Please Stop Acting Like This Hasn’t Happened Before

25 years of watching white male rage 

The thing that has shocked me most about my reaction to the killings in Isla Vista this past weekend was, in fact, my lack of shock. It felt to me like a continuum of the fracture of society that I have been writing about for years, Cassandra-like, when I wrote on various blog sites that 9/11/2001 was, we would come to see, a rift in the Western male psychic landscape that would eventually lead to a great male rage that would be directed at women. This country wouldn’t be able to live through the knocking down of the two enormous phalluses in New York City that represented a culture that placed so much emphasis on the pursuit of wealth. That, more importantly, the act of being penetrated by outside, non-white invaders who were able to symbolically rape the United States, would continue to reap years of male rage that our seemingly impenetrable borders—borders due to the accident of two oceans that prevented whole scale invasion of our shores. In short, I wrote, over and over again, that while male cultural critics would want to argue that America’s loss of prestige and power was a a crisis of class or education or any other generalized senses that we were falling behind, and that they would continue to ignore that gender was at the heart of what was going on—especially white male masculinity—which would react in violent and horrific ways against those that it saw as responsible for making America vulnerable. And, I argued, there would be tremendous resistance to these types of analysis. That a feminist critique of white male rage would be met with rage—one would only have to look at the comments section of any blog I wrote on the topic to see the beginnings of the types of trolling (“you deserve to be raped”) that has become commonplace when women increasingly call attention to the problem with white men.

Even before the events of 9/11, I was convinced that a horrible backlash was coming against women. I should be clear that, for the purposes of this article, I am talking about western women. While I applaud those who have suddenly taken notice that women in countries such Nigeria and Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, perhaps most tragically of all, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where in the DRC alone, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped in a war that is financed by western powers; for the sake of of concision, I want to talk about the manifestations of white male rage in the west.

And, while 9/11/2001 marks a specific episode where male rage at women burst forth in its terrifying degree, of course, prior to this, there had been incidents that should have alerted white men that some among them were dangerous misogynists. It was their responsibility to fight the misogynists, just as white people who are paying attention are aware that white racists are our responsibility and that we must fight them with every fiber of our being, lest we be lumped into that heinous category and lest we allow them to do damage to the multicultural society to which we would like to belong.

So, for the sake of an argument about when I first began to notice a new type of misogyny, let’s pick a date, shall we? For me, that moment was on the sixth of December, 1989. I was a twenty-six year old feminist in my first year of graduate school, and up in Montreal, a young man walked into the Ecole Polytechnique and systematically began slaughtering the young women who were there to get an education. He began with an engineering class, where he ordered all of the men in the classroom to leave. And then he systematically shot the female students in the classroom. After leaving, he wandered the halls, shooting women. In all, he would kill fourteen.

The killer, 25-year-old Marc Lépine, was armed with a legally obtained Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife: he had earlier told a shopkeeper he was going after “small game”. Lépine had previously been denied admission to the École Polytechnique and had been upset, it later transpired, about women working in positions traditionally occupied by men. Before he opened fire, Lépine shouted: “You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!” One student, Nathalie Provost, protested: “I’m not feminist, I have never fought against men.” Lépine shot her anyway.

I remember that it was a cold, clouded-over, drizzly day in Seattle, and that when I heard the news, I sat down on the steps of my apartment and I wept. I did not know these women, but I knew that in a different location, I could have been one of them if some man, disappointed because he had been unable to get into my school, the college of his choice, had instead decided that women taking up the seats in the school were to blame for what he felt had been his entitlement. He should have enrolled to study engineering. It was his birthright. He was a man. Each woman who had earned her way into that college stood between him and what was rightfully his, and so he killed them until someone was able to stop him.

Twenty-five years later, we are once again dealing with an incident in which white male entitlement sees all women as the enemy—the roadblock to what is rightfully a male domain. In this case, it appears to be access to female bodies, the right to control women’s bodies so that they do exactly what you want them to do, but between Montreal and Isla Vista lies a long road littered with female bodies of men who felt it their right to kill women who stood in men’s ways to get what they want. And, once again, those who do not want to admit that male supremacy is toxic have jumped on the one crazy gunman theory, just as they did in Montreal.

From a discussion of the suicide note in 1989:

“Would you note that if I commit suicide today it is not for economic reasons … but for political reasons,” it read. “Because I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker … I have decided to put an end to those viragos.”

Mélissa Blais, a lecturer and doctoral student at the University of Quebec, is the country’s leading scholar on the topic of the massacre and its anti-feminist context. She interviewed a number of women for her research who were active feminists in 1989 and found that many felt responsible for what happened at Montreal. “Afterwards, they chose to be silent to avoid further attack.

“When I became a feminist, around the year 2000, I was puzzled to see that some were still reluctant to talk in political terms about the attack. It seemed as though the most efficient way to dismiss the feminist explanation was to reduce everything to the psychology of a single mad man.”

From the backlash to last week’s events:

Here is a post at The American Prospect describing how “pick up artist” writing shaped the mind of a killer. Here is a post at The Daily Kos asserting that Rodger was influenced by the Men’s Rights Movement. Here is a crayon drawing at the New Statesman by someone who should probably have taken a break rather than deciding to “make no apologies for the fact this piece is full of rage” and go on to describe the “ideology” that fuelled this crime. Society, say the writers, endorses this kind of hate-crime.

In short, and in the fast habit of the morally panicked, the internet and what remains of news media “know” why this crime was committed. On ABC1’s Q&A last night, author Tara Moss summed broad feeling up when she noted that the alleged assailant had told us that misogyny was his motive in his last video.

This view requires that we accept not only that the act of violence was the logical end to a normative hatred of women but that Rodger is a reliable narrator. This is bit like according Holden Caulfield the same status. If this were high school English, we’d all get an F.

(It is necessary when writing this type of article, I have learned, to emphasize that this problem is not about all men. A woman cannot point out the problem of male supremacy in this culture without immediately being called to task by the very same men who are often most guilty of the sense of entitlement that having a penis confers. Women have plenty of male allies—or so we want to believe—and so I write this. Those men who don’t participate in this hostility toward women are exempted—of course—although my immediate question to them would be whether they have ever stepped into a situation where they have seen male entitlement at work and have done something to stop it. I ask my male students this. They report that see young women in bars on Friday and Saturday nights, who are either too drunk to resist being led out of a bar by a sexual predator, or have witnessed young women getting harassed by groups of men, and I always ask them the same thing: “And what did you do to prevent what you knew was going to happen next?” Some have stepped forward to say that they broken the guy code by confronting the perpetrators, but some (most) have admitted that they have simply watched as this has unfolded for fear of either being physically beaten up, or, perhaps worse, being labeled as a “pussy” for not going along with the entitlement implicit in such acts.)

While 1989 was a watershed moment for me in terms of the idea that a man would be willing to shoot a complete female stranger simply by virtue of her sex, the knocking down of the World Trade Center not only released a toxic miasma of building materials and burnt human waste into the air, it also bled out into the air the crazies, who saw the feminization of culture as a locus of blame for why nineteen men with box cutters could have caught us asleep at the wheel.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed feminism for the attacks right away, blaming the attack on our weakness as a nation when they proclaimed, “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.” At the time, they were roundly criticized for such analysis, but as books began to appear that looked at the decline of the American workforce and seeing in that economic decline the rise of a conservatism that emphasized guns, God, and a rejection of Democratic social programs, I began to wonder why so few of these male pundits were talking about the right’s war on women. In fact, no less a cultural critic as Frank Rich declared the cultural wars “over.”

In 2005, for example, four years after the WTC, Thomas Frank added an addendum to his “seminal” text What’s the Matter With Kansas? by focusing on the rage of the working class, who saw electing right wing extremist candidates as their answer to the rage of the loss of good jobs, of a morally ordered universe, in that mythical long ago where each had known his place, and jobs had made it possible to support a family on one salary. Frank’s blindspot was obvious, as I wrote .

I find myself wondering if America doesn’t long for Daddy’s spank. So many people bemoan the loss of order in this culture: the hard, unyielding discipline meted out by daddy, the kind that scared us, the kind that made us behave ourselves for fear of getting into trouble. In the last forty years, things have been more fluid, more yielding, more liquid, and increasingly, covered by the mucus of borderlessness, some in our culture seem genuinely grossed out. Female bodies are icky for some, and perhaps they feel as if they’ve been living inside a cunt. The shapeless feminine.

And, that anger at the nebulous feminine characteristics of this culture as evidenced by the male backlash against it, frightened me.

Before 2006, before 2008, progressives have got to figure out how to appeal to the wounded masculine in this country. It is not to be accomplished by destroying Roe v. Wade, denigrating women, repealing the small steps that gays have made toward full citizenship. We cannot go backwards on that. But we can realize that there are a lot of alienated males in our culture right now. Without their jobs, their traditional jobs that gave them identity, they need a new way of understanding their manhood.

George Bush has stirred up patriotic fervour in this country. (Patriotic: from patria or father). He has tapped into and his advisors have manipulated a warrior ethos in which it is unpatriotic to not support the troops and the war, where to oppose the war is to be sissified. The right has stirred up resentment against elitism as the provence of effeminancy, borderlessness, the world of sexual depravity. The Christianity that has emerged to combat these evils is not the gentle Christ; it is the manly, take-no-prisoners, I’ll-kick-your-ass Christ.

The culture war we are engaged in is one of class, yes. But it is framed in notions of wounded masculinity that seeks to destroy the feminine in oh so many ways. As a woman, I’m terrified. But it’s not about males versus females. Gender here is about more than that here. It’s about rigidity versus fluidity, it’s about authoritarianism versus freedom.”

In 2006, Foreign Policy magazine blamed U.S. troubles in Iraq on a falling birthrate in the United States.

The historical relation between patriarchy, population, and power has deep implications for our own time. As the United States is discovering today in Iraq, population is still power. Smart bombs, laser-guided missiles, and unmanned drones may vastly extend the violent reach of a hegemonic power. But ultimately, it is often the number of boots on the ground that changes history. Even with a fertility rate near replacement level, the United States lacks the amount of people necessary to sustain an imperial role in the world, just as Britain lost its ability to do so after its birthrates collapsed in the early 20th century. For countries such as China, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, in which one-child families are now the norm, the quality of human capital may be high, but it has literally become too rare to put at risk.

I wrote: So, we’re getting our asses kicked in Iraq because those people out-bred us, have too many bodies they’re willing to sacrifice, and we cannot sustain ourselves as an imperial power if we do not create more babies. I always thought the British Empire collapsed for a whole host of reasons—stupid me didn’t realize it was because the Brits couldn’t make cannon fodder fast enough. And those other countries have turned into wimps of the first magnitude because they’re not willing to sacrifice their precious single children for a good cause—like fighting the war on terror.

According to Foreign Policy, women were also responsible for economic disaster.

Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today’s headlines. The long-term financing of social security schemes, private pension plans, and healthcare systems has little to do with people living longer. Gains in life expectancy at older ages have actually been quite modest, and the rate of improvement in the United States has diminished for each of the last three decades. Instead, the falling ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were never born. As governments raise taxes on a dwindling working-age population to cover the growing burdens of supporting the elderly, young couples may conclude they are even less able to afford children than their parents were, thereby setting off a new cycle of population aging and decline.

For Foreign Policy, the answer to these issues was to reinstate patriarchy so that women would bear more children, which was the only way that the modern nation state was going to be able to continue to both fight wars and replenish its work forces. If there was one thing that the WTC terror bombings taught us, it was that allowing women to assume a role in society that was not that of childbearer would lead directly to the destruction of this country as a whole. How could we be expected to defend ourselves from the “other” hordes, who, continuing to practice their own measures in which women knew their proper place, were able to reproduce at much higher rates than we were?

And when I say “we,” I should acknowledge my own white bias and privilege here, because, of course, one of the great fears of American right wing white male agitators is that it is white women’s refusal to stay home and make babies that is going to make America a majority brown country in just a few decades.

Perhaps the most shocking consequences of this so-called connection between plummeting of white female birthrates and the rise of the brown “other” happened not here in the United States, but in Norway, where a gunman, who had previously written a manifesto tying together the fifth column of feminists and Islamists killed 77 people, most of them young teenagers, with a particular emphasis on trying to kill as many women as possible.

Nevertheless, the right clings to the idea that feminism is destroying Western societies from the inside, creating space for Islamism to take cover. This politics of emasculation gave shape to Breivik’s rage. Thus, while he pretends to abhor Muslim subjugation of women, he writes that the “fate of European civilisation depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism.” When cultural conservatives seize control of Europe, he promises, “we will re-establish the patriarchal structures.” Eventually, women “conditioned” to this new order “will know her place in society.” His mad act was in the service of male superiority as well as Christian nationalism. Those two things, of course, almost always go together.

The incidents I have discussed are, of course, just a small portion of the daily violence committed against women by white men who feel entitled and angry. In this country, we cannot have a full conversation about the entitlement of white men without going back to the very beginning of the founding of our nation, when white men felt entitled not only to the bodies of white women, but claimed ownership of the bodies of African-Americans and Native Americans. With the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, they claimed ownership of all of the bodies of the Western Hemisphere. There is historical precedent for these mass acts of violence against groups of people of color and women in our history.

And yet, discussing the anger of the white male places one in a dangerous position. Those who have written this week of their reactions to the Vista Isla killings have found themselves attacked in the blogosphere, on news sites, and in the Twitterverse. But, if we are to lance the festering sore that is growing inside the body of these United States, we must continue to have these conversations. As women, our very lives depend upon it. And we ask, again, for our brethren to join us in openly discussing the white male codes of violence and entitlement that make them believe that it is okay to hurt any of us who are not them.