Why is the shooter always male?

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2012-12-17 18:04

Article here. Excerpt:

'Yet until very recently the fact that mass murder is an essentially all-male phenomenon got almost no attention. Ironically, we are so accustomed to the idea that violence is gendered male that we don’t even notice that it is — unless we force ourselves to focus on something that seems so natural that it’s normally invisible to us.

As feminists have pointed out, if we define “human nature” as “what men do” we will treat male violence as merely violence, as opposed to a very gender-specific behavior. If, when considering violence in our society, we were to turn being a man into a marked category, we would not ask questions like “why is America so violent?” but rather questions like “why are men so violent?”'

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Comments

Good one here. And they go on. Obviously the author of this article has a particular ideological tilt. Glad to see he's being challenged on it.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2012-12-18 04:08

"I suggest that we men self-consciously mark the category to which we belong, and engage in some critical self-reflection about why committing such horrors should be such quintessentially male behavior."

Given that I do not encourage violence in any form, and, in particular, I cannot imagine stalking and killing 6 year old children, what possible reason would I, and most every other man, have for self-reflection? Also, I can't help but note that no such examination of their lives is expeced of women, and yet we find that the shooter's mother stock-piled these assault weapons, in addition to other survivalist supplies. She was a "prepper" who ignored her son's desperate need for psychological help. She was an enabler, in the worst possible sense of the word.

Why, then, does the esteemed professor not ask women to consider their roles in these sorts of tragedies?

Men's violence is often fostered, directed, and celebrated by women. Therefore, we was a society, men AND women, need to ask ourselves what needs to change in that society, as a whole. No amount self-reflection, conducted by decent men, is going to yield any answers.

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Submitted by StayingFit on Tue, 2012-12-18 18:38