It’s always a little distressing to see manosphere-style dumbassery outside the manosphere. Today’s offender: Charlotte Allen at National Review Online, explaining how the deaths in Newtown are the result of the school’s “feminized setting.” Had the school been filled with manly men (and manly boys), Adam Lanza could have been stopped in his tracks!
No, really, that’s what she says. Except that what she wrote is somehow even more egregious than my sarcastic summary. Read for yourself:
There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees.
As everyone knows, janitors with buckets can easily overwhelm adult males firing semiautomatic rifles. That’s why most armies in the world have given up guns, are stocking up on buckets, and have started massive recruiting drives aimed at janitors.
(In fact, there was a male custodian on duty, who (according to one witness) warned students and teachers of the gunman, probably saving lives in the process. It does not appear that any buckets were thrown.)
Oh, Allen gives the women at the school some grudging credit for confronting Lanza and saving lives.
The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms.
But they were ladies, and ladies just aren’t made to be heroes.
[I]n general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.
I’m pretty sure that if this had happened they would have been gunned down, and there would be a couple of former high school football stars and “some of the huskier 12-year-old boys” added to the list of victims. Not even the “huskiest” 12-year-old is any match for a man with a semiautomatic rifle. [EDITED TO ADD: Also, if there were any 12-year-olds on the scene they would have had to have have flunked several years, as the school only goes up to the fourth grade, as several commenters here have pointed out.]
People, even unarmed people, need to fight back against criminals — because usually, no one else will. It took the police 20 minutes to arrive at Sandy Hook.
According to this timeline, a police SWAT team was there ten minutes after the shooting started.
By the time they got there, it was over. Cops and everybody else encourage civilians not to try to defend themselves when they are criminally assaulted. This is stupid advice. There are things you can do. Run is one of them, because most shooters can’t hit a moving target. The other, if you are in a confined space, is throw things at the killer, or try a tackle.
Many students, with the help of teachers, saved themselves by hiding. Some of the students in one classroom tried to run, and were gunned down. Their classmates who stayed hidden survived.
Remember United Flight 93 on 9/11. It was a “flight of heroes” because a bunch of guys on that plane did what they could with what they had. They probably prevented the destruction of the White House or the Capitol.
The hijackers weren’t carrying semiautomatic rifles. And the heroes literally had nothing to lose by attacking them.
Parents of sick children need to be realistic about them. I know at least two sets of fine and devoted parents who have had the misfortune to raise sons who were troubled for genetic reasons beyond anyone’s control. Either of those boys could have been an Adam Lanza. You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons. You have to set boundaries. You have to say, “You can’t live here anymore — you’re an adult, and it’s time for you to be a man. We’ll give you all the support you need, but we won’t be enablers.” Unfortunately, the idea of being an “adult” and a “man” once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.
Really? Very few mass killers have lived at home with their mothers, but somehow being “adult” and “men” didn’t stop them from killing. It’s good that Allen, without actually knowing any of the details of Adam Lanza’s apparent “sickness” (because at this point none of us do) is able to tell us what would have been best for him.
Appalling.
When was male aggression ever a part of elementary school?
Also, when was male aggression from adult men, ie teachers, ever considered a good thing? Is she imagining a distant past in which teachers jousted on horseback in the school gym?
“When was male aggression ever a part of elementary school?”
I dunno, Claire. Unless she’s counting dodgeball.
Male agression was part of elementary scholl when beating the shit out of other kids only got you a mild scolding, and dads approval when you got home?
Fuck IDK. Seems to me that guys I knew who solved lifes problems with fists got cracked down on. And I’m forty.
Hey pillow, this here:
“Seems to me that guys I knew who solved lifes problems with fists got cracked down on.”
I think you’re right. I don’t think these shooters are usually the physically agressive types. They’re another type altogether. George Sodini didn’t have a history of punching people, but he left behind a cyber trail of festering resentment and entitlement.
My daughters at 12 were much taller than their male fellow students as most girls are, however the thought of teaching anyone lt alone children to throw themselves into the fire
Line of guns is a true abomination.
There is a video making the rounds of a toddler forcing himself on another toddler over and over while an adult films him and encourages him, and adults claim it is charming. It is so not charming.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/324730
I was the tallest girl at my primary school (small school of about 43 kids though) and was 2 centimeters taller than the oldest boy. I’m still the same height I was then. But kids at that age are always around the same height. Why do people think height= physical strength?
None of those children were over 10. The school only goes to the fourth grade. Naturally this so called journalist didn’t bother to do a stitch of research on the matter before she bloviated.
Actually, I have an idea about how to stop at least some killers.
When a tradgedy happens, do not go on endlessly about the killer and his motivations in the media. His name, his life and his motivations are best left to police, forensics and the medical professions. The public needs to understand there is NO explanation that will ever satisfy or explain really.
The other is that when the the tragedy strikes, the media should report it but then reverse the flow. Instead of endlessly hounding victims and their families (which feeds the sadistic tendancies of any killer) it should be reporting on the care, support, concern and outrage of the community at large. Too many families that have murdered famiy members feel isolated. What would happen if churches stepped forward to offer support? If counsellors stepped forward and publically offered support? It happens now, but I think there’s more that can be done short term and long term. I think the world needs to see just how vast the difference is between killers and the rest of humanity. And we can do that by offering compassion, by actually sitting and crying when we hear such terrible news, by not making things an intellectual or political discussion before we’ve even grieved or offered help. In short, by being human.
That video isn’t cute, it’s parenting fail. Please don’t teach your kids to ignore the wishes of other people, folks, it’s not cool.
@ pillowinhell
I think that’s what pissed people off about Diogenes in this thread. He jumped right in hoping to hijack this tragedy in service of whatever half-assed political agenda it is that he’s advocating by posting here, and that rubs anyone with a sense of decency up the wrong way.
Also, I think the biographies on killers needs to stop unless its as a textbook for law enforcement, psychologists or profilers.
I could probably think up a thousand things I’d like to see gone. I believe that there’s no one thing that makes a killer, but each thing that displays violence, entitlement, hatred and lack of concern with anothers welfare is another drop in a very poisonous well. Most people handle the occassional cupful okay, but a few become toxic and a violence loving culture makes it really easy for these people to hide in.
Cassandra I agree.
Its really uncomfortable to sit with the pain and horror. Society says that breaking into tears over people you don’t know is extremely odd or possibly disturbed. So I can understand why the need to intellectualize. The danger in doing so though is a loss of humanity and sense of connection.
There’s nothing wrong in feeling loss or outrage or great sadness for another human being. It should be encouraged and not ostracized.
Yep. It’s totally reasonable to be upset when a bunch of children are killed, and not a sign of weakness at all. Caring about other people is good for society, and so is a strong sense of empathy. When someone seems to instinctively empathize with the killer rather than the victims that’s a bit creepy, though. Part of what’s offputting about Diogenes is the way he shifted the focus of responsibility away from the shooter to society as a whole, and I’m pretty sure the reason he’s doing that is because the shooter is a young man and so is he. Which is like…it’s super easy to empathize with people almost exactly like yourself, but that very limited kind of empathy isn’t what you need to make a kinder, safer society.
I was in highschool when the columbine shootings happened. My group of friends and I were in a similar situation to them, being picked on, past times and what have you. We felt sorry about the shit that happened in the criminals lives, but not one of us could wrap our heads around their “solution”. Still, some of us wondered that if things were a little worse, could that have been us?
Looking back, the answer is no. But we could see their lives so clearly because every detail was neatly printed and described. And that’s a real problem.
What Cassandra said. I second it. Trying to shift the blame onto parents who may or may not spank their children is overly simplistic. Othering the victims — especially those who were killed or injured is downright wrong.
@pillowinhell
While it was the narrative that the media focused on, the Columbine shooters were not actually picked on. It goes a bit against your not liking bios of killers, but Dave Cullen’s “Columbine” is fantastic at picking apart what the media said and what was actually true. They were rather popular boys with friends who liked them enough to help them acquire weapons with no (or not enough) questions asked.
I think that’s probably why he’s so determined to in some way insist that the shooter was “crazy”, so that responsibility can be shifted away from the young man who did this thing and onto someone else, anyone else.
I think that we all really want to understand what could make someone do something like this and so we think about what could make us want to hurt (not kill, but hurt is a reasonable midpoint for empathy). It is why the Columbine “bullied” narrative still has so much staying power and probably why kids who didn’t know any better speculated about it in front of reporters in the first place.
For some people who don’t want to think about it at all or who want to believe their desire to hurt is utterly unlike the mass murderer’s, “crazy” nicely reassures them and frees them from really thinking about it. (Dio is obviously not thinking about it, but in a different way.) It also is often used as a pseudoscientific word for evil.
I think you are right about Dio, CassandraSays, but I think he also wants to shift the conversation to a theory he pulled out of his ass that isn’t mainstream so he can awe us all with his brilliance. It is childish and selfish and not well thought out.
The comment he made to me earlier about there being no simple solutions should be up for the “most unintentionally ironic comment by a troll” award.
Oh, my god. Yes, I had a wonderful time in late elementary/junior high school, before the epidemic of ‘feminizing’ began…but what’s truly astounding in this article is the notion that this disturbed young man should have been forced to ‘make it on his own’–now there is contradictory advice.
I would suggest that we actually need more, not less, attention paid to the people who commit these acts. It really is not about glorifying them, but about understanding what is making them do these things.
Well that thread was fun to read all of, by which I mean completely infuriating at times, and hilarious at others. (Varnish off? *dies*)
timetravellingfool —
*raises hand*
pecunium — “Because me, I’m a cynic. I figure that some people will always be violent, the trick is to minimize the damage.” — Seconded.
“Naive, or stupid, or lying through your teeth, or some combination of all of the above.” — my vote is on a weird combination of all of the above. He somehow manages to be both naive and fake naivety, it’d be cute if it wasn’t so fucking frustrating.
Thank you for the link to your “citation needed” gif, I really wanted that of the disingenuous naif’s false rape accusation meltdown. And since I see you’ve gone to bed, g’night, hope you feel better soon!
And now for the cynical troll — first though, why’d y’all have to chew him up and spit him out so many times? Used troll is kind of gross!
“A chaotic childhood, lots of beatings, verbal abuse, etc. Not saying that everyone who grows up in that sort of environment will become violent, but that kind of environment tends to create people capable of doing horrible things.”
Chaos? Check. Random physical violence? Check. Verbal abuse? Check. Access to guns? Check. Mentally ill? Check. And guess what? I’m not going to kill anyone! Even at my worst I’m only a danger to myself.
Things that aren’t really relevant, and won’t make sense to the naif, but need said all the same. Frequent beatings and random beatings are not the same, the former is predictable, you can learn wtf will set it off — never knowing whether “window shopping” in the fridge will be ignored or get you screamed at? Far more chaotic.
“I don’t google when I have a discussion with someone online because I consider that to be intellectually dishonest. Everything is off the top of my head.”
For the love of all things holy, google support for your claims when you make sweeping generalizations. It’s one thing to post ancedates off the top of your head (that is where they reside after all) but statistical or otherwise factual claims? Get a citation for them, or at least be willing to when asked for them.
“Less people dead is only a marginal goal. Ideally, you want no one dead.”
Ideally we want no one to go remotely hungry, ideally we want everyone to have full, affordable access to health care, ideally we don’t want people to have to jump through a million hoops to prove that they’re disabled. In the mean time we settle we feeding as many people as we can, as well as we can, we settle for making healthcare as accessible as possible, and as affordable as possible, we settle for making filing for disability as easy as possible.
And you know what? Those compromises are a lot harder to arrive at than settling for less dead people.
Now for a round of Spot That Fallacy!!
Refusing to cite your claim, while insisting we have to prove our claims?
(shifting the) Burden of proof (see – onus probandi) – I need not prove my claim, you must prove it is false.
Onus probandi – from Latin “onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat” the burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim, not on the person who denies (or questions the claim). It is a particular case of the “argumentum ad ignorantiam” fallacy, here the burden is shifted on the person defending against the assertion.
Changing the claim you are making?
Moving the goalposts (raising the bar) – argument in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded.
I don’t know if anyone else has posted this,(bit tired from treatment today)but this is the best thing I’ve read from a gun owners point of view.
http://www.xojane.com/issues/on-black-holes-patience-and-what-i-know-to-be-true