Supremacy Issues

I want to apologize for the quality of the site the link I am providing points to, but it as the only copy of this essay I could find online... I also do not believe the essay is entirely complete, but the beginning is complete and it is the part I want to focus on.

Ms. Steinem's article, "Supremacy Crimes"

In the article, Steinem asserts that those members of our society acting out in violent ways are our "sons." She equates the violence seen in male serial and mass killers with a sense of entitlement, a sense of superiority that she says is drilled into them from an early age. She even goes on, later in the article to say, "This is not about blame. This is about causation." All-in-all, it was quite an interesting read. My difficulty lies in the arrangement of information.

Not to be alarmist, but I wonder at the strategic placement of, well, blame, in the article. It is not until the eighth paragraph that any sense of explanation comes into play. The first seven paragraphs are a scathing indictment of males and violence. Is this agenda-driven? If so, what really is the agenda? I was upset by the article until I made it well into the late middle.

Also, and I know this is a painfully generalized assumption, but I wonder, as I think about the scenarios this article is read in... how many readers made it to the eighth paragraph? Imagine you are in the waiting room at the doctor, the dentist, or any other place, and you begin reading this article. You get called into the appointment around paragraph five and you go home thinking that men are horrible killers. Anyone who takes the time to read the entire article gets a better sense of the actual argument Steinem is making, but even then, it is presented in a manner very unfavorable to the subjects it claims not to blame.

As someone who has personally been attacked (and often) about my involvement with Dungeons and Dragons and the "fact" that it will make me commit suicide or become a devil-worshipper, I tend to worry at any argument such as this one. After all, the majority of mass and serial killers may be, statistically, white males. But consider the number of mass and serial killers as a percentage of the entire white male population and you wonder if statements such as, "Even if one believes in a biogenetic component of male aggression, the very existence of gentle men proves that socialization can override it," are truly worthy? After all, the vast majority of men would seem to fall into this latter category, since it is not every day that another angry white man just starts killing.

And even more interesting, Steinem asserts that we don't talk about the causes because the people affected by those causes are "the powerful." Is the assertion here that it is a trap we can't escape because the men in power will refuse to relinquish that power by talking about its negative effects?

It is a difficult piece, and I wrestled with it quite a bit. I still don't have answers for myself that I am happy with, but I certainly think that gender is at the heart of, what feels to me, to be a very strategic piece of writing.

--Michael