The Wall Street Journal reports on #YesAllWomen – not with anything earthshaking to say, but it’s interesting that it reports on it at all.
Hours after a shooting rampage in this coastal college town that the alleged gunman said was “retribution” against women who’d rejected him, a woman launched a conversation on Twitterabout what it’s like to feel vulnerable to violence.
“As soon as I reached my teens, I didn’t feel comfortable being outside in the evening on my own street,” the woman wrote in one of her first posts under a Twitter hashtag called #YesAllWomen. The woman declined to be identified for this article.
The hashtag had garnered more than 500,000 tweets by Sunday afternoon, according to Internet analytics firm Topsy.com, making it the most active on Twitter.
Oh no! Grandstanding!! Selfishness!!! Talking about misogyny just because a shooter created a misogynist video just before going on his shooting spree!!!!
Comments started pouring in as soon as the hashtag was started, with women from around the world—including Saudi Arabia—chiming in and using the hashtag as a vehicle to air their feelings on issues from criticism of their dress, to men’s behavior. (A response from men quickly started under the tag #NotAllMen).
And from women eager to disassociate themselves from the filthy feminism.
On Sunday morning talk shows, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said deputies who visited Mr. Rodger weeks before the shooting at the request of family members, concluded that he wasn’t a threat. “At the time the deputies interacted with him, he was able to convince them he was OK,” Mr. Brown said on the CBSprogram “Face the Nation”.
In a 141-page document posted online, Mr. Rodger described the visit, expressing relief that they didn’t search his room, which was filled with weapons and ammo. “That would have ended everything,” he wrote. Instead he was able to convince them it was “all a misunderstanding,” the manifesto says.
So it turns out he wasn’t completely lacking in social skills. He couldn’t get women to like him, but he could convince sheriff’s deputies that he wasn’t a threat. B+.
#YesAllWomen has especially touched a nerve, in part because Mr. Rodger’s video exemplified attitudes that generally put down women, Ms. Sklar said. “It’s not just about violence against women, but the attitudes that were so chillingly on display in his video–that he was unfairly deprived of attention from women, which was his due,” she said.
That is correct. It’s not healthy – it’s not healthy to have a culture in which it’s just normal for group X to express endless venomous hatred of group Y in public. Not healthy, not productive, not the way to foster peace and kindness among people.
They have it backwards. #YesAllWomen was a response to #NotAllMen…not all men are femicidal misogynists, but yes, all women have experienced misogyny and sexism.
Ibis3:
I imagine some of the women who are associated with the ‘Pit (or share their views) saying “I’ve never experienced misogyny and sexism”, which I find mindboggling, bc the culture here in the US is awash in misogyny and sexism.
That is correct. It’s not healthy – it’s not healthy to have a culture in which it’s just normal for group X to express endless venomous hatred of group Y in public. Not healthy, not productive, not the way to foster peace and kindness among people.
I agree, though it’s tough to get away from this mindset. The American political system is more or less a system of group X expressing endless venomous hatred for group Y.
The thing is, Tony, it’s so pervasive that many are unable to see it as “not normal”. It was a lot worse when I was coming of age (late 1970s), and I can appreciate in retrospect how much things have changed, but I didn’t realize how bad it was then even though it was worse than now.
I checked with an expert and learned that psychopaths find it quite simple to fool psychiatrists, therapists, police, prison guards, parents, teachers, and anyone else trying to find out what they are up to inside their heads. So it’s no surprise that Rodgers was able both to convince the cops that he was just fine, a well-spoken gentleman AND to reflect upon it in his journal.
I was one of those kids who worried about every goddamn thing, all the time, day and night. I’ve shaken off most of the worries, but the one that sticks with me is an almost primal fear of men between the ages of about 15 and 30 or 35. Older ones often alarm me too. Even after I got to know some of them, I maintained that fear. And I do not think I am alone. When I read quotations from Rodgers’s retribution video and my blood ran cold because it repeated the hateful violence that I always suspected was out there. . .
So someone authoritarian about the opposite sex knew how to talk to other authoritarians?
I’m shocked.
I’m also predicting a use of #YesAllWomen as a weapon by more of the same in ways that should prove, interesting.
There wasn’t a ton for police to do. They had no evidence of a crime and no legal way to search anything except to ask for his permission. Police get asked to do “checkups” on people all the time, and most of the time, it doesn’t add up to anything, and so police don’t get to worked up about such things.
And the woman who started the tag has made her account private and asked to not have her name associated with it at all, due to the level of harassment she’s received since. 🙁