When talking about an abusive or dangerous man, do you ever hear things like,
"He holds in his feelings too much, and they build up until he bursts... He needs to get in touch with his emotions and learn to express them to prevent those explosive episodes"?
"My colleagues and I refer to this belief as "The Boiler Theory of men." The idea that a person can only tolerate so much accumulated pain and frustration. If it doesn't get vented periodically-- kind of like a pressure cooker-- then there's bound to be a serious accident. This... has the ring of truth to it because we are all aware of how many men keep too much emotion pent up inside. Since most abusers are male, it seems to add up. But it doesn't, and here's why:
Most [abusive men] are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than some nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their own feelings are, and they talk about their feelings-- and act them out-- all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. An abuser's emotions are as likely to be too big as too small. They can fill up the whole house."
- Day 4 of sharing Lundy Bancroft's excerpts from Why Does he DO That?
I would like to add this: I'm sure many of you have seen that people especially love to use this myth to justify atrocities like mass shootings and other "crimes of passion" that result in the deaths of innocent people. The reality is that men who behave in abusive ways are not victims of society. They are not bottling up their emotions, in need of a place to vent, suffering from low self-esteem, etc. It is quite the opposite. These men are suffering from being over-emotional, grandiose, and entitled. Notice how men will always go on shooting sprees shortly after finding communities of like minded individuals, venting their frustrations to them, and spending hours a day exchanging information with peers (all things that are supposed to help people get better)?. They meet people in cyberspace and real life: places such as 4chan, "redpill" forums, on-campus white nationalist club meetings, Fraternities, bars, "mens rights" rallies and it emboldens them to finally unleash their rage onto the public. Perhaps if we stopped having such bleeding hearts and took away their platforms these men would shrivel back up and stay in their parents basements where they belong. Just an idea.
According to popular history, Exarchon was a Malignus warlord during the Second Cybertronian War. Claiming to be blessed by the tripartite god Vion-Lenja-Igern, contemporary records claim that Exarchon had a mutant mitotic spark, which allowed him to split his consciousness between three separate bodies—and, indeed, to take over the bodies of others that he had subjugated in battle. This made him functionally immortal, as even if one of his bodies was destroyed, he had two more to continue to spread his will.
These days, the understanding among academics is different. Lancer—a professor of archaeometallurgy at Drouhard University—argues that there is little direct evidence for Exarchon's supposed powers, which do not line up well with the modern scientific understanding of mitotic sparks; instead, she posits that it is more likely that the idea of Exarchon's "threefold spark" was a shared fiction created by the Malignus leadership through the use of public performance, puppetry and sleight of servo. The idea of an "immortal warlord" would, of course, be extremely useful as propaganda for a faction that rarely, if ever, found themselves with the edge in their war against the Guardians.