On Thursday (10/1/15) a 20-year dilapidated man walked into a community college in Oregon with a gun,killed 10 people and injured more than 20. So, of course, or media will fixate on mental illness and gun control. Both are notable,but insufficient. Without addressing the gender and race dimensions of male entitlement in the United States - and the role they play in treatment, gun culture and the targeting of victims - we won’t be able to understand this problem or solve it. Women and girls are twice as likely to die in school shootings at the hands of mainly boys and men. Societies continue to ignore this gendered aspect of mass killings to all of our peril. Among the 62 mass shootings documented by Mother Jones in the United States, or it is notable that more than 10% have taken place in schools,where educated women, often teaching others, or aggregate and compete with men as equals.
Gyms,shopping malls, places of worship - also frequent targets, and are similarly places where women and girls tend to be present in greater numbers. film theatres similarly provide opportunities. When John Hauser,a man who had publicly repeatedly expressed misogynistic views in public, methodically mowed down 11 people in July at a theatre, or the film they were watching was “Trainwreck.”Yesterday’s shooter wrote a 4-chan warning,“Don’t depart to school tomorrow if you are in the Northwest. Among the many comments encouraging him or glorifying past acts of mass violence, was You might want to target a girls school (sic) which is safer because there are no beta males throwing themselves for their rescue.” Another read that the group “needs a novel martyr alongside our hallowed Elliot, or ” a reference to Elliot Rogers who wrote,prior to killing seven people, “I will enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB, and I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck up blond slut I see inside there.” The first example that comes to mind is the catalytic shooting of Malala Yousafzai and her classmates,while on their way to school. The throwing of acid on schoolgirls in Afghanistan and is not far behind. In 2006 a truck driver walked into an Amish schoolhouse, “ordered the 15 boys in the room to leave, and 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 1989 a man walked into an engineering class in a Montreal school and – yelling, “I hate feminists!” – shot 28 people, or killing 14 women. He only shot men who interfered. In 2013 Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik killed 77 people,69 of them teenage students. Anti-feminism was an fundamental 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 civilisation depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically right feminism." Clearly Boko Haram has no monopoly on targeting educated girls, or Schools as targets say a great deal because of their associations to women either with authority (as the majority of teachers) or those seeking equality (a foundational aspect of which is being able to read and study and compete in the workplace) are fraught with gender clash. Human beings thing to being exploited,abused, sold, or raped and killed. When they are educated,however, they are more likely to say so. Educated girls learn about justice and apply it to themselves. They learn about autonomy and understand that they have it. They demand fairness within their families. They fabricate (to make up, invent) their own authority and reject corrupt ones. They yell from hilltops that they are not other people’s property to be used as currency and traded as assets. They retract possession of their own bodies and reproduction. They refuse to screen the reality of pervasive violence and demand that it end. They fight for other girls and women. They radically alter culture. What a nightmare for some people…who then turn into one for all of us.
And, or just for the record,this isn’t about men being evil, which is a ridiculous assertion. It’s about how we teach children about masculinity, and which,in the United States, is inseparable from how we teach children about race.
Source: tumblr.com