On April 16th, 2007 Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting rampage at Virginia Polytechnic and State University killing 32 people, committing the deadliest incident of its kind in American history.
In the aftermath, as the nation struggled for answers, fingers were pointed everywhere, mostly at campus security failures and gun control. Though many would agree that little can be done to prevent the actions of a mad man, the resultant scrutiny was understandable.
Well, most of it.
Unfortunately, in the polemically charged atmosphere of gender politics it was more or less predictable that men themselves would eventually become the target of blame. Usually we can depend on the likes of N.O.W., or by proxy a feminist academic to seize the opportunity and insert some sound bites into the media, covering men with a blanket of shared culpability.
That may well have happened, but they didn’t need to put forth the effort on this one. The American Psychological Association (APA), acting as sycophantic sock puppets for the feminist orthodoxy, toted that barge, and did so quite well.
In a statement issued by the APA’s Division 51, Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity (SPSSM) signed by president Mark Stevens, Ph.D., they conclude, “Therefore, although most men aren’t violent, most violent people are men who were influenced by exaggerated notions of masculinity…”
Let’s start with the first word. “Therefore” indicates a certainty based on previously offered evidence. Their “evidence,” in this case, consists of pointing to the fact that mass murderers are nearly 100% men. And that’s true unless you consider the tide of female suicide bombers or the numbers of Black Widow Killers that marked their lives and fortunes by how many husbands they put in the grave. Or unless you also consider the numbers of women that have snuffed the life out of their children.
They also point to the fact that most violent crime is committed by men. And of course there is no mention of the real explanation for this either. They just sort of let the reader infer that it comes with chest hair and an addiction to a remote control.
Since the intelligentsia at the APA won’t bother you with thoughtful analysis, let me see what I can do to help.
Violent crime is usually the conduct of people on the lower end of the intelligence scale. Women and men are roughly of equal intelligence, but the bell curve in the distribution of intelligence scores makes two things vividly clear. On one end of that curve there are many more male geniuses than female, and on the other end there are many more low functioning males than females. It is why men dominate the sciences, and it’s also why prisons are crowded with aggressive men that aren’t very bright.
Men commit most of the violent crimes for the same reason that men created every significant technological advance in human history. It all boils down to how and where intelligence, or a lack of it, is concentrated in the general population. In that, masculinity won’t be helped till the day comes that really ingenious men figure out a way to make the less intelligent men smarter.
Only the influence of hidden agendas can spin that one into the pathetically misguided realm of gender socialization.
The rest of the “evidence” they offered is based on a very narrow analysis of domestic violence, in which they pointed only to the murders of women by partners and ex-partners. They ignored that fact that women do kill men, and also side stepped the reality that women are more likely than men to physically attack their partners, including with the use of weapons.
So we must go back to SPSSM’s use of the word “therefore.” Actually we need to delete it. Non sequiturs and false conclusions don‘t teach us diddley. It is an insult to even the remotely scientific minded.
Consider Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who waited till she was alone with her children so no one could stop her, and then dragged them, one at a time, kicking and screaming and pleading for their lives into the bathroom and drowned them.
Now let’s apply SPSSM’s embarrassingly poor style of judgment and come to a conclusion about women in general, acknowledging in advance the act that women are responsible for the lions share of child homicides and violence toward children in the home.
Therefore, though most women don’t kill their children, most child killers are women, who were influenced by exaggerated notions of femininity.
As absurd as that sounds, it is every bit as valid as the statement on masculinity by SPSMM. Which is to say it has no validity at all. It’s pure gobbledygook, and it reveals SPSSM and the APA itself not as valid advocates for their mental health disciplines, but just another extension of misandrist academia; a women’s studies product with a fake beard painted on it.
It is no wonder that the mainstay of their mission statement is more about ingratiating themselves to feminists than it is about improving the lives of men and boys.
They also argue, though, as most feminist ideologues do, that the core of the problem goes to male socialization; that males are taught to limit their emotions to anger and not to seek help. And in that they do indeed come close to one actually cogent idea, except for the fact that they of course stop short of the whole picture on this and remain in their cozy paradigm of myopic masculinity.
The insane emphasis on male strength and power is a result of the insane requirement for male disposability. As long as men are designated as biologically determined and expendable human appliances, to be used and discarded for the benefit of women and children, we will have unfeeling men.
And most importantly, we will have women that are attracted to them, for that mechanical heart is the one that offers the most protection and provision.
If there is anything there that is in need if repair, it is both sexes. And it will start by raising our sons with the idea that it is not their job to take responsibility for the lives of women.
But I won’t ever expect ideas like that to grace the pages of SPSSM’s website. They are much to busy reducing 100,000 years of biological and social evolution to feminist sound bites.
And they do it to the exclusion of all reason.
The most egregious example of just how sexist and indifferent to the truth these people are can be found in the following from their statement:
“There is a tendency to see violent tragedies like the one at Virginia Tech as solely the product of a disturbed individual, rather than as the interaction of individual factors within a gendered culture. Clearly there is a need to examine and redefine what it means to be masculine and men in the U.S.A..”
Seung-Hui Cho had been getting mental health treatment since he was in middle school. Not long before the shooting one of the faculty urged him to get counseling. He clearly was a disturbed individual and had been his whole life. His actions were tragic, considerably more disturbing even than the incompetence emanating from the APA.
But with his last pull of the trigger, the murderer removed any future threat he might be. Not so for the APA that remains, ready and willing to help us do anything but find answers.
Feminism can easily be described as an ongoing dialogue on what’s wrong with men. And now the APA, supposedly invested in enlightening the world, offers it’s own take on what’s wrong with men.
Isn’t it about time we had a dialogue on what’s wrong with this picture?
