Sadly, this is not completly unsurprising in a culture that celebrates both men feeling entitled to women and violence. Also sad (but equally predictable) is the chorus of 'what about the menz?' talking points trotted out to derail any kind of meaningful discussion.
A post that's framed in an imflammatory and sexist manner like the OP has about as much chance at creating "meaningful discussion" as someone who grabs a couple of news articles about murders in Detroit and makes some comments about how terrible black people are.
Did the OP make any comments about how awful men are? All I see is someone lamenting the increasing frequency of women getting murdered for the horrible awful crime of rejecting a guy romantically. The closest thing you could find to being 'inflammatory' is a paraphrased quote lacking context, which, at this point has been corrected in the OP.
(rubs forehead) Ok, its depressingly not new that this happens far too often, but all kinds of horrible that we've had two examples now in a matter of days.
All I have going through my head is the saying 'A mans worst fear is being laughed at - a woman's worst fear is being murdered'
EDIT:
mecegirl said:
CaptainChip said:
That conclusion is pretty terrible when you consider the fact that men usually make up about 70 to 80 percent of homicide victims worldwide...
That conclusion is a reference to a quote from writer Margret Atwood when she was talking about what men fear from women vs what women fear from men. So its pretty relevant to the discussion.
Gonna copy and paste this in here as I should have made the context of the saying/quote clearer to explain why it had been in my thoughts regarding these events.
I guess they should have began a long term abusive relationship with those men, and drag out their death by domestic violence into slow terrifying decades. They didn't die because they rejected a man. They died because they ran into an insane person, who accepted that murder was an acceptable option they could take.
Once a person commits an act of murder they no longer a atheist, feminist, veteran, capitalist. They belong to new and exclusive demographic of insane murderer.
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/386066/Bo-Tuan-eats-victims-heart-after-row-about-noodles-in-China.
Do we need change the way men think about noodle entitlement in china?
(rubs forehead) Ok, its depressingly not new that this happens far too often, but all kinds of horrible that we've had two examples now in a matter of days.
All I have going through my head is the saying 'A mans worst fear is being laughed at - a woman's worst fear is being murdered'
Well then, women (Or at least, the women you reference here - it bears mentioning that you don't speak for all of us) fear stupid shit. Men get murdered at three of four times the rate of women. They've got miles more reason to be terrified of it than women do.
Al Green had boiling hot grits thrown on him by his woman
Karla Homolka kidnapped and murdered people and the PoS walks free today
Lizzie Borden
Recently in my neighborhood a woman murdered her ex because he won custody of their children
Lets not sensationalize this people. Evil people kill others everyday for various reasons.
I just read about a woman who was caught after twelve years on the run with her child. She had kidnapped her, at the time 5 year old, daughter and ran off to Mexico with her. Her ex-husband had custody of the child and she was supposed to bring her back to her father, but never showed up. She also spent the twelve years claiming to her daughter the husband had abused her (which he claims is untrue).
A horrible crime and truly tragic for her family (the girl is now 17 and none of her family have seen her in all this time). Last I heard, she hadn't even seen her father, yet, as she was seeing a psychologist. I would never point it out as an example of how women are horrible, like the OP seems to have done with men and these stories. I'd only point it out as an example of how horrible that one person is. She is to blame, not her gender.
And I'm certain I could find similar stories of women killing/maiming men for frivolous reasons as well. The act is horrible. The perpetrator is horrible. That's where is should end.
May those women receive justice for the crimes committed against them.
The problem is that you're simply assuming that the frequency of these things is increasing, when you provide no evidence of that, just a situation where you had two cases happening close together. Yes, it's terrible and the men involved will be prosecuted to what will likely be the fullest extent of the law. It's always happened, however, and it's no evidence that these types of cases are common or increasing.
Think about it this way: two white people get murdered by Muslims within a few days, and people use that as pretext to claim that this is a huge, growing problem that needs to be "discussed" when in reality those are the only two cases of that happening this year. You might see that person as not really caring about the murders, but just trying to make Muslims look bad in order to push a narrative.
Pointing out that men, for example, get murdered much more often than women is not distracting from the "real issue", it's simply putting it in context. Trying to block out all other contextual factors in a given issue is the most effective way to silence others. "Talk about what I want to talk about or you are derailing things" is, in itself, a way to stifle debate.
These forums are going to get really depressing if we're going to have a thread every time a man kills a woman... It sucks, but really, what is the discussion value? There are shitty people in the world who do shitty things and they deserve to live the rest of their lives in a shitty existence as punishment.
Are we supposed to have a debate over who has it worse? I mean obviously there's some truth in you quote, but the content of your post kind of makes it seem like you've just said "look at this, that's why it's more scary for women", and then left it at that to make me feel ashamed of my gender.
On a lighter, yet still related tone, here is Louis CK comparing the courage of a man asking a woman out, and the courage of a woman saying "yes": Before people jump down my throat, yes, he's exaggerating. It's a very common strategy in comedy and just because it's a touchy subject, doesn't mean you need to get offended.
What interests me is that this seems to be a predominately women problem.
The fear that rejecting an advance will provoke vindication from the rejected. This specific but prolific fear so many women are saddled with.
I've been told stories about a rejection turning ugly. Some aren't murder, but murder attempts. Some are just a tarnished reputation, setting up a path for ugly verbal abuse. Just because a women exercised her right to say no. That's a scary thing, never knowing who is a land mine ready to try and ruin your life. Just walking up to you.
I suppose it happens to gay guys too. Some men don't take no for an answer. But the pain of rejection to make people act out hideously seems to be saddled on men. Even I'm afraid of the thought of having to tell a man no.
How many males worry about that? A women making an advance, and you rejecting it, and being met with physical assault? Cuz I know women aren't expected or trained to ask dudes out. Nor be aggressive in asking them out.
That is a clear societal problem that needs to be fixed. Holy shit, a man asking you out should not feel like he just pulled a gun on you.
I'll just leave this here, so you can tell us again how 1 in 11 people being shoplifters makes shoplifting fairly common place, but 1 in 6 women being raped doesn't make rape/sexual abuse/assault commonplace.
You know what isn't commonplace? 1 in 33 men being raped. 1 in 33 for men vs 1 in 6 for women, but please, also do keep going on about how bad men have it in order to trivialize and demean the abuse women face at the hands of men. But, of course, we're to believe the people who do this kind of thing in every single thread about women and issues that affect them that are made on these forums totally aren't sexist/misogynistic.
And proportions of the population raped don't have any bearing on the fact that small number of people of both genders are psychos who kill other people for retarded reasons. Men kill women, men kill men, women kill men and women kill women, all of these are tragic, but don't prove anything beyond 'people can do terrible things to other people'.
While your link is better referenced than I expected, I do question its modern value and relevance to this thread about psychos committing murder. Specifically the total number of people who have been raped/assault/made victims of crime, while making for scary, clickbait claims, is a far less important figure than the current rate those crimes are committed. To use a hypothetical (because I'm speculating here) example, the 50s were a more sexist time (we can agree on that yes?), therefore I'd expect a greater proportion of women alive at the time to have been raped, and they would have been included in the '1 in 6' figure from your article, skewing the number higher as the modern rape rate will be lower than when their rapes occurred.
Crime rates are what matters, as they can show us trends of rising/falling crime, as well as the more recent state of crime. And comparing the 1998 data referenced by that link (which is pretty damn old by now), with FBI statistics paints a far more optimistic picture. Firstly, potential errors in the survey. They report 0.3% of women being raped in the last 12 months, with these victims averaging 2.9 rapes/victim. With A US population of 275.85 million, assuming 50% male/female ratio gives us a figure of approximately 1,199,948 rapes/year. This is greater than the FBI figures by over ten fold, as they report a 'mere' 93,103 rapes in 1998 (34.4 per 100,000 inhabitants). Now this isn't 100% conclusive given the intrinsically vague nature of surveys, but it does suggest the picture wasn't as bad in 1998 as the survey wants you to think. Now if we compare to 2012, there were 84,376 reported rapes, which is 52.9 per 100,000 female inhabitants, so if we adjust for 50% gender ratio we get 26.45 for 2012 vs 34.4 for 1998 (or 52.9 vs 68.8 if you adjust the 1998 numbers to match the 2012 ones instead of the other way around). Also, I don't subscribe to the 'X% of rape goes unreported' line, because there's no way to confirm the data, so it's essentially worthless speculation. But whichever way you slice it, there is less rape now (or at least in 2012, the last year with completed data) than it was in the late 90s. This is a very good thing. Interestingly, these data do not include any instances of male rape, as the FBI definition specifies female.
So what's the take home message here? Think about the statistics you see I guess. Also, psychos are psychos, neither gender has a monopoly on them, and they do terrible things. This does not however lead to the conclusion that either men or women are intrinsically worse/less moral than the other.
Sources:
US popoulation
http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table
I'll just leave this here, so you can tell us again how 1 in 11 people being shoplifters makes shoplifting fairly common place, but 1 in 6 women being raped doesn't make rape/sexual abuse/assault commonplace.
You know what isn't commonplace? 1 in 33 men being raped.
Oh, certainly, sir and/or madam. However, considering how "1 in 33" is blatantly false, I'm not sure how that's pertinent to the discussion. Here, let me show you:
Here's a more focused study showing that most sexual violence and rape occurs between teenagers, and nearly half (48%) of offenders are female - they're even more likely than boys to engage in gang rape.
And here's a more general study on wider society as a whole showing that men make nearly 40 percent of rape victims, and that number may very well be climbing. Hell, even the study that infamous(ly false) stat comes from, that states that 1 in 5 women have been raped, shows that nearly the same number of men have been raped, too. Granted, said study doesn't classify it as rape, because rape is when you're forcibly penetrated, and male rape victims are typically forced to penetrate, meaning it doesn't fit the legal definition of rape.
Meaning I could tie a man down and sit on his dick and force him to penetrate me, and even if he has unassailable proof he can't convict me of rape, because I didn't penetrate him. And given how the legal system goes easy on women, I might very well get off scott-free. Hell, if I get pregnant from it, he has to pay me child support.
That trivalized enough for ya?
And thanks for calling me sexist (Or rather, internally misogynistic, I guess) for caring about this shit when your own comment in this thread proves that someone has to, otherwise most people wouldn't think it's okay to say that.
I'll just leave this here, so you can tell us again how 1 in 11 people being shoplifters makes shoplifting fairly common place, but 1 in 6 women being raped doesn't make rape/sexual abuse/assault commonplace.
You know what isn't commonplace? 1 in 33 men being raped. 1 in 33 for men vs 1 in 6 for women, but please, also do keep going on about how bad men have it in order to trivialize and demean the abuse women face at the hands of men. But, of course, we're to believe the people who do this kind of thing in every single thread about women and issues that affect them that are made on these forums totally aren't sexist/misogynistic.
Thread is not about rape Zeconte. OP has it about women getting killed for turning down strange men for a date or sex and how it is becoming a trend or something. Again sensationalistic I know, but hey I look at facts. So I cited abuse. NOT RAPE, which is also down since the 90's, to show this really is not a trend.
But since you want to source RAINN. And they source the National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey.
From RAINN
"1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed rape; 2.8% attempted rape).
17.7 million American women have been victims of attempted or completed rape."
The source is this.Violence Against Women Survey.
The survey consisted of telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 8,000 U.S. women and 8,000 U.S. men about their experiences as victims of various forms of violence, including intimate partner violence. The survey compared intimate partner victimization rates among women and men, specific racial groups, Hispanics and Non-Hispanics, and same-sex and opposite-sex cohabitants. It also examined risk factors associated with intimate partner violence, the rate of injury among rape and physical assault victims, injured victims' use of medical services, and victims' involvement with the justice system. Among the survey findings are that intimate partner violence is pervasive in U.S. society, with nearly 25 percent of surveyed women and 7.6 percent of surveyed men reporting that they were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime; 1.5 percent of surveyed women and 0.9 percent of surveyed men said the were raped and/or physically assaulted by a partner in the previous 12 months. Based on these estimates, this report indicates that approximately 1.5 million women and 834,732 men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States. Policy implications of the survey findings are discussed.
One telephone survey with 8,000 women in the sample pool and using advocacy research. Please Zeconte try and actually listen to the rebuttals to this "fact" with a critical ear and try and control your bias. And calling bullshit out as bullshit is not misogynistic or sexist. It is what critically thinking people do. I try not to accept other peoples facts unless I do research on them myself.
One kind of descriptive policy research, carried out by people who are deeply concerned about certain social problems, such as poverty or rape. Their studies seek to measure social problems with a view to heightening public awareness of them and providing a catalyst to policy proposals and other action to ameliorate the problem in question. Occasionally, advocacy research studies bend their research methods in order to inflate the magnitude of the social problem described, and thereby enhance the case for public action to address the issue. See Neil Gilbert 's article: ?Advocacy Research and Social Policy?, Crime and Justice (1997)
So automatically I take ADVOCATES and the claims they make with research with a grain of salt. Call me silly.
Are some dudes really surprised by this? Why do they think some women are so wary of random guys asking them out? The reactions that I've gotten after turning a guy down have ranged from polite acceptance to him trying to hit me with his car. What's worse are the ones that go from being polite to full of rage the moment you turn them down. It's like Russian roulette sometimes.
Also its not like taking this issue seriously minimizes other issues, and it's not like we can't start a thread about how often men get murdered, why, and who murders them. But since we are on the topic, statistically it is more common for women to be murdered either in situation like this or by their boyfriends/husbands or ex boyfriends/husbands.
Al Green had boiling hot grits thrown on him by his woman
Karla Homolka kidnapped and murdered people and the PoS walks free today
Lizzie Borden
Recently in my neighborhood a woman murdered her ex because he won custody of their children
Lets not sensationalize this people. Evil people kill others everyday for various reasons.
In all fairness, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the charges. If it weren't for that damn catchy (and inaccurate) nursery rhyme, she wouldn't even pop up as a blip on the radar of female killers.
Instead, let's talk about Mary Bell, who killed a 3 year old boy in 1968 at the age of 11. Throughout the course of the investigation, it was revealed that she had killed another kid before, and had several other violent incidents. She was convicted of two counts of "Manslaughter because of Diminished Responsibility". She was sentenced to life in prison. She was released at the age of 23, and has had a child, although her identity, and that of her child, is protected by court order.
Seriously, that's who should be used instead of Lizzie Borden.
Excuses are a dime a dozen when it comes to physical assaults and any crime in general. If such physical assaults are commonplace in the US then the victims should report them to the police and let the justice system short things out.
Forgive my double quoting here but I'd like to address this from a standpoint of being in this situation.
I'm going to second what thaluikhain has said in that many people don't have faith in the justice system.
In my city (which is a majority of "minority" groups not white people btw), if you are a white male you are fairly exempt from justice. Like the police will overlook whatever you've done and go pay attention to someone else. I've witnessed it. I get identified as female much to my dismay (i'd rather people be confused as to my gender tbh). However, back when I rollerbladed a lot, I was rollerblading and stopped at a crosswalk/stop sign (as you should whether pedestrian or motorist) and checked to make sure that it was safe for me to cross. It was. There was a cop car on the corner. I had short hair. And my helmet on. Basically following every safety rule I could (back when I did follow them doing bike riding/rollerblading). So I get almost half through the crosswalk and this white dude in a lifted pickup truck decides to speed down the street (the speed limit is 40mph and judging by wind velocity and how quickly he got to the next stop sign that he also blew he was going at least 60), almost hit me, yell at me to "get out of the middle of the fucking road", and run the stop sign. He made my hair blow into my face, to the point I could barely see so I did the smart thing. I finished crossing and sat down on the curb and took the helmet off to fix my hair. Cop decides to pull ME over instead of the jackass who almost hit me because obviously blonde is going to fall off sidewalk and crack head open? But he "let me off with a warning". So, rightly so, I DO NOT trust the cops in my city. Actually, technically they are from the next city over and not our city cops as we don't have the money for our own police force again. Regardless, that's still shitty behaviour as I'd think the dude breaking at least 3 laws in a motor vehicle is more dangerous than someone fixing their hair.
Anyway, that's my backstory of not trusting "my city's police force". Not to mention how many times I've heard that they've laughed at rape victims. Which is WHY I haven't reported any of my 3 rapes. Not to mention they're all me vs them and one of them is a Marine. It's not that I think that it's justifiable that they happened. But I know that our police force isn't going to do shit. Our justice system is absolute SHIT in my area. And also it's better for my mental health that I not have to go to court over any of these. I'm in therapy it's good enough for me (also one just got out of jail on an unrelated incident and not anywhere near to me state wise). Yes, victims SHOULD report assaults. However, sometimes it's not possible. Not to mention there's also the race issues. Black people statistically aren't always taken seriously by police. I'd have to find where I read that if you want a source but right now I'm about to go to bed so...kind of tired.
Let's not count the numerous times people (usually male but sometimes female) have asked me out and then threatened physical violence if I don't date them. And it's people I DON'T KNOW who do it. No way am I going to go out with someone that if I reject them (nicely by the way as in "No thanks I'm not interested") is going to threaten me with physical violence (and people wonder why I carry a knife on me....).
As long as the simple, dogmatic, "won't someone who isn't me do something" explanations are accepted as gospel, nothing is going to change.
Yes. Women are sometimes the victims of violence for rejecting men's advances. No, that's not okay. It would be lovely if that were to happen less often.
Reducing it to "entitlement" and "rape culture" and all the popular pop phrases boils it down to one thing:
You are doing something horrible to me! No, I'm not doing anything to you, stop screaming in my ear and @$%# off.
Being the first person in that conversation is no more noble, brilliant, or above all, useful than being the second.
Consider this:
Women are often defined by things they may not want to be or over which they have little control. Being beautiful. Caring for children. Keeping things going, keeping things in order. Women are expected to be weak, or at least weaker, to require help.
Conversely, however, society often expects people to help women. Holding doors, giving up seats on buses, helping with heavy packages. You're not supposed to hit girls, and while people may look away in some situations, such an act is almost never met with approval in modern western society, whatever the circumstances.
Men are defined by things over which they may seem to have more control- their jobs, primarily, but also (and all too often related) their salaries, their ability to provide for their families, and their ability to attract women. Men are expected to be strong, or at least stronger, and not to require help.
...So what happens to men who find themselves without that power, without that strength, without that definition? The man who can't get the job he's told he ought to have, attract the woman whose absence raises doubt about his masculinity?
What if, God forbid, he is hurting or does need help?
In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, one of the things the author notes in her interviews with men in counseling for having committed domestic abuse is that one of her interviewees says that while he may have said he was "out of control" when he hit his partner, it was actually the first time in a long time he had actually felt in control.
We keep telling men the world is theirs, the power is theirs, and for the vast majority of men (and an increasing number, given economic conditions), that is a lie. A lie that is told every day.
Trying to wield the power they're told is theirs, some men turn to violence.
And some kill themselves. Some come back from wars with PTSD, but they're deeply entrenched in a culture that says if they're hurting, the problem is with them.
Some join groups like ISIS. Seriously- a report was on the radio today about young Islamic men journeying from Europe to join up largely because employment at home was near 50%.
And of course there's any number of advertisers who are willing to tell them they just need to drink this whiskey, smoke this cigarette, wear this cologne, eat this artery-clogging fast-food, drive this SUV, and they'll be real men.
TLDR? (Because, of course, there must be a TLDR...)
Yes, this is a real problem. But it's not a problem that you can fish out of the system like a bad fuse, and it's not a problem that you can just dump on men's shoulders without any accounting for how it got there or what you, personally, are willing to consider doing to change it.
If your sole addition to the process is some easy little canned quip about "men's entitlement" or "won't someone think about the menz" like this was a one-sided equation and the solution was simple, well, look up to that conversation up there in bold and italic. You've already said your line.
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