Schools in Philadelphia are currently on high alert because of a
threat of violence
made against "a university near Philadelphia." The threat was posted on
4chan, an anonymous message board, on Friday, the day after a
murder-suicide that left 10 people dead in yet another campus shooting.
Today's threat, echoing other comments, praised the Oregon shooter for
being part of a "Beta Rebellion," a beta being a weak, unattractive man
who lacks confidence and can't get a girl. An unnamed police official
described
the Oregon shooter this way, "He didn't have a girlfriend, and he was
upset about that. He comes across thinking of himself as a loser. He did
not like his lot in life, and it seemed like nothing was going right
for him."
Prior to last week's mass shooting, the gunman allegedly also
wrote
a 4-chan warning, "Don't go to school tomorrow if you are in the
Northwest." Among the responses, many encouraging him or glorifying mass
killing, was the comment "You might want to target a girls (sic) school
which is safer because there are no beta males throwing themselves for
their rescue." Another read, "//r9K needs a new martyr alongside our
hallowed Elliot," a reference to Elliot Rodger. Like Rodger, it appears
the Oregon school shooter felt let down by life and women.
It's
impossible to confirm if the original post was made by the gunman, but
the commentary is insightful and disturbing nonetheless. The comments
revealed more than thoughts about guns or anger over women. Some argued
that this shooting will give white men a bad name. Others, in a proxy
for class, noted that "Chads and Staceys" should be targeted. We Hunted
The Mammoth's Dave Futrelle is keeping a dismal
running update of the discussions.
The
term "beta male" succinctly captures certain attitudes about gender,
hierarchy and sex. Whether role playing or not, as one redditor
put it,
some people are taking the idea that there are betas and alpha males
seriously and concluding that, "Since sexual freedom is rising and women
today can choose with whom they want to have sex, a small minority of
"alpha males" gets all girls while most betas are left in the dust. See
this picture. After the betas have realized this, they'll rise up and
stop the feminist insanity that left them without pussy."
However,
many media outlets and analysts continue to treat information like this
like an aside, or, when addressing the issue, actually feed it.
Consider, for example, this
headline:
"Chris Mintz Defies The Age Of The Beta Male." In the meantime,
another young white man with a gun has wreaked havoc on a community and
once again the media is fixated on a numbing
conversation
about guns and mental illness. These are important dimensions of this
crisis, but they are insufficient ones. Without addressing the gender
and race dimensions of male entitlement in the United States -- and the
role they play in the treatment of mental illness, gun culture and the
targeting of victims -- we will never tackle this problem in a
meaningful way.
Consider schools, for example. Schools make up
10 percent of mass shooting
sites in the US and are highly gendered targets of opportunity. They
are places where educated women aggregate and compete with men as
equals. According to one thorough analysis, women are
twice as likely to die in school shootings. This year alone we
have already had 45 school-based mass shootings.
But schools are not the only places.
gyms,
shopping malls, places of worship
are also frequent targets, and are similarly places where women and
girls are predictably present in greater numbers. Similarly, movie
theaters provide opportunities for gunmen to express particular rage.
When John Hauser, a man who had publicly repeatedly
expressed misogynistic views in public, methodically mowed down 11 people in July at a theatre, the film they were watching was
Trainwreck,
a "chick flick" in dismissive parlance, one frequently discussed in
terms of feminism. Workplace shootings also have a marked result:
being
killed while at work is the second most likely way for women to die in the workplace, after car accidents.
Lastly,
there is, perhaps, no greater gendered target of opportunity than homes
which, in terms of intimate partner violence, become Alpha male arenas.
As Melissa Jeltsen
wrote earlier this year, "The untold story of mass shootings in America is one of domestic violence." Fully
70 percent of mass shooting incidents occur in homes,
but we don't generally hear about them because these crimes are
considered a matter of private, not public health. In August, for
example, a man tracked down his ex-girlfriend, and
executed
her, her husband and six children. He was apparently angry that she had
changed the locks on her doors. Headlines focused on the
"incomprehensibility" of the crime and about "domestic disputes."
Overall, according to a recent Huffington Post
analysis, 64 percent of the victims of mass murders are women and children. So,
it doesn't require an explicit statement of misogyny to result in a
explicitly disproportionate harm to women and children due to the
violent expression of masculinity. There is, however, for the record, no
shortage of explicit and public statements of hatred of women, in the
U.S. and the rest of the world. Particularly in connection to women's
education and status.
What may come to mind for many people in terms of anti-feminist violence, schools and girls is the catalytic shooting of
Malala Yousafzai and her classmates, while on their way to school. Acid thrown on schoolgirls in Afghanistan and
is not far behind in terms of hatefulness. However, we have no
shortages in countries where we tend not to focus on gender. In 1989
a man walked into an engineering class in a Montreal school and -- yelling, "I hate feminists!" -- shot 28 people, killing 14 women. He only shot men who interfered. In the US, in 2006 a truck driver
walked into an Amish schoolhouse,
"ordered the 15 boys in the room to leave, along with several adults,
and demanded that the 11 girls line up facing the blackboard." He tied
the girls' legs together and shot them. In 2013 Norwegian mass shooter
Anders Breivik killed 77 people, 69 of them teenage students.
Anti-feminism was an essential aspect of his manifesto,
although that information often got buried in his wider ranting. He was
concerned that feminism would "deny the intrinsic worth of native
Christian European heterosexual males." He wrote that, "the fate of
European civilization depends on European men steadfastly resisting
Politically Correct feminism." Prior to killing six people during
his 2014 killing spree, Elliot Rodger
explained,
"I will enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB, and I will slaughter
every single spoiled stuck up blonde slut I see inside there...The true
Alpha Male."Clearly Boko Haram has no monopoly on targeting educated
girls or schools.
The demographics of mass shootings in the United
States are a testament to how inseparably and tightly bound race and
gender to one another. During the past 30 years, all but one of the mass
murders in the U.S. was
committed by men, 90 percent of whom were white. Sociologist Michael Kimmel has worked for decades, conducting
extensive research, to illuminate the relationship between race, hyper masculinity, homophobia and violence. As he
put it
after the Sandy Hook shooting, "White men... have a somewhat more
grandiose purpose: they want to destroy the entire world in some
cataclysmic, video-game, and action movie-inspired apocalypse. If I'm
going to die, then so is everybody else, they seem to say. Yes, of
course, this is mental illness speaking: but it is mental illness
speaking with a voice that has a race and a gender."
That mental
illness can be socially constructed is rarely mentioned in knee jerk
media coverage after a mass shooting. "Mental illness actually does
reflect the local culture," explains anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann at
Stanford University. When we spoke last year, she made a comparison with
people's behavior when drunk. "The way people express their symptoms
has a lot to do with the ways that people learn to think. For example,
Americans are violent drunks. American college men want to destroy
things when they're drunk. That's a learnt behaviour. Violence is not
necessarily associated with alcohol around the world." Luhrmann's
research,
revealed
that the voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic
behaviors differ around the world. In Ghana the voices people hear are
benign and playful, in the U.S. they are violent and harsh.
Gender
considerations also affect the way people deal with mental distress.
"Women in distress," she explained, "turn their anger against
themselves, men in distress, turn to violence. I think that before the
biomedical revolution of the 1980s, mental illness was feminized. Our
general cultural ideas tend to think of emotion as just more feminine.
However, after biomedical revolution, I would say that the stereotype
for serious psychotic disorder did shift to more of a male model, the
crazy angry psychotic person. It is, however, still much more difficult
for men to seek help or to recognize that he needs help." Think, for
example, of something as basic as men learning to associate simply
asking for
directions as shameful or embarrassing.
Last
week's shooting was, like many others, effectively a murder-suicide.
The killer was dead before the end of the episode. It is
estimated
that there are 12 murder-suicides a week in the U.S. They may not be as
publicly spectacular as this one, but they are every bit as tragic.
Ninety percent of cases are perpetrated by men and involve guns 78
percent of those killed are women, and more than 90 percent of the
killers who commit suicide are men.
So, yes, we need strict gun
control laws, a deeper understanding of the role of media and better
mental illness treatment. However, what we really need, central to all
of those dimensions, is a public conversation about hegemonic
masculinity in the United States, particularly the historical and social
relationship between
ideals of white manhood, agency and guns.
Masculinity does not have to be misogynistic. It doesn't have to be
based on white supremacy. It doesn't have to cultivate the denial of
men's emotional pain.
Yesterday's shooter allegedly chose to
either kill or injure people on the basis of religion, so, some might
say, this has nothing to do with cultural ideas about power, gender and
race. Similarly, when men die in these killings, many people laugh at
the idea that gender can be an issue, but this doubt represents an
unhelpful, serious and dangerous error. Too many boys are learning that
violence and entitlements to domination and control, including,
centrally, over girls and women, define become "a real man." That's
about gender, and the outcomes are grossly misogynistic, whether they
use
money,
knives,
fire,
laws, or guns and whether or not their stated intent is
religiously or racially motivated.
Schools,
parents, coaches, religious communities all need to be thinking deeply
about how traditional ideas about gender, gender stereotypes and
stereotype threat work to create a national culture in which
bullet-proof clothing and backpacks for children are a clothing category and gun deaths occur at
20 times the rate of peer nations.
And,
just for the record, this isn't about "all men" or "all white men"
being evil, which is an absurd and specious assertion. It's about how we
teach children to think about gender, race and how to be human.
This article was originally
seen here
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