The Cult of "Masculinity" is the Problem

While most men are not killers, almost all mass killers are men.  This is just one of the many excellent points Gary Younge makes in his piece for the Guardian.  It is time to look at the Toronto mass murders for what they are, and that is they are hate crimes.

Murders against women by men, since they are so fairly common, aren't considered forms of terrorism.  But this Alek Minassian  is a terrorist just the same.  

Younge gets right to the point about what the issue is:

With tens of thousands visiting their message boards, incel is hardly marginal – though arguably too amorphous and incoherent to dignify with the term movement. It is debatable how widespread the cult of Rodger might be. But the issues of misogyny and inadequacy that drive men to it characterise a far broader and deeper problem that helps to explain male violence.

On the one hand, there is the hatred of women, born for the most part from a sense of entitlement. These men do not just resent the fact that they can’t get a girlfriend. They feel women are denying them the sex that is rightfully theirs. They belong to broadly the same demographic as the Gamergate movement earlier this decade, in which male gamers systematically harassed female game developers and media critics, subjecting them to rape and death threats, and publishing details of their personal lives online. 

These men, wherever they are, now have more political space than they used to. There is considerable overlap with the American hard right. And they have a role model in the White House in a president who was accused of rape by his first wife, boasts of grabbing women by the genitals, makes up sexual stories about womenon the internet, and openly disparages their looks and intellect. In the 2005 book TrumpNation, the future president tells Timothy O’Brien his favourite part in Pulp Fiction is when “Sam [Jackson] had his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up: ‘Tell that Bitch to be cool.’ Say, ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.”

The gender--sex role--of masculinity is the problem.  As Younge concludes, it is feminism that helps to liberate men from the stifling sex roles, but these guys just don't understand it.  Or maybe more likely, these guys don't want to lose all the benefits--entitlement--that masculinity provides.