Apparently it’s important to be civil. Whatever pageantry of violent intolerance is playing out in the news, liberals and women and people of colour must moderate our language so that certain sensitive Caucasian gentlemen in the room aren’t made uncomfortable. We must remember that their feelings matter. We must not, for example, point out that violent misogyny – from online harassment and stalking to domestic abuse – is the live wire running through the machinery of mass murder, white supremacy and far-right mobilisation in Trump’s America and beyond.
Yesterday, Jarrod Ramos allegedly murdered five journalists at the offices of the Capital Gazette in Maryland. Ramos had sent countless threats to the paper, after one journalist reported on his harassment of a former classmate. The woman went through what she called a “year-long nightmare” of intimidation and threats before Ramos was convicted of misdemeanour harassment. Ramos was apparently furious that the Capital Gazette wrote about him as if he’d done something wrong.
Of 95 mass shootings carried out in the US between 1982 and 2017, 92 of the perpetrators were male, and 57% of mass-shooting perpetrators from 2009 to 2015 included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims. “In many of these mass shootings,” Jennifer Wright observed at Harper’s Bazaar, “the desire to kill seems to be driven by a catastrophic sense of male entitlement.” That sense of entitlement may well be the greatest threat to what remains of civil society.
I’m sorry if that hurts to hear. I know that calling prejudice by its name makes people uncomfortable, and whatever happens, those of us who believe in silly things such as shared humanity are supposed to be civil, to be polite, to mitigate and manage hurt male feelings. After all, we know what might happen if we don’t.
Six weeks ago, Shana Fisher was murdered by Dimitrios Pagourtzis in Santa Fe, Texas. For months beforehand, according to her family, the 16-year-old was harassed by her killer: “He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.” Finally, she stood up for herself. Days later, he came to school and shot her, along with nine others.
Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015, was accused of domestic violence by two of his ex-wives.
Omar Mateen, who massacred 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, had a long history of domestic violence.
Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 17 people, 14 of them teenagers, in Parkland, Florida, in February, was allegedly so abusive to his ex-girlfriend that she could not travel alone to school.
He was also a member of a white supremacist group. So was Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, telling his victims: “You’re raping our women.”
That same swivel-eyed paranoia about a perceived threat to white femininity stretches from street-marching European fascist groups to the White House, with scaremongering about “Mexican rapists” being used to justify the inhumanity on American’s southern border, where thousands of children remain in holding camps, torn away from their families.
Mere days before the Capital Gazette killings, rightwing “provocateur” Milo Yiannopoulos quipped that he could not “wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight”. Yiannopoulos insists that this was just a joke. Like many grifters in the gig economy of modern rightwing extremism, Yiannopoulus has long been regarded as a harmless clown, even after a protester was shot at one of his rallies. His ugly harassment of women of colour such as Leslie Jones won him a reputation as a valiant free-speech defender. Of course women and people of colour may not exercise our free speech to call out oppression and abuse. That would be uncivil.
For years, Yiannopoulos and others like him, spurned by the mainstream, polished their personal brands in the trenches of the online culture wars, whipping up hate-mobs against female games journalists before expanding their franchise to stage-managed attacks on trans women, women of colour and “social justice warriors”, which is an odd thing to call your enemy, unless social justice itself makes you uncomfortable. This was the demographic courted by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former right-hand manchild and svengali of Breitbart news. Bannon was not the first to recognise the power of wounded male pride and sexual entitlement as recruiting tools. It’s the theme that connects the “incel” movement with Islamic State, the refrain that runs from 1930s Berlin to Washington in 2018.
There is nothing in men’s nature that obliges them to behave like this. The problem is not masculinity but misogyny. There are plenty of shy, lonely men living in their parents’ basements who have not taken up violent woman-hatred as a way to relax after work. There are plenty of worried, white, straight chaps nursing private anxieties about their place in the world who have somehow managed not to drink the crypto-fascist Kool-Aid, refreshing though it surely looks to anyone lost in the directionless desert of modern masculinity. Racism and misogyny are chosen. You don’t catch them like a cold; you catch them like you catch a train to somewhere dark and terrifying. And a great many men seem to have bought their ticket long ago.
Not all misogynists are violent, but most modern recruits to the diffuse male supremacist movement seem extremely comfortable with the spectacle of violence being done in their names. These are the people for whom a Hillary Clinton presidency truly would have been “just as bad” as a Trump regime that is doing everything it promised and more. These are the people for whom an administration bent on persecuting migrants and religious minorities, destroying the free press and tearing up the fabric of American democracy remains a fair price to pay so long as nobody has to say the words “Madam President”.
And yet, somehow, it is women who are being implored not to get angry in public, lest we make these men uncomfortable. It is people of colour who are being shamed for being insufficiently civil. It is liberals who are castigated for not showing enough empathy with those who long ago decided that basic respect for other human beings is “political correctness”, and it’s evil, and it must be rooted out at gunpoint. In times like these, a demand for civility is a demand for complicity. We must not allow our society to be held hostage to white male fragility any longer.