No man is entitled to a woman’s companionship
He bypassed the men and attacked the women. By the time an assailant’s stabbing spree at a Sydney, Australia, mall on Saturday was over, six people — five of them women — were dead. So was a male security guard who tried to stop the bloody assault. More than a dozen others, most of them female, were wounded, including the 9month-old daughter of a woman who died.
It was “obvious” from video footage of the attack that Joel Cauchi, 40, “focused on women and avoided the men,” Karen Webb, a South Wales state police commissioner, said. He was shot and killed by a police officer.
Speaking to reporters, Andrew Cauchi blamed his son’s rampage on mental illness and the fact that he “wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain.”
That’s not a motive. That’s victim blaming. Women’s safety and lives are too high a price to pay for a man’s ego and his egregious sense of entitlement to their attention.
These are the Sydney mall victims: Dawn Singleton,
25; Yixuan Cheng, 27; Ashlee Good, 38; Jade Young, 47; Pikria Darchia, 55; and Faraz Tahir, 30, the security guard.
Police ruled out terrorism as a motive, saying that the attacker was not driven by “ideology.” But they’re missing a bigger point. Violent misogyny is an ideology and, in its broadest definition, is an act of terrorism against women. For years, there have been warnings about “incels,” a subculture of men who consider themselves burdened with “involuntary celibacy” because they cannot have the women they find most desirable. Some have committed mass killings.
Nearly 10 years ago, a 22-year-old man murdered seven people and wounded several others in Isla Vista, a California community. After he died by suicide, police found a video in which he railed against women who he believed had shunned him and vowed to take revenge against them. He’s become a role model sanctified among like-minded men.
Even a cursory web search finds story after story about women who were killed by a man who believed that having their unwanted advances rebuffed was an offense worthy of her execution. So-called influencers who preach that women “belong” to men and that feminism emasculates men have garnered followers in the millions, including many teenage boys. One of the most prominent is now facing multiple charges including rape and human trafficking.
It’s anti-women hate borne long before the rise of social media, but one that has found an inexhaustible mainline there. And one need not inhabit its more insidious corners to encounter it — many sites are rife with it. A short video clip currently making the rounds across various sites shows a bearded man, a self-described “a professional dating coach,” sitting in his car. He looks into the camera and, with his fingertips pressed together in a universal gesture of mansplaining, he emphasizes every word: “You do not have to accept her rejection.”
Nearly every comment or reply I’ve read claps back with some version of “Yes, you do!” or cracks about an imminent arrest. But there are probably just as many men hanging on this person’s every idiotic word and taking notes because he claims he can “teach guys how to understand the female mind.”
Women aren’t puzzles to be deciphered by men who refuse to comprehend that no means no. But just as this nation refuses to take the epidemic of domestic violence seriously, there’s little discussion about how boys and young men are often socialized, through various influences ranging from pop culture to religion, that women are subservient to men and exist purely for a man’s pleasure and dominance.
Except for the use of a knife, the mass killings in Sydney feel sickeningly American. But no nation has cornered the market — or properly addressed — violence against women with the urgency it deserves. Each incident is wrongly regarded as an isolated act instead of part of a larger pattern of unchecked misogyny that endangers girls and women, then blames them for the violence they face.
But that’s what happens when men — and not just influencers but Republican politicians and the judges who protect their detrimental policies— believe that women who dare to exercise agency over their choices and bodies deserve to be punished.