Femicide…where’s the outrage?
MEDIA MISSES
REFRAMING THE MEDIA’S COVERAGE OF WOMEN
George Sodina killed three women…
George Sodini shot and killed three women and injured 11 more before killing himself in a hate crime against women Tuesday night in Pennsylvania. Sodini entered an aerobics class at a gym in the Pittsburgh area intending to take revenge on women, who he saw as rejecting him en masse, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Sodini did not know anyone in the aerobics class he targeted, according to the New York Times, contradicting earlier reports of an ex-girlfriend inside the gym. In a blog that has since been removed from the internet, Sodini wrote of his plans for the killing and his hatred of women.
“I actually look good,” Sodini wrote in December of last year. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne – yet 30 million women rejected me – over an 18- or 25-year period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are.” Sodini also repeatedly referred to women as “hoez,” and wrote of his sexual frustration, claiming to have been celibate since 1990.
“This killer fits into a long pattern of males who harbor hatred towards all women, the image of ‘woman,’ and towards individual real women, and who take out their frustration on a female scapegoat,” Professor David Gilmore of Stony Brook University told the Christian Science Monitor.
Source: Feminist Majority
Please read Bob Herbert’s (my hero) write up in the New York Times called Women at Risk.
We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.
Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
Unbelievable, isn’t it? No outrage. No uproar. No uprising.
We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.
For more about outrage (or lack thereof), read: Femicide: There’s not enough outrage
But, as Toronto author Brian Vallee points out in his 2007 book The War on Women, nobody counts the dead, nobody connects the dots, nobody calls out the problem.
“Compare the raw numbers,” he writes of the period 2000-06. “In the same seven-year period when 4,588 U.S. soldiers and police officers were killed by hostiles or by accident, more than 8,000 women – nearly twice as many – were shot, stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death by the intimate males in their lives. In Canada, compared to the 101 Canadian soldiers and police officers killed, more than 500 women – nearly five times as many – met the same fate.”
There’s not enough outrage.
How many women and girls must die – often brutal – deaths before society is outraged enough to do something about it?
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