I was going to write about the misogyny behind the murders in Santa Barbara, the literal war on women. Then I saw someone did it better.
During the last couple of days, I've been thinking about the rerun of the shooting in Santa Barbara: a man who enacts his revenge towards women rejecting him by killing unassociated bystanders. I started writing about it, then wondered if anyone else had drawn the connection to George Sodini, the misogynist killer who shot and killed three women in a Pittsburgh gym in 2009. I found one news link on Google. And it blew me away.
Laurie Penny, the author of the piece, writes with an elegance and rage that broadens the scope of the cultural problem we have in America more than I ever could. This really is a "guns aren't the problem, misogyny is" argument that focuses in on the cultural cancer we have as a nation. That's not to dismiss the problem we have with guns. But there's something wrong with our white guy brains especially, and we need to address this.
Bkamr asked me to post a quote, and this resonates with me, especially because the "all men are not like that" diaries are floating around kos:
Well, there have always been good men. Actually, I firmly believe that today there are more tolerant, humane men who recognise and celebrate the equality of the sexes than there have ever been before. Today, what I hear from many men and boys who talk to me about gender justice - decent, humane men and boys of the kind the twenty-teens are also, blessedly, producing in great numbers - is fear and bewilderment. Who are these people? Where do they live? And the unspoken fear: do I know them? Might I have met some of them, drunk with them? If the wind had changed when I was growing, if I had read different books and had different friends, might it have been me? If any man is capable of this, is every man capable of it?
I am not defensive. Because it doesn't matter that I'm a good guy to the parents of the dead. It only matters that good guys didn't stop a bad guy.
I hope you will take a moment to read this, and share it with others. It really is a fantastic piece:
Let's call the Isla Vista killings what they were: misogynist extremism