Misogyny is Co-Morbid with Capitalism, and it Harms Us All: My Thoughts on the Plymouth Shooter
By Helen C
This month my Facebook feed was ignited with the horrific crimes of the Plymouth shooter. I felt horror as the details broke. One of the victims was revealed to be a three-year-old girl. The epitome of innocence, caught in the shooter’s wrath. Discourse quickly turned to speculation over the shooter’s mental health, a natural response in an attempt to fathom such a gut-wrenching sequence of events. This is a familiar and somewhat defensive reaction when a white man is at the centre of such abhorrence.
I am not the shooter’s therapist, but it’s extremely probable that the shooter suffered psychological hardship. Then again, as a mental health professional, I can promise that there’s no DSM-5 criteria that specifies ‘shooting women and children’ as a symptom. As a neurodiverse person, it’s grating that mainstream media’s attempts to destigmatise mental health issues are always correlative with divorcing a white man from the victims of a hate crime.
The ‘lone mad shooter’ narrative seems to sate a collective cognitive dissonance; it’s easier to individualise the issue than see patterns in behaviour and ideology. The incel ‘movement’, of which the Plymouth shooter was a member, plays on that very concept. The people leading it aren’t concerned about the disenfranchisement and mental anguish of young boys when they’re structurally exploiting for an anti-women agenda, stoking a sense of injustice at a perceived loss of privilege and dangling this subscription like a chocolate-coated carrot. Individualising these cases allows a platform for discussion around the incel narrative, offering legitimacy to their aims.
According to recent research, incel-motivated acts of violence have increased with significance over the past seven years. Again, it’s easy to isolate this as an insidious online community, lurking in their mum’s basements, seething in muddled matrix jargon about their stolen chances. But the truth is, thousands of years of patriarchy have paved the groundwork for this.
Statistics from Women’s Aid maintain domestic abuse as a gendered crime, stating: ‘The majority of domestic homicide victims (killed by ex/partner or a family member) for the year ending March 2017 to the year ending March 2019 were female (77% of 274 victims) and most of the suspects were male (263 out of 274; 96%). Of the 83 male victims of domestic homicide, the suspect was female in 39 cases, and male in 44 cases. (ONS, 2020A).’
This is yet another painful illustration that misogyny is a motivator for violence, even within the constraints of a traditional relationship. It was only fairly recently, in the 1980s, that laws against marital rape were recognised. Prior to this, the idea that consent was fluid and that a woman could dictate her own sexual autonomy within the constraints of the marriage that neoliberal society embellished as a fairytale was apparently beyond the justice system.
For fellow survivors of sexual assault, the thought of us addressing male violence as a public health issue, as though the justice system is our cheerleader, remains as gobsmacking a concept today. Only 3.4 % of our offenders will be convicted.
Entitlement over women is perpetuated in a misogynistic worldview. Indeed, some of the men in the incel community may be mentally ill or socially marginalised, but that only makes them more susceptible to being manipulated into taking violent reactionary action against a skewed worldview.
Entitlement is entangled into the dynamics of traditional cis-het relationships, ingrained in centuries of law. A single disenfranchised man doesn’t cause this worldview because that worldview is already widespread. We are doing victims a massive injustice by minimising these incidents because entitlement exists even when it isn’t embellished in black-pill metaphors and the strife of a poor little nice guy.
This begs the question: how do we even begin to challenge violent patriarchal rhetoric? Kicking capitalism in its proverbial balls may be a good shout. The commodification of sex is at the centre of the incel worldview. The accumulation of this commodity is a status-enhancing right. If we humour the incels’ hierarchy – in which they’re left behind, at the bottom of the pile after trying to compete with ‘Chads’ (dominant, good-looking males) – it might make sense to challenge the system that allocates said status, which is the patriarchy.
Capitalism and the patriarchy are also factors in the rapid decline in the mental health of men (and the mental health of everyone in general), but isolating cases like the Plymouth shooter’s, rather than challenging a fundamentally oppressive system, is fodder for the incels’ grasp.
While we’re building the tools to smash capitalism, we need to accept that the ultimate root of incel violence must be understood as a social issue. This means using whatever social capital we have to challenge misogyny, not placing the responsibility predominantly on survivors, and not diminishing it as ‘identity politics’ in an attempt to distance it from a class-focused response.
In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne states: ‘at the most general level of description, misogyny should be understood as the “law enforcement” branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology.’
There is an ember of promise, with public health research recognising that we need to act before incels offend . However, procedures of holding a Norwegian model that ‘targets at risk individuals’ ignites the scepticism of a woman who’s seen her class and gender failed by structurally prejudiced legislation.
We are at a peculiar moment in time. Capitalism faces no clear challenge and neoliberalism plays on the respite we take in technology, often perpetuating its own disdain. We must recognise that misogynistic violence is counter-revolutionary and respond with social solidarity. This means that while we may recognise the circumstances that contextualise hate in an attempt to address them, we need to stop failing victims of that hate by making excuses.
Sources
Domestic abuse is a gendered crime - Womens Aid
07_Rape_Prosecution.pdf (uky.edu)