Where are they coming from, these violent men? The right-wing terrorists like David McMenemy. The onslaught of damaged males inflicting violence on women in dramatic and public ways. It all seems so new, so sudden. And yet so familiar.
What is most striking about this seeming trend is how abstract the women victims are for so many of the perpetrators. Both of the deranged school shooters in Pennsylvania and Colorado simply picked the schools at random, and selected girls as their victims retributively, for supposed harm done to them in the past by other females. All of them indicated a long-sweltering rage at women.
Sara wonders, reasonably, if this is something new. It isn't. In many regards, this kind of angry outpouring by would-be controlling males seems new because we haven't seen it, on a large scale, for many years. But this kind of murderous hate in fact has a long and colorful history -- ranging from the Holy Roman Empire to the Nazis.
What has changed are the conditions and the context in which it is happening. Those in turn can give us some ideas how best to confront it.
Western-style misogyny probably has its roots in a Greek/Roman culture that gave women little power, political or otherwise, despite including women in its pantheon of gods. One could also point to the deep psychological roots in the urge to civilize, particularly in the view of nature as wild, harmful, something to be repressed and tamed; as women became identified with nature, the desire to control them took root as well.
But the particular psychological component that creates the twist of murderous misogyny comes from Dark-Age Christianity: the notion of humankind -- and indeed, all of nature --as innately sinful. Because the chief burden for that sin fell on women who already had no power.
[...]
The rest at:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/10/misogyny-and-fascism.html
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/ dave /