Schools make up 10 percent of mass shooting sites in the US and are highly gendered targets of opportunity. They are places where educated women aggregate and compete with men as equals.
But schools are not the only places. Gyms, shopping malls, places of worship are also frequent targets, and are similarly places where women and girls are predictably present in greater numbers. Similarly, movie theaters provide opportunities for gunmen to express particular rage. When John Hauser, a man who had publicly repeatedly expressed misogynistic views in public, methodically mowed down 11 people in July at a theatre, the film they were watching was Trainwreck, a “chick flick” in dismissive parlance, one frequently discussed in terms of feminism.
- Workplace shootings also have a marked result: being killed while at work is the second most likely way for women to die in the workplace, after car accidents.
Lastly, there is, perhaps, no greater gendered target of opportunity than homes which, in terms of intimate partner violence, become Alpha male arenas. As Melissa Jeltsenwrote earlier this year, “The untold story of mass shootings in America is one of domestic violence.”
- Fully 70 percent of mass shooting incidents occur in homes, but we don’t generally hear about them because these crimes are considered a matter of private, not public health. In August, for example, a man tracked down his ex-girlfriend, and executed her, her husband and six children. He was apparently angry that she had changed the locks on her doors.
- Overall, according to a recent Huffington Post analysis, 64 percent of the victims of mass murders are women and children.
So, it doesn’t require an explicit statement of misogyny to result in a explicitly disproportionate harm to women and children due to the violent expression of masculinity. There is, however, for the record, no shortage of explicit and public statements of hatred of women, in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Particularly in connection to women’s education and status.
- What may come to mind for many people in terms of anti-feminist violence, schools and girls is the catalytic shooting of Malala Yousafzai and her classmates, while on their way to school.
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Acid thrown on schoolgirls in Afghanistan and is not far behind in terms of hatefulness. However, we have no shortages in countries where we tend not to focus on gender.
- In 1989 a man walked into an engineering class in a Montreal school and – yelling, “I hate feminists!” – shot 28 people, killing 14 women. He only shot men who interfered.
- In the US, in 2006 a truck driver walked into an Amish schoolhouse, “ordered the 15 boys in the room to leave, along with several adults, and demanded that the 11 girls line up facing the blackboard.” He tied the girls’ legs together and shot them.
- In 2013 Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik killed 77 people, 69 of them teenage students. Anti-feminism was an essential aspect of his manifesto, although that information often got buried in his wider ranting.
- Prior to killing six people during his 2014 killing spree, Elliot Rodger explained, "I will enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB, and I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck up blonde slut I see inside there…The true Alpha Male.“
- An unnamed police officialdescribed the Oregon shooter this way, “He didn’t have a girlfriend, and he was upset about that. He comes across thinking of himself as a loser. He did not like his lot in life, and it seemed like nothing was going right for him.” A commentor on the 4-chan post purportedly made by the shooter prior to the killings encouraged him to, “target a girls (sic) school which is safer because there are no beta males throwing themselves for their rescue.“
Clearly Boko Haram has no monopoly on targeting educated girls or schools.
The demographics of mass shootings in the United States are a testament to how inseparably and tightly bound race and gender to one another.
- During the past 30 years, all but one of the mass murders in the U.S. was committed by men, 90 percent of whom were white.
Sociologist Michael Kimmel has worked for decades, conducting extensive research, to illuminate the relationship between race, hyper masculinity, homophobia and violence. Even if you prefer to focus on mental illness, gender is highly determinative.
Masculinity standards make it all but impossible for some boys and men to admit to psychic or emotional pain without compromising themselves as men trapped, as Jim Dowd puts “trapped in ideologies insisting on a natural order where the strong dominate the weak.”
“Mental illness actually does reflect the local culture,” explains anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann at Stanford University. When we spoke last year, she made a comparison with people’s behavior when drunk. “The way people express their symptoms has a lot to do with the ways that people learn to think. For example, Americans are violent drunks. American college men want to destroy things when they’re drunk. That’s a learnt behaviour. Violence is not necessarily associated with alcohol around the world.“
Last week’s shooting was, like many others, effectively a murder-suicide. The killer was dead before the end of the episode.
- It is estimated that there are 12 murder-suicides a week in the U.S.
- Ninety percent of cases are perpetrated by men and involve guns 78 percent of those killed are women, and more than 90 percent of the killers who commit suicide are men.
Luhrmann’s research, revealed that the voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic behaviors differ around the world. In Ghana the voices people hear are benign and playful, in the U.S. they are violent and harsh.
Gender considerations also affect the way people deal with mental distress. “Women in distress,” she explained, “turn their anger against themselves, men in distress, turn to violence. I think that before the biomedical revolution of the 1980s, mental illness was feminized. Our general cultural ideas tend to think of emotion as just more feminine. However, after biomedical revolution, I would say that the stereotype for serious psychotic disorder did shift to more of a male model, the crazy angry psychotic person. It is, however, still much more difficult for men to seek help or to recognize that he needs help.” Think, for example, of something as basic as men learning to associate simply asking for directions as shameful or embarrassing.
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