#YesAllWomen
This past weekend, a young man posted a video about how he hated women for rejecting him. How he was going to get retribution by shooting up a sorority house. And that’s precisely what he did. The normal topics after a mass shooting came out. We need more gun control! We need more mental health awareness! Topics that we’ll all forget about in a week or so.
But more terrifying, is that from some of the darker corners of the internet there were men sympathizing with the shooter. Saying explicitly that this happened because women rejected him. And of course when it was pointed out that this was a hate crime, that the shooter did it because he felt he deserved to have sex with women who rejected him, the cries of “Not all men are like that” took hold. It is from here that #YesAllWomen was born.
You guys know how I normally feel about “hashtag activism” or any other method of memifiying important issues. But #YesAllWomen is different. #YesAllWomen is women telling their stories of everyday sexism. Stories that help men realize what women go through on (often) a daily basis.
Sharing our stories is important. Because honestly, if we don’t talk about it, men don’t realize there is a problem. Time and time again I’ll see a post about sexist behavior at conventions, and there will be a comment along the lines of “none of the women I know have stories like this.” Which I find unlikely. What is more likely, is that the behavior is so common that we don’t mention them.
I think of my own experience at Gen Con last year, when my husband was getting answers to questions I asked. And how I just brushed it off because I’m used to it. I think about Wil Wheaton saying that conventions are a “safe place,” which I’m sure is true for Wil Wheaton. But if they were, Cosplay is Not Consent wouldn’t be needed.
So tell your stories ladies, and be heard.
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Nicole is a Software Quality Engineer, music collector, and chronic project starter. In her free time she enjoys reading trashy romance novels, catching up on her game backlog, and bourbon.
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Though he mentioned females more than he did males in his manifesto, his resentment and anger was with anyone who was sexually active. Males and females. Showing this is the fact that 4 of his 6 victims were sexually active males and his NUMEROUS rants about hating men who were not virgins. Also, I would like to point out that over half of the victims were stabbed to death. None of this is sympathizing, just some interesting facts that I’ve seen left out of most articles on the subject.
Hi Eric, I’ve seen this brought up before. But I think that argument leaves out something interesting as well. Three of those male victims were his roommates. That is, people who could stop him or alert the authorities. And honestly, all the articles I’ve read about the crime itself have listed the names of the victims and that half of them were stabbed. This post is about the hashtag itself, not the crime. The crime described briefly for context.
Maybe I’m reading the argument wrong, but the way I take the “but he killed men too” argument is trying to say that the shooter was not motivated by a deep hatred of women. Which is simply not true. His video said he was going to kill “every blonde slut.” His manifesto specifically calls out ‘females’ for being the cause of his misery. He said he was going to get ‘retribution’ for the way ‘females’ had excluded him from ‘humanity.’ He calls sexuality the cause of “vileness and depravity” and women (sorry, ‘females’) the “ultimate evil” behind it. I’m going to repeat that for emphasis. He calls women the ultimate evil. He says they “don’t deserve any rights” that they “shouldn’t have the right to choose who they breed with.” He says “there is no creature more depraved than the human female.” He says women are “vicicious, evil, barbaric animals.”
This crime was committed out of a hatred for women. Period. The killer specifically said so.
Two things I wanted to add to this post (and please know that I’m not trying to detract from the initial intent of putting #yesallwomen out there)…. 1. I would venture to say that this poor excuse for a human being had, at some point, rejected some young lady out there who actually gave him the time of day. I can’t help but wonder how he would have felt had she came for him with the same lack of compassion that he displayed for his victims…. And 2. We live in a world where some folks just seem to be wired to hurt people. While I’m an avid supporter of the 2nd, this really IS a gun issue. It’s also a knife issue, and a mental heath issue, etc., ad nauseum…. However, as much as we’d like to lock away all the things that can hurt people, Pandora’s box is open, and if someone truly wants to do damage, they’ll find a way. As harsh as this sounds, my only wish is that those who decide to harm others would realize that they made the decision to feel the way they do (nobody has the power to make another person feel a way they don’t want to feel – that’s a personal choice). It’s unfortunate that these folks don’t, therefore, do the damage to themselves first since the choice is their own to feel the way they do. Just my two (unfiltered) cents!