This article at Gawker has me fiercely pissed off! I am so fucking sick of hearing the tired, pathetic, profoundly sexist story about how women don’t kill, women aren’t mass murderers, women are such kind, gentle, loving spirits and it’s the big bad patriarchy and all the mean men who are responsible for all the horror and violence in the world.
Go fuck yourself Gawker, and every shitty commenter who agreed that it’s only men who lose their minds and carry out despicable acts of cowardice against other humans.
4 children shot at point blank range.
2 children with their skulls smashed in with rocks.
Burned to death in a microwave.
Mouth duct-taped shut, placed in a garbage bag and left in a dumpster to suffocate.
All killed by women. And not just any woman: mommy fucking dearest. The only real difference between men and women who commit mass murder is that women prefer victims who can’t fight back. They prefer to stab, beat, shoot, burn, strangle, cut the throats of babies, toddlers and children. Often prompted by sheer cruelty, vindictiveness and selfishness.
So enough with this crap about men, toxic masculinity and patriarchy causing mass murder.
Here’s the Gawker article, written for women.
WOMEN WHO KILL
From what I know about the woman who killed three of her four children on August 19th, she was angry because she felt her daughter deserved more attention than her sons. This woman reminds me of many other women who kill their children – the most common form of mass murder when women are the killers —off the top of my head I can think of at least five mass murders where the killer was stressed out, embarking on a sexual relationship with man not the father of her children, which her children were making difficult, frustrated by disabled children or simply because she wanted to hurt her husband. Ending the lives ofchildren essentially because the women didn’t feel like they were getting what they deserve. Entitlement.
Gynocentrism does all of us dirty in varying ways. This includes women. We live in a society that often does a piss-poor job at teaching women that children are not their own personal property and that women are not entitled by birth to a life of comfort and ease. It does an even worse job at teaching women how to handle adult responsibility. Even tiny moments of frustration are enough to create lethal conditions. And it is other people, often children, who bear the brunt of that.
I do not suggest, of course, that all women lack these skills, but I am suggesting that many do, and that it manifests itself in various, troublesome ways. It seems to me that we must do a better job of teaching our children, especially our daughters, that your ego does not own you and the world does not owe you. That a man has the right to not be interested. That you might get fired. That your ex-husband might meet someone else. That your ego may not only bruise but shatter, and you will be okay. That it is not anyone’s job to protect it, only your job to make sure it is durable. Your job is to practice humility.
Of course, these deaths cannot in any way be blamed entirely on ego. People like Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, Brittany Pilkington, Allyson McConnell and Tania Clarence have other serious mental ailments besides outrageous entitlement. And I realize that this is a very binary heteronormative frame.
But that is the frame that many of us are trapped under. I think about the men who are treated as cash-machine dispensers by vindictive ex-wives, the men falsely accused of sexual assault and rape, kicked out of school based on false allegations, others who’ve been abused by partners for what are perceived to be even slight dismissals. I think about the number of arrests, assaults, and even murders that have happened because someone in stilettos felt quote unquote disrespected.
I think about how early in life men are conditioned to provide for women and protect them,even at the expense of their own lives, and how men are taught the importance of soothing, wrangling, and navigating the female ego. #HeForShe, not #WeForAll. And while that has its own downsides; it did arm me with some tools I’m glad I have now. I just wish it went both ways.
So yes, family law reform, reproductive rights for men, shared parenting and yes, treatment for women’s mental illness. But this also bears addressing.
I focus on women specifically because it is women who are more likely to do things like Yates and McConnell did. Forget pedophiles or strangers on the street or random kidnappers. It’s the bruised ego of women that’s responsible for the overwhelming majority of child murders. It’s women’s sense of entitlement to a life of ease, in which children are their personal possessions, to be disposed of at will. Adulthood comes with responsibilities, and children are never accountable for the problems adults have. You never kill a child.
Let us not forget that while we’re teaching our girls to be independent and strong, we must teach them this too.
[Ed. note: this post originally appeared at JudgBitch.com and is reprinted here with permission.]
