We Have to Talk About This. Now.

[Content Note: Guns; terrorism; toxic masculinity; rape culture; threats of violence and self-harm.]

Marc Lépine. Seung-Hui Cho. George Sodini. Anders Behring Breivik. Jaylen Fryburg. This guy. All these guys. Mark Dorch. Elliot Rodger. Ben Moynihan. Dean Sutcliffe. Christopher Harper-Mercer.

This kid:
An Idaho school was placed on lockdown after a student threatened to "kill all the girls" because none of them would send him nude photos.
When I talk about the culture of violent entitlement, that is exactly the kind of shit I mean. This 15-year-old kid felt entitled to nude pictures of his female classmates, and, when none of them would comply, he decided to threaten to kill them. And his threats were explicit: He posted on both Facebook and Twitter that he "intended to bring a gun to school and kill all the girl students, and shared detailed plans for how he would enter the school and eventually kill himself in the weight room."

And it wasn't just any girls:
"Some kid who was having attention problems with specifically the cheerleaders, didn't get nudes," said student Isaac Gomez. "He was asking for some inappropriate things."
"Specifically the cheerleaders." I wrote in comments only two days ago:
A whole other aspect of this that no one talks about openly is: It's not just that the Beta Boys want girlfriends—they want kyriarchy-approved girlfriends who conform as closely as possible to the Beauty Standard.

Like, if I offered to be the girlfriend of one of these human nightmares (never in a million years), they'd tell me I was a disgusting fat pig and GTFO.

It's not that they want a girlfriend. They want a female trophy to prove they're valuable men who are winning the Man Race.

So all the implicit and overt suggestions that misogynist mass shooters could have been "tamed" and their violence prevented if only they'd had a girlfriend utterly misses the point. They don't want to be "tamed." They want a female-bodied possession to make themselves feel superior to other men, and to assure themselves that they have value as men.
This kid didn't just want nude pictures of any old female classmate; he wanted nude pictures of a cheerleader. There is a reason for that. He feels entitled to the most highly-valued female bodies, in order to demonstrate his masculinity. The only other option? Mass murder.

The revenge plot was reported by a friend/classmate with whom the rageful plotter was texting:
"This," the friend texted, "Over freaking nudes? Dude."

"Because no one will give any to me," the teen complained. "Every one hates me. And I hate (one particular girl). And I will kill myself after."

The boy's friend appears to take the threat seriously, particularly after he says he hopes classmates have wills in place.

"We're kids," the friend says. "Nothing valuable. Except our lives so leave us alone."
Anyone with an internet connection can access nude pictures these days. But just being able to gaze at naked female bodies wasn't enough. He needed a desired girl within his social sphere to give pictures to him, to personally provide them, so that his feelings of ownership over her would be satisfied. And he felt so entitled to this outrageous expectation that his response to not getting what he feels he deserves from the female people from whom he wants it is to kill them all.

Is now when we can start having a serious conversation about toxic masculinity and the culture of violent entitlement? How many more girls and women need to die before we treat with the gravity it deserves the epidemic of men with guns and a grievance against women rooted in ancient patriarchal narratives about men's entitlement to women's bodies?

*crickets*

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