12-7-89 Thursday. A Canadian man went berserk today, killing fourteen women at an engineering school in Montreal. According to news reports, he entered a building heavily armed with a rifle and handguns. He segregated the students by sex—men on one side of the room, women on the other—and shot the women to death. The men were spared. All the while, he called the women “feminists” and complained that feminists had ruined his life. That’s about all we know so far. To my amazement, the officials on the scene express puzzlement; they say that the man’s motives are obscure and describe his actions as “senseless”. They may be senseless, but they’re not obscure. In fact, they’re perfectly transparent to a radical feminist like me. Many contemporary men feel threatened and disoriented by the elevated status of women in society. At one time even the most unskilled, unmotivated of men believed that he was superior to any woman. He was a man, after all, and men were special. The Canadian murderer was apparently a loser in the competition for jobs, an education, and a mate. He blamed his numerous failures on “aggressive women”. That, I suspect, is why he shot engineering students. Engineering is traditionally a male field. Here were women intruding on a male domain—his domain—and the killer couldn’t stand it. His gunshots symbolized his power over them, a power that, as a male, he felt slipping away.
Incidentally, this event shows the power of ideology. When viewed through conventional liberal lenses, the killings are puzzling—inexplicable. Why would a young man with everything to live for suddenly throw it all away? (He killed himself after shooting the women.) And why would he shoot only women—innocent, compassionate, defenseless women? When viewed through radical-feminist lenses, his actions are perfectly intelligible. We live in a society in which power is unevenly distributed on the basis of sex. Men are powerful; women are not. Moreover, men expect women to submit to them. When they don’t, men take it as an affront to their masculinity and respond with violence. That is why we have such horrifying rates of rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and murder. Violence by men against women is part of our culture. When women move into positions of power and authority, as they have in recent years, men feel disoriented. This only increases the extent of their violence. Of all the ideologies that I’ve experienced or tried, radical feminism is the best. It makes the most sense of events in the social world. Almost anything that happens, from mass murder to opening a door for a woman to wearing lipstick, can be explained by radical feminism. Perhaps that’s what Marilyn Frye meant when she said, early in her book The Politics of Reality, that she was about to describe a worldview. I take this to mean that she was about to put radical-feminist lenses on the reader.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 