This is a comment by Monkey on the post “Bill Bennett Uses Aurora Shooting To Reinforce Own Bullshit Ideas Of Gender“.
“That’s interesting about Jesse Childress. What I find troubling is the expectation that a man sacrifice himself. Of course I would protect those who I was with – I would hope they would do the same for me.
“In 1989, a disturbed man shot several people in a university in Montreal. He injured people of both genders but was actively targeting (and indeed killed) only women. At one point he removed the men from a class at gunpoint and locked them in another room.
“In the aftermath the men (who were of course unarmed) were shamed by many for not defending the women. I think this was unfortunate – essentially their survivor’s guilt was legitimized.”
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I get the sentiment, but I disagree with the notion. I think we should reject the idea of guilt as an active verb, “I guilt you, you guilt me, we both guilt too easily” (with kudos to Simon and Garfunkel).
I experience guilt, but others don’t CAUSE my guilt unless I am somehow complicit and allow it. Should my wife, kids, boss, or others attempt to “guilt me” for not being chivalrous or manly or self-sacrificing, I need to examine that feeling and test its deeper nature. Perhaps the initial feelings of guilt will awaken more men to a (not so) new conversation about what it means to be a man. Warren Farrell and Sam Keen and others have written brilliantly about the need for men to become aware of the “hidden injuries of maleness.”
By that argument bullying and peer pressure don’t exist unless the victim want it to.
I like the comment by Monkey. I, too, have a problem with the ways in which masculinity is celebrated in America. For some reason, we are ecstatic about heroism, but are not interested in discussing the psychological fallout.
Is it weird that I haven’t heard of a single woman in the Aurora shooting who saved her boyfriend, husband or significant other. Did any of them do it, or is it just not talked about in the media. In fact, I rarely hear of women who sacrifice for the men in highly dangerous situations like this where there isn’t time to think about it.
Some of the stories of heroism that come out if events like this seem somewhat ambiguous. It’s dark, it’s chaotic, both the man and the woman hit the ground, or they are both running and he gets shot and she doesn’t. That doesn’t mean he took a bullet for her. But in the aftermath it is easy for survivors to jump to that idea and then the media runs with it. Alternative explanations are ignored: random chance; maybe the man’s larger body size makes him a bigger target, maybe the man was wearing more visible colors, maybe the shooter targeted males….
I remember years ago there was a school shooting where a female teacher knocked a gun out of an assailant’s hand. I’ve also read many stories of women saving people from drowning, pulling someone from a burning car and so on. Somehow those stories seem to get less attention.
Sarah,
With due respect to you as a stranger and respecting your intellectual skepticism, I think your view is hugely implausible. Read and/or talk more to men – at least those in their 30s or more, in most western (that I’m aware of) cultures. We are schooled from very young to put ourselves at the disposal of those in need – the proverbial “damsel in distress.” I can’t tell you how deep that wiring is. I assume you have corollary in-culturations as a female of whatever generation you were raised.
A mother, by some deep biologic-cultural wiring protects her young in a similar way.
And a teacher with a profoundly deep sense of caring for his/her kids could surely be inclined in this way as you point out.
But to think it’s accident and not gender that a few men risked and in some cases lost their lives in Aurora….I don’t think so.
Please note that many of us are not boasting about this either. As Richard Aubrey writes there is something deeply noble about this instinct to self-sacrifice. But such inculturation also has many perverse effects in terms of diminishing the value of one’s being. Thus we fight wars, go into mines, drive insanely, work with dangerous equipment, etc., somewhat “thoughtlessly” and in great disproportion and at some great risk compared to women.
Fair enough, except that it wasn’t ambiguous: “Blunk instinctively pushed his girlfriend to the ground and threw his body on top of hers.”
I think it’s possible that women’s heroics don’t get as much coverage. I’d be surprised it it were true (it’s still great media fodder) but it’s possible. What’s undeniable is that female survivors are never shamed for having survived.
I’ve also read many stories of women saving people from drowning, pulling someone from a burning car and so on. Somehow those stories seem to get less attention.
Probably because women don’t have the “save men, even if it costs you your life” expectation pressed on them.
When coverage of men saving people, bonus points for saving women and children (in fact wasn’t there a fourth man that did the same as our three heroes, but only for a man and not a woman?), it’s covered because that’s what “real men” are supposed to do.
I’ve wondered if Kevin McCarthy, LIRR survivor and son of a man killed by Colin Ferguson, resents his mother on some level.. Carolyn McCarthy has become as legitimate an advocate for gun control as impossible. So on some level is Kevin robbed of a red blooded American fantasy- If he had a gun his father would be alive?
I myself think that this whole “a real man gives up his life for women” bullshit puts a sexist (yeah I said it) burden on men which reduces our value as our own selves. It’s telling men that as a man he is supposed to give his life up for women as if his life is less valuable than hers and that the little value it does have based upon doing something for women.
Giving up your life for somebody is a pretty useful thing to do. Does our own value depend at least on being a bit useful? If we’re useful only to ourselves…who would or should give a rodent’s patootie about us.
Now, of course, we’re getting close to guilting the guys who made the sacrifice.
Was an Air Force guy named Hackney. Don’t bother with the details. Just figure that, when something got really bad, people would think, what would Hackney [or various others] do. Then you’d have to do it. So I can see dismissing the guys who sacrificed.
Survivors guilt can be really harmful. That survivors guilt after the Polytechnique massacre in ’98 has lead to at least two suicides (who left notes connecting their suicide to the massacre – there were other suicides where no such note were left). One hanged himself eight months after the massacre and left a note stating that he was torn apart by guilt for not stopping the shooter. Not long after that his parents killed themselves, unable to cope with the loss of their son*.
* http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2009/12/04/montreal-polytechnique-massacre-20.html
According to this article there indeed was a lot of criticism against male survivors for not overpowering the shooter or otherwise try to save victims. In short – a lot of people in essence shamed a man into killing himself.
Now that I didn’t know. From the way I’ve heard this event told it started and ended with a man who massacred women because they were women and men were spared. On the other hand when scores of men are killed oddly enough we always manage to hear about the women left behind (and a few who try to say they were the “real” victims).
WRT Polytechnique: Some feminists claimed it was the male thing doing what male things do. Mark Steyn noted there hadn’t seemed to be a surplus of testosterone.
I have no doubt the man who killed himself, and other who reproached themselves, felt really bad about missing the chance, about the instant’s failure of nerve.
It would be interesting to know–although we never will–whether criticism was anywhere near the intensity of the self-reproach. So saying “a lot of people in essence shamed a man into killing himself” is speculation.
Now, it appears that a great deal of criticism is considered legitimate. It would be necessary to come up with a category having specific definitions to know what criticism is legit and what is not.
Suppose you had been one of those guys who went out of the room. Would you reproach yourelf?
Now, suppose you feel you would not, that the responsibility was unfairly imposed on you by patriarchal gender expectations. Would you, starting on a first date with a woman, inform her in advance that, if the SHTF, she’s on her own?
Fact is, sometimes we do something so bad, or fail to do something so important, that self-reproach is justified and monstrous self-reproach not unlikely. Why the Polytechnique case does not fall into this situation is not clear.
Fine, I’ll adjust that to “a lot of people, by shaming him, contributed to his decision to killing himself”.
I have partaken in training for shop-personell how to handle oneself in an armed robbery. The one thing which is really underlined is that we should do as the perpetrator say (go where he says, give him what he demands etc.) while noticing as much about the perpetrator as you can. It was pointed out that defying the perpetrator were the most likely to escalate the situation. When a situation with one armed person and several unarmed person is escalating the overwhelmingly likely outcome is not hard to predict.
The rest of the course were pretty much observation training.
It seem you are stating that the smartest/decent course of action when threatened under gunpoint to leave a room is to refuse to do so.
In my day-dreams I like to imagin that I would kick the perpetrators ass like any of the good american action hero I grew up watching on VHS. That I would instantly correctly know exactly how long it would take the perpetrator to reload a rifle I didn’t know (although I know I used only 1-2 seconds to change the cartridge/magazine in my HK AK3 and reload it when I was conscripted) and would manage to reach and disarm or disable the perpetrator in that timeframe. In reality I don’t know what I would do. I strongly suspect that if I tried I’d not succeed (I am not trained in taking out an armed man while unarmed).
But I am pretty sure that whatever I ended up doing had I been present on campus in Montreal in ’89 some casualties would have happened and I think surviviors guilt would be present regardless. Since no-one knows for certain what would happen if they had taken another course of action (or refrained from a certain action) one can never know how many life one have saved, but only how many one failed to save (those killed up to that point). Doing something is no guarantee against survivors guilt, nor is it a guarantee against shaming and blame.
Sitting on a high horse and criticize untrained civillians for not doing certain theoretical actions in such situations are counter-productive. Now, praising the 5 or 7 (sources differ) who managed to reach and constrained the perpetrator at Thurston high school in 1998 in the time between he was out of ammunition for his rifle and he went for his handgun (this suggest to me that the perpetrator either was very slow or the other pupils were very close) is one thing. Sitting on a high horse and criticising someone for not executing a scenario one has constructed in one’s own mind based on limited/incomplete third hand information are reminiscent of those who boast the loudest, but are the first to chicken out.
Tamen. Couple of things. First, armed robbery is not mass murder. It’s smart to let the guy go while accumulating the facts.
Second, I did not criticize anybody at Polytechnique. I said self-reproach was likely. In addition, the actiions the kids took at Thurston provides the self-reproaching with another possibility that he may have missed. This would increase his self-reproach.
No criticism, except of myself if I failed in such a situation.
Your implication that I am boasting, which I am not, seems defensive.
Fortunately, as at Virginia Tech, nobody else was armed, or someone might have been hurt.
There’s a report from V-T that one of the bodies, a ROTC cadet, showed by the position of the body and the position of the wounds, that he was probably trying to rush the shooter. Too bad his tools didn’t match his heart.
First: No, armed robbery is not mass murder. Keep in mind that when the men were told to leave the room the men did not have the knowledge that this was to become a mass murder. It was a an armed person giving orders.
Secondly: Yeah, I know you kind of walked close to the line and that you might have been writing about what happens internally for the survivors while at the same time avoiding saying outright that they should have acted in such and such a way. But you did come off as excusing those who did criticize the survivors for not taking specific actions. I read your above comment as a clarification that that was not what you meant.
The assessment that people who boasts the loudest about what they would have done in a (rare, expectional, hypothetical) situation is not someone I would expect to act accordingly should such situation arise was a general opinion applying to those who boast. The same thing can be seen in Sean Hannity’s reneging on his promise to prove that water-boarding is not torture by undergoing it himself for charity to the troops.
I am sure you are aware that there are plenty of people doing such boasting in the aftermath of such tragedies. Some of them are quite loud about it as well. Would you entrust your life to them acting accordingly?
Sorry, I forgot one sentence in the beginning when copying the comment from notepad:
No, armed robbery is not mass murder. Part of that advice is in place to avoid an armed robbery to turn into a murder or a mass murder (if there are several store clerks).
Tamen,
The guys who felt bad after leaving the room felt bad because of something they thought they should have done. Little to do with post-event critiques. It also implies there was an ambient idea of what people ought to do.
However, is it your view that nobody should ever be critiqued for acting or failing to act in any situation? I doubt it. So the question is, in what circumstances is criticizing others’ actions justified?
As to what the guys in the room thought the shooter was going to do in Montreal: I suppose it depends on what he said before they left. Any mention of open your purses? “I hate women.” That sort of thing. A reasonable person would not think a gunman coming into a classroom was bent on stealing from impecunious students. Not like it’s a bank or jewelry store.
Problem with not critiquing these guys is that, to be consistent, you can’t praise the kids who took down the shooter at Thurston HS. I don’t know exactly how close the first guy to jump him was but it probably seemed pretty far, as he had one leg tangled in a chair and a round through his lung. Then he got another through his hand. By praising these guys, you implicitly criticise those who don’t show equal nerve and competence. So you can’t do that, can you? Since it was all guys taking care of business in the HS, it alarms those who get fussed about gender expectations.
You know, I haven’t seen anybody boasting about what they’d do. In fact, I think you had to make that up because you had jacksquat all to go on otherwise.
Danny,
The shooter came into a classroom with a gun and told the guys to leave. They did. He then proceeded to shoot the women. Turns out, based on various reports, that he had to reload one or possibly two times.
There was a potential mass shooting at a Thurston High School in, iirc, Oregon or Wash state. When a couple of guys heard the hammer go down on an empty chamber, they charged the shooter and took him out.
So, if any of the Polytechnique guys reproach themselves, there’s at least a technical possibility they had an opportunity and missed it by having not only left the room but the vicinity. Which would add to the self-reproach.