Whispers

Back when I was in junior high school, there was a class assignment to create a news program, modeled after the local network news. The class was divided into small groups and each group determined what would be in their program. This being the early 1980s, editorials at the end of the program were still a thing, and so our program ended with one. I was manning the editorial desk, and I spent a few minutes pontificating on how insulting it was that adults worried about the effects that cartoon violence would have on us. While there were some cartoons that had more or less realistic portrayals of people in them, Bugs Bunny and The Flintstones were still regular fare at this time. And it really did seem to be dismissive of our faculties for reasoning to think that we couldn't be trusted to understand that real people wouldn't just get up an walk away from the sorts of things that happened to Tom and Jerry or Rocky and Bullwinkle.

But, in the nearly four decades between then and now, I've come to understand that there's a form of virtue signalling that operates by casting others as foolish or unintelligent and then proclaiming that the world needs to be altered to protect them from themselves. The graphic below being one such:

In fairness, it's true that one can say that "School shooting victim rejected shooter and embarrassed him in class" implies that if Shana Fisher had "played nice" and given Dimitrios Pagourtzis what he wanted, he wouldn't have shot her. But it's just as true that one can say that the same headline makes Pagourtzis out to be a complete, and blameworthy, loser - especially in the absence of any headlines that point to him having deliberately spared any of his female classmates who had responded to his advances.

Where I find this to be suspect is in the idea that changes in the wording of headlines is what buoys sexism in this country, rather than much more open apologism of violent acting out. "School shooter shot victim 'because she rejected him'," would be a much more direct statement. And a headline like that would typically be followed by someone (likely a relative or close friend of the shooter) directly making the point that the shooter had acted out of hurt or shame, in an attempt to make the shooter seem less evil, or to otherwise excuse their behavior.

And if we take "School shooting victim rejected shooter and embarrassed him in class" to have sexist implications, it's more likely that it's a symptom of a sexist society, rather than a driver, and the people who seek to victim blame subtly through their headlines are likely being much more open about it in other contexts - and that is where young people would learn it from. And it would be young people; the middle-aged, like myself, are far too set in our ways, and world-views, to have the needle moved by weak insinuations in online headlines.

It's also worth understanding that there can be something else at work here, too. And that is the common understanding that in the end, the world is fair. In other words, it doesn't take sexism to come to the conclusion that Shana Fisher had done something to contribute to her own demise. The idea that "bad things don't happen to good people" will do perfectly.

Sexism is like any other "ism." Once one is convinced that it's pervasive and seductive, it will appear to be everywhere and have a way of worming into anyone's mind. It is perhaps worth thinking of people as being smarter than that. If for no other reason than one's own comfort with the world, and the other people they share it with. There are enough people obviously spreading discord that there's no need to look under rocks for it.