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Brent Jesiek
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Bethany Gizzi and Christine Plumeri
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2007-06-07
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Bethany Gizzi and Christine Plumeri
26 Apr 2007
The tragedy at Virginia Tech on April 16th, 2007 is no doubt on many of our minds. We struggle with the impossible task of trying to understand how such a horrific act of violence could occur on a beautiful, thriving college campus. Some of us have to try to explain this to our young children. We turn to the media for information, for facts, evidence, and perhaps, an explanation for something that is so difficult for us to comprehend.
As those who work in the media work tirelessly to gather information and share it with the public, we cannot help but notice that almost all of the attention thus far seems to be on individual, blame-centered explanations for why this troubled young man took his and 32 others' lives. Certainly, this is understandable and necessary to help us to make sense of such incredulous violence. Yet, we wonder why not also focus on the larger, cultural, macrolevel factors that are common denominators in our nation's acts of mass murder in the workplace and in educational institutions?
We would like to raise our voices to encourage the media to follow one of the most important aspects of this story. One which can provide us with an understanding of this tragedy and a way in which we can create positive and necessary social change out of this tragic act. As professors of Sociology, we study and teach courses on Sex & Gender and Criminology. It is obvious to us that the time is now to face the issue of gender and gender based violence. This is not just a gun control or "hawk versus dove" debate and this is not just a woman's issue. To quote Jackson Katz, an anti-violence educator who writes and lectures on gendered violence, "we need to say this is a men's issue", too (<a href="http://www.jacksonkatz.com/">www.jacksonkatz.com</a>).
In 2003, according the F.B.I.'s arrest-based Uniform Crime Reports, 90.1% of homicides were perpetrated by males and 77.5% of their victims were other males. The perpetrator of these violent acts at Virginia Tech was male. In fact, this crime is only the most recent of a long history of mass shootings committed by males in this country - many of them committed by young men and boys at educational institutions. You may recall the stories: 2 killed and 7 wounded by 16 year old Luke Woodham in Pearl, Mississippi in 1997; 3 killed and 5 wounded by 14 year old Michael Carneal in West Paducah, Kentucky in 1997; 5 killed and10 wounded by 13 year old Mitchell Johnson and 11 year old Andrew Golden in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998; 2 killed and 22 wounded by 15 year old Kip Kinkel in Springfield, Oregon in 1998; 15 killed and 23 wounded by 18 year old Eric Harris and 17 year old Dylan Klebold in Littleton, Colorado in 1999; 2 killed and 13 wounded by 15 year old Charles Andrew Williams in Santee, California in 2001; 2 killed by 15 year old John Jason McLaughlin in Cold Spring, Minnesota in 2003; 10 killed by 16 year old Jeff Weisse in Red Lake, Minnesota in 2005; 6 killed and 5 wounded in an Amish school house by 32 year old Carl Roberts in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in 2006; 33 killed and 15 wounded by 23 year old Cho Seung-Hui in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2007. These are not the only stories of male-perpetrated gun violence, but those that received the most media coverage over that past decade. In the coverage of each of these stories, including the murders at Virginia Tech, the media has failed to appropriately address the fact that men and boys are committing these crimes. It is time for that to change.
Addressing the issue of male-perpetrated violence is not about blaming men, nor is it about locating the cause of violence in a biological explanation of aggression, given that the rates and contexts of male violence vary significantly across cultures and among individual males within them. It is also not about expensive, band-aid solutions such as metal detectors and armed security, over long-term, meaningful societal transformation. Rather, we must address the ways in which we socialize our young boys in our culture. Masculinity becomes associated with dominance, aggression, power and violence and these characteristics are encouraged, accepted and perpetuated. We have to stop believing that "boys will be boys" who grow up to kill people with guns. Boys are taught, and they see, hear and live what they learn.
If these crimes had all been committed by young women, we would no doubt be asking ourselves "why?" How could a young woman perpetuate such an act of horrible violence against someone else? It would be even more unthinkable than it already is. Yet current social trends show that we are increasingly socializing our girls into more traditionally masculine characteristics as they seek to gain power and equality in our patriarchal society. As long as masculinity, and more importantly power, is associated with aggression and violence, it may be just a matter of time before females start lashing out in similar mass, destructive ways.
Well, we should be asking ourselves that same question now instead of ignoring the fact that these perpetrators are male. In doing so, we are accepting the association of aggression and violence with masculinity. That should be unacceptable to all of us - men and women. We must stop ignoring the importance of gender socialization and its strong, consistent correlations with many forms of violent crime. We owe it to our sons and daughters to have this conversation and to start changing the way we raise our young men.
Bethany Gizzi & Christine Plumeri
Instructors of Sociology
Monroe Community College
<a href="mailto:bgizzi*monroecc.edu">bgizzi (at) monroecc.edu</a>
<a href="mailto:cplumeri*monroecc.edu">cplumeri (at) monroecc.edu</a>
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Original Source: <a href="http://rochester.indymedia.org/newswire/display/20291/index.php">http://rochester.indymedia.org/newswire/display/20291/index.php</a>
Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain">Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication</a>.
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eng
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Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication
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ANOTHER INCONVENIENT TRUTH: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech
gender
male
masculinity
sociology
violence
-
Document
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Contributor
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Brent Jesiek
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Jeff Fecke
Date
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2007-06-19
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April 23, 2007
Filed under: Feminism, Minnesota Monitor, Virginia Tech — Jeff Fecke @ 12:21 pm
It is human nature to try to figure out why bad things happen. Long ago, we blamed natural disasters on the capriciousness of the gods. The flood was caused by Poseidon's wrath, the storm by Thor's fury. Gifts were given to the gods, sacrifices of fruit, of animals, even of people, in order to placate them and turn their anger into love for their human charges. Today most of us (Pat Robertson excepted) reject the notion that bad things happen because of an angry and vengeful God. And yet, when tragedy strikes, we still seek to find the pattern underlying the madness, our ultimate failing that led to our punishment by...well, we're never quite sure, but we're sure we're being punished.
After Cho Seung-hui opened fire on his classmates in Blacksburg, Va., it was only natural for us to ask why. The primary answer — that he was a deeply troubled, possibly schizophrenic and certainly psychotic man who was operating outside the bounds of normal society — is unsatisfying and seems to beg more questions than it answers. And so some writers have seized on an explanation that has a mythic history as rich and powerful as any blameworthy figure in human lore: It's the women's fault.
Not all women, of course, but specifically feminists. These horrid people have, we are told, upset the natural order. They have made women more like men, causing them to demand for themselves the same privileges and prerogatives that men alone have traditionally enjoyed. At the same time, they have demanded that men stop behaving like louts, thus feminizing them, making them more female, robbing them of their manly virtue. <em>National Review</em> columnist John Derbyshire started the drumbeat by arguing that all of the students should have been armed, the better to kill the shooter. But that wasn't his main point.
"Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals," he wrote, "why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns, for goodness' sake — one of them reportedly a .22."
Nathan Blake, a writer for the weblog Human Events caught Derbyshire's meaning and amplified it. "Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that."
Now, you may think that blaming students for not rushing a man with two semi-automatic handguns is, to put it nicely, insane. Especially since there were more than a few examples of bravery that day, from the resident adviser who gave his life trying to protect the first victim of the shooting to the students who held the door shut with their feet while Cho fired away above them. But of course, one should never let facts get in the way of a good session of blaming women. Besides, it wasn't just the men hand-wringing about those wimpy men; there were also women hand-wringing about those tough women.
Sarah Baxter, writing for the Sunday <em>Times of London</em>, fingered female sexual promiscuity as the reason that Cho Seng-hui went on his rampage, going so far as to quote long-time scold Camile Paglia in her argument.
"The pervasive hook-up culture at college," wrote Baxter, "where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.
"'Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again' [said Paglia]."
As the Kinks once said, it's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world. And that's when the gods get angry.
The scolds, of course, never really explain why it is that "young women behaving like men" is confusing and enraging — or at least, why young women behaving like men is worse than young men behaving like men. They don't have to bother. We all know that good girls don't, and cool boys do-the message is driven into us, all of us, from the moment we become aware of what sex might be.
If anything exacerbated the insanity of Cho Seung-hui, it was this message — the message that if he was worthy, he should be having sex, and lots of it. That if he was worthy, women would and should be lining up for him — but not the pure and chaste ones. Normal people learn, at some point, that this message doesn't make a lot of sense; that sex, while entertaining, is neither the best nor the most important measure of human worth and human happiness. We learn that whether you're having sex or not is a truly meaningless measure of your worth as a human being — whether you're a good girl who is, or a cool boy who isn't.
But Cho Seung-hui wasn't equipped to deal with this message, this drumbeat that he was a failure because he wasn't successful with women. And so he turned his rage to violence, first stalking women, then ultimately attacking them. That his rage reached a violent crescendo that included men as well was unsurprising, for it wasn't women he hated, or men — it was himself.
The killer internalized the messages of what men are "supposed" to be, and when he could not measure up in his mind to that standard, he did the only thing he could think to do — he became ultra-violent, violence being another acceptable proof of manliness. It wasn't a shortage of manliness that was the problem last Monday, it was a surfeit.
And so we come to find that the fault, if there was fault that we can assigned, lay not at the feet of the women who rejected a stalker, nor at feminists who want people to have rough equality, nor at men and women who faced a horrific massacre and did not all fight back against nigh-impossible odds. If there was a fault, it was that we as a society continue to try to tell people what they're supposed to be, rather than letting them determine that for themselves. That's not as satisfying as blaming women, nor as simple as blaming victims. But it's the truth, and we do ourselves and the dead no favor by pretending otherwise.
(Cross-posted from <a target="_blank" href="http://minnesotamonitor.com/editDiary.do?diaryId=1650">MinMon</a>)
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Original Source: Blog of the Moderate Left
<a href="http://moderateleft.com/?p=3324">http://moderateleft.com/?p=3324</a>
Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States</a>
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eng
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
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No Shortage of Manliness
blog
cho
commentary
feminism
manliness
masculinity