Opinion | How Many Women Have to Die to End 'Temptation'? - The New York Times - 0 views
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After the attack on three Georgia spas on Tuesday, which took the lives of eight people, Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old charged with the slayings, told the police that the women murdered were “temptations” he needed to “eliminate.”
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For too long, women have been punished and killed because of men’s inability to deal with issues around rejection, desire and shame. Women of color are especially at risk; they’re disproportionately attacked and more likely to be blamed for the violence perpetrated against them.
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Thanks to decades of academic and activist work, we know more than ever about why men lash out at women in this way and how we can curb the violence. Still, the occurrence of mass killings targeting women shows no sign of stopping.
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The story has become a horribly familiar one: A young man, bemoaning his virginity or singleness or his anger, sets out to slaughter women (though men also lose their lives in these rampages).
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In 2019, Christopher Wayne Cleary was arrested in Denver before he could carry out his plan to kill “as many girls as I see.”
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In part, these attacks are a predictable outcome of extremist online sexism. Young, mostly white men seek community and commiseration in violent forums. There they are radicalized to believe women are to blame for all their problems, especially those around sex.
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Mr. Long’s views on sexuality, for example, appear to stem from his religious upbringing. Reportedly, he didn’t own a smartphone because he was afraid he would be tempted by online pornography. He is said to have felt ashamed of masturbating and was suicidal over his belief that his habit of visiting sex workers meant he was “living in sin.”
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This kind of purity culture has a reach far beyond religion. Abstinence-only education classes taught in over half the states across the country tell young people that the onus is on girls not to tease or tempt boys, whose sexual compulsions, they say, are near uncontrollable.
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These ideas are so pervasive that they can also be found in school dress codes, which almost exclusively target young women, explicitly telling them that the way they dress distracts their male classmates and teachers.
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The National Women’s Law Center has also found that Black female students are more likely to be cited for dress code violations than their white peers — another indication of how girls and women of color are hypersexualized and punished.
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After a Maryland high school student shot 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey in the head, The Associated Press initially described him as a “lovesick teen.”
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Across culture and institutions, the message is the same: Male sexual violence is to be expected. It becomes harder and harder to treat these crimes as aberrations when the values that drive them are so clearly normalized.
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There are countless ways to curb massacres like the one in Georgia: Editors could take a closer look at the way they cover sexualized violence; pop culture creators could rethink their objectification of women, especially women of color; schools could teach comprehensive sex education that dismantles gender stereotypes and myths about desire and consent.