Patriarchy
I'd say that men and women are not on equal footing in our society. Men have the advantage.
I know this from my own experiences, because I try to pay careful attention to the world around me, although admittedly my mind wanders more than I'd prefer. But how might I make this case to someone who asked me about it? How to argue the point?
Here's my argument, which is a name: Elliot Rodger.
I lived in Santa Barbara when Elliot Rodger went on his shooting spree. It was news that I heard about in the middle of the night from a friend who posted the story on social media. My apartment was nowhere near UCSB's campus, but the greater Santa Barbara area is relatively small. I remember going around campus shortly after the event happened...an otherwise beautiful and vibrant campus on the water suddenly had a morose silence cloaking its entire population.
It took me two years to get around to watching the video Rodger recorded in his car before his rampage. I chose not to watch it right away, since I wanted to let the dust settle and the story to get sorted out before I saw it.
When I finally did watch it, I was really quite surprised by how much hostility there was on Rodger's part towards the girls on campus, and all women in general. He laments that girls rejected his romantic / sexual advances, didn't find him attractive, and that the frustration he was experiencing due to this was a big motivator in him choosing to go on a shooting spree through the Isla Vista community.
I'm no psychologist, sociologist, or any kind of expert on human behavior, but I watch this video, and I see a human being who was warped by his environment to feel entitled to something to which he never was entitled. It's not that a society full of breeding parents is going to inevitably produce some disturbed children; it probably will, regardless of how much you try to safeguard against that. It's the exact nature of Rodger's complaints, his specific statements that single out women as the source of his unhappiness, and the manner in which he does it, that makes me feel as though he's a byproduct of a society who notions about gender have been warped in a very particular fashion.
His words and actions certainly point to mental instability, but the misogynistic basis for his feelings and actions are something he most certainly picked up from our culture at large. His notions about gender belie a subcutaneous wound in our country about the roles that men and women are "supposed" to play. The world doesn't owe any one of us a single thing, yet somehow this is a feeling we get seduced into all too often.
I know this from my own experiences, because I try to pay careful attention to the world around me, although admittedly my mind wanders more than I'd prefer. But how might I make this case to someone who asked me about it? How to argue the point?
Here's my argument, which is a name: Elliot Rodger.
I lived in Santa Barbara when Elliot Rodger went on his shooting spree. It was news that I heard about in the middle of the night from a friend who posted the story on social media. My apartment was nowhere near UCSB's campus, but the greater Santa Barbara area is relatively small. I remember going around campus shortly after the event happened...an otherwise beautiful and vibrant campus on the water suddenly had a morose silence cloaking its entire population.
It took me two years to get around to watching the video Rodger recorded in his car before his rampage. I chose not to watch it right away, since I wanted to let the dust settle and the story to get sorted out before I saw it.
When I finally did watch it, I was really quite surprised by how much hostility there was on Rodger's part towards the girls on campus, and all women in general. He laments that girls rejected his romantic / sexual advances, didn't find him attractive, and that the frustration he was experiencing due to this was a big motivator in him choosing to go on a shooting spree through the Isla Vista community.
I'm no psychologist, sociologist, or any kind of expert on human behavior, but I watch this video, and I see a human being who was warped by his environment to feel entitled to something to which he never was entitled. It's not that a society full of breeding parents is going to inevitably produce some disturbed children; it probably will, regardless of how much you try to safeguard against that. It's the exact nature of Rodger's complaints, his specific statements that single out women as the source of his unhappiness, and the manner in which he does it, that makes me feel as though he's a byproduct of a society who notions about gender have been warped in a very particular fashion.
His words and actions certainly point to mental instability, but the misogynistic basis for his feelings and actions are something he most certainly picked up from our culture at large. His notions about gender belie a subcutaneous wound in our country about the roles that men and women are "supposed" to play. The world doesn't owe any one of us a single thing, yet somehow this is a feeling we get seduced into all too often.