Operation braying donkey

In an earlier bleating I remarked about the idiocy and deceit at play when journalists, police and other incident-public mediums refer to the murders and abuses of solely one half of the gendered divide as happening to "people." No doubt women are people, but in the event that they are systematically targeted by males (also people I admit), we are done no favors by glossing over the implicit misogyny at play in these daily tragedies. So following the breaking story of the man who went into a Pittsburgh fitness center and shot several rounds at an aerobics class attended only by women, I was curious whether even when the gendered aspect of the viciousness was so blatant, would our unthinking, droning media employ their usual boilerplate terminologies? Would this be an incident where "people" were massacred, the massacring also done by a "person?" Or would news agencies find it in themselves to call it like it was: A man massacring females.

To the New York Times I clicked, and there on the front of its digital page I spied an article. In it one learns that "A man carrying guns and a gym bag walked into a busy fitness center... opened fire, killing at least three people and wounding nine others." Hmm, from this sentence one could infer that a busy gym might be filled with both examples of the gendered divide. "People" suggests a gender-neutral status, right? But further on our exacting journalists chisel their subject down even finer, carefully exhibiting yet another aspect of this deeply complex story: "Three women and one man were dead. The police believe he was the gunman. The rest of the victims were all women." It seems to me that if we subtract the man - who "police believe was the gunman" - from the list of "victims" the only victims remaining are women. Therefore, using my powerful command of semantic logic, I shall conclude that women were the sole victims of the violence of a single man. And I'm not even in Pittsburgh, couldn't find it on a map, and yet here in my underwear I can offer a detail reluctantly given by the news outlets breaking the story. A man targeted women, shot as many as he could, then killed himself; no need to use the insidious, distracting term "people" when the event cuts along such explicitly gendered lines.

In the coming days I suspect it will be uncovered that the gunman, George Sodini, was a deeply disturbed, unhappy man. I wonder if he blames women for his troubles? It appears he did. Scratch that, he DID blame women for his troubles, the use of "appear" is another insidious qualifier used ubiquitously to convey an impression of caution by the journalist. It is not difficult to know very well that old Georgie hated the ladies, in the first place he left a long and rambling webdiary where he regularly rants against "hoes and bitches" for failing to notice him, about the fact that he hadn't had sex since he was 29 years old. It's all here. He began his diary in November of last year with the words, "Why do this?? To young girls?" He says he had planned a massacre earlier in the year but chickened out. Here's this fact in contemporary newspeak: "The gunman appears to have made plans to carry out a shooting at sometime earlier in the year. It is unclear if he had specific targets in mind or what, if any, his motives may have been." It couldn't be as simple as yet another mentally unstable male reaching for weapons to slaughter women. No, probably not, it's more complex than that. Alas, another profound mystery.