We need to talk about misogyny

[ismnotwasm]

65. Actually I talked to a school administrator who suggested the same thing

He said put in enough social workers and resources for the number of kids in schools and they would catch sociopathic behavior right away.

This was a discussion about non-gendered violence however, but there might be an answer in education boys on sexism, harmful ideas of masculinity, as well as the expectation of male violence. We teach males that violence is an appropriate response, tell them they're helpless in the face of hormones (testosterone) , interestingly, there has been an increase in violence from young girls as well, so this message of violence as answer has proliferated. The question is how. Males, are (duh) more violent, against women, against each other then women are, are often taught to feel sexually entitled, have ideas of masculinity that ranges from antiquated to dangerous.

We are in a time of flux.

That this young man spouted off hate speech against women, doesn't make him anymore disturbed than murderous racists, or anti-Semites. That he killed women probably felt like the only thing he had left to do. It probably felt right. What he expressed was sexual frustration and went right down the line with MRA talking points, much like an Racist would to justify killing with racist talking points.

Did he see women as human? I wonder-- no I don't wonder- he didn't

I'm not saying he wasn't disturbed, I'm saying he was participating in hate, in this case misogyny.


I disagree about social media, because this is what kids are using, what they are exposed too, hashtags and online activism can reach the unreachable, teach the ones who have had exposure to only one way of conflict resolution. Are there better ways? Sure. But we need to use every resource we have.

I imagine you are not a Dworkin fan, but read these words, feel the exhaustion, the despair of the woman who wrote then. While this is about rape--we are still talking about male to female violence

I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce
During Which There Is No Rape
1983
I have thought a great deal about how a feminist, like myself, addresses an audience primarily of political men who say that they are antisexist. And I thought a lot about whether there should be a qualitative difference in the kind of speech I address to you. And then I found myself incapable of pretending that I really believe that that qualitative difference exists. I have watched the men's movement for many years. I am close with some of the people who participate in it. I can't come here as a friend even though I might very much want to. What I would like to do is to scream: and in that scream I would have the screams of the raped, and the sobs of the battered; and even worse, in the center of that scream I would have the deafening sound of women's silence, that silence into which we are born because we are women and in which most of us die.

And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The cliches. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are.

And also: that we do not have time. We women. We don't have forever. Some of us don't have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, "Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way." That's true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women's oppression.

It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don't have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one's body in marriage and then having no rights over it.

More:http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html