ࡱ>  @ ҢbjbjVV $r<r<Қ2222222 4,>,@,@,@,@,@,@,$-R/d,2###d,22y, ( ( (#^22>, (#>, ( (22 ( P:[x' (>,,0, (Y0'(Y0 (F |2222Y02 (4jDp ( d,d,j$'(jElliot Rodger Wasnt Just a Murderer The California gunmans actions werent an aberration; they were the product of a misogynistic and racist society. BY SADY DOYLE It should be easy for any intelligent observer to conclude that Elliot Rodger was a terrorist. On Friday, May 23, Rodger embarked on a killing spree, the details of which are now famous: He began by stabbing his roommates George Chen, Cheng Yuan Hong and Weihan Wang. He then drove to a sorority house near the University of California, Santa Barbara campus and opened fire, killing Veronika Weiss and Katie Cooper. After fleeing the scene of the crime in his car, he shot through the window of an IV Deli Mart, killing Christopher Michaels-Martinez, another USCB student; finally, he shot and killed himself. Prior to all this, Rodger clearly and explicitly detailed his rationale for the murders. He left a 137-page manifesto, several YouTube videos and posts on misogynistic hate-sites such as PUAHate outlining them. In fact, he was quite remarkably clear: Rodger hated women. Rodger wanted to kill women. Rodger wanted to kill all women, but would settle for killing some women. Also, although Rodger was biracial (his mother is Chinese and his father is white), his manifestos speak to a self-loathing white supremacist ideology, in which sex with blonde white women was the ultimate proof of manhood, and other men of color were ugly and inferior, which is probably why he killed three Asian men before proceeding to the sorority house. In all of this, he was working to create the ideal society he'd envisioned on PUAHate: A world where WOMEN FEAR YOU. I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex, he wrote, in a representative passage of his manifesto, made available by the LA Times. He added: I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts. In other words, Rodger planned to use violence to intimidate a marginalized group for political reasons. This is pretty much the dictionary definition of terrorism. He even referred to this mission as a War on Women. And yet, despite a groundswell of feminists on social media highlighting the killings as indicative of a broader climate of violence against women, many mainstream media outlets continue to focus on his apparent craziness rather than his racism or misogyny. In an article that does not mention Rodgers politics, for example, ThinkProgress quotes an anonymous source as saying that he was somewhere on the autism spectrum. Time explicitly refutes any political analysis, cautioning us instead that blaming a cultural hatred for women for [Rodgers] actions loses sight of the real reason why isolated, mentally ill young men turn to mass murder. (That real reason, according to Time, is mental illnessin Rodgers case, specifically the fact that he was focused on his sexual inadequacies, which is said to have caused his misogyny, rather than, say, societal misogyny causing him to feel that he was only a real man if he had sex.) Meanwhile, Slate bemoans the fact that, despite receiving therapy until the age of 18, Rodger was not committed to a psych ward four years later, at the age of 22. Again, this article does not mention Rodgers stated political motivations, nor the actual name of his illness. Because, you see, Slatelike Time, like ThinkProgress, like this very articleactually cant give the name of Rodgers illness. We dont know it. No one does, other than his therapists and perhaps his parents. The only thing any of us has is pure armchair speculation based on the publicly available materials, which, if we are not mental health professionals, and did not treat Elliot Rodger personally, is not the same thing as an actual, medical diagnosis. Let me be clear: I dont think its unlikely that Rodger had a mental illness. Certainly, his emotions seem disproportionately extreme. Some passages of his manifesto, where he refers to himself as more than human and the closest thing there is to a living god, seem overtly grandiose. But I wont, as some have done, throw a slew of vaguely medical labels at Rodgerpsychotic, narcissistic personality, psychopath, or sociopathor speculate on his precise place on the autism spectrum. I wont do this, because Im not a doctor. But I also wont do it because the drive to classify Elliot Rodger as mentally ill and nothing else, to strip his terrorism of its political motivation and context, seems to me like an act of sheer denial: It is a cultural refusal to admit the demonstrable link between sexism and violence. It is also an attempt to take a hate crime committed against two marginalized groupswomen and men of colorand place the blame for it on a third marginalized group, the mentally ill. The fact is, mentally ill peopleor autistic people, who are not mentally ill; the conflation of the two is but one of the strangely medieval twists these conversations tend to takeare vastly more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.There are some afflictions, such as antisocial personality disorder, which list criminality as a potential symptom. But people with that illness are far from the all-powerful, infinitely evil psychopaths you see in horror movies. Hannibal Lecter is, thank goodness, a fictional character. In the real world, those with ASPD are more likely to be run-of-the-mill jerks (or, apparently, corporate success stories) than they are to eat someones liver with a well-selected wine. According to one study, a history of aggression, unemployment and promiscuity were more common than serious crimes among people with antisocial personality disorder. Overall, in 2006, the Institute of Medicine found that the contribution of people with mental illnesses to overall rates of violence is small. But the perception of mentally ill people as violent continues to be a major factor in their oppression. For one thing, the equation of ill with evil causes people with mental illness to feel shame and avoid treatment, which can be fatal in cases that carry self-harm risks. For another, the perception of people with mental illness as violent or scary can lead to discrimination against them in housing and employment, not to mention personal relationships. And its not just the stereotypically scary illnesses, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder: According to one report, 68 percent [of Americans] are unwilling to have someone with depression marry into their family. So, if you have a neurochemical problem that makes it hard for you to feel happy, take comfort in the fact that more than two-thirds of your fellow citizens believe you dont deserve love. Meanwhile, though mental illness cannot be conclusively correlated with violence, misogyny surely can. Worldwide, 40 percent of murdered women are killed by a former or current partner; men are six times less likely than women to be killed by people they love or used to love. In the United States, one in six women reports being stalked; one in five women reports either rape or attempted rape; one in four reports being physically abused by a partner. Not only is Elliot Rodger far from the only person to kill women for rejecting him sexually, hes not even the only man to try it this month. Within 24 hours of Rodgers spree, another California man shot eight rounds at three women leaving his apartment because theyd refused to have sex with him and his friends. (Thankfully, he missed.) As Jessica Valenti points out in her Guardian column, only a month prior, a man stabbed a young woman to death for turning him down when he asked her to the prom. The Tumblr When Women Refuse, curated by Deanna Zandt, curates stories of women who were physically hurt or murdered for turning men down sexually or romantically. There are many stories. They are chilling. Before last Saturdays murders, Elliot Rodger spent his time consuming materials by pick-up artists, or PUAs, who explicitly advocate contempt for women, and in some cases, violence against them. The PUA communitys trouble with telling the difference between rape and sex is well known. In April 2013, a PUA named Ken Hoinsky started a Kickstarter for his seduction guide. In his Reddit posts, hed outlined how to use physical force and coercion to get sex: Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Dont ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances Pull out your cock and put her hand on it Dont ask for permission. GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick. Meanwhile, famous PUA Roosh has written blog posts against domestic violence laws, musing that they have created men such as myself, who see absolutely no incentive to pursue a relationship in a country where I can go to jail or be robbed blind from a failed relationship. As a Utopian alternative, Roosh offers his time spent in the Ukraine, where he once saw a man slap a woman in the street and no one helped her. The woman herself did nothing, not screaming or running away. Thats the world Roosh wants to live in. And thats the vision of the world Elliot Rodger eagerly consumed. Thats the audience he was writing for when he eagerly typed about a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU. We live amidst a growing epidemic of violence against women. We know for a fact that there are communities dedicated to fostering hateful and harmful attitudes toward women. And yet, we refuse to connect the dots: to acknowledge the clear and deadly connection between the people who encourage bigotry and violence verbally, and the people who enact that bigotry with violence. The proof is thereall 137 pages of itbut we refuse to look at it. Doing so might acknowledge, after all, that we failed as a society by creating a world where a 22-year-old boy could be taught to hate women and people of color (himself included) enough to murder them. Blaming Elliot Rodgers crimes on the mentally ill and not misogyny is the equivalent of a police officer walking onto a murder scene, seeing a Labrador Retriever and a man with a smoking gun in his hand, and proceeding to arrest the dog. Because, you know, in a very small number of cases, some dogs do have rabies. By reducing Rodgers actions to autism, or mental illness, or anything else that fits the lone madman thesis, we strive to make his crimes seem like an aberration. And this, in turn, is a way to abdicate our own social responsibility. Seeing Elliot Rodger for what he wasnot a murderer, but a terroristwould require us to accept that sexism and racism are real, and that they kill women and people of color. Were so scared of admitting the problem that were meeting it with blunt-force denial, even though seeing the situation clearly is the only thing that might fix it. Unless we acknowledge the epidemic levels of gendered and racialized violence in our society, and work to fight them, more men like Elliot Rodger will continue to kill more people. We're sacrificing our future safety to our present comfort. That, more than anything else, is crazy. ______________________________________________________________________________ Why Its So Hard for Men to See Misogyny Men were surprised by #YesAllWomen because men dont see what women experience. By Amanda Hess When Santa Barbara police arrived at Elliot Rodgers apartment last monthafter Rodgers mother alerted authorities to her sons YouTube videos, where he expressed his resentment of women who dont have sex with him, aired his jealousy of the men they do choose, and stated his intentions to remedy this injustice through a display of his own magnificence and powerthey left with the impression that he was a perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human. Then Rodger killed six people and himself on Friday night, leaving a manifesto that spelled out his virulent hatred for women in more explicit terms, and Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown deemed him a madman. Another rude awakening played out on social media this weekend as news of Rodgers attack spread around the world. When women took to Twitter to share their own everyday experiences with men who had reduced them to sexual conquests and threatened them with violence for failing to complyfiling their anecdotes under the hashtag #YesAllWomensome men joined in to express surprise at these revelations, which amassed more quickly than observers could digest. How can some men manage to appear polite, kind, even wonderful in public while perpetuating sexism under the radar of other mens notice? And how could this dynamic be so obvious to so many women, yet completely foreign to the men in their lives? Some #YesAllWomen contributors suggested that men simply arent paying attention to misogyny. Others claimed that they deliberately ignore it. There could also be a performative aspect to this public outpouring of male shocka man who expresses his own lack of awareness of sexism implicitly absolves himself of his own contributions to it. But there are other, more insidious hurdles that prevent male bystanders from helping to fight violence against women. Among men, misogyny hides in plain sight, and not just because most men are oblivious to the problem or callous toward its impact. Men who objectify and threaten women often strategically obscure their actions from other men, taking care to harass women when other men arent around. Placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. The night after the murders, I was at a backyard party in New York, talking with a female friend, when a drunk man stepped right between us. I was thinking the exact same thing, he said. As we had been discussing pay discrepancies between male and female journalists, we informed him that this was unlikely. But we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long about his obsession with my friends hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few minutes later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the party. Why did I say that? I wouldnt have been interested in him even if I werent married, she told me. Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you werent into him, I said. We agreed that she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another mans domain than to accept a womans autonomous rejection of him. A week before the murders, I experienced a similar dynamic when I went for a jog in Palm Springs, California. It was early on a weekend morning, and the streets that had been full of pedestrians the night before were now quiet. When I paused outside a convenience store to stretch, a man sitting at a bus stop across the street from me began yelling obscene comments about my body. When my boyfriend came out of the convenience store, he shut up. These are forms of male aggression that only women see. But even when men are afforded a front seat to harassment, they dont always have the correct vantage point for recognizing the subtlety of its operation. Four years before the murders, I was sitting in a bar in Washington, D.C. with a male friend. Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted next to her. He was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently downed her drink. Why is she humoring him? my friend asked me. You would never do that. I was too embarrassed to say: Because he looks scary and I do it all the time. Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, whos failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. Two weeks before the murders, Louis C.K.who has always recognized pervasive male violence against women in his stand-upspelled out how this works in an episode of Louie, where he recalls watching a man and a woman walking together on a date. He goes to kiss her, and she does an amazing thing that women somehow learn how to doshe hugged him very warmly. Men think this is affection, but what this is is a boxing maneuver. Women are better at rejecting us than we are, C.K. said. They have the skills to reject men in the way that we can then not kill them. When Elliot Rodger finally snapped, he drove to a Santa Barbara sorority house as part of his plan to give the female gender one last chance to provide me with the pleasures I deserved from them, and killed two women who were walking outside. Before he hit the sorority house, he stabbed three men in his apartment; after he left the sorority, he killed another man who was entering a nearby convenience store. In the course of the attack, he wounded 13 more people. Rodger hated all the women who did not provide him sex, but he also resented the men he felt had been standing in the way of his conquests, though they were never made aware of this belief. (Many men die of domestic-violence-related murders this way, killed by ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, and family members of the women in their lives.) Some men are using this death count to claim that Rodgers killings were not motivated by misogyny, but that is a simplistic account of how misogyny operates in a society that privately abides the hatred of women unless its expressed in its most obvious forms. ______________________________________________________________________________ Our Words Are Our Weapons The Feminist Battle of the Story in the Wake of the Isla Vista Massacre By Rebecca Solnit It was a key match in the World Cup of Ideas. The teams vied furiously for the ball. The all-star feminist team tried repeatedly to kick it through the goalposts marked Widespread Social Problems, while the opposing team, staffed by the mainstream media and mainstream dudes, was intent on getting it into the usual net called Isolated Event. To keep the ball out of his net, the mainstream's goalie shouted mental illness again and again. That ball, of course, was the meaning of the massacre of students in Isla Vista, California, by one of their peers. All weekend the struggle to define his acts raged. Voices in the mainstream insisted he was mentally ill, as though that settled it, as though the world were divided into two countries called Sane and Crazy that share neither border crossings nor a culture. Mental illness is, however, more often a matter of degree, not kind, and a great many people who suffer it are gentle and compassionate. And by many measures, including injustice, insatiable greed, and ecological destruction, madness, like meanness, is central to our society, not simply at its edges. In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T.M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, theyre more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters. Or as my friend, the criminal-defense investigator who knows insanity and violence intimately, put it, When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever its immersed in -- the surrounding culture's illness. The murderer at Isla Vista was also repeatedly called aberrant, as if to emphasize that he was nothing like the rest of us. But other versions of such violence are all around us, most notably in the pandemic of hate toward and violence against women. In the end, this struggle over the meaning of one mans killing spree may prove to be a watershed moment in the history of feminism, which always has been and still is in a struggle to name and define, to speak and be heard. The battle of the story the Center for Story-Based Strategy calls it, because you win or lose your struggle in large part through the language and narrative you use. As media critic Jennifer Pozner put it in 2010 about another massacre by a woman-hating man, I am sick to death that I have to keep writing some version of this same article or blog post on loop. But I have to, because in all of these cases, gender-based violence lies at the heart of these crimes -- and leaving this motivating factor uninvestigated not only deprives the public of the full, accurate picture of the events at hand, but leaves us without the analysis and context needed to understand the violence, recognize warning signs, and take steps to prevent similar massacres in the future. The Isla Vista murderer took out men as well as women, but blowing away members of a sorority seems to have been the goal of his rampage. He evidently interpreted his lack of sexual access to women as offensive behavior by women who, he imagined in a sad mix of entitlement and self-pity, owed him fulfillment. #YesAllWomen Richard Martinez, the father of one of the young victims, spoke powerfully on national TV about gun control and the spinelessness of the politicians who have caved to the gun lobby, as well as about the broader causes of such devastation. A public defender in Santa Barbara County, he has for decades dealt with violence against women, gun users, and mental illness, as does everyone in his field. He and Christopher Michaels-Martinez's mother, a deputy district attorney, knew the territory intimately before they lost their only child. The bloodbath was indeed about guns and toxic versions of masculinity and entitlement, and also about misery, clich, and action-movie solutions to emotional problems. It was, above all, about the hatred of women. According to one account of the feminist conversation that followed, a young woman with the online name Kaye (who has since been harassed or intimidated into withdrawing from the public conversation) decided to start tweeting with the hashtag #YesAllWomen at some point that Saturday after the massacre. By Sunday night, half a million #yesallwomen tweets had appeared around the world, as though a dam had burst. And perhaps it had. The phrase described the hells and terrors women face and specifically critiqued a stock male response when women talked about their oppression: Not all men. It's the way some men say, Im not the problem or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, What do they want -- a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women? Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes thats more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels. Or as someone named Jenny Chiu tweeted, Sure #NotAllMen are misogynists and rapists. That's not the point. The point is that #YesAllWomen live in fear of the ones that are. Women -- and men (but mostly women) -- said scathing things brilliantly. -- #YesAllWomen because I can't tweet about feminism without getting threats and perverted replies. Speaking out shouldn't scare me. -- #YesAllWomen because I've seen more men angry at the hashtag rather than angry at the things happening to women. -- #YesAllWomen because if you're too nice to them you're "leading them on" & if you're too rude you risk violence. Either way you're a bitch. It was a shining media moment, a vast conversation across all media, including millions of participants on Facebook and Twitter -- which is significant since Twitter has been a favorite means of delivering rape and death threats to outspoken women. As Astra Taylor has pointed out in her new book, The Peoples Platform, the language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech, to scare them into shutting up. Laurie Penny, one of the important feminist voices of our times, wrote, When news of the murders broke, when the digital world began to absorb and discuss its meaning, I had been about to email my editor to request a few days off, because the impact of some particularly horrendous rape threats had left me shaken, and I needed time to collect my thoughts. Instead of taking that time, I am writing this blog, and I am doing so in rage and in grief -- not just for the victims of the Isla Vista massacre, but for what is being lost everywhere as the language and ideology of the new misogyny continues to be excused... I am sick of being told to empathize with the perpetrators of violence any time I try to talk about the victims and survivors. Our Words Are Our Weapons In 1963, Betty Friedan published a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, in which she wrote, The problem that has no name -- which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities -- is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease. In the years that followed, that problem gained several names: male chauvinism, then sexism, misogyny, inequality, and oppression. The cure was to be womens liberation, or womens lib, or feminism. These words, which might seem worn out from use now, were fresh then. Since Friedans manifesto, feminism has proceeded in part by naming things. The term sexual harassment, for example, was coined in the 1970s, first used in the legal system in the 1980s, given legal status by the Supreme Court in 1986, and given widespread coverage in the upheaval after Anita Hills testimony against her former boss, Clarence Thomas, in the 1991 Senate hearings on his Supreme Court nomination. The all-male interrogation team patronized and bullied Hill, while many men in the Senate and elsewhere failed to grasp why it mattered if your boss said lecherous things and demanded sexual services. Or they just denied that such things happen. Many women were outraged. It was, like the post-Isla Vista weekend, a watershed moment in which the conversation changed, in which those who got it pushed hard on those who didnt, opening some minds and updating some ideas. The bumper sticker I Believe You Anita was widespread for a while. Sexual harassment is now considerably less common in workplaces and schools, and its victims have far more recourse, thanks in part to Hills brave testimony and the earthquake that followed. So many of the words with which a womans right to exist is adjudicated are of recent coinage: domestic violence, for example, replaced wife-beating as the law began to take a (mild) interest in the subject. A woman is still beaten every nine seconds in this country, but thanks to the heroic feminist campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, she now has access to legal remedies that occasionally work, occasionally protect her, and -- even more occasionally -- send her abuser to jail. In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, Studies of the Surgeon General's office reveal that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined. I go to check this fact and arrive at an Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence website that warns viewers their browsing history might be monitored at home and offers a domestic-violence hotline number. The site is informing women that their abusers may punish them for seeking information or naming their situation. Its like that out there. One of the more shocking things I read recently was an essay in the Nation about the infamous slaying of Catherine Kitty Genovese in a neighborhood in Queens, New York, in 1964. The author, Peter Baker, reminds us that some of the neighbors who witnessed parts of her rape and murder from their windows likely mistook the savage assault by a stranger for a man exercising his rights over his woman. Surely it matters that, at the time, violence inflicted by a man on his wife or romantic partner was widely considered a private affair. Surely it matters that, in the eyes of the law as it stood in 1964, it was impossible for a man to rape his wife. Terms like acquaintance rape, date rape, and marital rape had yet to be invented. Twenty-First Century Words I apparently had something to do with the birth of the word mansplaining, though I didnt coin it myself. My 2008 essay Men Explain Things to Me (now the title piece in my new book about gender and power) is often credited with inspiring the pseudonymous person who did coin it on a blog shortly thereafter. From there, it began to spread. For a long time, I was squeamish about the term, because it seemed to imply that men in general were flawed rather than that particular specimens were prone to explain things they didnt understand to women who already did. Until this spring, that is, when a young PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that the word allowed women to identify another problem with no name, something that often happened but was hard to talk about until the term arose. Language is power. When you turn torture into enhanced interrogation, or murdered children into collateral damage, you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it. If you lack words for a phenomenon, an emotion, a situation, you cant talk about it, which means that you cant come together to address it, let alone change it. Vernacular phrases -- Catch-22, monkeywrenching, cyberbullying, the 99% and the 1% -- have helped us to describe but also to reshape our world. This may be particularly true of feminism, a movement focused on giving voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. One of the compelling new phrases of our time is rape culture. The term came into widespread circulation in late 2012 when sexual assaults in New Delhi, India, and Steubenville, Ohio, became major news stories. As a particularly strongly worded definition puts it: Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of womens bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards womens rights and safety. Rape culture affects every woman. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. Thats how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men dont rape, and many women are never victims of rape. Sometimes Ive heard rape culture used to describe specifically whats called lad culture -- the jeering, leering subculture in which some young men are lodged. Other times its used to indict the mainstream, which oozes with misogyny in its entertainment, its everyday inequalities, its legal loopholes. The term helped us stop pretending that rapes are anomalies, that they have nothing to do with the culture at large or are even antithetical to its values. If they were, a fifth of all American women (and one in 71 men) wouldnt be rape survivors; if they were, 19% of female college students wouldnt have to cope with sexual assault; if they were, the military wouldnt be stumbling through an epidemic of sexual violence. The term rape culture lets us begin to address the roots of the problem in the culture as a whole. The term sexual entitlement was used in 2012 in reference to sexual assaults by Boston Universitys hockey team, though you can find earlier uses of the phrase. I first heard it in 2013 in a BBC report on a study of rape in Asia. The study concluded that in many cases the motive for rape was the idea that a man has the right to have sex with a woman regardless of her desires. In other words, his rights trump hers, or she has none. This sense of being owed sex is everywhere. Many women are told, as was I in my youth, that something we did or said or wore or just the way we looked or the fact that we were female had excited desires we were thereby contractually obliged to satisfy. We owed them. They had a right. To us. Male fury at not having emotional and sexual needs met is far too common, as is the idea that you can rape or punish one woman to get even for what other women have done or not done. A teenager was stabbed to death for turning down a boy's invitation to go to the prom this spring; a 45-year-old mother of two was murdered May 14th for trying to "distance herself" from a man she was dating; the same night as the Isla Vista shootings, a California man shot at women who declined sex. After the killings in Isla Vista, the term sexual entitlement was suddenly everywhere, and blogs and commentary and conversations began to address it with brilliance and fury. I think that May 2014 marks the entry of the phrase into everyday speech. It will help people identify and discredit manifestations of this phenomenon. It will help change things. Words matter. Crimes, Small and Large The 22-year-old who, on May 23rd, murdered six of his peers and attempted to kill many more before taking his own life framed his unhappiness as due to others failings rather than his own and vowed to punish the young women who, he believed, had rejected him. In fact, he already had done so, repeatedly, with minor acts of violence that foreshadowed his final outburst. In his long, sad autobiographical rant, he recounts that his first week in college, I saw two hot blonde girls waiting at the bus stop. I was dressed in one of my nice shirts, so I looked at them and smiled. They looked at me, but they didnt even deign to smile back. They just looked away as if I was a fool. In a rage, I made a U-turn, pulled up to their bus stop and splashed my Starbucks latte all over them. I felt a feeling [of] spiteful satisfaction as I saw it stain their jeans. How dare those girls snub me in such a fashion! How dare they insult me so! I raged to myself repeatedly. They deserved the punishment I gave them. It was such a pity that my latte wasnt hot enough to burn them. Those girls deserved to be dumped in boiling water for the crime of not giving me the attention and adoration I so rightfully deserve! Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it. The nineteenth-century geologist and survey director Clarence King and twentieth-century biologists have used the term punctuated equilibrium to describe a pattern of change that involves slow, quiet periods of relative stasis interrupted by turbulent intervals. The history of feminism is one of punctuated equilibriums in which our conversations about the nature of the world we live in, under the pressure of unexpected events, suddenly lurch forward. Its then that we change the story. I think we are in such a crisis of opportunity now, as not one miserable, murderous young man but the whole construct in which we live is brought into question. On that Friday in Isla Vista, our equilibrium was disrupted, and like an earthquake releasing tension between tectonic plates, the realms of gender shifted a little. They shifted not because of the massacre, but because millions came together in a vast conversational network to share experiences, revisit meanings and definitions, and arrive at new understandings. At the memorials across California, people held up candles; in this conversation people held up ideas, words, and stories that also shone in the darkness. Maybe this change will grow, will last, will matter, and will be a lasting memorial to the victims. Six years ago, when I sat down and wrote the essay Men Explain Things to Me, heres what surprised me: though I began with a ridiculous example of being patronized by a man, I ended with rapes and murders. We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harassment, intimidation, threat, battery, rape, murder. But I realize now that what I was saying is: its a slippery slope. Thats why we need to address that slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with each separately. Doing so has meant fragmenting the picture, seeing the parts, not the whole. A man acts on the belief that you have no right to speak and that you dont get to define whats going on. That could just mean cutting you off at the dinner table or the conference. It could also mean telling you to shut up, or threatening you if you open your mouth, or beating you for speaking, or killing you to silence you forever. He could be your husband, your father, your boss or editor, or the stranger at some meeting or on the train, or the guy youve never seen whos mad at someone else but thinks women is a small enough category that you can stand in for her. Hes there to tell you that you have no rights. Threats often precede acts, which is why the targets of online rape and death threats take them seriously, even though the sites that allow them and the law enforcement officials that generally ignore them apparently do not. Quite a lot of women are murdered after leaving a boyfriend or husband who believes he owns her and that she has no right to self-determination. Despite this dismal subject matter, Im impressed with the powers feminism has flexed of late. Watching Amanda Hess, Jessica Valenti, Soraya Chemaly, Laurie Penny, Amanda Marcotte, Jennifer Pozner, and other younger feminists swing into action the weekend after the Rodgers killing spree was thrilling, and the sudden explosion of #YesAllWomen tweets, astonishing. The many men who spoke up thoughtfully were heartening. More and more men are actively engaged instead of just being Not All Men bystanders. You could see once-radical ideas blooming in the mainstream media. You could see our arguments and whole new ways of framing the world gaining ground and adherents. Maybe we had all just grown unbearably weary of the defense of unregulated guns after more than 40 school shootings since Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, of the wages of macho fantasies of control and revenge, of the hatred of women. If you look back to Betty Friedans problem that has no name, you see a world that was profoundly different from the one we now live in, one in which women had far fewer rights and far less voice. Back then, arguing that women should be equal was a marginal position; now arguing that we should not be is marginal in this part of the world and the law is mostly on our side. The struggle has been and will be long and harsh and sometimes ugly, and the backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. 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