Terrorists are misogynists first
Think of the beautiful men we have suddenly come to know: Rick Best, Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Micah Fletcher of Oregon, who stepped in to help two young girls being abused on a train; Canada’s Tyler Ferguson, who cradled his fiancée Christine Archibald as she died in the London attack; Florin Morariu, the Romanian baker who threw crates at the Borough Market attackers; the nameless cabbie who swerved to warn a 19-year-old woman at an ATM to “RUN!”; the Spanish waiter Sergio Farina, who held the restaurant’s doors tight against men armed with long knives; Manchester doctor Naveed Yasin, who spent 48 hours treating bomb attack victims only to be racially abused in the street.
And then we have fresh bright Richard Angell, the young Londoner cheerfully heading back post-attack to pay his restaurant bill and saying, “If me having a gin and tonic with my friends, flirting with handsome men and hanging out with brilliant women is what offends these people so much, I’m going to do it more, not less.” I raise a glass to this man.
In contrast, think of the hateful men we have come to know: Borough Market attackers Youssef Zaghba, 22, Khuram Butt, 27, and Rachid Redouane, 30; the Oregon white supremacist Jeremy Christian, 35; Nice truck terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31; racist killer Dylann Roof, 22, of Charleston; Canadian mass killer of women Marc Lépine, 25; mass killer Elliot Rodger, 22, of Isla Vista; and a man I especially recall, George Sodini, 48, who opened fire on women in a Rhode Island gym in 2009 after a lifetime of nursing hate.
The think pieces after Borough Market were startlingly blind. “The Four Reasons People Commit Hate Crimes” was a CNN headline. “Who Are the New Jihadis?” was a Guardian book excerpt by Olivier Roy. Both pieces had holes in them half the size of the human race. Women’s suffer- ing went unmentioned.
It is my job to see patterns in events. And we women see different patterns than men do.
Imagine human history as a seascape of blue ocean water. Each act of violence is a part of a “chaotic crisscross of crests,” as science writer Gavin Pretor-Pinney describes it, with mass terror attacks like a broader “pattern of undulations rolling in towards us from far out in the Atlantic.”
But here’s what women have lived with forever: the deep lightless ocean mass far beneath the surface through which massive energy passes and yet stays still. This is misogyny; it kills.
For this is what the killers have in common: They are men. They are almost all young. They hate women. Whatever their group, their world view is small and cramped, their reactions physically violent and their contempt for women born of status anxiety. They display maleness by spilling blood.
If you disagree with this approach, at least consider it. Peaceful Muslims are being vilified by racists around the world for violence when only a male subset is to blame. Religion isn’t terribly relevant. “The problem isn’t Islam, or a perverted interpretation of Islam, but rather a perversion of frustrated masculinity,” the journalist Hadley Freeman has written, listing terrorists who beat and controlled their wives. Daesh killers are sex slavers and pedophiles. “Wives and girlfriends make good target practice” for men planning mass death.
As I said, women see things differently. It’s of no interest to us whether we’re attacked by a men’s rights advocate, the “alt-right,” a Muslim terrorist or an Irish one. Men are physically stronger. Male rage kills women.
Badly behaved as women can be, we tend not to be violent. But we are braced for it. The CNN piece only mentioned a woman hypothetically, e.g. “a woman fires gun shots into the men’s locker room of a fitness centre, saying she hates men for rejecting her.” Why invent a woman when a man actually did it?
Sodini, mentioned above, was angry that women declined to sleep with him, so he killed as many as he could, trapping them in a gym in the middle of a workout.
“People” kill people, CNN wrote, but they don’t. Generally, enraged young men do it. Roy’s intelligent excerpt mentioned the strange need of killers — Mao’s Red Guards, Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, the Khmer Rouge — to “wipe the slate clean,” which is useful, and how often brothers kill together, which is generational. But he didn’t mention the elephant in the room, which is that mass killing is almost entirely a male practice.
You’ll notice that I began writing about the gallant young men filling the cafés and bars of the Borough Market that dreadful night. Why were they so instinctively unlike the killers?
Maybe the key to understanding this latest wave of that old thing, terrorism, is to discard Muslim or Islamic as an adjective. For the resultant racism might poison Canada as it has the U.S. Almost all religions, to one degree or another, crush women. Why single out Islam? The misogyny of the Roman Catholic church is one of its pillars.
Viewing recent events through the lens of male misogyny is wiser than resorting to racist condemnation of peaceful Muslim men. Islamist hate is just a branch of the poison tree. Let’s study the tree itself. Men aren’t born violent, they learn to be that way when they are told that boys are better than girls.
American anti-Black and antiMuslim racism is at its height. But here in Canada, I fear thin young white men in T-shirts and baseball caps. I’ve seen their instinct for violence in small towns and cities all my life. It’s a guy thing. A smart woman crosses the street.
How can this be fixed, with boys being raised so that violence is not their default? It’s achievable. Let’s tackle misogyny at its source and find a way to raise boys to be more like the studious, gentle girls many of them have been told to despise.
Let boys and girls be kind, men and women too. hmallick@thestar.ca
What the killers have in common: They are men. They are almost all young. They hate women