“Michael Ian Black reacts to Florida shooting: Boys are broken” -New York Daily News
“How Gun Violence And Toxic Masculinity Are Linked, In 8 Tweets” -The Huffington Post
“Toxic white masculinity: The killer that haunts American life” -Salon
“Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us” -The Boston Globe
“Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us” -Harpers Bazaar
“Don’t Blame Mental Illness for Mass Shootings; Blame Men” -Politico
Boys aren't broken and every biological male isn't responsible for the actions of some lunatic; a lunatic enabled by a complacent law enforcement system, an absence of real mental heath programs at the federal and state level, and a school that allowed a former student [and this is mind-numbingly outrageous to me, speaking as a former educational administrator], whose educational career was marked with mortal threats and violence against fellow students, to simply walk into a school with a rifle.
It took a bit of work, but I found something that Doris Lessing observed about seventeen years or so ago. For those who don't know her name, she was a proper feminist and not one of these contemporary neo-Victorian whelps who require great government systems to protect them from words and images. [Jeez, talk about patriarchy. Is there anything more enabling of patriarchy than women expecting a government to protect them from creepy men?]
She was in her eighties, I believe, reacting to a visit to a British elementary school classroom:
Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy which could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men.
"I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed," the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday.
"Great things have been achieved through feminism. We now have pretty much equality at least on the pay and opportunities front, though almost nothing has been done on child care, the real liberation.
"We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?
"I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.
You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives."
Lessing said the teacher tried to "catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish".
She added: "This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.
"It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.
Sorry, but "fighting back" is not a feminized reaction, and that is the only style of reaction that would be acceptable in our current age. The Episcopal Church determined that men were a problem about three decades ago. How many men do you see in the average Episcopal parish on a Sunday morning these days? How many of those parishes look shabby and have inadequate budgets? In society as well as in physics, every action has an opposite and equal reaction."It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests."Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."