Commenting on the media’s coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre - and, more to the point, their lack of coverage of the misogyny underlying the killer’s rampage - Jennifer Pozner reprints an editorial she wrote in the wake of the (seemingly now forgotten) Jonesboro school shootings, in March of ‘98:
Jonesboro’s mayor has been quoted as saying, “If anyone had had any reason to believe something like this was possible, they would have prevented it.” But as David Vest, a counselor to men who batter, writes in an editorial that ran in the Houston Chronicle and the Huntsville (Ala) Times, “The sad truth is, we had every reason to believe that ’something like this’ could happen. It has happened many times this year in America, and it’s barely springtime.” In the Christian Science Monitor’s “Pondering Jonesboro: Consider Gender,” sociology professor Kersti Yllo writes, “This case is extreme, not aberrant. According to the FBI, ten women a day are murdered by their boyfriends, husbands or ex-husbands. The Jonesboro boys are not alone in taking deadly revenge against the females in their lives.”
In rare articles addressing the true underlying causes of these murders — the targeting of girls for revenge by boys who felt jilted — Vest and Yllo bring into focus what the mainstream
press has largely left unsaid: unless we alter our culturally condoned, boys-will-be-boys / boys-will-own-girls attitudes, we are placing not only our daughters but our sons, and ourselves, in extreme jeopardy.
“We have every reason to believe that it will happen again,” Vest argues. “The boys who methodically gunned down those girls and those women were only acting out their own version of an all-too frequent story in America. The only difference is that they were a little bit younger….” […]
It may be tempting to echo the gender-blind soliloquy of the mainstream press and say that “there are no words” to describe the horror of children killing children. But I know better. […]
Push beyond the bliss of willful ignorance, and the answers we need appear with frightening clarity. There are words to describe the horror. Misogyny. Hate crimes. Dating abuse. Male entitlement. And, finally, femicide.
Jill’s earliest post, 31 Dead at Virginia Tech, generated upwards of 250 comments, many posted within the first few hours. The trolls, of course, made quite a showing (no doubt due in part to the recent developments in the Duke rape case, and the MRA’s subsequent smug trolling of feminist blogs for an “apology”).
Their attempts to dismiss the obvious misogyny and male entitlement at play here are predictably misogynistic and entitled:
ummmm, Few things are as important to people as their relationships with others, be they man/woman, man/man woman/woman. So to say that is insane. the person who committed this heinous act was not acting out of hate or lack of respect for women in general. he was acting out of rage for one person and when he couldn;t find that PERSON, he took it out on whomever he could.
But he wasn;t trying to kill her because of her sex, he was trying to kill her because he was pissed at the person who happened to be a woman.
I dint read every entry, but misogyny? Come on
Shoot your girlfriend in the head isn’t hatred of women, it is insanity. I would volunteer to cane him before I get to execute him?
I’ll certainly agree that hatred of women plays a large part in most of these shootings, but I don’t think that’s evidence of patriarchy. It makes sense: If you’re a guy, and you suck at life (as most of these jerkoffs do), it follows that most women, and most men also, will not like you much. Men not liking you isn’t really a big deal, but women not liking you is. Nothing reinforces someone’s sense of victimization and mistreatment as being unsuccessful with and unliked by the opposite sex.
Women are mass murders very often.It just doesn’t work that way. Let me suggest that it is a matter of maternal instincts in most women and a lack of it in men.
Yeah, nevermind that the guy apparently stalked several women on-campus prior to the shootings (as we’re now finding out); that the police didn’t take the first two murders as seriously as they should have since it was “just a domestic disturbance”; and that the victim-blaming in the media has already begun (see: “The girl who led to the massacre”). No misogyny here, so siree.
Nearly a decade ago, Pozner ended her Joneboro piece with the following entreaty:
The best way to honor the girls and teacher who died in Jonesboro is to take the steps necessary to prevent the targeting of girls and women for violence. On a legislative level, that means pressuring Congress to ratify an amendment, introduced in November by Senator Kennedy and others, which would include gender in federal hate crime laws. On a political level, it means following the example of Title IX Advocates and the Sonoma County Women Against Rape in pressuring the news media to place cases such as Jonesboro in their proper (if frightening) cultural context. We need to launch educational campaigns that challenge the notion that male violence is an “understandable” response to female rejection.
And when we identify sexism, we need to name it. To activists who’ve talked about the importance of breaking silence about domestic and sexual violence for years, this seems redundant. But in the wake of the senseless yet horribly predictable Jonesboro slayings, it’s more obvious than ever- Sexism kills girls.
To that end, go check out the Take Back the Blog! blogswarm, scheduled for April 28, hosted by Bruce Godfrey at Crablaw. (Logo via Renee in Ohio.)
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Tagged: feminism misogyny Jonesboro Virginia Tech Jennifer Pozner male entitlement sexism domestic violence blogswarm trolls MRAs Take Back the Blog
