(![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
amazon_syren Aug. 6th, 2009 07:06 pm)
amazon_syren Aug. 6th, 2009 07:06 pm)So, I’ve been trying to post about this all day. With links. And Ire. And all the rest of it.
You can thank a screwed-up server for the brevity of the following:
What it comes down to is:
Yet another Very Fucked Up dude has gone and murdered a bunch of women because he couldn’t get what they had. (In this case: pussy. In other cases? Jobs. Education. Custody of the kids. A life away from him and his fucking insecurities. The list goes on).
While the news media is making note of the killer’s misogyny (which is kind of a first, as news media doesn’t tend to look at gendered killings as hate crimes), I have yet to see anything (outside of feminist blogs, I mean) pointing to the widespread social memes that lead to this kind of thing.
See. A little over a year ago (or there-abouts? I’m pretty sure it was early August, as I was working for the science-grant people down on Kent Street, at the time) I ran into Idioglossia, and we talked about this stuff over cake and tea which she’d impromptu-ly taken me out for.
Basically, my thought is that while, fuck yes, it takes a severely broken person to decide that murder is the appropriate response to not being able to get a date (for example), you still need a culture that says a guy is entitled to that date/fuck/whatever from that woman (or those 30 million women, as the case may be), and that said woman is wrong, bad, or defective for not giving it to him. You need a culture that tells us all that women who don’t capitulate to men’s sexual demands/requests/expectations/whatever are supposed to get punished for it.
As noted yesterday: Rape doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Well, neither do mass shootings.
We all get indoctrinated with these messages that guys are supposed to want sex all the time and that gals are supposed to be available for sex all the time (and be uber-chaste gate-keepers, don't ask me how that one works), and then men aren't Manly Men if they aren't getting laid by tonnes of hawt chicks, and women aren't Womanly Women if they aren't crazy-pursued by drooling guys (but aren't *good* women if we actually drool back, um...) and so on.
We all act on these messages in various ways.
It's what makes us want to walk our gal-pals to their cars, but not worry about our guy-pals in the same situation.
It's what makes us wonder "Who let her out of the house dressed like that?" but not "Who let him out of the house dressed like that?"
It's why Cosmo and Maxim have any readership at all.
It's what teaches us to tell our gal-pals to take charge of a situation they don't like, but *not* to tell our guy-pals to just cut it out, already[1]. It's how some of us come to the stupid-and-fucking-wrong conclusion that it's somehow okay to get selectively deaf-blind-and-stupid when a woman's body-language goes from enthusiastic to totally non-participatory in the context of fucking, even though we know damn-well what it actually means because we learn how to read body-language before we can fucking talk.
It takes a broken psyche to decide that murder is the right degree of punishment.
But I think it takes a certain type of cultural conditioning for that broken psyche to determine that said punishment should be directed at "the women who wouldn’t fuck him", rather than, say, "the men who were stealing all the bitches and, as such, getting laid when he wasn’t", or the gender-irrelevant(?) "group of people who were surely laughing at him for not being able to get pussy". Or whatever.
Anyway. That’s the short version.
- TTFN,
- Amazon.
[1] My bad. Sorry. <*headdesk*>
You can thank a screwed-up server for the brevity of the following:
What it comes down to is:
Yet another Very Fucked Up dude has gone and murdered a bunch of women because he couldn’t get what they had. (In this case: pussy. In other cases? Jobs. Education. Custody of the kids. A life away from him and his fucking insecurities. The list goes on).
While the news media is making note of the killer’s misogyny (which is kind of a first, as news media doesn’t tend to look at gendered killings as hate crimes), I have yet to see anything (outside of feminist blogs, I mean) pointing to the widespread social memes that lead to this kind of thing.
See. A little over a year ago (or there-abouts? I’m pretty sure it was early August, as I was working for the science-grant people down on Kent Street, at the time) I ran into Idioglossia, and we talked about this stuff over cake and tea which she’d impromptu-ly taken me out for.
Basically, my thought is that while, fuck yes, it takes a severely broken person to decide that murder is the appropriate response to not being able to get a date (for example), you still need a culture that says a guy is entitled to that date/fuck/whatever from that woman (or those 30 million women, as the case may be), and that said woman is wrong, bad, or defective for not giving it to him. You need a culture that tells us all that women who don’t capitulate to men’s sexual demands/requests/expectations/whatever are supposed to get punished for it.
As noted yesterday: Rape doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Well, neither do mass shootings.
We all get indoctrinated with these messages that guys are supposed to want sex all the time and that gals are supposed to be available for sex all the time (and be uber-chaste gate-keepers, don't ask me how that one works), and then men aren't Manly Men if they aren't getting laid by tonnes of hawt chicks, and women aren't Womanly Women if they aren't crazy-pursued by drooling guys (but aren't *good* women if we actually drool back, um...) and so on.
We all act on these messages in various ways.
It's what makes us want to walk our gal-pals to their cars, but not worry about our guy-pals in the same situation.
It's what makes us wonder "Who let her out of the house dressed like that?" but not "Who let him out of the house dressed like that?"
It's why Cosmo and Maxim have any readership at all.
It's what teaches us to tell our gal-pals to take charge of a situation they don't like, but *not* to tell our guy-pals to just cut it out, already[1]. It's how some of us come to the stupid-and-fucking-wrong conclusion that it's somehow okay to get selectively deaf-blind-and-stupid when a woman's body-language goes from enthusiastic to totally non-participatory in the context of fucking, even though we know damn-well what it actually means because we learn how to read body-language before we can fucking talk.
It takes a broken psyche to decide that murder is the right degree of punishment.
But I think it takes a certain type of cultural conditioning for that broken psyche to determine that said punishment should be directed at "the women who wouldn’t fuck him", rather than, say, "the men who were stealing all the bitches and, as such, getting laid when he wasn’t", or the gender-irrelevant(?) "group of people who were surely laughing at him for not being able to get pussy". Or whatever.
Anyway. That’s the short version.
- TTFN,
- Amazon.
[1] My bad. Sorry. <*headdesk*>
