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Last week I wrote a post that went viral about Epstein and Pelicot and pornography and male violence against women and having to talk to my daughters about spiking etc, with the over-arching question: maybe it is all men? It must have been shared in some kind of men’s rights activist or incel forum, because the gates of hell opened and a torrent of abusive tweets poured out, all of them doing very little to enhance my worldview of the male of the species. I was called a hag, a dumb bi***, ugly, a whore, scum, transphobic, hysterical, a grifter, old, a c***, a bad mother, sent a picture of a guillotine, told to go f*** myself, told my children should be taken from me, etc etc etc.
You could hear the desperation in the endless barrage of tweets, which, alongside abusing me, my looks and my character, were all shouting the same message, like they’d learnt it from a playbook: women do bad things too! In fact maybe women are even WORSE!! They sent photo after photo of Ghislaine Maxwell, as if this were the ultimate gotcha, as well as multiple references to other female criminals: primarily Hindley, Letby, and female teachers who had abused their male pupils. But mostly Ghislaine. You could almost hear the snot coming down their noses as they excitedly copy pasted her image into my replies, mouth-breathing away in their mum’s basements in their crusty underpants.
The existence of Ghislaine and her role in the Epstein story excites them so much because in their view, she completely disproves my suggestion that abusive and violent crime is a male problem. She is the drop of poison that spoils the well. They desperately want evidence that women can do bad, evil things, because it gets them off the hook: ‘no need to look in the mirror, chaps! men and women can be equally nasty!”
I wasn’t going to do any of these chipolata owners the honour of any more attention, but then something happened yesterday that seemed to come from the same stable of relentless misogyny: a male mass murderer was described by the press as ‘a female in a dress’.
Most of us knew even as the story was breaking that this was going to turn out to be a man. Initial reports, including from the BBC, used the phrase, ‘a female in a dress’, to describe the killer.
As I observed the coverage of the story, and how the Canadian police’s and the international press, and even the Wikipedia page for the tragedy, were being so careful to describe the killer as ‘she’ and a ‘female’, the tweets I was sent about Ghislaine Maxwell proving me wrong about ‘all men’, came back into my mind.
The underlying desperation of both is surely to distance men from the problem of male violence.
And of course, this is not the first time this has happened. Last year in Minneapolis, another tragic school shooting occurred. Of the male killer, the BBC informed us:
”She was obsessed with killing children.”
And the killer in Canada was a six foot man. His identity does nothing to change this fact.
Male violence and male abuse of women belongs to men. Let’s keep calmly handing it back.
Source: Stop lying about the sex of mass murderers – by Milli Hill