Remembering the Virginia Tech massacre
Cross-posted at The New Agenda.
It was two years ago today that Seung-Hui Cho went on his murder spree at Virginia Tech, killing 32 people, wounding 17 others, and finally turning the gun on himself. It was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
A few days after the massacre, Sarah Baxter put her finger on what was troubling Cho in an article that must surely rank as one of the most brutally inane things ever published by the Times: it was feminism made him do it! What the shooting revealed, said Sarah, was “the crisis of young males in a feminised society.” Sarah Baxter is something like the English version of Camille Paglia, though without the bustier: both are anti-feminists who claim to be feminists, yet somehow only manage to write about how a) feminism is crap, b) most women are crap, and c) everything would be fine if we’d just stop whining and appreciate all the wonderful things men have done for us. Anyhoo, Sarah consulted with her buddy Camille and came up with a tender portrait of Cho the Shooter, a manly young man who was frustrated by a modern world full of harlots and unfeeling feminists: “college girls who reported him to the police for stalking and got him carted off to mental hospital after he sent them shy love messages full of yearning,” in Baxter’s phrase. Damn those idiot college girls for reporting Cho as a stalker! If only they’d appreciated his shy love messages full of yearning, there would have been no massacre. See what feminism does?
Actually, there is a connection between feminism and the Virginia Tech massacre, though it’s precisely the opposite of what Baxter thinks it is. But first, let’s get one thing clear: what caused Cho’s behavior wasn’t feminism or anti-feminism or anything in this big blue world but the addled contents of that boy’s skull, emphasis on addled. The guy was insane. A raving psychotic. You might as well blame gallstones on feminism. Yes, I understand that mental illness is affected and sometimes prompted by life history — it’s not all just brain chemistry — but the level of psychosis displayed by Cho is pretty clearly in the realm of massive disease. But if Cho’s actions had been shaped by some kind of angry response to women’s liberation (as was the case with the Montreal killer), what that would show us is not a society that is too feminized, but one that isn’t feminized enough. A society where bigotry against women’s rights is still so deep that it evokes murderous rage. A society that needs more feminism, not less.
Think about it: feminism is surely the only social justice movement that is still treated as a problem rather than a solution. If a group of young toughs go on a gay bashing spree, for example, the gay rights movement isn’t named as the social problem that has prompted those poor confused young men to kill. Instead, everyone understands that the problem is the bigotry, the homophobia, and that what needs to happen is for the young toughs of our society to learn tolerance and respect for diversity. Yet when women are slaughtered, people say, “well, if they’d just stop trying to be equal they wouldn’t get killed. No wonder men are upset.” We see that right now with the Chris Brown-Rihanna trainwreck: people actually blame feminism for imperiling young men’s self-esteem. Surely the answer to that is more feminism — perhaps young men could be taught that manliness isn’t measured by the number of stitches in your girlfriend’s lip? — but no, instead we’re told that “of course” young men beat the crap out of women to assert themselves in these terrible feminist times. And that if feminists had any sense or compassion they’d recognize the crisis of masculinity that is causing those balled-up fists to collide with our jaws. Still waiting to see that argument applied to gay bashing.
But back to Cho and Virginia Tech. The other thing the massacre shows (as if we needed more evidence) is how much violence against women is accepted as normal. Just part of the landscape. Cho had already been reported by female students as a stalker, yet he wasn’t confined, wasn’t under supervision, wasn’t on a police watch list. He was even able to buy guns, for pete’s sake. And the morning of the massacre, the police initially assumed that the first two shootings were “just” domestic violence, which is why they didn’t issue an alert or shut down the campus. “Just” domestic violence. Yeah, yeah, just another dead woman, murdered by her stalker/former boyfriend/would-be boyfriend. Happens all the time.
33 Responses to “Remembering the Virginia Tech massacre”
-
sister of ye says:
Assuming for argument’s sake that there is truth to the “feminism made him do it” meme – what the hell kind of fragile egos do these supposed manly men have? Why should beings so delicate be trusted with any important matters like the economy and war and peace?
Indeed, the logic of the argument cries out for men being shunted to the side and distracted with busywork where they can feel important, while more stable women take care of the serious business of the world.
Exceptions must always be made for personal merit, however, so fleabrains like Baxter and Paglia can be assigned the same make-work as the men.
Is my argument extreme? Perhaps, but I thinkg it makes as much if not more sense than Baxter’s.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:44 pm EST -
Violet says:
Why should beings so delicate be trusted with any important matters like the economy and war and peace?
Indeed, the logic of the argument cries out for men being shunted to the side and distracted with busywork where they can feel important, while more stable women take care of the serious business of the world.
Ha! Exactly. I have made this same argument myself many times, though I particularly enjoy your phrasing of it.
Whenever people tell me that women and gay men shouldn’t be allowed in the military because it’s too upsetting/distracting for het guys, I say it sounds to me like het guys are way too fragile to be soldiers.
-
Sameol says:
Much like the good ol’ “you wimmins don’t know what you’re doing in releasing men’s sexual urges” trope. Seems like if men can’t control themselves and are turned into maniacs by the glimpse of skin, they probably shouldn’t be walking around free.
-
Sis says:
Has this kind of thing ever happened in, say, an English department? Anthropology grad school? Victorian poetry grad seminar? Why is it always in the tech universities, or engineering faculties.
-
Violet says:
Virginia Tech is just a regular university. It was an agricultural college in the 19th century, then a “polytechnic” school. Then the name shifted to Virginia Tech. But it’s a regular public university, not an engineering school. Cho was an English major.
-
Sis says:
Oh God. Surely not. I had no idea. Are you sure he was an English major? Not an ESL pre-entrance student?
-
Sis says:
“Rage and humiliation … boys who are spurned again and again.”
A couple weeks ago as I entered the elevator, a man walked out of it grinning at me and said “Hi”. Stranger. I can say that in afterthought. Then it didn’t register. I was preoccupied with something. It registered when he then said, in a raised voice. “Well, aren’t you special”.
Small teeny ways we are expected to serve it up, all our lives. Kind of shocked, I turned around reflexively, saying “Oh. I’m am sorry. Hello”. Then spent the rest of the day hating myself for doing that. Delivering it up.
However. I’m still alive.
Dozens of times a day, thousands of times a year, millions of times in a woman’s lifetime. We belong to every stranger.
-
gayle says:
“Rage and humiliation … boys who are spurned again and again.”
Yet girls who are spurned again and again tend not to gun down strangers with machine guns.
Go figure.
-
Sandra S. says:
We spoke about this in class when it first happened, and frankly, I blame the American cultural willingness to allow churches to solve problems that they have no business working on. The guy’s mother noticed that he was creepy and violent and sought help for him- through CHURCH. Apparently he was told that he was possessed and exposed to an exorcism. AN EXORCISM. You don’t think that might fuck a kid up? If the kid had been taken to a doctor or a psychologist, he’d have been on anti-psychotics.
-
quixote says:
I wasn’t aware of most of the background on the VT massacre. The event was horrible, but after the initial reports the coverage got so ga-ga I stopped paying attention.
I’m just flabbergasted to hear that he’d been reported for stalking, which isn’t important. That the first few deaths were not important. That the cops only started paying attention when it wasn’t “just” violence against women.
And if they ever did get it through their heads that violence toward women is a leading indicator, what would it mean to them? That it needs to be stopped? Or that when the canaries are dying it’s time to get out of the coal mine?
-
quixote says:
Interesting, too, about the church angle. As Sandra says, imagine if he’d gotten actual help.
-
lexia says:
I’m glad to see it mentioned that Cho’s first two murders were ignored as “just domestic violence” by the school administration. The subsequent 30 murders would not have occurred had Va. Tech. taken male violence against women seriously.
I told a faculty wife I knew about that fact shortly after it occurred and she immediately said it wasn’t true and called me paranoid. No change in her viewpoint on how casually male violence against women is treated once that fact became more widely known, just silence.
It does look like Cho was insane but Va. Tech.’s heightened permissiveness towards male violence provided the fertile ground for that insanity to become destructive. Va. Tech. was the school where the rape of a student by two football players eventually culminated in the destruction of the Violence Against Women Act by the Supreme Court in 2000.
The case is Morrison v. U.S. The best statement of the school’s negligence, concern for men’s welfare above all and complete indifference towards its women students is the circuit court’s initial opinion:
http://www.nacua.org/documents.....aTech.html
(The free public sources like Wikipedia and the search engines are already junked up by pro-rape advocates arguing that all rape accusations are false. The courts determined the rape had occurred and Va. Tech. had acted harmfully towards Brzonkala – she won her Title IX action against the school. Where she and all women lost was the courts’ judgment that women, unlike black men, have no federal right to protection against violence).My apologies for repeatedly stating this, but not one news source mentioned the Morrison case in connection with Cho. Virginia Tech decided in 1995 to lie to a student, to protect rapists and to change the law of the land to remove the strongest protection women ever had against male violence. Then the school gets a free pass when it comes back to them ten years later.
-
Sis says:
The problem may be “the help”. There are several studies showing neuroleptic drugs cause psychotic breaks and violence: Columbine, Montreal Massacre, many, many individual cases. This is not to say these men aren’t sexist. It’s just the drugs case murder and suicide ideation. So they take it where they have always wanted to.
-
yttik says:
“Dozens of times a day, thousands of times a year, millions of times in a woman’s lifetime. We belong to every stranger.”
That’s just chilling, Sis. And absolutely true.
-
Sis says:
As I posted, the drugs do not prevent. They can cause violence, murder and suicide ideation. The myth of these drugs healing anything is being exposed by evidenced based medical studies.
-
simply wondered says:
well we trusted ourselves with ‘important matters like the economy and war and peace’ and in no fewer than one of those areas we seem to be having lots of success, thank you!
how on earth can people say we need change with statistics like that to speak for our abilities? still, if we manage to put the blame for things like this on feminism, we clearly have a good propaganda machine, so it’s not all bad. -
Sis says:
I don’t know why you bother with law. Your forte lies elsewhere.
-
slythwolf says:
Whenever people tell me that women and gay men shouldn’t be allowed in the military because it’s too upsetting/distracting for het guys, I say it sounds to me like het guys are way too fragile to be soldiers.
One of my favorite moments in The West Wing dealt with this, when Admiral Fitzwallace (who is black) is talking to some military dudes who don’t think gay people should be allowed in because it will “disrupt the unit”.
“The problem with that,” Fitzwallace says, “is that they were saying the same thing about me 50 years ago. And you know what? It did disrupt the unit. The unit got over it.”
-
Lexia says:
Slight correction: the plaintiff in Morrison settled the Title IX part of her cause of action against Va. Tech in 2000. This was after Va. Tech. tried and failed on appeal to have the Title IX claim dismissed.
Most of the Internet chatter defending Morrison and Va. Tech. attempts to deny that a crime was committed; the facts on record prove otherwise.
-
tinfoil hattie says:
From the opinion:
Rape of a female student by a male student is the only violent felony that Virginia Tech authorities do not automatically report to the university or town police.
I live in Virginia. I have two elementary school-aged boys. VA Tech was a logical option until now. I don’t think I can pay for them to go there. Fuck this shit.
-
Sis says:
So it’s not a tech school or an engineering school But reading about this I was reminded of the engineering school at amajor Canadian university which published an article in their dept newspaper about how to penetrate a child. And they didn’t think they should remove it, or sanction the writer and publisher. Nor did the Chancellor’s office. Until. But the first response was a variation of boys will be boys. This was about 20 years ago.
I’ve got to the point where I don’t even want to go *near* that side of campus. I’ll walk way out of my way.
-
Joan says:
Sis-I believe it is still mainly a tech school and does have engineering though also liberal arts. Sports are very important there and it is a male oriented place imo. That wonderful human being Michael Vick was a star football player there. They still idolize him.
If I recall correctly, the first two students found murdered were a black male and a white female. I wonder if race also contributed to the campus police basically blowing-off the incident as domestic violence?
-
Violet says:
I live in Virginia and went to college in this state. Virginia Tech has long been just a regular state university, with a complete undergraduate program and several graduate schools.
There are two big state schools in Virginia: UVA and VPI (VPI is the older name of Virginia Tech and is how I still think of it). VPI is the school you go to if you can’t get into UVA or W&M, or if you want to be a farmer. Sorry, hokies: bite me.
The heart of VPI is the original agricultural college. When I was in school the joke was that to graduate from VPI, all you had to do was keep a pig alive for four years.
-
simply wondered says:
‘I don’t know why you bother with law. Your forte lies elsewhere.’
bless you sis! i really don’t think i have a forte – more kinda piano in a bunch of random areas, but bless you many times!
(you mean counting to one, right?)(certainly isn’t block quotes however many times violet has told me how).
and vi, i reckon keeping a pig alive for four years is quite a skill. i know which of the virginians i’m gonna cosy up to when the bomb drops. i love you, but pork is pork.
-
Tabby Lavalamp says:
Great post, but I think you’re being a little too lenient on homophobes and the depth of homophobia that still permeates society. Yes, things are getting better, but many (conservative religionists especially) see “gay panic” as a valid defense and do blame the gay rights movement for “shoving it down their throats” (double entendre not intended). Another thing to watch is where hate speech laws are in effect and there is talk about adding sexual orientation as a protected class. The right-wingers start frothing at the mouths crying that it’s going to prevent their ability to preach against sodomy from their pulpits.
Not to say the number of people who will jump on the “gay panic” defense doesn’t far outweigh the number of people who will jump on the “feminist panic” defense. It’s very disheartening how many people will deplore homophobia in one breath but then turn around and blame feminism in another. -
Violet says:
i know which of the virginians i’m gonna cosy up to when the bomb drops. i love you, but pork is pork.
Virginia Tech’s your ticket then. I swear to God, I think you can actually get a degree in poultry there.
-
tinfoil hattie says:
I do know a lot of really smart people who went to Tech, so I don’t agree that it’s a university for dumb people.
Misogynists, yes. Dumb? I disagree.
-
Violet says:
tinfoil hattie, surely you realize that people from rival schools make fun of each other. And surely you’ve grasped that I went to one of Tech’s rival schools. I make no claims for the truth of my remarks about hokies. All in good fun.
-
Sis says:
I thought it was de rigeur to make fun of Ag schools. Just what else bonds us when we’re undergrads? For a few years I was chastened when someone implied I was unfairly prejudiced against simple, hard-working folk who provided us with sustenance. Yada yada. Then I learned Ag schools are little more than agraceutical brothels, and deserve all the ridicule and censure we can muster.
-
Level Best says:
“Think about it: feminism is surely the only social justice movement that is still treated as a problem rather than a solution.”–Violet
That is brilliant and so true. I know the past election was hell on you, but you have been on fire as a feminist blogger ever since. Thank you.
-
m Andrea says:
Think about it: feminism is surely the only social justice movement that is still treated as a problem rather than a solution.
Once again, you’ve identified a particularly odious manifestation of vile stupidity with breathtaking ease. And then you wonder why I want you to write more…
I mean, I’ve always known that, but until you articulated the idea so clearly it never seemed like an important point unto itself. But it is. It’s encapsulating almost the entire problem with misognyny and explains, among other things, why feminism is forever running in circles — we always get stuck chanting “but we love teh menz”.
Do black feminists have to stop every two seconds and say “but we love white people”? It’s assumed that the problem is injustice, not emotional attachements.
This little gem can be applied to practically every feministy thing. Thank you!
-
Sis says:
Think about it: feminism is surely the only social justice movement that is still treated as a problem rather than a solution.
##
Yes. Amidst all the rage among the broken hearted (because, what else can we be when our fathers, sons, lovers, nephews, brothers, male children betray us)…a laser.
I guess she still has to pay the rent. Somewhere else. All we can do is wait.
-
Sis says:
Since there’s this echo here, I’ll just post this for mAndrea and others to read. I expect Vi will remove it when she finds it. Until then… .
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 11:39 PM
Subject: Women’s Water Walk crosses Quebec66-yr old Anishinabe elder Josephine Mandamin started out in Thunder Bay and after walking around all of the Great Lakes between 2003 and 2008, she and her family is now walking along the St.Lawrence River down to the Atlantic
ocean, which they expect to reach at the end of April.Mandamin and four other Anishinabe-quay carry an old copper pail filled with of water and a ceremonial staff with an eagle’s head, performing small ceremonies, and talking to people about the condition of the Great Lakes and the River.
Local sympathizers are honking as they walk by, joining her and her small group for a stretch, hosting them for the night, making donations…
Enthusiasm is growing about this innovative action.For info about the group’s current location in order to interview Ms. Manadamin, one can contact Mado Terrio at (506) four six six 1977.
An article by Canadian filmmaker Kevin McMahon who has been following her trip and making a film about it: Waterlife, out this summer :
http://www.thestar(DOT)com/New.....cle/613541A strong interview of Mandamin on Youtube:
http://tr.youtube(DOT)com/watc.....annel_pageThe Mother Earth Water Walkers’ website:
http://www.motherearthwaterwal.....rence.htmlPlease consider a contribution. These courageous women say they are doing it for the water… but they are really doing it for us, our children,
grand-children…
