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
...go 2 levels up... Expand

caoilfhionn

May 29 2014, 22:31:48 UTC 3 years ago

Mine is also written by a woman. My sympathies! Mine, I think, is throwing everything into shaping an honest-to-goodness book, but losing track of what she's actually saying at the sentence level sometimes. I'll finish my first edit today and explain my concerns in the accompanying letter, but I'm not in a place to do much more than nudge her toward healthier character relationships. With so many popular romances and teen books selling exactly this kind of poison (Twilight-flavored, basically) to great success, who knows if I'll convince her? And even then, it's hard to get this far with a book and be challenged to unpick and change the threads that you've already woven so carefully into it.

Good luck with asking, and with not letting it gnaw too much at you, whatever she chooses!

universal_gm

May 30 2014, 05:00:49 UTC 3 years ago

And here I was worrying that the novel I'm writing would be problematic because the guy's violent and, well, he tries to be controlling, and yet his girlfriend stays with him. Between what you've said here and what I've seen elsewhere this week while doing promo stuff for another book, I'm thinking I'm more likely to get complaints that she doesn't find this behavior sexy and, in fact, informs him to shape up or get the hell out of her life. That's depressing to think about.