Patriarchy and Surplus Violence
The following is an excerpt from the essay “Mass Shootings and the Dialectic of Patriarchy,” available in full at asatanistreadsthebible.com and as a podcast episode of the show A Satanist Reads the Bible, available on Spotify and other platforms.
Speaking at a press conference held by the National Rifle Association after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said, “The truth is, that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them” (Remarks, 2012). So the claim being made here is that some people are just like this and there’s nothing we can really do about it. And perhaps this is true, but this does not describe the profile of many mass shooters. The motives of the Buffalo supermarket shooter were entirely comprehensible. The voices that possessed him were those of Fox News. Shooters very often have aggressive personalities, and that’s not at all incomprehensible. I think all of us have, at one time or another, done something out of anger that we later regretted. That doesn’t excuse or even compare to shootings, but it does make them at least comprehensible to us. Many shooters were bullied or abused, and again, that doesn’t excuse anything, but we can at least understand people lashing out violently when the world has treated them badly. I want to be very clear about this: these aren’t excuses or exculpations of any sort. These actions are deranged and evil; LaPierre was entirely correct about that. What he was wrong about was that these people are incomprehensible monsters whose motives and behaviors are mysterious and inexplicable to us.
Here’s a question: if LaPierre’s monster theory is correct, why are almost all the shooters men? A Statista survey which looked at 128 shootings committed in the U.S. between 1982 and 2022 found that only three were committed by women (U.S. Mass Shootings by Shooters’ Gender, 2022). But psychopathy, while not being evenly split by gender, is fairly close (Ramsland, 2019), and in general, if the propensity for mass shooting is indeed random, wouldn’t we expect the numbers to be more evenly matched when broken down along gender lines? Even if we were to say that anyone can be one of LaPierre’s monsters but that only men are ultimately socialized so as to commit a shooting, or if we were to say that there are non-random factors which cause more men to be monsters than women, shouldn’t we looking at those causes as being causal in mass shootings?
So no, we shouldn’t accept LaPierre’s claim that shootings are randomly caused by inscrutable monsters. The data confirm with as near certainty as we can find in anything that there are non-random causes at work, causes to which men are almost uniquely susceptible. So we must ask: what social and biological phenomena affect men in particular, men of all races and ethnicities — shooters break down along those lines more or less proportionally (Mass Shootings by Shooter’s Race in the U.S. 2021, 2022) — but almost never other kinds of people? What is different about being a man, physically and within the context of society? There may be other contributing factors that are more universal, but there is at least one thing about men that only they experience that tips them over the edge.
I’m speculating a bit here, but here’s my thinking: of such forces, the strongest one is patriarchy. Patriarchy is one of the strongest social forces period, and being largely about sex and gender itself, it affects people of different sexes and genders in different ways. How does it affect men in particular? Well, in order for patriarchy to operate, men in general must feel entitled to dominance. If you had men in general saying things like, “Hey, you know, maybe it isn’t supposed to be just us in charge,” the whole thing would fall apart. So, one, men in general need to believe that things are supposed to be like this. Two, being that it is unjust that the people in charge are primarily men, there’s resistance to patriarchy, and men must maintain dominance in the face of this resistance. Which means, again, they have to believe that things are supposed to be like this, and they also must be willing to establish, maintain, and defend the status quo. Now, suppose this resistance were ever to become forceful, as it justly might in the face of such injustice. Then the status quo must be maintained by force, and by greater force than is presented by the resistance.
So, in order to maintain itself and the power, status, and wealth that it entails, the patriarchy is going to construct society so that men believe and feel this way. And it’s going to go about this in various ways: media, institutions like the police and the military, religion… it need not even be consciously driven by malicious actors, though I suspect that in some cases it may well be. The point is, if there weren’t forces working to that effect, we wouldn’t have the patriarchy in the first place. The problem is, though, all of this entitlement and aggression needs to be controlled. The patriarchy has to maintain not only its own abstract power structure in which men in general have headship but also the specific and concrete power structures of our real society in which certain men in particular have the most power. So there’s a balance that has to be maintained between inspiring violence and suppressing it. Tip too far in one direction, the patriarchy collapses. Too far in the other direction, and you get an environment in which it is likely that a few men, feeling entitled to power or wealth or women that they don’t have access to for whatever reason, will occasionally “go rogue,” in a manner of speaking, and just go off on their own and kill a bunch of people. And that’s exactly what we see. Furthermore, the incentive would be to push towards that side of the balance rather than risk the collapse of the patriarchal power structures of society.
To sum it up, I think that mass shootings are the latent and intrinsic violence of the patriarchy spilling over the boundaries in which the patriarchs work to contain it.
Works Cited
Mass shootings by shooter’s race in the U.S. 2021. (2022, May). Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-race/
Ramsland, K. (2019). Why Female Psychopaths Are a Different Breed | Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201906/why-female-psychopaths-are-different-breed
Remarks from the NRA press conference on Sandy Hook school shooting, delivered on Dec. 21, 2012 (Transcript). (2012). Washington Post. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/remarks-from-the-nra-press-conference-on-sandy-hook-school-shooting-delivered-on-dec-21-2012-transcript/2012/12/21/bd1841fe-4b88-11e2-a6a6-aabac85e8036_story.html
U.S. mass shootings by shooters’ gender. (2022). Statista. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/476445/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-gender/
