“Your all pusseys i have the right to protect my family. Ypu can keep being faggots and ill keep my guns.”
— Some guy I hung out with in high school in a Facebook comment thread about gun control (quoted without permission)
Yet another angry white man has made his frustrated sense of entitlement the public’s problem. Whatever “motive” the police ultimately release to the media to explain Stephen Paddock’s decision to shoot over 500 people at a music festival in Las Vegas last week won’t touch upon the actual reason he or any of the other violent men that hold the world hostage behave the way they do.
Before I get into what that actual reason is, let’s have a look around. Who is in charge of the world and its governing institutions? Outside of Rwanda and Bolivia, no nation on Earth is governed by a legislative majority of women, and even in those two countries, a man holds the presidency. Globally, in nations with parliamentary systems, women hold an average of twenty percent of those seats. In the US, women hold 19.4 percent of congressional seats and 21 percent of senate seats. We’ve yet to see a female president, despite the fact that several nations most Americans would consider “backward” when it comes to women’s rights (India, Mongolia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Haiti, Ecuador, the Philippines, Mozambique, Liberia, Jamaica, and — again — Rwanda) have had female heads of state (though even they were stymied by male legislatures in all but one case).
Note that nowhere in this world aside from the Rwandan or Bolivian parliaments do women hold enough seats to get in the way of a male majority. In fact, men hold a supermajority of 60% or more of the parliamentary posts in every nation in the world but twelve out of 195 (Rwanda, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Finland, Iceland, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Senegal, South Africa, and Sweden). I don’t suppose I need to inform anyone of what role women play in non-parliamentary/autocratic governments.
Even the UN, which is ostensibly focused on the inclusion of women in world governance, can only muster about a third of General Assembly seats with women in them. Among the major corporations based in G7 nations (the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy), 39% operate without a single woman in upper management, while women make up only 22% of upper management among the firms in those nations in which they are represented. And that’s after decades of campaigning that shamed them into allowing a few women upstairs.
Tokens aside, this is a man’s world, which is painfully obvious to every woman in it.
So, who are these “men” who run the world as they see fit? Are they gun-licking conservative Christians who believe women ought to be jailed for aborting fetuses? Yes. Are they gun-licking Islamic fundamentalists who hope to destroy as many people as possible before ascending to a heaven in which the population is made up of a miraculous 72 (suddenly willing) virgin females per male? Yes. Are they gun-licking vodka-swillers who believe domestic violence ought to be legal and long for the days when they mattered in the geopolitical order? Yes. Are they gun-licking rocket enthusiasts who do whatever the fuck North Koreans do with their days? Yes. Are they gun-licking, pillow-fucking, fedora-wearing nascent school shooters who spend their days issuing death threats online because women aren’t DTF on demand? Yes. (Even these cretins have somehow emerged as a political force that can’t be ignored anymore.)
But they’re also your dad, husband, brother, cousin, friend, neighbor, and cat trainer. The problem is, even most of the men who aren’t completely insane and reside closer to Tom Brady than Peyton Manning on the asshole scale (hey, it’s NFL season) end up throwing their lot in with other men when pressed, because men trust other men to represent their interests more than they trust women to. That’s because very few men can imagine a world in which women — given the reigns of power — wouldn’t seek vicious revenge on men for what they do to women. That says more about their behavior than ours, but it’s their reality, whether subconscious or not.
How did men get this way? Let’s leave biology aside and assume this is a nurture rather than a nature-derived problem (if only for the purposes of avoiding openly pushing for a mass culling). The cult of masculinity spans cultures and geographical boundaries. The specifics may be culturally situated, but in most cultures in the world, that cult urges boys to voice their opinions, to take up space, to impose themselves on the world, and to refuse to take no for an answer, even if it requires violence. Popular media teaches boys that assuming such a role will result in an embarrassment of material wealth and the poontang that flocks thereto. Men’s emotional development ends when they fail to move beyond the cult’s confines, which means we’re all surrounded by entitled children who are angry and have access to weapons.
This isn’t a problem that’s limited to the US. Our culture industries have coated the globe in media (action movies, video games, porn) that — while the shitty jokes may not compute — manage to teach the message that one becomes a man by fucking and either shooting a bunch of people or convincing everyone that you might. The pockets of the globe in which this violent cult of masculinity does not hold sway are infinitesimal and shrinking.
Here in the US, where we hold the patent on this globalized vision of masculinity, we’re seeing it play itself out to its bloody, gruesome conclusion. A huge generation of boys raised on violent porn, SSRIs, and first-person shooters is coming of age and realizing that a resume comprised of Call of Duty stats and a sick collection of unopened, limited edition energy drinks doesn’t bring in the babes. And they’re fucking PISSED.
Not all men are this guy:
But not all of them aren’t. In fact, I’d surmise that thoughts like these lurk beneath the beards of most male feminists and more than 95 percent of the general male population worldwide.
It isn’t as if I haven’t written before about an adult brat killing a bunch of people because he didn’t get his way, but it’s only gotten worse and looks like it’s leading the species off a cliff. People like ol’ “nasolabial folds” (who I’m sure would bro down with Elliot Rodger were he still with us) above have elected Donald Trump to usher us through one of the tensest periods in modern history, and the result is as terrifying as everyone predicted.
While earnest dorks stop elderly men in Army Veteran hats to pat them on the dick for their “service,” then bop over to the gun shop to pick up a bump stock for their AR-15 before heading home to jack off to a swastika and anime “tiddies,” their God Emperor is leading the world toward a nuclear war and the next Stephen Paddock is planning how to exercise his Second Amendment “rights” on Jason Aldean fans (contrary to what most people think I believe, bad taste in music shouldn’t be punishable by death).
Several optimistic journalists have argued that Trump’s presidency and the epidemic of mass violence are the “death rattle” of white male supremacy. I’d be jazzed if they’re right, but I doubt that white men will go down (i.e., accept anything other than a position at the top of a hierarchy ordered by their whims) without taking the rest of us with them, which is what I’d bet all of Dennis Rodman’s Potcoin will turn out to have been Paddock’s* motive. This right here is what the cult of masculinity and the worship of male violence leads to: the end of the fucking world.
I suppose we could all move to Rwanda or Bolivia, but that seems logistically problematic.
*Even if you believe any of the many conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas shooting, my argument still holds. (Unless you’re treading into new territory in which feminists are carrying out mass shootings to make men look bad.)