George Sodini

As someone who has survived serious sexual violence on a few different occasions, I live with a fair amount of hypervigilance and fear for my safety. On the street I very routinely get harassed (not just like "take care of those gorgeous legs baby," which doesn't really bother me, but things like "I had better put my eyes back in my head because I am going to get arrested for what I am thinking about you right now." this would be a direct quote). Now, the fact that all of these men are not psychotic or homicidal is precisely the point. Rather than speculate about whether George Sodini was insane, (he clearly was) or even whether he should have gotten a long prison sentence (in a world of ideal penal reform he probably should have, but I am undecided here), the only responsible thing to do is to think about how to prevent this violence. 

If it turns out that a culture of sexism encourages the likelihood that crazy people will kill women, it is irresponsible not to examine that. The psychological and physical well being of the women being victimized is just as important as that of any man -- and I have an inkling that the feeling of persecution straight men may get from this critical examination is not as serious as the situation for women in California, who, for example, recently had all funding for domestic violence shelters -- all of it -- cut by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who again is not a psychopath. But indirectly, in cutting all funding for domestic violence shelters he is leading to the death of people who did not need to die.

A cursory glance at cable TV, YouTube, or the movie theatre reveals that the mistreatment of women, and quite often their outright rape and murder, gets sexualized (in everything from Judd Apatow films [he blames anti-semitism for the criticism that Knocked Up is sexist], to the treatment of Hillary Clinton's recent trip to the Congo to talk about her $17 million dollar program to keep women from being raped with the barrels of guns, to basically every horror film ever, except perhaps this... http://www.teethmovie.com/ ). 

The naturalization of male violence is not backed up by scientific evidence (see Pulitzer-prize winning biologist Natalie Angier's text 'Woman') . Recognizing this is good for both men and women, because it means men don't have to be violent. What it also means is they have effective free will, or at least a serious obligation to continue assuming they have free will. And when we realize how extensive the positive depictions of the rape of and violence against women are in our culture, it is obviously more important to subject "their" media to critical examination than to blindly disavow any possible linkage whatsoever and thus save face.

You do not need to say that any man is directly responsible for George Sodini's actions other than himself to say that critical examination of media is called for. And by the way, I don't think that these straight men you are talking about should have any sort of monopoly over "their" media, as you say. The lines are not so clean. The pornography industry is responsible for all kinds of violence against women and their economic oppression. One of the main men in the pornography industry today is also a major movie producer and has ties to the KKK ( http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=235&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html) 

This doesn't mean that pornography viewers are murderers any more than casual cocaine users directly cause the guerilla warfare which they support with their purchase, but it does mean there is a linkage.

Furthermore, mental illness doesn't happen in a vacuum. Nor is it a necessary fact. If it is remotely possible that we can create a culture that doesn't encourage men to think of violent or hyperaggressive behavior against women as sexy -- which is a situation that hurts plenty of men too, by pressuring them to demonstrate their "straight male" macho-ness in a way that leaves millions deeply emotionally and psychologically wounded (http://community.feministing.com/2009/07/why-pornography-hurts-men-repo.html) --if we can help to prevent people like George Sodini from feeling so boxed-in by this caricature of masculinity that he suffers a mental breakdown and commits heinous acts of murder against innocent people, I think we have a huge obligation to critically examine whether it is possible. It makes just as much sense to deny that as it does to say that a man who murdered a black man after watching casual racism in some movie over and over doesn't obligate the filmmaker to even ask himself once how he could have depicted race differently. We will save so much more time, money, angst, and innocent life if we do this than if we wait for psychiatric "cures" and prison sentences after the fact. The "after the fact" concern only helps George Sodini -- it doesn't help the women he killed.

The one point where I do agree with you, Steve, is in saying that people like George Sodini need help. Psychiatric help, but not only psychiatric help -- also help through cultural education. As Hannah Arendt says, violence can only exist in the absence of power, and power is precisely the ability to effect change without stooping to the use of force. Clearly these homicidal actions, like (if not the same as) the violence of the patriarchy itself, like all of the fantasies about violence against women that do exist in media today, stem from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women. Women, after all, are these "inferior" beings upon whom even sexist men inevitably have to depend in order to, at the very least, perpetuate the species. And no man was always independent of his mother.

It's funny, because in creating a caricature of women who use sex, not violence, to effect the changes they want to see in the world, the patriarchal media has, like Midas, unwittingly projected into women a weird cartoon version of what they wanted all along: the power to impact the world without being so desperate as to stoop to anger, or force.