Yeah--What Bob Said!

Trigger Warning For Violence
Here is Bob Herbert in Yesterday's New York Times:

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

[...]

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

Please, read the whole thing. In this piece, Herbert refers to the column he wrote after the Amish school shooting in 2006. So, read that one too.

So far, Herbert seems to be one of the only voices in the MSM who is not presenting Sodini's massacre as unfortunate but understandable. Here are some quotes from one of my local news outlets:

George Sodini couldn't find love.

He tanned, worked out at the gym, held a steady job and still went nearly two decades without the loving touch of a woman, according to his online blog begun in November. He wrote that he felt totally alone -- isolated -- and estimated that 30 million desirable women rejected him in the last 30 years.
Enraged, he hatched a heinous plan to make some of those pretty young women pay for his misery.

The price would be their lives.

That was in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review under the headline, "Failures in love bred LA Fitness Center Killer's Hate".

Or this, from an article by Luis Fabregas and Chris Togneri in the same publication:

Sodini's online diary depicts a man desperate to meet women, yet deeply frustrated by more than two decades of rejection.

Poor guy.

Most of the voices in the MSM appear to be making excuses for Sodini and explaining to us how his crime was just the "price" women have to pay for not providing Sodini with the sex he deserved.

The shocking thing to me is that Sodini's crime was understandable--just not for the reasons presented in the Tribune-Review. Sodini was simply taking our culture's hatred of femaleness and femininity to its logical extreme.

So thanks, Bob--let's keep making noise about this.