"It's extreme masculinity – not love or despair – that drives a father to kill his children"

Submitted by Mastodon on Thu, 2015-03-12 20:42

Article here. Excerpt:

'The messages that emerge from such narratives are double-edged, adding fuel to the fire they seek to douse. A similar problem arises with broader discussions of fathers’ rights and masculinity; no one dares to say “what you have lost was never yours to begin with”. If men grow up expecting to acquire ownership of people in the same way one might acquire wealth – as easy as sticking pink and blue pegs in one’s car in The Game of Life – then they are destined to end up feeling robbed. The “masculinity in crisis” narrative already tells them they are being deprived of something essential, something to which all men who lived before them had access but to which they, inexplicably, do not.
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Masculinity is not some fragile butterfly on a wheel. It depends on reducing other people to objects. The solution is not to recreate an imaginary golden age in which said objects were – so we tell ourselves – more pliable and less likely to disrupt the narrative. A world in which not only jobs were stable and not going anywhere, but neither were women and children. That world dehumanised over half the human raceand we should temper our sympathy for those men who would openly mourn its passing. As the feminist Kathy Miriam argues, “the problem of ‘masculinity’ has displaced a systemic, structural analysis of male power. And has displaced . . . the problem of men possessing women”. Our obsession with masculinity’s supposedly never-ending crises merely bolsters the myth that if women and children are people, men cannot be. 

Confronted with violence and cruelty, we need to speak plainly. Family annihilators are not loving fathers. This is not love or despair, nor is it “masculinity in crisis.” It is masculinity at its most raw and extreme; an absolute statement of ownership over bodies and lives. If you can’t have them, no one can. We cannot reduce the acts of men such as Sykes and Fuller to self-harm plus two or three.'

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Australian mother charged with murder in deaths of 8 children

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Comments

It must be because of extreme femininity.

In fact, more children are killed each year by their mothers than their fathers. And more often mothers kill boys. We recognize this by giving the killing of a child by its mother a special name: infanticide. Which is a lesser charge than murder and punished with a smaller sentence. Mostly because it's mostly women who commit infanticide.

Some have suggested even SIDS is just a way to cover up for women killing their children.

And when Andrea Yager in Houston killed her five boys, the amount of sympathy for her from feminists and female columnists was overwhelming. They even tried to blame dad.

But when a man kills his children, it cannot be from despair or even mental illness--it's the pure expression of masculinity. Cause, as we all know, women are good and men are bad.

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Submitted by el cid on Sat, 2015-03-14 16:41