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Almost three years ago to the day, I wrote a post called, "Shooting Girl-ery," which recorded my reaction when a man "apparently nursing a 20-year-old grudge, walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse here Monday morning and systematically tried to execute the girls there." Now I'm facing another horrible tragedy which resulted from a man feeling slighted by women decided that the reasonable way to deal with his emotions was to walk into an aerobics class and spray the room with bullets.
Three years ago, I wrote:
It is my wholehearted belief that our culture fosters tragedies like this by emphasizing that it is critical for men to be manly and not suffer slights from girls or women, which are the ultimate insult. The degradation of any "feminine" emotions as valueless doesn't help (i.e. - only girls and babies cry).
I am hard pressed... to think of a time when a woman took out her anger at men by randomly killing a bunch of people. Yet how many times do we hear about men or boys going on shooting sprees to avenge a wrong that has been done to them?...Even if boys and men are more physical due to biology, we make the situation worse by encouraging them to act on their aggression. Women, who are plenty aggressive, are encouraged to suppress it or express anger in non-physical ways. No one wins.
As families and friends mourn the deaths of three women (and the injuries - physical and mental - of others), I wonder if we will ever learn any lessons from incidents like these. Certainly - fortunately - they do not happen often. But neither are the (mass) murders of women by angry men isolated incidents. We live in a world where we constantly receive messages that men and women are different. When George Sodini, the perpetrator of this massacre, lamented that the women in the aerobics class appeared "so beautiful as to not be human," he encapsulated exactly what happens when we focus on gender differences instead of common humanity.
Since this gender binary defines people as "either/or" - either a person is male or female - and since men are somehow considered the default for being human/a person, women are dehumanized. We are not people. We are there to prop men up; to serve them; to be treated as property; to be degraded or cherished as men see fit. Whether this plays out in America as a man who insists on dating only women who are ten to twenty years younger than him, who is then so enraged by their lack of interest in him although he has matching furniture (because, thanks to other gender binaries, of course that is what women seek in men - material goods and good looks - not companionship and respect) that he feels entitled to end their lives when he decides to take his own, or in Pakistan when mobs hurl acid into the faces of girls on their way to school, it is the same problem: gender binaries create false dichotomies that make women objects rather than people.
I am not saying that men and women are exactly the same. We have different physical components which require different types of care. Once again, the gender binary fails women when it comes to how we treat our differences. Because we are not human, our unique needs are not prioritized the way men's are. Gynecology services are termed "women's health care," but men's prostate care is never called "men's health care" - it is just health care, since men by default are people and thus their care is just health care, not a special health care different from the norm. As Nicholas Kristof wrote last week:
If men had uteruses, “paternity wards” would get resources, ambulances would transport pregnant men to hospitals free of charge, deliveries would be free, and the Group of 8 industrialized nations would make paternal mortality a top priority. One of the most lethal forms of sex discrimination is this systematic inattention to reproductive health care, from family planning to childbirth...
Whether we let women die in childbirth or in fitness centers (and I can't help but wonder how many of the women were there in an effort to comply with society's unrealistic beauty standards, which by achieving, they then rendered themselves "not human" in the eyes of their killer), it comes down to a world in which we let this happen by
