As you’ve probably noticed, mass shooters are invariably male. Dealing with the implications is too much for misogynist Tucker Carlson so he has a simple hand-wave solution, that women drive men to it:“They’re angry. They know that their lives will not be better than their parents’. They’ll be worse. That’s all but guaranteed … Yet the authorities in their lives, mostly women, never stop lecturing them about their so-called privilege. ‘You’re male! You’re privileged!’ ” And so “a lot of young men in America are going nuts.”
Even if this were true, why would that let men off the hook? Even if their fee-fees are hurt by, say, Gillette’s ad about toxic masculinity, that doesn’t excuse them channeling their anger into killing sprees. Sure, some right-wing extremists, as Amanda Marcotte says, are driven by masculine insecurity: “None of them clearly feels confident that manhood is much of a biological, irrefutable fact that they claim it is. Instead, they are constantly trying to ‘prove’ it, from demanding female submission to bashing trans people to refusing a vaccine. If masculinity isn’t a social construct, then one wouldn’t need to put so much work into socially constructing it.” Insecurity doesn’t excuse one damn thing. Lots of people are insecure and don’t feel the need to turn homicidal. Or to wail that Pride Month makes them feel marginalized.
But this is an old, old whine. For at least a decade, right-wingers have been explaining how women drive men to kill by not putting out or by not letting them be heroes. Because only women have agency. If women don’t conduct themselves properly, men have no choice but to rape them/kill them/go psycho/beat them up. If men don’t amount to a hill of beans it’s because women didn’t marry them and shape them up.
I know it’s comforting to feel there’s someone besides yourself to blame when things go south. And in our culture, plenty of people such as Carlson (who believes gender roles are fundamental to society) will tell them to blame women.
But it isn’t true. It never has been.
I get into this bullshit more in the book Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with current holder.
