Common contributing factors in American mass and serial murders: Mental instability. Guns. Misogyny. Racism. Things that don't "provoke" these tragedies: Girls and women. So journalists, get your act together and stop writing about victims as if it's their fault.
In the aftermath of Friday's mass shooting in Santa Fe, Texas that left ten dead, Reuters chose to headline a story about it with the message "Spurned advances provoked Texas school shooting, victim's mother says." That information was gathered from a Los Angeles Times piece similarly headlined, "Texas school shooter killed girl who turned down his advances and embarrassed him in class, her mother says." CBS likewise ran with "Texas school shooting victim's mother says daughter rejected suspect's advances."
Imagine for a moment that you sent your teenage daughter off to school in the morning and she was murdered a few hours later. Imagine that you're Sadie Rodriguez, grieving your child, and what you had said was that your daughter Shana Fisher "had 4 months of problems from this boy," because "He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no." Imagine that, as the LA Times reported, he "continued to get more aggressive, and she finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class." Imagine that your narrative then gets infuriatingly twisted in international headlines about rejection.
That is not a story of a killer who was "provoked." That is not one of a kid who was "turned down and embarrassed." It's one about a dead girl who stood up to someone who was provoking her, and about nine other human beings snuffed out by a monster. It takes a truly astonishing amount of mental gymnastics to see a man who's left behind a trail of bodies and leap immediately to framing a female victim as an active cause of his crimes. Yet it happens all the time.
Two years ago, after the mass shooting at the Antigo High School prom, Broadly ran an interview with an expert on "why failed romance sometimes drives men to violence." That excuse has been a bigger workout lately. In March, a 17-year-old Maryland teen opened fire and fatally shot a female classmate and wounded another before committing suicide. The Daily Mail then described the incident by saying that "Tuesday's school shooting . . . increasingly appears to be the action of a lovesick teenager." The AP, Time and ABC News similarly described him as "lovesick" because he'd had a prior relationship with his murder victim. And a local D.C. Fox news station didn't hesitate to mention that his neighbors said the suspect "came from a good family and all of their interactions with him were positive." If calling an actual murderer a lovesick kid from a good family isn't a case of tone deaf, male entitlement language in action, I don't know what is.
Then in April, when Golden State Killer suspect Joseph DeAngelo was arrested, the Daily Beast reported that "Breakup With ‘Bonnie’ May Have Fueled Golden State Killer, Investigators Say." The Mercury News had more info, saying that an investigator on the case was "convinced that DeAngelo’s breakup with Bonnie and his reportedly ‘toxic’ marriage to another woman fueled his alleged desire to rape and kill." The ever reliable Daily Mail once again went all in, publishing a photo and the full name of Bonnie and identifying her as "The woman who broke suspected Golden State Killer Joe DeAngelo’s heart and may have spurred him on his decade-long murder and rape spree." This man is believed responsible for at least twelve unbelievably sadistic murders and fifty rapes over a more than decade-long reign of terror. So I guess the real question is, why did Bonnie make him do that?
The perverse rush to assign a reason for violent male behavior other than, oh I don't know, toxic masculinity, has been a wild, infuriating ride. After the suspect in April's Toronto van attack that left ten people dead was tied to the vile "incel" (involuntary celibate) community that also inspired Isla Vista mass murderer Elliot Rodger, the hot takes went into overdrive. Ross Douthat pontificated from the pages of The New York Times that "The sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration." Why, it's almost as if women having rights and freedom to choose their romantic and sexual partners makes some people angry. Douthat then went on to fancifully speculate that maybe sex robots will one day "address the unhappiness of incels," because sure, if there's one thing 20 years of internet culture has proven, it's that technology definitely makes misogynists hate women less.
If you've ever experienced any form of stalking — and nearly eight million Americans, including me, have — you know that the very first rule is not to engage. Do not talk to him. Do not react to him. Do not give him attention. You need to go out of your way to make that happen, need to change your schedule, lock down your social media, maybe even move? If that's what it comes to, yes. The experience is unbelievably shitty and unfair and terrifying. So take it seriously when I tell you that no one who cares about your safety will ever in a million years advise you to just be nice to the guy who won't leave you alone, to just think about his feelings. That's one of the most dangerous possible options, because it gives him what he craves: the drama of engagement.
The National Center for Victims of Crime tellingly advises, "Victims of stalking often feel pressured by friends or family to downplay the stalker’s behavior, but stalking poses a real threat of harm. Your safety is paramount."
And when Gavin de Becker wrote "The Gift of Fear" in 1997, his common sense advice to women was to ''never explain why they don't want a relationship, but simply make clear that they have thought it over, that this is their decision and that they expect the man to respect it.'' From then on, he said, ''It is very important that no further detectable response be given." That was two decades ago. That was long before the teen victims of these recent mass shooters were even born.
We have known for a very long time that engaging with a person who makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up is a potentially fatal act. And yet a prevailing public narrative is still a) Why can't you be sympathetic to that scary "nice guy"? and b) You made him kill those people because you weren't.
Did you know that after auto accidents, the leading cause of death in pregnant women is murder? Here's a heading from last year: "Pregnant woman was put in bathtub, doused with gasoline and set afire, police say." What do you think she did to "provoke" that? Did you know that roughly half of all female murder victims are killed by their partners? That's three women every day. So here's a suggestion: Stop romanticizing the deaths of women.
It's completely unnecessary, by the way. Last year, The Chicago Tribune had no trouble coming up with the headline "What mass shooters often have in common: domestic violence." It still makes the point, without implying what they have in common is women who turned them down. Last fall, Dame explored the issue with a story called "Men are killing thousands of women a year for saying no." And in what might be deemed a timely petard hoisting of attention, on Friday, the same day as the Santa Fe shooting, The New York Times profiled "Custodian of the Patriarchy" Jordan Peterson.
The feature includes choice nuggets like "Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married. . . . Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end." The writer quite logically reports that her response to him was laughter.
This isn't just about extreme violence, though. This is about an entire culture that expects females to be accommodating and make men feel flattered by their attentions, however unwanted and inappropriate they may be. This is about getting called a bitch when you ignore a harasser on the street. About being passed over in your industry because your boss either finds your too bangable or not bangable enough.
This is about policing the attire of schoolgirls, because they're a "distraction," rather than teaching boys how to exist with maturity and respect in a world that contains females. It's about the timeworn tradition of questioning what a woman said or did or wore to understand why a man why a man would rape or assault her.
In 2017, the deadliest (so far) year for mass shootings in America's history, Fox News ran a cozy op-ed explaining that "Most men just want a woman who's nice," because "Nice, to a man, means being soft, gentle and kind. . . . Being nice means you think of others before you think about yourself." In the 21st century, this is what people still get paid to tell women.
I am so, so tired and I am so, so angry. I am angry about every single time in my life that I have endured disgusting behavior and then been told I should have been pleasant about it. I'm angry about every woman I've loved who's endured so much worse. I'm angry about the family friend who was stabbed to death by her estranged husband after she took out an order of protection against him. I am angry about all the garbage my adolescent daughters have already experienced in their young lives, from classmates and from creeps on the street. I'm angry for all of us. It's not our responsibility to fix these guys, and if you've ever known an abuser you know couldn't even if you tried.
And I'm furious at the reprehensible, irresponsible reporting that outright states that girls and women who quite justifiably reject men who hate women are "provoking" them. So if you're a headline writer, the next time you're wondering who caused a mass murder, look to the man holding the gun, not the woman who was trying to get away from him.
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