Stop Killing Women, will you?

We’re doing it again here in the US – people are going into schools and shooting the place up. One boy killed his principal, a man who simply gave him detention or some equivalent for bringing tobacco to school which the boy is not suppose to have in the first place. That one was a question of male dominance, which male in that situation would be dominant, a question of control. And it's also a Jackdom killing. One man took hostage, apparently raped a few, and shot some other girls in Colorado. One man took hostage and then shot several girls in Pennsylvania. All in the last week. The loss of all these people is manifestly tragic, wasteful, and heinous.

But one thing I want you to remember is that these killers were not off the radar. We want to think that such events, these and Littleton and Jonesboro and so many, are simply the acts of the deranged, explosions into our ordered and just world that cannot be understood except as wild and dangerous exceptions.

Here’s the thing that most sociologists, psychologists, and cultural critics alike can say about this: these people are symptoms of derangement and illness present in our culture and society. Though they themselves are either dead or inarticulate for other reasons, these killers’ crimes trace the pattern of a sickness We Have Collectively.
We feel too much entitlement to do as we please. We feel far too much entitlement to the bodies and wills of other people. And that two of these shootings are gendered forms of murder …
I knew it in my marrow when I first heard about the Colorado incident on NPR, I said it, “He raped them.” And he did. A man who knew he could what he wanted, simply because he wanted it. And not out of line with Jack- thinking at all … only out of line with accepted methods.

The man in Pennsylvania chose Only the Girls to kill. Some twenty year grudge. I’ll be you dollars to doughnuts that some little girl, Amish or not, refused him in some way when he was 12 -- perhaps his first attempt at asking a girl on a date, a rejection. This is painful, true. Such rejections are common, part of our growing up, and part of our realizing that other people are not merely extensions of our own desire and fantasy. Other people, even women (the thought!), are agents of their own desire and will, not servants to ours.

Some rumors now have it that the Penn. Shooter had molested some girls or family members of his victims twenty years ago, and was feeling the urge to do so again, and the only way to appease that urge was to kill some girls. So, my guess was very generous. In a world where girls are still, no matter your lip service, less conceptually human than boys, girls become the targets. In a world in which we do not deal with sex and sexuality and issues of control and dominance in clear and direct ways, molesters proliferate. Our denial, our collective refusal to cope with these issues is part of this situation.

Jonesboro, AK, back in the 1990’s when America was “innocent”, that little boy, age 11, went to school with “his grandfather’s arsenal” to shoot girls and women, it was reported, because a girl did not want to be his girlfriend. That aspect of one of the first school massacres in the US was woefully under analyzed. Gender, sex, desire, and a girl refusing to obey a boy’s fantasy of her.

Because, as a collective, we still refuse to face it. The marrow in the bone of Jackdom is cancerous, and eats our hearts. These people are perverted beyond our ken; they are perverted by our ken. The several books on femicide are testimony to that. And then there's Italian Vogue.

No, this isn't Bangladesh, also in the news this week on the BBC, for their habit of throwing battery acid on women's faces and bodies in the course of land disputes between men; no is this some parts of the Middle East in which honor killings of women are common and tacitly approved. No, it's not. Granted. Still and all, Jack, here in the "enlightened" West, it seems your fantasies are little different.

Peace on these souls, dead and living, who suffer under their fantasies and for the fantasies of others in a culture of death.