As far as Sodini and his mates are concerned, its not so much a societal problem as it is a few nuts being nuts.
No, you are entirely, exactly wrong. Your dismissal of people like him as an extremist fringe is part of the problem of sexism, and I find it more than personally offensive: It is
dangerously naive. People kill females every single day for similar reasons, in this country. Sexist murder is up there with
war--gang war, religious war, guerrilla war--as one of the highest causes of murder on Earth. What he did was uncommon--not even "rare," merely uncommon--
only because he killed several females at once, not because his resentment led him to murder.
And that's "only" murder; there is a whole world of lesser hurt done, on a daily basis, to millions of females in this country...by people just like him--by all those who people buy into the notion that the sexes are fundamentally different and that males are superior and therefore entitled to control females. FaustWolf has already pointed out that this murderer's actions have attracted considerable sympathhy. That's because a significant percentage of our society agrees with him--not necessarily with the act of murder (although most often the only thing stopping them is their own cowardice), but with his resentment against sexual equality and against female rights.
Such resentment leads to many things, including murder. Don't you dare pretend there is no connection, because obliviousness to the obvious is as odious as sexism itself. It is the supposedly "normal" people like you who, in providing sexism with even the tiniest escape route by saying that "extreme" forms of it are somehow different from the rest, even when the underlying motivations and mindsets are exactly identical, enable sexism to flourish popularly and enable the murderers and rapists of our world to be dismissed as alien when in truth they come
from us. You are talking out of your androcentric ass to call this an issue of fringe extremism. Sexism is the most deeply entrenched prejudice in the entire human civilization; it's
everywhere, at
every level of society, in
every culture,
all the time. In many other countries, people with mindsets like his are the ones who write the laws and keep the peace! Even in America until recently, people like him could speak openly without facing any significant backlash. Sexism is not defeated; it's not even on the ropes; not even in San Francisco and Seattle, your favorite punching bags of unfettered liberalism. All we have managed to do to this very day is to blunt the
obscenity of sexism's worst excesses out of our legal system, and even that narrow victory has been partial. And when I say "we," I exclude people like you who think feminism is some kind of blight.
The relationship between resentful attitudes and oppressive or vindictive behavior is so glaring, and the sociological evidence of it so overwhelming, that I would more easily be persuaded that triangles have four sides. What kind of idiot are you to make excuses so idly, without even realizing the nature of your idiocy? Do you give no thought at all to the consequences of actions and to the progressions of ideas? Do you think you exist in some special place of awareness, knowledge, and information that entitles you to talk about these things which you clearly know nothing about? Do you think your own opinion is so important that it outranks your irrefutable ignorance on this topic? Would it have been so hard for you to admit to yourself--not even to the rest of us but simply to your own mind--that you don't really know about this stuff, and that intuition cannot create truth?
I've noticed with some approval that, even if you still manage to be wrong most of the time, you're at least somewhat open-minded. Well, consider this:
Hold your tongue. Be quiet. The things you say have consequences that you don't realize, and to talk when you don't know what you're talking about is worse than embarrassing to you; it is dangerous to other people--not necessarily directly, but indirectly, in the spaces where sexism thrives: Your attitude will shape others; it is the interconnectedness of sexist attitudes which produces the occasional sexist murderer. When it comes to other people's lives and wellbeing, you're either a responsible human being who speaks only what he knows, or you're a disgrace and a a failure and an enemy of progress. It's that simple. Think before you speak, or don't say anything. And, by gawd, if you post "TLDR," I swear I'll kick your arse so hard you kiss the moons.
Let me leave you alone now and speak more generally...
The "fringe" is those people who are truly devoted to sexual equality; the vast majority of humanity is not interested in sexuality equality. They are interested only in picking the degree of sexism that is most comfortable to them, with their preferences typically resulting from their personal upbringing and sources of influence in society.
Did you know that air conditioners don't actually produce a net cooling effect? They produce more heat than cool, so the heat has to be vented outside the building. If you've ever walked past an air conditioner exhaust fan outside, you're familiar with the blast of hot air they put out. One of the reasons that I cannot condone ZaichiArky's fondness for "benign" sexism is that it's not benign. It's like running an air conditioner inside a room but not venting the heat outside: That little bit of cool air is quickly overpowered by the larger output of heat, and the room's overall temperature rises.
The only counterbalance to sexism is sexual equality. Absolute equality between the sexes. I cannot emphasize that enough. If you want to make a difference, you have to understand for yourself that all sexist thinking is interconnected, and that the vast base of "moderate" sexism is what sustains the extremist fringe: The two are not disconnected; the extremists are like mountain peaks on the landscape: Don't tell me they float in the sky simply because they're tall. You should
always strive to refrain from sexism yourself, and you should
usually oppose it or at least point it out in others. Why "usually" and not "always"? Because, for example, if I lived in Saudi Arabia I could be put to death for writing this. One must usually temper their activism so as not to get themselves or others needlessly killed or stripped of their sole livelihood. But that's it. Everything else is fair game. If you want to make a difference in this life--if you want to do your part to destroy sexism--there is no end of reward in doing so, but you'll have to accept that you'll be committing yourself to making other people uncomfortable.
