Laurie Penny has an angry piece in the New Staggers about misogyny and the rush to deny that misogyny makes any difference to anything.
This is not the first time that women and unlucky male bystanders have been massacred by men claiming sexual frustration as justification for their violence. In 1989, 25-year-old Marc Lépine shot 28 people at the École Polytechnique in Quebec, Canada, claiming he was “fighting feminism”. Fourteen women died. In 2009, a 48-year-old man called George Sodini walked into a gym in the Pittsburgh area and shot 13 women, three of whom died. His digital manifesto was a lengthier version of Rodger’s, vowing vengeance against the female sex for refusing to provide him with pleasure and comfort. Online misogynists approved.
“When men kill women, the underlying reason is almost always an unfulfilled psychosexual need . . . to men celibacy is walking death, and anything is justified in avoiding that miserable fate,” wrote “Roissy in DC” of the Pittsburgh killing, as reported by Jezebel in 2009. “At least it is implied that feminism is to blame and he is taking a last stand,” said another. “I had been waiting for this (almost thinking I had to do it myself) and I am impressed. Kudos.”
The ideology behind these attacks – and there is ideology – is simple. Women owe men. Women, as a class, as a sex, owe men sex, love, attention, “adoration”, in Rodger’s words. We owe them respect and obedience, and our refusal to give it to them is to blame for their anger, their violence – stupid sluts get what they deserve. Most of all, there is an overpowering sense of rage and entitlement: the conviction that men have been denied a birthright of easy power.
And it is what it is. It’s not something else. It’s absurd to be in denial about it. When people create public rage-rants about X set of people and say they’re going to kill X set of people and then immediately go out and kill some of X set of people, it’s not delusional or “ideological” to connect the rants and threats with the killing.
Why can we not speak about misogynist extremism – why can we not speak about misogyny at all – even when the language used by Elliot Rodger is everywhere online?
We are told, repeatedly, to ignore it. It’s not real. It’s just “crazy”, lonely guys who we should feel sorry for. But as a mental health activist, I have no time for the language of emotional distress being used to excuse an atrocity, and as a compassionate person I am sick of being told to empathise with the perpetrators of violence any time I try to talk about the victims and survivors. That’s what women are supposed to do. We’re supposed to be infinitely compassionate. We’re supposed to feel sorry for these poor, confused, vengeful individuals. Sometimes we’re allowed to talk about our fear, as long as we don’t get angry. Most of all, we mustn’t get angry.
We have allowed ourselves to believe, for a long time, that the misogynist subcultures flourishing on- and offline in the past half-decade, the vengeful sexism seeding in resentment in a time of rage and austerity, is best ignored. We have allowed ourselves to believe that those fetid currents aren’t really real, that they don’t matter, that they have no relation to “real-world” violence.
I haven’t. I haven’t allowed myself to believe that at all, and I don’t believe it. I don’t think it is best ignored; I think it’s best challenged and defeated, including driven underground if that’s possible. No, I don’t think it’s “healthier” to let it expose itself so that people can argue with it; I don’t think that’s how it works. I think the more it “exposes itself” the more recruits it gets and the hotter the rage gets. I think the whole thing needs to be fucking stopped, by shame and lost jobs and ostracism and every other social tool in the arsenal.
We have been told for a long time that the best way to deal with this sort of harrassment and violence is to laugh it off. Women and girls and queer people have been told that online misogynists pose no real threat, even when they’re sharing intimate guides to how to destroy a woman’s self-esteem and force her into sexual submission. Well, now we have seen what the new ideology of misogyny looks like at its most extreme. We have seen incontrovertible evidence of real people being shot and killed in the name of that ideology, by a young man barely out of childhood himself who had been seduced into a disturbing cult of woman-hatred. Elliot Rodger was a victim – but not for the reasons he believed.
Misogyny is nothing new, but there is a specific and frightening trend taking place, and if we’re not going to accept it, we have to call it by its name. The title of the PUA bible belies the truth: this is not a game. Misogynist extremism does not exist in a mystical digital fairyland where there are no consequences. It is real. It does damage. It kills. And this is no longer a topic where abstraction is anything approaching appropriate.
But…still we are told to shut up about it. Even by some women.
“the vengeful sexism seeding in resentment in a time of rage and austerity”
“seething”, not “seeding”. But “seeding” actually works as well, as it describes how it spreads. Both work. Which do you suppose was really meant?
“I think the more it “exposes itself” the more recruits it gets and the hotter the rage gets. I think the whole thing needs to be fucking stopped, by shame and lost jobs and ostracism and every other social tool in the arsenal.”
Indeed. Social censure is a powerful weapon – look how we’ve cut down on racist jokes and stereotypes in society and in the media. Social approbation can serve as a powerful endorsement. We need to manage these societal reactions carefully, however distasteful such an approach might sound.
“But…still we are told to shut up about it. Even by some women.”
In cultures that practice female genital mutilation, it is typically women doing the mutilating and insisting upon the mutilation.
No, wait. Isn’t this a word-for-word reprint of the last time this happened, but with the names changed?
Rodger, Lépine, Sodini et al killed because of their hatred of women. Women had “wronged” them and they were taking revenge against women they had never had any contact with previously because women as a class had to be punished. This is pure, blatant, unadulterated misogyny.
Guns made it easier for the misogynists to punish women but that’s an entirely separate issue. The misogyny rampant in the world needs to be recognized, needs to be addressed and needs to be curtailed. This is not an abstract, theoretical question, misogyny is a real-world problem and needs real-world solutions.
MRAs, PUAs, the slymepit, etc. are only the more visible aspects of misogyny. Religious dogma, political patriarchy, and casual “just us guys having fun” sexism are all ingrained in society (not just western society either) and need to be routed out.
I don’t have an easy answer on what to do about misogyny. H.L. Mencken noted: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” I try to stand up against the casual sexism I see on a daily basis and I rail against the religious and political insistence on patriarchy but that’s all I feel capable of doing. But if we all do this, then someone might notice that being a misogynist is acceptable in society and that’s wrong.
This problem runs through the history of psychology and psychiatry. Reading Paula Caplan’s The Myth of Women’s Masochism, I’m stunned by her descriptions of her training in psychotherapy. In “family systems therapy,” for instance, men’s violence was understood to result from the problems of the entire family, especially the woman involved. Pedophilia was dealt with by “displacing” those desires in a “healthy” direction: toward women, including sex workers. It’s appalling.
Oh, I also posted a short bit about this.
There was a film made a few years ago on the École Polytechnique massacre, someone recommended the trailer on youtube. The video had comments like “maybe things like this need to happen so that women understand the pain they are causing men.” And many comments on how feminism has ruined everything. I’m not sure how these complete strangers, just trying to get an education, were causing this guy and men in general, pain.
One comment on Sodini’s massacre was “those women looked smug” in their gym I.D. photos. The commenter actually blamed the facial expressions of the women slaughtered as proof they deserved it. They didn’t look shy and demure enough for him.
This problem runs through the history of psychology and psychiatry. Reading Paula Caplan’s The Myth of Women’s Masochism, I’m stunned by her descriptions of her training in psychotherapy. In “family systems therapy,” for instance, men’s violence was understood to result from the problems of the entire family, especially the woman involved. Pedophilia was dealt with by “displacing” those desires in a “healthy” direction: toward women, including sex workers. It’s appalling.
That’s kind of the flipside of Laing: there’s no mental illness, just problem families. At the time he was considered radical.
I think we need a word for the pathology of groups. ”Madness” doesn’t cut it because it passes the pathology onto the individual and stigmatises mental illness.
There probably is a word already and if so I’d like to know it; otherwise we need to invent one.
DSM-V excludes irrational behaviour or belief systems as ”mental illnesses” if those behaviours are shared by a community and it’s clear that some irrational behaviour is entirely the product of interactions between members of groups, particularly when they are isolated from the outside world.
Cults are an example; lynch mobs and riots; the abrogation of responsibility you find in bureaucracies; maybe even the kind of bystander apathy where people in groups are reluctant to help while they might have done so where they individuals.
“But…still we are told to shut up about it. Even by some women”
That probably deserves a whole article, ‘why some women defend their own oppression’. I live with a girl who as well as denouncing ‘all that feminist claptrap’ proclaimed ‘women who don’t wear makeup deserve to be cheated on’. Her ex-boyfriend can only be described as catastrophically obese whereas his mother was just obese. My housemate said ‘well I know he’s bigger, but its much worse for her, its shameful that a woman should have so little pride in her appearance’. My mum has a similar attitude, when my brother was having trouble with work colleagues, and she just said to him on the phone ‘well you will find it unbearable, its run by women, we really shouldn’t be in charge, things always mess up with women in charge’. As a guy, I’m horrified by this sort of shit!
Why do some women think like this?
Would that make the Catholic Church demanding its priests be celibate mass murderers or something?
There have been celibate monks and other celibate men throughout human history. The male body can survive without sex quite well.
Well written and agreed Ophelia Benson. the rape culture, the misogyny and the tolerance for it needs to stop now before it claims even more lives and shouldn’t forget this massacre or the others and what inspired them.
” …the rape culture, the misogyny and the tolerance for it needs to stop now before it claims even more lives and shouldn’t [sic] forget this massacre or the others and what inspired them.”
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Granted that such crimes and whatever produces them ‘need to stop now’, (a) how might this best be achieved, and (b) what steps do you recommend at the individual level?
Sigh. I’ve avoided the lengthy discussions of attributions of “metal illness” and the associated stigma on the threads about this because I think it would have a derailing effect and I don’t want to have yet another argument with people I like and respect. So I’ll just leave this here and move on.
There are no mental illnesses.* DSM diagnoses are scientifically invalid. I’ve provided some reading recommendations in the past,** and you can also read more at my blog. You don’t have to believe me, though – you have their own words. (And see here for recent developments.) Biopsychiatric pseudoscience has done and continues to do harm on a massive scale.
* This is NOT to say that people don’t have very real and sometimes very serious psychological problems and extreme experiences.
** Robert Whitaker, Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic; James Davies, Cracked; Marcia Angell, “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?”, “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” and “‘The Illusions of Psychiatry’: An Exchange” (all available free online); Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure and The Bitterest Pills; Irving Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs; Stuart Kirk, Tomi Gomery, and David Cohen, Mad Science; Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe (I can’t speak to the quality of this one); Brett Deacon, “The Biomedical Model of Mental Disorder: A Critical Analysis of its Tenets, Consequences, and Effects on Psychotherapy Research” (available free online); Jonathan Leo and Jeffrey Lacasse, “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature” (available free online); Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us.
SC: “There are no mental illnesses. DSM diagnoses are scientifically invalid…. This is NOT to say that people don’t have very real and sometimes very serious psychological problems and extreme experiences….”
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Well, that’s sorted then.
Yes, it is. Emotional/psychological problems and experiences don’t have to be labelled illnesses (or demonic possession or whatever) to be real. Perhaps you should read some of the materials I’ve suggested, because you seem confused about what I’m saying.
Now I’m really going to try to leave the discussion and return it to its original subject.
Step 1:
People stop hating and hurting women.
Step 2:
Other people stop excusing the hatred of and violence towards women.
Step 3:
We stop pretending that we can’t acknowledge a problem exists unless we have the solution to the dilemma.
Rodgers appears to have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into the PUA subculture that it was effectively impossible for him to have any real relationship with any actual woman. (To their good fortune)
How close to ‘normal’ were his attitudes? How easily do predatory monsters circulate in the community? It is ridiculous to pull the ‘not all men’ trope out when ‘those men’ clearly pass for normal in everyday life.
I’ve seen a Slate article that claimed that Boko Haram aren’t ‘real’ Muslims. Of course, no one bothered to observe that BEFORE the mass kidnapping/enslavement.
The toxic sexual culture we’re living in; which combines bronze-age patriarchy with Guccione/Hefner consumerism, is evil, root and branch. It shouldn’t take an over-the-top criminal rampage to make that obvious.
sambarge @#15:
“3. We stop pretending that we can’t acknowledge a problem exists unless we have the solution to the dilemma.”
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Sorry. I don’t see too many doing that. But maybe back in pre-police gunfire times before the ‘bronze-age patriarchy’ got going, individuals like Rodgers got themselves selected out of the population in various other ways. Our best ‘solution to the dilemma’ at the moment works after a fashion: lock the offender away until he is too old and/or demoralised to do any more harm. Our stone-age ancestors in some cases cast such an offender out of the tribe, into the Biblical ‘wilderness’ where his chances of survival were considerably reduced.
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That ancestral thinking is neatly summed up in the Ten Commandments. Rodgers would have at least gone down on a charge of ‘covetousness’. In some ways for better, and in some ways for worse, a daughter was in the custody of her father, and under his protection, until formally passed from him to her husband in marriage.
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“Step 1: People stop hating and hurting women; Step 2: Other people stop excusing the hatred of and violence towards women.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. But will that stop the frustrated misfits?
Modern women who prefer to live independent of men have to work out their own strategies for dealing with creeps,: as they will always be seen by said creeps of the world as inviting targets. The womens’ problem is: how to stop progressing from target to victim? And on top of that, the suicidal attacker who wants to go out in some perceived blaze of glory is in many ways the hardest to deal with.