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. Acid thrown on schoolgirls in Afghanistan is not far behind in terms of hatefulness. However, the United States has 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 â yelling, âI hate feminists!â â shot 28 people, killing 14 women. He only shot men who interfered.Â
In the US, in 2006 a truck driver walked into an Amish schoolhouse, âordered the 15 boys in the room to leave, along with several adults, and demanded that the 11 girls line up facing the blackboard.â He tied the girlsâ legs together and shot them.Â
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. He was concerned that feminism would âdeny the intrinsic worth of native Christian European heterosexual males.â He wrote that, âthe fate of European civilization depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism.âÂ
Prior to killing six people during his 2014 killing spree, Elliot Rodger explained, âI will enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB, and I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck up blonde slut I see inside thereâŚThe true Alpha Male."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. As he put it after the Sandy Hook shooting, "White men⌠have a somewhat more grandiose purpose: they want to destroy the entire world in some cataclysmic, video-game, and action movie-inspired apocalypse. If Iâm going to die, then so is everybody else, they seem to say. Yes, of course, this is mental illness speaking: but it is mental illness speaking with a voice that has a race and a gender.â
[⌠] That mental illness can be socially constructed is rarely mentioned in knee jerk media coverage after a mass shooting. âMental illness actually does reflect the local culture,â explains anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann at Stanford University. When we spoke last year, she made a comparison with peopleâs behavior when drunk. âThe 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 theyâre drunk. Thatâs a learnt behaviour. Violence is not necessarily associated with alcohol around the world.â Luhrmannâs 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.â
Soraya Chemaly, Mass Killings in the US: Masculinity, Masculinity, Masculinity
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