At Slate, Amanda Hess takes on the disclaimers of those who point to the men whom Elliot Rodger killed in his murderous rampage last week to argue that misogyny is not the root of the Isla Vista killings. Hess: "Misogyny kills men, too."
Hess cites Julia Serano:
In her 2007 book Whipping Girl, Julia Serano noted that misogyny is the belief that "femaleness and femininity are inferior to, and exist primarily for the benefit of, maleness and masculinity," and that’s an attitude that works to police both men and women. It expresses itself in the bullying of insufficiently masculine boys, in the pervasiveness of homophobic slurs, in the suppression of open emotional expression among men, and in overwhelming violence against trans women, who are especially stigmatized for appearing to reject what some consider as their God-given male bodies.
In not unrelated news: at Thing Progress, Lauren Williams summarizes the findings of a diversity report Google released this week:
For the first time after years of resistance, Google released a diversity report Wednesday evening. The findings are not good, by Google’s own admission: employees are overwhelmingly white men, reinforcing Silicon Valley’s problem with gender and ethnic diversity.
For Salon, Sarah Gray notes,
In terms of gender, the company is 70 percent male and 30 percent female. In terms of ethnicity Google’s makeup is 61 percent white, 30 percent Asian, 4 percent "two or more races," 3 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black and less than 1 percent "other."
Max Nisen at Quartz offers a graph of the findings of Google's report (the graph is evidently from Google's NewsHour):
And also at Salon, Joan Walsh points out that Eliot Rodger is half Asian, and that, in their eagerness to create binary memes of black and white in telling his story, the media have flattened the racial (and class) aspects of the story — as I myself did in telling it several days ago. As she notes, part of the significant takeaway of this story is that "[s]adly, misogyny and male entitlement come in every color and culture.
In case you were wondering, the response of Joe the Plumber (remember him? the average American Joe idolized by the mainstream media as, well, an average American Joe in the 2008 election cycle) to the Isla Vista murders:
I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.
The photo at the head of the posting is from the Pop Dust article to which the preceding link points.