Drama Queen for a Day

MRAs: Bigger Drama Queens than Batman

Drama queens: so annoying, but so, so entertaining. Tammy Wynette, singing about failing marriages with that little choked-up quiver in her voice. Chris Crocker, begging us to “leave Britney alone!”  Emo kids whining about whatever it is they’re always whining about. Cats, being cats. 

And, of course, Men’s Rights activists, seriously in the running for  biggest drama queens of all. 

  

Over on A Voice For Men, guest blogger “Tom Snark” recently wrote about a little incident in his life in which he heard the woman who lived next door to him yell at her husband because she didn’t like the way he was trimming some branches.

Not much of a story, you’d think. But Snark, showing considerable ingenuity, stretched it out into a 1200 word post. The woman didn’t just yell; she “yapp[ed] at him like a menopausal Chihuahua.” The man wasn’t just embarrassed to have a neighbor overhear the exchange; he

know[s] that their facade of marital bliss was now forever shattered in my mind. … Is this his terrible secret, hidden from the world: that he is continually disrespected behind closed doors, by the very woman who said to him “I do”? 

Needless to say, Snark answered this question with a resounding “yes.” And then decided that all marriages are like this -- ultimately concluding that the women of the world are quite literally nagging their hubbies to death: 

One needlessly stressful incident after another is sure to raise the blood pressure. But actually living with a person who does this, combined with the stress of full-time work five days a week? The origin of the life expectancy gap [between men and women] becomes clear. 

Never mind that married men actually live longer than unmarried men, as approximately two seconds of Googling will show. Snark was just getting going:

marriage has no benefit at all for men. It is not even a stretch to say that, in this day and age, marriage is systematically abusive for men. While women can up and leave at any time they like, with minimal resistance from the law, family courts, or society as a whole (we continue to suffer from Eat, Prey, Love syndrome) – men cannot leave women without paying the price. 

Yes, he did say “prey,” not “pray.” But wait, there’s more: 

Married men are literally trapped, stuck supporting the poisonous predators that will eventually kill them. Plenty of women know this; perhaps this is why they are so keen on the idea. A little legal tweaking was all it took for feminists to remake marriage in their own image: men are now the dehumanised tools for women’s personal use. Sex roles have not simply been reversed, because men continue to do most of the work. What has changed is that the paycheque is now handed directly over to the wife, and his time at home will be spent completing endless ‘honey-do’ lists. 

Oh, the terrible tyranny of the “honey-do” list! Hitler had nothing on these foul shrews and their endless branch-trimming demands!

Now, I don’t mean to make light of verbal abuse. It happens, and it’s real abuse. I once had a neighbor, an elderly Italian man, who was continually yelling at his wife. Most of it was in Italian, so I don’t know exactly what he was saying, but every sentence or two was punctuated by what was evidently his favorite English word, “asshole,” a word he delivered with so much contempt it was chilling. In between these verbal barrages, I could hear his wife softly responding, trying to placate him. I don’t think he physically abused her – he was in a wheelchair – but this verbal abuse was constant. I doubt there was a single day I didn’t hear it. Had I known then what I know now, I would have called the police.

But not every overheard argument is a sign of abuse. Snark has heard one nasty exchange in the ten years he’s lived next to this couple – and he’s concluded from this one data point not only that his neighbor is being abused but that virtually all married men are prisoners to “poisonous predators [who] will eventually kill them.” 

Naturally, the regular commenters on A Voice For Men found this conclusion eminently reasonable. Indeed, in one heavily upvoted comment, Barbarossaaa managed to out-queen Snark’s already impressive drama queenery:

All one has to do is to observe these married men, i mean really look at them… dont let them catch you looking, observe the married man is his natural habitat, and if you look close you can see the dulled eyes of a man simply waiting to die. 

he is the fly caught in the spider web, that has accepted its fate and stopped struggling. he now waits for the black widow to climb down and consume him slowly but surely… 

this is not freedom it’s subtle servitude … you are dancing her dance, she is the initiator you are the reactor, and SHE decides whether you pass or fail she is in complete control. 

Yes, married men are all dead-eyed puppets in the hands of their evil wives. When I read this last bit, I couldn’t help but think of this little scene in Ed Wood’s perplexing bad-movie masterpiece Glen or Glenda, in which Bela Lugosi, himself a drama queen of considerable ability, shouts out “pull the string!” for no apparent reason:

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