This little compilation of links to Monday morning must reads after the terrible Isla Vista shooting Saturday goes out to all my readers, but especially to my fellow cismen.
Laurie Penny in New Statesman makes a lot of great points in an essay titled “Let’s call the Isla Vista killings what they were: misogynist extremism.” Here’s an excerpt:
We have been told for a long time that the best way to deal with this sort of harrassment and violence is to laugh it off. Women and girls and queer people have been told that online misogynists pose no real threat, even when they’re sharing intimate guides to how to destroy a woman’s self-esteem and force her into sexual submission. Well, now we have seen what the new ideology of misogyny looks like at its most extreme. We have seen incontrovertible evidence of real people being shot and killed in the name of that ideology, by a young man barely out of childhood himself who had been seduced into a disturbing cult of woman-hatred. Elliot Rodger was a victim – but not for the reasons he believed.
Misogyny is nothing new, but there is a specific and frightening trend taking place, and if we’re not going to accept it, we have to call it by its name. The title of the PUA bible belies the truth: this is not a game. Misogynist extremism does not exist in a mystical digital fairyland where there are no consequences. It is real. It does damage. It kills. And this is no longer a topic where abstraction is anything approaching appropriate.
Read the whole damn thing.
Also a must-read (if you can read German) is this text by Charlott at Mädchenmannschaft that adds a bit of context. The articles she links to in the piece are essential reading, too. Check out the #YesAllWomen hashtag on twitter, it highlights how not all men practice violent misogyny, but all women experience it and have to fear it.
I found these words about “gentleman supremacy” as a response after the shooting. But read the women* first.
Thoughts?