In that same post of Futrelle’s he does a quick review of Twitter assholes explaining away any connection between the actions of Elliot Rodger and the popular sport of misogyny.
When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
On A Voice for Men, for example, Janet Bloomfield (who goes by the name JudgyBitch), notes that Rodger killed more men than women…
So nothing to see here move on people everything is normal shut up shut up shut up.
On Twitter, meanwhile, cultural commenter Cathy Young, long sympathetic to Men’s Righsters, seems to think that Rodger’s rampage was entirely due to “mental illness” and argues that connecting Rodger’s rampage to a wider culture of misogyny is a form of “anti-male hate speech.”
It’s funny because I’ve seen other feminism-haters RTing both Bloomfield and Young. Not the most thoughtful sources in the world…
The reaction is truly bizarre. Guy says he hates women, goes off with the stated intention of killing women, but couldn’t have possibly killed women because he hated them. Say what? The denialism involved is so huge I’m beginning to think it must be like standing near the bottom of a vast mountain. It’s never possible to see the mountain from that vantage point.
It’s also all the evidence needed to show which bigotry people still deeply depend on.
It’s becoming pretty obvious that any man-hating he was doing was predicated on his women hatred. Now continues the work of learning where he learned to see women the way that he did, and why he was able to remain firmly entrenched in a view that all women were X (deserving to be punished, horrible people with “fill in your favorite” example, etc…).
This black and white view of all women was not reflected in a similarly black and white view of men. We are allowed to try to find out why.
As I commented over on WHtM: I wonder how many of these MRA sorts denying Rodger’s misogyny have called or would call Valerie Solanas a misandrist.
I wonder what they would say if a woman wrote that she wanted to put men in concentration camps and watch them starve, and then went on a murder spree in which males and their supposed sympathizers (as conveniently characterized by the person doing the killing), along with anyone who got in her way, were the victims.
I wonder what they would have to say about that.
Well, golly, Hitler killed more Goys than Jews din’ he? So, what Antisemitism?