Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: sad
  • Music: Halestorm, "Freak Like Me."

So very tired of the uphill battle.

I spent much of the weekend looking in horror at the news, and at Twitter, and at everything else. A man murdered seven people and injured thirteen others before killing himself, explicitly because he couldn't get women to have sex with him. That's horrifying. That's upsetting and disgusting and wrong.

And then the people started saying "we'll never know why he did it," and I sort of lost my shit and had to go away for a few days.

He actually SAYS, IN SO MANY WORDS, that this is because he hates women. Because women will not give him the sex he so clearly deserves. Because "inferior men" are getting the women he should have. Because women have too much control (IE, the ability to say "no, I do not want to have sex with you"), and so the appropriate response is killing them to death.

But we'll never know why he did it.

A lot of people have said very good, sensible, logical things. Things that point out the power imbalance and the assumptions based on his apparent whiteness (he was half-Malaysian and half-Caucasian) and the fact that if someone shoots basically any other group of people on the planet, we're damn fast to accept that they did it because of hatred, but that when a man shoots a bunch of women, we'll look for any excuse but misogyny. I have not been able to say anything good, or sensible, or logical. Maybe I'll be able to in a week or two. But right now...

Right now, I look at the mounting number of incidents where "she wouldn't have the sex with me" has been used as an excuse for murder, and I'm just tired. That's all. I'm tired of the entitlement, and I'm tired of the assumptions, and I'm tired of the "not ALL men" response whenever someone says "misogyny kills."

I'm tired. No cookies today.
Tags: cranky blonde is cranky, depression, state of the blonde
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  • 96 comments

elizalavelle

May 29 2014, 19:02:31 UTC 3 years ago

People get a mental block with a white male who kills and somehow want there to be a reason that they can rationalize into something that fits in their reality. If their reality is "white men are good but people who are different races can be bad" we get to hear their attempts to remove the evil from a very evil and very clearly thought out act. Even though he wasn't necessarily white he identified as such. Many people want the excuse to be mental health. The issue clearly was this man through being raised and through his own choices determined that women had no value other than as sex toys. And there's a far too large part of society who are willing to overlook it because they want it to be something more complex than that so that it fits into how they view the world.

I'm very sick of the "not all men" reply because even though it's not all that doesn't make any okay. If one man feels they can kill because they couldn't get a woman to do what they wanted that's too many.

In this case there's no argument to the contrary that can be made. He wrote 140 pages about how much he hated women because they would not have sex with him. It was stated over and over and over. He wasn't unclear he was hateful.



ckd

May 29 2014, 21:01:39 UTC 3 years ago

A guy gets a gun and shoots a bunch of people, after participating in online discussions about how people like him are oppressed by a particular category of person. People he'd known had expressed concerns ahead of the attack about him and his views, and afterwards people who share his views about the perceived oppression praise him for his actions.

The 2009 Fort Hood shooter, or the 2014 Isla Vista shooter? Or both? Some people call the first a terrorist and the second a "lone nut"; is it, perhaps, because they disagree with one and agree with the other?

dornbeast

May 30 2014, 08:29:05 UTC 3 years ago

In some people, there is a desire for people who commit acts of violence to be The Other. These are the people who want to be able to say, "I could never do that," and "My friends and family aren't like that."

So when something like this comes along, there will be some people grasping at straws to build a wall of separation between the killer and themselves. Terrorist. Lone nut. "He had Asperger's, no, really, my friend said his cousin's sister said so." "It's a false flag operation so the gun grabbers can smash the second amendment."

Rationalization is a powerful thing. I'm not immune to this; I'm just a tiny bit more aware.