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October 16, 2006
Quote of the Day
In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes [the recent school shootings], very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.
There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.
None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected...The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.
October 16, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
Word.
Posted by: nolo | Oct 16, 2006 12:27:58 PM
I find Herbert sort of boring, but what a good and decent man he is.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Oct 16, 2006 12:28:43 PM
None of that occurred because these were just girls...
Well, that's a speculation. Here's another that is much more likely....they were WHITE.
Posted by: Fred Jones | Oct 16, 2006 12:55:19 PM
Well, that's a speculation. Here's another that is much more likely....they were WHITE.
It must be hard being Fred, living in a world where straight white men suffer so very much, where no straight white men have any positions of power. My heart bleeds for Fred, living in that horrible world where straight white men are underrepresented in making laws, running businesses, leading churches. I just wonder how Fred gets an internet connection from that alternate reality so that he can comment here.
Posted by: paperwight | Oct 16, 2006 1:00:03 PM
Tim expresses what I've always thought about Bob Herbert.
Posted by: Neil the Ethical Werewolf | Oct 16, 2006 1:28:31 PM
and some were raped. this is the awful secret that america wants to ignore. nail on the head.
Posted by: christian | Oct 16, 2006 1:28:39 PM
'None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected'
And women grow up not expecting any better of men than what we see on the news. We are always surprised when men act well but never surprised when they act poorly. I had always wondered when men would finally tire of being thought poorly of by women, until I realized that they were totally oblivious of the fact. This passes all race, status and social barriers. Women do not expect better of men, and men taught us that.
Posted by: Hawise | Oct 16, 2006 1:41:39 PM
Yeah, I'm with Tim: Bob Herbert is definitely one of the NYT's more predictable Op-Ed sermonizers: Good and decent, no doubt or question: just predictable and a tad boring.
So it IS weird to get this sort of straight-to-the-heart-of-it truth out of him: the sexual-assault component of these recent school-shooting incidents does seem to have swept under the rug, for whatever reason (especially the one in Colorado) - strange that we have to rely on Bob Herbert to point it out: but yeah, Word.
Oh, and "Fred Jones" - WTF does your comment mean? You have a point to make: or does your contract with whoever pays you to troll Ezra's blog merely require that you crap on the rug of any discussion?
Posted by: Jay C | Oct 16, 2006 1:41:42 PM
and some were raped. this is the awful secret that america wants to ignore. nail on the head.
I don't know if that happened in Pennsylvania, but sexual assault took place in Colorado, and the PA shooter had the same in mind, given what he'd packed along with his guns.
The feminist bloggers noted this early on, but they're just wimmyns, aren't they Freddie? And they probably don't shave their pits, either.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Oct 16, 2006 1:43:04 PM
Well, that's a speculation. Here's another that is much more likely....they were WHITE.
So were the men who committed the murders. So what?
These men walked into school, selected all the girls, and told everyone else to leave. In the Colorado case, sexual assault and then murder followed; in the Pennsylvania case, the man has Astroglide with him, implying he intended to commit sexual assault, but instead he "just" killed the girls.
There's simply no other conclusion to draw but that these men did have specific targets in mind, and those targets were female. How Fred can't see that is beyond me.
Posted by: fiat lux | Oct 16, 2006 1:50:36 PM
Well, that's a speculation. Here's another that is much more likely....they were WHITE.
So were the men who committed the murders. So what?
The comment was not about the intention of the shooter nor his motives, but in response to the question of why it didn't get much press. The commenter speculated that if they were black, everyone would be up in arms about it. I agree. They were not black.
They were, indeed, white and as such, received no press.
Posted by: Fred Jones | Oct 16, 2006 1:56:53 PM
None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected.
That's the easy conclusion, but perhaps not the correct one. There was a thread on this earlier based on a link to echidne's blog, and not much has changed since then. I'll repeat some of what was in that thread, along with a couple other ideas.
As I heard the reports develop, there was immediate interest in the fact that that the shooter separated out the girls, but it soon became apparent that the man was mentally disturbed, that he had left some notes and explained his acts to his wife in terms of having been abused and having fantasies about abusing little girls, and it was reported that he had set things up to abuse his victims. At this point, the misogyny theory, to whatever extent it might have seemed a possibility, pretty well left people's minds and was replaced by the deranged maniac theory. Which is the correct theory, in my view. I haven't heard a shred of evidence that this event was due to misogyny in the ordinary sense. (Of course, mental illness that involves sexual compulsions can be regarded as including hatred towards whatever group the compulsions involve, including women, but that's not what people generally conceive of as misogyny.) The reaction is the same kind we have to someone who just abuses boys, that it's due to mental aberration, not misandry.
It's no doubt true that had the victims been separated by race, there would have been more of an outcry about that, even if there was clearly mental illness involved. I see two reasons for the difference. One, we intuitively and clinically understand race hatred as a less deeply seated motive than sexual compulsion, and we are likely, rightly, I suppose, to see the former as more reflective of social circumstances. We don't as easily imagine sexual compulsion of this kind to be due to being taught badly. Two, racial prejudice has a different recent history than misogyny, and as a result even the possibility of racial hatred as a motive triggers groups and spokespersons to speak out. While there is still a vibrant feminist movement, it isn't organized in the same ways and doesn't respond in similar ways when abuse of women occurs.
Posted by: Sanpete | Oct 16, 2006 2:56:56 PM
I don't quite get where the idea that the fact that the girls were targeted was covered came from. Every article or news report I have seen on the subject has mentioned this.
I certainly agree that if it had been blacks or jews, rather than girls, the situation would have been looked at somewhat differently. I disagree though that this is necessarily inappropriate.
We generally regrad devations from the norm in dealing with sexuality to be a personal issue. Some of them (homosexuality, S&M, etc.) are considered generally ok, as long as it is consensual. Other, pedophilia, and obviously extreme cases like this one are not ok, but still regarded as personal. I think it obvious that this guy had some extreme sexual hang ups, and issues with women, but I don't think it so obvious that that fact is an indictment against how our society treats women any more than a pedophile who rapes and kills young children (of either gender) is an indictment of how our society treats children.
Personally, I think that attempts to us this tradgedy as a rally point for feminism does a disservice to the victims.
Posted by: Dave Justus | Oct 16, 2006 3:01:29 PM
Fred makes a good point: If the shooter had shot any black Amish girls, it would have been a hell of a story.
Posted by: space | Oct 16, 2006 3:43:11 PM
I find myself more with Dave Justus on this... I don't know where Herbert - who I agree is rather, well, predictable - gets this notion that people did not realize or were not sufficiently outraged that this was done to women. Reports have been very clear in both the Colorado and Amish cases that the men sorted out the girls from the boys, and then prepared to mistreat the girls. Moreover, I'm not sure what Hebert wants us to do with this - what would "more outrage" look like exactly? What would we do with that outrage? If a male gunman had separated the boys from the girls, kept the boys and sexually molested them, would we be expected to have more outrage? Would we need to "do something" about that?
My point only is that these weird, isolated incidents are just that - weird and isolated. I appreciate that the President had little choice in school season with several random attacks but to convene a panel. But does anyone have serious expectations of this panel's discussion? Is there something that keeps crazy outsiders with guns from invading schools? Because it strikes me that there really isn't a lot to be done here, whether the victims are boys or girls. It's all an outrage, and all terribly sad.
Posted by: weboy | Oct 16, 2006 4:08:23 PM
Fred makes a good point: If the shooter had shot any black Amish girls, it would have been a hell of a story.
Fucker. You made me laugh at this. See you in hell.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Oct 16, 2006 4:40:17 PM
"If a male gunman had separated the boys from the girls, kept the boys and sexually molested them, would we be expected to have more outrage? Would we need to "do something" about that?"
It wouldn't be that we would expect it, it would happen. There is a double standard- ask yourself- if Foley had sent the same messages to the female pages, how would people have reacted? Would the Republican leadership have responded differently at the outset? Would the media have seen it as such a sellable commodity?
Yes, the incidents are sad and weird but as a woman who lives in a town where a man gunned down sixteen women he did not know because they got into the school that rejected him, I will not say "there really isn't a lot to be done here, whether the victims are boys or girls." We can at least discuss it like it matters.
Posted by: Hawise | Oct 16, 2006 4:42:07 PM
What Herbert and everyone else expects is that people don't brush off misogyny as "mental derangement". Okay, he was deranged. Still a hate crime. Just the word "misogyny". Just a hint of grasping that women and girls are targets of these crimes for the same reason other murderers go after people for their race or religion or sexual orientation: hate crime. Just the words, an acknowledgement that hate crimes against women are hate crimes just as surely as other hate crimes. That would be a nice start, instead of pretending that some hate crimes are hate crimes and some are just the way it is, the latter being those aimed at women.
Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Oct 16, 2006 7:34:59 PM
I will not say "there really isn't a lot to be done here, whether the victims are boys or girls." We can at least discuss it like it matters.
Hawise, I thought we were discussing this like it matters, but if we aren't, show us how we should. I'll admit I've had some trouble following your views in this thread because we seem to have very different views of the world. I'm not surprised when men behave well, for example, and most women I know don't seem to be either. And I would think that the events in the Amish schoolhouse or the page scandal would have been treated the same way regardless of the sex of the victims. (Well, possibly the homosexual aspects would make a difference for some, but that's another matter.)
Amanda, is this a matter of brushing off misogyny as mental derangement, or vice versa? The claim I was responding to was that it's cultural misogyny that is behind the supposed lack of attention to the sex of the victims and lack of outrage about that aspect. I don't see the evidence for either, but I'd be interested in knowing about any you have. I don't hesitate to call this misogyny or a hate crime because there isn't hate involved. There is. But lumping this kind of thing in with other hate crimes, without distinguishing the cultural causes from the personal causes, obscures an important difference, because the two causes require very different kinds of responses and prevention.
Posted by: Sanpete | Oct 16, 2006 8:58:19 PM
Amanda, is this a matter of brushing off misogyny as mental derangement, or vice versa?
I think the argument is that the mental derangement took the form of killing girls because of cultural misogyny. (And that less attention was paid to the misogyny of the crime than would have been to a hate crime against other groups because we're inured to misogyny.) To give an analogy, I've read that paranoid delusions often take the form of believing in conspiracies by the Jews. (Something like this happens at the beginning of Stanley and the Women.) This is mental illness, but the mental illness takes the form it does because of anti-Semitism in the culture.
Posted by: Matt Weiner | Oct 16, 2006 9:13:33 PM
That's a useful analogy, Matt. I just don't see the evidence that this is a parallel case. We see similar sexual abuse directed against only boys sometimes, but there doesn't seem to be any cultural misandry involved. This kind of sexual obsession seems to be of a different nature than paranoid delusions relating to Jews. It seems to tie more directly to deep drives that have been deranged by events or genes rather than to delusions, though there were no doubt delusions involved. We need a good psychologist here, I suppose.
Posted by: Sanpete | Oct 16, 2006 10:11:41 PM
They were, indeed, white and as such, received no press.
Yeah, I mean look at how the press totally ignored the Natalie Holloway, Laci Peterson, and Jonbenet Ramsey stories. They never cover stories about white girls, right Fred?
Dipshit. Another stellar post from the resident bigot.
Posted by: Seitz | Oct 16, 2006 11:29:46 PM
Sanpete- Maybe I am coming from a different view point because I have had family members involved in a school shooting within the last two months. Perhaps it is because a while back I realized that I do look at men differently than I look at women. I expect more of women than I do of men. It is wrong of me. I should expect both sexes to have strong moral fiber and a willingness to make the world better but I don't. Most women I know will give men a pass on things that they will expect me to do. We have ourselves in a double standard, that is why it is so hard to see.
Posted by: Hawise | Oct 17, 2006 7:01:58 AM
do Amish come in any color except white? jesus dude, you are a fucking freak.
Posted by: merlallen | Oct 17, 2006 9:04:48 AM
We see similar sexual abuse directed against only boys sometimes
Well, we certainly see sexual abuse of boys, but do we see any cases in which someone's sexual desire for boys leads them to single out boys for murder? I'm not aware of any, though there may be cases I'm unaware of. (I mean singling out boys from a group, not serial killing like Gacy and Dahmer.)
I'm tempted to say that part of what may be going on here is that there's a tendency in our society to see a man's desire for the woman as the woman's fault; the 'temptress' stereotype, as manifested in calls for women to dress modestly to avoid distracting men (too lazy to find examples now). But it would be pure speculation to connect that to these killings.
Posted by: Matt Weiner | Oct 17, 2006 9:37:04 AM
