“I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven,
bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George
Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a
Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and
then killed himself.
We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A
guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns.
The result: mass slaughter.
Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural
Pennsylvania , separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the
girls, killing five.
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if
someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot,
say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot
only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of
about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out
the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny
that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less
expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes,
but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder
and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an
important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny,
and pornography is now a multibillion- dollar industry — much of it
controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.
One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how
consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual
humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to
their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and
begin blowing people away.
What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his
personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young
girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, months long rant, he managed to
say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently.
One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So,
err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME
in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”
I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32
people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well
as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and
to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former
roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked
into the eyes of a woman on campus.
Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who
spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts
and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. “What I’ve concluded from decades
of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,”
he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to
one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and
that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to
commit a violent act.”
Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take
particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the
nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who
they are. They are attacked because they are female.
A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of
minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far
beyond the ability of any agency to count.
There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the
Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.
We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could
bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive
problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined
with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most
tragic proportions.
http://www.nytimes. com/2009/ 08/08/opinion/ 08herbert. html?_r=1
