sadAnd 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.
May 29 2014, 23:53:40 UTC 3 years ago
On the bright side, some of the discussions have been good. @miniver's FB tends to collect them, I notice. I am so glad that I know a lot of men who get it. And I am also glad that the men directly in my life (as opposed to random people on the internet) who don't get it didn't decide that they needed to tell me about How It Really Is.
I remind myself that overall incidents of shootings are down. I remind myself that as uncomfortable as a lot of these conversations are* that the overall cultural conversation about these things is happening - and there's a backlash, but damn it, I have to believe it's a fighting retreat.
Spending five hours at the coofeehouse with my newest research student helped.** Partly because OMG I needed out of the house, and partly because he's a great kid, and I get to be the crusty old geek who's been on the net since 1978, and a big part of his introduction to programming and computational biology.
* And, um, I ended up burning a lot of mod points on slashdot which is a pretty major hot spot of whiny male geek entitlement.
** Y'know that study about professors preferentially responding to inquiries from white males? So I'm not a professor (yet, maybe) but so far my research students have been about 80% female and 20% Caucasian. (And that's counting one of my anatomy students, who I'm really trying to set up as the minion of one of my lab mates, as his work is a better fit. I'll be teaching him Python, though.)
June 24 2014, 23:54:27 UTC 3 years ago