A Feminist Says Toxic Masculinity Is Responsible for Gun Violence. She's Right.

Before we go any further about toxic masculinity and mass shootings, let's gather up all the sisters who've committed one. Oh wait, there are (almost) none.

It's now unclear the true motives of the Orlando shooter, as he joins the rest of the
young males who answered their challenges with shocking levels of gun violence

Amanda Marcotte, who writes often at Salon.com, points her feminist finger at toxic masculinity as a driver of American gun violence. In my view, she's definitely on to something:

Every time feminists talk about toxic masculinity, there is a chorus of whiny dudes who will immediately assume — or pretend to assume — that feminists are condemning all masculinity, even though the modifier “toxic” inherently suggests that there are forms of masculinity that are not toxic.

So, to be excruciatingly clear, toxic masculinity is a specific model of manhood, geared towards dominance and control. It’s a manhood that views women and LGBT people as inferior, sees sex as an act not of affection but domination, and which valorizes violence as the way to prove one’s self to the world.

What rings true about Marcotte's diagnosis of a particular American male trait -- the need to dominate "inferiors" -- is that it is so prevalent. Stephanie Pappas, writing in LiveScience, suggests that aggression has been reinforced in males throughout history and that sexual frustration may very well play a role:

There are no simple answers. The easiest theory to digest is probably an evolutionary one: Males, over hundreds of thousands of years of development, have historically been rewarded for aggression. A tendency toward violence is seen in chimpanzees, humans' closest living primate relative. (Bonobos, humanity's other close primate family member, are far more peaceful.) Violence can beget status for males, both in chimps and in humans (just look at how many action heroes get the girl). And for males, a lack of status can mean missing out on the chance to mate.
Indeed, sexual frustration is a theme running through the writings of many male mass shooters, Lankford said. Many shooters leave manifestos explicitly detailing their hatred of women and of men who seemed to navigate relationships with women with ease.
"By contrast, I'm not aware of any female attackers, even though we have a small sample, I don't know that any of them complained about not being able to have sex," Lankford said.
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 There are no simple answers. The easiest theory to digest is probably an evolutionary one: Males, over hundreds of thousands of years of development, have historically been rewarded for aggression. A tendency toward violence is seen in chimpanzees, humans' closest living primate relative. (Bonobos, humanity's other close primate family member, are far more peaceful.) Violence can beget status for males, both in chimps and in humans (just look at how many action heroes get the girl). And for males, a lack of status can mean missing out on the chance to mate.

Indeed, sexual frustration is a theme running through the writings of many male mass shooters, Lankford said. Many shooters leave manifestos explicitly detailing their hatred of women and of men who seemed to navigate relationships with women with ease.

"By contrast, I'm not aware of any female attackers, even though we have a small sample, I don't know that any of them complained about not being able to have sex," Lankford said.

As Marcotte points out, this leaves conservatives scrambling for a narrative that supports their world view. Orlando may not end up supporting it:

For obvious political reasons, conservatives are hustling as fast as they can to make [the Orlando shooting] about “radical Islam,”  which is to say they are trying to imply that there’s something inherent to Islam and not Christianity that causes such violence. This, of course, is hoary nonsense, as there is a long and ignoble history of Christian-identified men, caught up in the cult of toxic masculinity, sowing discord and causing violence in our country: The gun-toting militiamen that caused a showdown in Oregon, the self-appointed border patrol called the Minutemen that recently made news again as their founder was convicted of child molestation, men who attack abortion clinics and providers.

Toxic masculinity aspires to toughness but is, in fact, an ideology of living in fear: The fear of ever seeming soft, tender, weak, or somehow less than manly. This insecurity is perhaps the most stalwart defining feature of toxic masculinity.

This explains, in part, conservatives' recent obsession with who is using which bathroom. Quite simply, their masculinity is challenged. Pretty insecure, if you ask me.

Marcotte's analysis brings up something that I've been aware of for a while, and that is the fact that Islamic radicals and Christian radicals, especially in the U.S., have shown a disturbingly similar attraction to gun violence. In fact, I'd be willing to posit that gun ownership is more prevalent among white Christians than any other group in America. Wanna bet? Any takers?

According to the startling results of a survey released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute, 57 percent of white evangelicals live in homes where someone owns a gun (compared, for example, with 31 percent of Catholics.) And more startling, even after 20 first-graders were slaughtered in Connecticut at the hands of a madman with an assault rifle, 59 percent of white evangelicals continue to oppose tighter restrictions on gun laws.

Which makes one wonder: How many first-graders would Jesus shoot?

Sorry, got off-track. But it's interesting that women are rarely mass killers, and married women killers are even rarer.

Eric Madfis, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington Tacoma, says he doesn’t know of any cases where a husband-and-wife duo have perpetrated a mass shooting, although there are recorded cases of husband-and-wife teams who were serial killers or domestic terrorists. Most shooters are “single, separated or divorced,” according to a sweeping analysis of mass shooters that the New York Times published this October; Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado on the day after Thanksgiving, was twice-divorced and estranged from his children.

Though the average age for mass shooters is 35, many fall in the FBI’s peak window for violent crime, which is 16–24. This is a moment when people “are less likely to have significant attachments in their life that deter them from criminal violence,” as Pete Simi, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, has told Vice. “Those of us who are not committing crimes on a regular basis, [it’s] largely because there are constraints in our lives—we have things to lose.” Such a description seemingly wouldn’t apply to the parents of a baby.

So, our final example, the wife and mother who participated in the San Bernardino killings, must have been powerfully motivated to leave a baby behind. But one simple answer exists: She thought she would survive the shootings and make it back to her baby without being caught. It's a pretty persuasive argument, perhaps the only one, and the one that proves the rule.