Rodger was reportedly involved with the online mens rights movement and said to have been following several mens rights channels on YouTube. The language Rodger used in his videos against women – like referring to himself as an alpha male – is common rhetoric in such circles. These communities are so virulently misogynist that the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups, has been watching their movements for years. Yet, as the artist Molly Crabapple pointed out on Twitter: White terrorism is always blamed on guns, mental health – never poisonous ideology. If we need to talk about this tragic shooting in terms of illness, though, lets start with talking about our cultural sickness – a sickness that refuses to see misogyny as anything other than inevitable. It was reported on Saturday that Rodgers family had contacted the police about his violent and strange videos weeks before the shooting The family attorney said that police interviewed Rodger and thought he was a perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human. I have to wonder how much police dismissed Rodgers video rants because of the expectation that violent misogyny in young men is normal and expected. Dismissing violent misogynists as crazy is a neat way of saying that violent misogyny is an individual problem, not a cultural one, feminist blogger Melissa McEwan tweeted. The truth is that there is no such thing as a lone misogynist – they are created by our culture, and by communities that tells them that their hatred is both commonplace and justified. So when we say that these things are unstoppable, what we are really saying is that were unwilling to do the work to stop them. Violence against women does not have to be inevitable, but it is almost always foreseeable: what matters is what we do about it.
Posted on: Sun, 25 May 2014 14:52:38 +0000