Masculism, misogyny & murders

BY Patience Collier

News Editor

Mass killings are not committed merely by isolated individuals, they are committed, by and large, by men with agendas. This clearly shows a larger trend in our society: the entitlement complex of white men.

Most recently, a man with an anti-woman agenda took out his anger at being denied sex by attacking random public figures before killing himself.

The killer at Santa Barbara had never been diagnosed with a mental illness, but he had spent time on Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) forums, communities dedicated to attacking women and feminism.

Although the killer’s main focus was hatred of women, fueled by communities that validated his hatred and perpetuated the idea that he was, as a nice guy, entitled to sex from the women around him, race also played a part in this shooting.

The killer described in great detail his obsession with white women, feeling invalidated as a man because they did not approach him.

This is an ongoing problem. Our society sees women as commodities, and men as actors, entitled to women’s bodies and affection.

It’s obvious in ‘edgy’ comedian routines and cartoons, in t-shirts, in memes, in the common trope of rating women’s bodies on a 1-10 scale.

Throughout American history, the objectification of women and the entitlement of men have always been tied to racism.

From the early settlement period, in which white men were seen as civilizing – and dominating – the American continent and the people who inhabited it, to the popular boys’ stories of the 1850s, which asserted white men as heroes, and minorities and women as targets of violence and objects of sexualization.

The theme of men as the rightful inhabitants of land, jobs, the public sphere, and women as the property of their men, improper interlopers in the public sphere at best, has grown into a strong undercurrent in the past ten years.

Likewise, despite the trend of talking about America as a “post-racial” society, violent rhetoric towards minorities, and the justification of police violence against minorities, has continued to be a widespread problem.

But let’s be honest: if we’re going to profile mass-killers, it’s not introverts or mentally ill people, not Muslims, not minorities, who would emerge. The most frequent mass murderers are young white men, specifically young white men with a grudge against society.

That’s not what goes into the media coverage, though; no matter how many young white men form communities online to say women who says no two a man should be shot, they remain “disturbed loners.”

Women bloggers are used to death threats and rape threats from these angry “activist” men; some sites and subreddits have made a habit of digging up and publishing the identities and addresses of feminist writers for the express purpose of enabling harassment against them.

These men will often deny up and down that they are misogynists… they just think women are inherently inferior, and need men to protect and keep them in line. Similarly, they deny being racists, but continually post tirades about women who date black or Hispanic men.

We only talk about mental illness when a white man picks up a gun and goes to a public place. We don’t talk about minority killers as disturbed individuals, but terrorists or thugs.

When this is pointed out, the backlash is immediate and angry. Many men feel personally accused, and feel the need to point out that they, personally, have never shot up a public place.

Even men who don’t get violently angry are very reluctant to admit that there could be any correlation between demographics – their demographics – and mass murders, clinging to “not all men” rhetoric, frequently claiming anti-white or anti-male rhetoric.

The wide availability of guns without background checks is certainly a problem, and it is certainly true that America’s mental health network allows many individuals to fall through the cracks.

But the problem of mass shootings is another issue, as well. This is the problem of angry, entitled white men who have been told their whole lives they deserve women’s bodies, and a modern crisis of masculinity, as the entitlement complex lashes out against minorities and women who have dared to speak out for equality.

______________________________________________________________________

The mass shooting psychosis 

BY R. Troy Peterson

Staff Reporter

In the aftermath of yet another mind-numbing tragedy, we find ourselves once more in the midst of debate over how this could have prevented.

‘We need to restrict access to guns,’ one group says. ‘No, we need to improve our mental healthcare system,’ retorts another. And this time, there is a third argument: ‘we need to put an end to our misogynistic culture.’

I contend that it would appear that misogyny’s main role in the killings was only a minor character in the larger cast of delusion, psychosis, and misanthropy. This argument seems to stem from the manifesto of the shooter.

In it, he blames women for their lack of interest in him, saying that he will punish them and deliver justice on what he termed the “Day of Retribution.”  In a darkly detailed yet mediocre epic, the shooter obsesses over his lack of sexual relations with women.

He also blames sexuality for almost all of humanity’s – and the earth’s – problems. He wrote, “I didn’t want things to turn out this way, but humanity forced my hand.”

These don’t read like the words of a misogynist; some of his passages read like something from a self-deluded, self-appointed holy man.

WebMD describes paranoid delusions, simply called delusional disorder, “a type of serious mental illness involving psychosis. Psychosis is the inability to tell what is real from what is imagined.”

The delusions are unshakable, yet ultimately untrue and/or exaggerated, beliefs – in this case, that no women would ever date the shooter, and that sexuality was the cause of all of mankind’s problems.

In an issue of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer highlights the three most common traits of mass murderers: (1) psychopathy/mental illness; (2) a sense of victimization/an ideological cause; (3) a desire for fame or glory. At least two of these are very present in the shooter’s self-aggrandizing ramblings.

In April, the killer’s mother tried to intervene by contacting his counselors after seeing some disturbing videos on YouTube.

His counselors contacted the police, and the police investigated, but saw only a well-mannered young man. They had no knowledge of the material with which the mother and counselors were concerned about.

The killer writes: “I had been rejected, insulted, humiliated, cast out, bullied, starved, tortured, and ridiculed for far too long.” He called women’s rejection of him an act of war, and saying “if it’s war they want, then war they shall have.” The deranged author says it will be a war that would result in their utter annihilation. Not only that, but he claimed he would “be a god, punishing women and all of humanity for their depravity.” The author called his vision the “ultimate and perfect ideology” for what he called “my perfect world.”

Much like other mass killers before him, his actions were not predatory or malignant, they were reactionary. He claims he didn’t cause this; we did, by not dating him or by dating the women who wouldn’t date him.

The killer’s worldview is clearly paranoid, and had forced himself into a false dilemma – either die violently and exact revenge, or become a young multimillionaire and have women fall in love with him.

But I can understand the need to blame something, anything – from video games to misogyny to easy gun access to mental health. After all, as Shermer points out, such events are random, what he describes as “high profile, improbable, rare and unpredictable.”

In short, misogyny was merely a minor variable, lost within the swirling madness of misanthropic delusion.