Too much to say and too many thoughts going through my head after what happened at Virginia Tech, especially for a friend of mine who's a VA Tech alumnus.
While the MSM will most likely frame this as school saftey or gun control and the cheesy investigation shows like Dateline and 48 Hours will do in-depth stories on the lives of the people affected by the tragedy, one of the most critical elements to understanding what happened will be the issue of gender.
Shortly after the Columbine HS shootings, Jackson Katz and Sut Jhaly wrote an amazing piece in the Boston Globe calling into question the role masculinity plays in most homicides. The Columbine HS murders was a case in point. Katz & Jhally write:
Read below the fold:
Political debate and media coverage keep repeating the muddled thinking of the past. Headlines and stories focus on youth violence, "kids killing kids," or as in the title of a CBS "48 Hours" special, "Young Guns." This is entirely the wrong framework to use in trying to understand what happened in Littleton - or in Jonesboro, Ark., Peducah, Ky., Pearl, Miss., or Springfield, Ore.
This is not a case of kids killing kids. This is boys killing boys and boys killing girls.
That these school shootings reveal is not a crisis in youth culture but a crisis in masculinity. The shootings - all by white adolescent males - are telling us something about how we are doing as a society, much like the canaries in coal mines, whose deaths were a warning to the miners that the caves were unsafe.
Consider what the reaction would have been if the perpetrators in Littleton had been girls. The first thing everyone would have wanted to talk about would have been: Why are girls - not kids - acting out violently? What is going on in the lives of girls that would lead them to commit such atrocities? All of the explanations would follow from the basic premise that being female was the dominant variable.
But when the perpetrators are boys, we talk in a gender-neutral way about kids or children, and few (with the exception of some feminist scholars) delve into the forces - be they cultural, historical, or institutional - that produce hundreds of thousands of physically abusive and violent boys every year. Instead, we call upon the same tired specialists who harp about the easy accessibility of guns, the lack of parental supervision, the culture of peer-group exclusion and teasing, or the prevalence of media violence.
All of these factors are of course relevant, but if they were the primary answers, then why are girls, who live in the same environment, not responding in the same way? The fact that violence - whether of the spectacular kind represented in the school shootings or the more routine murder, assault, and rape - is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon should indicate to us that gender is a vital factor, perhaps the vital factor.
Looking at violence as gender-neutral has the effect of blinding us as we desperately search for clues about how to respond.
We're beginning to hear that the killer hated women per the rambling note he left behind. But with regards to male violence (and we now know the killer was an Asian male)why is it that the majority of murders and shootings that take place are committed by men? Why can't the MSM (and more importantly "we") look at it from this perspective. Instead what concerns me is we keep going down the same paths that keeps bringing up the same answers and the crucial aspect of men's violence and other men and women is neglected. Jackson Katz mentions this in another recent shooting that happened in an Amish community in Pennsylvania.
Just after the Amish schoolhouse massacre, Pennsylvania Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said in an emotional press conference, "It seems as though (the perpetrator) wanted to attack young, female victims."
How did mainstream media cover these unspeakable acts of gender violence? The New York Times ran an editorial that identified the "most important" cause as the easy access to guns in our society. NPR did a show which focused on problems in rural America. Forensic psychologists and criminal profilers filled the airwaves with talk about how difficult it is to predict when a "person" will snap. And countless exasperated commentators -- from fundamentalist preachers to secular social critics -- abandoned any pretense toward logic and reason in their rush to weigh in with metaphysical musings on the incomprehensibility of "evil."
Incredibly, few if any prominent voices in the broadcast or print media have called the incidents what they are: hate crimes perpetrated by angry white men against defenseless young girls, who – whatever the twisted motives of the shooters -- were targeted for sexual assault and murder precisely because they are girls.
What is it going to take for our society to deal honestly with the extent and depth of this problem? How many more young girls have to die before decision-makers in media and other influential institutions stop averting their eyes from the lethal mix of deep misogyny and violent masculinity at work here? In response to the recent spate of shootings, the White House announced plans to bring together experts in education and law enforcement. The goal was to discuss "the nature of the problem" and federal action that can assist communities with violence prevention. This approach is misdirected. Instead of convening a group of experts on "school safety," the president should catalyze a long-overdue national conversation about sexism, masculinity, and men’s violence against women.
For us to have any hope of truly preventing not only extreme acts of gender violence, but also the incidents of rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence that are a daily part of millions of women’s and girls’ lives, we need to have this conversation. And we need many more men to participate. Men from every level of society need to recognize that violence against women is a men’s issue.
Whether it's men killing women or men killing other men -- on college campuses and elsewhere -- I hope this tragic incident at Virginia Tech doesn't squander an opportunity to discuss an all important topic: why do men kill at disproportionate numbers and why aren't we treating this as a men's health crisis? Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally had a great conclusion to Columbine piece that wrote for the Boston Globe in May 1999. They wrote:
There may indeed be no simple explanation as to why certain boys in particular circumstances act out in violent, sometimes lethal, ways. But leaving aside the specifics of this latest case, the fact that the overwhelming majority of such violence is perpetrated by males suggests that part of the answer lies in how we define such intertwined concepts as "respect," "power" and "manhood." When you add on the easy accessibility of guns and other weapons, you have all the ingredients for the next deadly attack.
Their observations fit well with what happened in Blacksburg, VA yesterday and to not examine the role that gender plays in shootings is an aspect that does not deserve to go un-noticed.
For more on the articles go here:
Littleton, CO
Pennsylvania
This is something that means a lot to me and I only wish more men out there would look at this honestly, look to each other and realize we have a men's health crisis on our hands and what are we going to do to stop us from killing each other and pther women? What can we do as men to stop violence? It's time we step up to the plate and address the issue (as well as the mainstream media for that matter).
- vtfinest