’s exactly what happened here, with Batten. She went to the police, she did everything she was supposed to do, and this guy still murdered her. So what are we supposed to do, here? If she were so inclined to arm herself, and he showed up in the parking lot, would we call her a man-hating, radical feminist who believed in female domination for shooting him before he had a chance to shoot her?
These are the things that I think about when we’re so quick to wave our hands and say we’re not like those scary radical feminists who are like the Black Panthers. I feel like we’re letting the establishment, which has an investment in our failure, frame the argument, and it makes me very uncomfortable.
I’m sorry, I know you’re a new poster here and I try to be nicer about this stuff, but I just had to point that out.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Psycho Bob, you’re like a zen yoga master of mental contortion. It’s quite breathtaking to watch.
You could say that a kid doesn’t “own” a toy, that it was bought and paid for by his parents. But if that kid breaks the toy rather than let another kid play with it, that kids rationality is “It’s *MY* toy.” So whether or not you actually own your tools, or your wife, it’s entirely irrelevant. If you BELIEVE YOU OWN IT, you will engage in ownership behavior. Killing someone so that they can’t go and be “owned” by someone else is ownership behavior. Just because you desperately don’t want it to be so doesn’t make it true.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
The very least you can say about Pyscho Bob is he admits he’s psychotic, ie: has no value for human life since he views himself as entitled to it. Its the same mentality as a serial killer hacking up people in his basement: He/She thinks they are entitled to do whatever they want with these people no matter how wrong it is. Hiding skulls of transients in a crawl space or murdering an ex for the ‘crime’ of leaving after you beat them is the same sociapathic behavior expect some people pick random strangers over closer relations. Drop this troll in the portal, Mighty One and give him a good right click on the way out.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Psyco: Can I quote your whole article … its all about control, which leads to the logic that if you would control your partner that you are then not in a partnership but in a sub/dom relationship (I’m not claiming you do this)… you are arguing that the above douche may have shot his wife due to losing control over her or control in some sense … this imo would actually support a doctrine that he was a sexist in the fact that he was mad he didnt have control over his wife anymore.
Tal: I wouldn’t say all feminist are man haters … I would say most of them are outspoken, confrontational, and difficult but then again if they were laid back seen and not heard it would be 1920 and frankly a boring place … (also I wouldnt know about this site because the owner wouldnt have posted about Fat Princess) …
Pony: Don’t get me wrong criminal ratios are not a prize or a contest but they do show an underlying problem with society when they are extremely skewed for instance if your population is 70 white 20 black 10 hispanic and your jail is 70 black 20 hispanic and 10 white, well frankly your society has a problem. The same logic can be placed in the DV area if your murder ratio is close to 50-50 female to male on family murders than it may mean they arent just targeting one sex (i.e. and this is sick they are wiping out the whole lot instead of just the girls and women) … now its obviously we have a problem in the DV area when you look at improvement ratio 70 men 20 women and you look at the sickness that more DV occurs when a woman is pregnant … (though I wonder if the improvement of male is not off, I know men typically don’t report sexual harassment and I’m betting DV is probably lower) …
Also I always wondered why Black Panthers were given a bad rep, I understand there were a few extremes that believed in the wipe them all out philosophy but almost every movement has those in one way or another … as for the protect their people against a group that was suppose to be protecting them but instead oppressing them it makes sense to me … hell even Jefferson supported the concept of over throwing and fighting against the government if it fails you (in fact he was for overthrowing the government every 100 years to make sure corruption didn’t take hold of it).
August 8th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I think you have to be a sexist to think that you can kill a woman just because you don’t like something she said or did.
My mother survived a lifetime of abuse, often taking blows that would have otherwise found me instead. One day, because I stepped in, my dad tried to kill us. So I take this shit pretty personally.
My dad is a sexist, but everyone loves him and excuses his behaviour. Even now, I can’t visit relatives without hearing how I’m a terrible daughter because I don’t visit my dad who loves me so much. The dad who tried to kill me. Who called my mother a whore for leaving him. Who forced my step mom to do the dishes after she broke her hand, saying that she was worthless to him if she couldn’t. Who joked about putting his fist in her mouth after she left him.
I’m sorry, I guess I lost my train of thought. I got caught up in a perfect living example of what MP was talking about.
August 8th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
*pets Cola* I’m sorry if I triggered you.
DK — Psycho Bob’s email address celebrates his awesome, precious-metal boner. Kind of tells you all you need to know.
ETA: you might find my ban message funny: “You’ve triggered one of our posters, and frankly, as I *own* this site, I don’t feel like paying to give air to your anti-woman rhetoric. Face!”
August 8th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I was chatting with ponygal and I realized that my previous post did a really bad job of expressing my thoughts on the subject, looked downright trollish, and I feel I owe it to myself to explain my thought process in more detail.
Let me state right out the incident makes me feel sick to my stomach. I truly hate domestic violence. Whenever I hear a fellow mail talking about how stupid women are I grit my teeth. Men and their attitude towards women drive me up the wall. Trouble is, the problem isn’t western culture. The problem is human beings. We’re a bunch of twisted animals. If anything Western Culture is a positive influence on us nasty overgrown chimps.
I look at things not from a misogynist perspective, but from genuine misanthropy.
Do a survey of violence towards women and attitudes of propriety in the US and in other cultures. We actually do damn well compared to the honor killing bastards of islam, the wife immolating pricks of old hinduism, the ritual misogyny of the Meditterranean Basin, the foot binding beasts of the orient, and we don’t even want to discuss the twisted crap they get up to in the Sudan.
We aren’t dealing with a cultural indoctrination, we’re stuck a with universal genetic tendency. A lovely gift from are tyrannical alpha male monkey nth generation grandfathers. Ponygal disagrees on this, but I find it hard to discount the evidence from the universality of winked at male polyamory, the violent tendencies of male territoriality, and the precisely analogous behavior patterns in our nearest evolutionary relatives.
This does NOT make it better in my eyes, it makes it worse. No matter how hard we try to suppress, it that insane urge to murder over infidelity is always going to be there unless we find a way to edit it out, and god only knows what side effects that might have. It horrifies me even more because I can sometimes see those thoughts and feelings in myself, and it repulses me.
I really do find human beings disgusting on a lot of levels. We’re, mean, stupid, short sighted and violent. Even now Russia and Georgia have initiated some retarded border war. We’re systematically destroing the biosphere. The US is looking down the barrel of an oil crash and a great depression that could very well shatter constitutional government and lead to some kind of totalitarianism. The world would be a better place if we all just dropped dead.
O Toba, why did you spur us on to language?
Why did you not destroy us?
Then we’d never have decimated the species of the Earth.
O Sumer, O Egyot, O our home
Home of our infant innocence
Now all is silted and salted and eroded
And made desert and filth.
O Iron and Bronze, you gave us the tools
to feed and protect ourselves.
You drank our blood.
Our kinsmens’ blood.
O Oil, Coal, fatal energy.
You sowed the seeds of our comfort
And are killing us by fire.
These horrors are the worst that life can ever know!
And so I think to myself that if only there were a mind that could think rationally about our problems without getting sidetracked by our emotions, humankind could be happy. If only we had AIs to act as the parents we’ve never had we might have peace and sanity. They could never love us but they’d never hate or fear us or lose their patience with us either. (Stanley Kubrick, and Mssrs Cameron and Wachowski are hopeless anthopomorphists.)
But I’m human, and the same emotional needs keep me from giving up on life. We also have an inbred need for community to go with our violence. And we do have our accultured minds to help us look past teh tyranny of our genes. Which is the only thing we can do if we have a chance of living in a civilization.
But god, this sort of thing makes me wonder if it is worth trying to preserve humanity.
August 8th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
My mother had a very similar thing growing up, glad to see your mother escaped and your step mother also escaped … (hopefully you did too)
What I am lost at is the site saying she should have went into hiding 0.o ? So she is suppose to hide and give up her life because she decided she didnt want to be with a douche anymore … that is fed up. She did what she was suppose to do and frankly the system failed in its responsibility not her but the system (go figure).
August 8th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Duke, for what its worth in some respects youre a man after my own heart, for the most part. There is a reason why I felt the nuclear fallout scene in COD4 had a certain distinctive beauty about it, and its because of my occasional daydream about these savages who run the world finally going through with it and nuking the planet. Though Im partial to a certain hatred of life in general, not just humanity. Im not some hayseed hippie who thinks were somehow an aberration. Were simply better at dealing out that constant of life: causing death - better than every other animal on the planet.
Im not always like this though, because if I were I would end up a total loon. No, I tend to take my mind off it by doing things like listening to Jamiroquai, which I think I might just do now. If I can credit one good thing to humanity, it’s the ability of using imagination to create and enjoy things that take our minds off of how bad humanity is.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I have been following all your comments and this is truly an inspiring conversation. There is truly so much to absorb… but I just have one thought I would like to share.
So, this guy, Batten is it… He threatens his wife with a gun, she seeks help, and obviously doesn’t get the response that is needed.
I doubt that if someone such as a famous star or a politician or a police officer etc etc had been threatened at gunpoint, the threatening party would probably be prosecuted, no? What I can’t understand, and I feel pangs of confusion, is that if her life was threatened, why wasn’t this guy arrested immediately?
And it is probably because domestic situations are all too often not given the attention that they need. I have a friend whose ex-boyfriend came over to her house, beat the crap out of her boyfriend, and threw her to the ground breaking out all her front teeth and part of her jaw as she hit the sidewalk. When she recovered at the hospital and tried to press charges, the lawyers she was speaking to advised her to drop them because there was “no proof”. There were only 3 witnesses, the ex, the boyfriend, and her. Of course the boyfriend and she would be on the same side, so the lawyer told her it would be a “he-said she-said trial” and wouldn’t go anywhere.
Unfortunately, she was not emotionally stable enough to continue to pursue charges after that.
I think that HEREIN lies the problem, and I hate to say we feminists are totally right, but seriously. She was actually DISCOURAGED from seeking justice, because it was a “lover’s spat” or “ex-lover’s spat” or some such nonsense.
So yes, we need to make a BIG DEAL about these things.
August 8th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Cola, I hope you are able to cut those toxic relatives out of your life.
In other words, they act like men are supposed to act, but because they’re women and/or doing it on behalf of women’s interests, that’s a big negative?
August 8th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I may have phrased that inelegantly.
It’s just we’re discussing things that seem like common sense to me, ie, radical feminists are not man-haters, that that image has clearly been largely perpetuated by males in positions of power who feel they have something to lose if these “uppity” women should ever achieve their goal of true equality (Rush “Feminazi” Limbaugh comes to mind), so they try to create this artificial division between radical feminism and the more palatable (to them, to our patriarchal culture) variety.
Slightly off topic, but I find it really telling that even men who identify as libertarian still have a difficult time accepting feminism because it’s been so drilled into their head that that is a strictly “leftist” cause, even when, if they were really practicing what they preached, true libertarianism is impossible without feminism (I’m not a libertarian myself, but I know a few).
Anyways, while I agree somewhat with the argument that you can never be 100% sure when attributing motives to someone who is no longer around to question, from what I’ve read I’d tend to believe that his actions *were* strongly informed by a chauvinist world outlook based on possession, even if he wasn’t conscious of it. That’s the thing, he doesn’t need to be conscious of it to still be dangerous.
It’s often the “passive” forms of sexism that make it possible for the most overt forms to find any support whatsoever.
August 8th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Maybe they’re just “outspoken” because you don’t get your rights recognized by being quiet when they’re trampled on. As for “confrontational”, see above. Confronting what’s wrong with our society and how it treats certain people as garbage is fine. And I’m more than sure difficult just means, “Why won’t they just do what we say?” Kind of like being “nicer” or “more reasonable”.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Schopenhauer would have approved of the Jamiroqui principle Bends. Maybe not the band itself, but then who knows. He may have been a nasty, bitter, sarcastic misogynist, but he was honest, and that’s more than can be said for a lot of philosophers.
Very much on my reading list.
August 9th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Pix — this shit is so common. It happens in areas both liberal and conservative, and it’s absolutely infuriating.
My own experience was fortunately not even near as dire, but still very illuminating. I had gone out on a date with a guy that had gone bad. I told him to leave me alone and that I didn’t want to see or hear from him again, and he began harrassing me… bigtime. Like, 14 phonecalls in one hour. So I told him “cut it out or I’m going to the police,” and he kept calling, so, I went to the police.
I explained that I went out on one date with a guy, didn’t want to continue seeing him, and was currently being harrassed by him, and basically I just wanted to file a report with the police so that 1) I could tell him that I’d filed a report with the police and he better cut it the fuck out now, and 2) Have something already documented in case he decided to escalate stuff.
The police kept referring to him as “my ex-boyfriend.” I explained that no, he was not my ex-boyfriend, there was no intimate relationship that went sour, there was a single date that went bad and his behavior was just harrassment, plain and simple. I admit, I was making such a fine point of this for selfish reasons because I knew that anything that even smelled of domestic dispute would be written off as a “lover’s quarrel” and I was trying to get across to these guys that I wanted them to take this as seriously as I did. The officer writing it up insisted on referring to him as “my ex-boyfriend.” It was what was written on the report.
I was so pissed off by this. Fortunately, he was intelligent enough to know better than to keep trying to harrass me after I’d gone to the police, and the calls stopped after I told him I’d been to the police and had filed a report and I could begin documenting his phonecalls for a harrassment charge. But in the meantime I had this horrible feeling that, if he became a full-blown stalker and I had to go to court for a restraining order, the “ex-boyfriend” tag would dog me, and I wouldn’t be taken seriously, I would just be seen as some crazy bitch girlfriend who’s trying to ruin some poor, nice boy’s life.
Most, and I would hazzard to say ALL women know about this. They know that if they are threatened by their intimate partner, the police won’t take them seriously, and that’s part of the system. Hell, as my example proves, the guy doesn’t even have to be an intimate partner. The police naturally and stubbornly refuse to listen to a grievance by a woman filed about a man as anything other than a domestic dispute. And the system corrupts all the way down, because even idealistic, sympathetic officers and attorneys are going to look at women who are discouraged by the system further up and don’t prosecute (or worse, return to) their abusers are going to start to think that women just want the abuse and stop taking them seriously. The only way to get this shit done is to take a hard line against abuse, not blame the victim, and offer her resources to be able to cut the ties with her abuser. And we’re not interested in that as a society. And that’s called patriarchy.
August 9th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Excellent post. I especially like your take on the ‘blame the victim’ mentality so pervasive in our culture. The person who does the stalking and the killing is the criminal to be blamed. I would agree that there is definitely a tragically familiar pattern to these kinds of crimes, and that patriarachal beliefs, while not the sole cause of these acts, certainly play a significant role in framing the thinking of the killer. Thank you.
WD
August 9th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Pix: That story made me so angry. Literally had my mouth agape while reading it.
Mighty Ponygirl: I wish more people could see that.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
[...] Domestic violence claims XBox Developer [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
[...] Domestic violence claims XBox Developer [...]
August 15th, 2008 at 9:32 am
without trying to disrepect anyone’s veiws on matters like this.
but in my humble opinion i think there is a level of seperation between your average run of the mill sexist behaviour and what is obviously an ab-normal mind.
People act in a certain way because they get what they want from those actions.
be it bullying with either physical, verbal agression, manipulation and other forms of control. In an abnormal mind there isn’t a line to stop this control and it spirals.
but when it comes to bad behaviour, you may want to beleive that it’s just men , but it’s not .. it’s society … the majority of people fill the roles that are expected for them .. as offensive as it seems to you or me there is possitive re-enforcement of the caveman male and the airhead female… to name just two social archtypes
There is no answer , there is no quick fix .. you can go on about how wrong things are … but at the end of the day we are all powerless to make a difference… people don’t care about small insignificant injustices
And that is why you make your battle cry over the big issues , because if you take something that can be seen by everyone as wrong then there is a chance for change.
Worst still every time you pin your banner to a cause that is frivilous and easily dismissed the less voice you have next time you choose a cause even if that time it’s more worthy.
to others your seen as the boy who cried wolf
Admin’s response: The fact that you think that a woman who did everything she was supposed to do and was still murdered is no big deal, along with the fact that you seem to think you can come in here and tell us what we should and shouldn’t discuss just tells us what a privileged, patronizing ass you are. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:27 am
I figured this was the best place to post this:
http://www.the-isb.com/?p=510
Trying to get word around.
August 19th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
That headline just made me want to throw something in anger. The sorry excuse of a man killed his estranged wife for nothing and may have killed any chance of Goldeneye appearing on Xbox live in the process.
August 24th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Women know that we live in a world and society where male violence against them is common and, unfortunately, probable depending on where they live and what their personal lives entail. Why don’t more women own and carry firearms? I’ve always wondered this and am still baffled by it.
Consequently, I am sorry to hear about another senseless act of violence against another human being.
August 25th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Dionades–I don’t think that Batten arming herself would have mattered much in this situation, FWIW. Her killer had the element of surprise, she wouldn’t have been able to “shoot him first.” That’s how most of these things happen. People think gun ownership will magically protect them and it doesn’t: If someone is out to kill you, chances are, they’ll have drawn their weapon and shot before you even see them and have a chance to reach for your own firearm.
The solution isn’t that women need to arm themselves — the solution is that the criminal justice system needs to take us seriously. Even if Batten had armed herself and managed to shoot him first, statistically speaking, the likelihood of her being acquitted because of self-defense is quite low if you’re a woman who shoots a man.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:56 am
It’s really hard for me to post on this topic, since it drags up many painful memories of an abusive childhood but at the same time we do need to start getting all this shit out in the open.
Let’s start at the beginning, I was raised to possess, beat, objectify and disrespect women. that’s what was taught in my home and outside my home. My father was a violent sociopath who did things you wouldn’t believe if I told you, and whilst we were all subject to his rage, no one more so than my mother. I will tell you that he forced us to watch as he held her head to an open fire and burned her hair off, that was just one incident and one I feel able to talk about.
Why do I say these things?
Well to show that despite being brought up and conditioned to act and feel in this way towards women, it is possible to break out of the cycle.
The more I think about feminism the more I realise that it’s not just about freeing the women, us men are just as trapped in these godawful roles that we feel compelled to try and live up to, the role of strong provider, the unattainable perfect breadwinner. In this respect I disagree with MPG’s analysis of what drove this man to do what he did, I don’t think he was thinking those things, I think playing the role of being a man just got too much and when he realised he had lost control of it all, he really did lose control of it all. Men are conditioned to be all or nothing types of people, it’s why most of us don’t deal well with conflict and blow up so easily.
It breaks my heart to think of Mellisa’s killing, and the seeming unwillingness and inability of us all to prevent what was clearly a tragedy waiting to happen.
All we can do is make a personal decision to start speaking out against all this shit and finding the courage to stand up and say that we disagree when we see behaviour which reinforces these heinous fucking roles we’ve all been placed in.
For the record, I was raised and bathed in violence, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t an aggressive bone in my body, and whilst I’ve never struck or ever considered striking my partner, nevertheless the rage is always boiling away beneath the surface, it took me decades to realise that not hitting wasn’t enough, the words and screams are also violence.
It’s a daily battle, but it can be won.
Peace out folks.
August 25th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Cruithne,
It’s difficult to find the words to say in the face of that sort of senseless violence and rage that you grew up with. I think I want to say both “I’m sorry” and “congratulations on bucking the cycle” and “stay strong” all at once.
But mostly, I wanted to touch on the similarity of these accounts of abuse. True, there might be some variation in the way that you or Pony see it, but what we can all agree on, the main point that we need to hammer into the heads of gamers and non-gamers alike, is that this shit is systemic. Too often people write off events like this as the work of someone crazy, who was obviously out of their mind.
The question now is, what do we do to raise the level of discourse about domestic violence? How do we get people, not just talking, but talking in the right direction?
August 25th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
You’re very kind bg but I would like to emphasise that I didn’t share that in order to garner pity, I’m very conscious that this thread is about yet another murdered women dead at the hands of DV, the last thing we should be doing is focussing sympathy in the direction of yet another guy with anger problems.
I say that because whilst I disagree perhaps with MPG’s full analysis on why this happened I nevertheless do share her and other’s sense of anger that it was allowed to happen, and the very worst thing about this case is the fact that it was allowed to happen, it wasn’t an unstoppable act. You see whilst I can look back and see where my own anger issues come from I have never once lost sight of the fact that ultimately it is I who am responsible for my actions, no amount of bad conditioning gives me license to beat or harm another human being.
My point being that we need to look at both the causes for these things and ways of preventing them from happening in the first place but those two things aren’t equal, prevention ought to be the priority and the first step to prevention is educating people that they need to take responsibility for their actions, men especially have a duty to manage their anger.
September 7th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I want to tell you all that he was absolutely of the mind that he owned her. She did not recognize it until she started thinking for herself, once he could not control her with yelling or threats, which she hated, she was a soft girl and very loving. She believed she was strong and could make everything okay. The problem was is that you can’t help a man like that. She went to consoling with him to help him thru the divorce until he started threatening her again. The reason he killed himself was to get pity. The proof is in the pudding, some people do think he did it for love sick reasons. We are her family and we know the truth it was exactly for the reason of martydom.
Please don’t confuse this with the idea that he actually loved her. Real true love never kills.
Missy’s Family.
March 1st, 2009 at 2:40 am
[...] Domestic violence claims XBox Developer [...]