Summary Of The Article Mass Killings

Words: 1188
Pages: 5

The Article Mass Killings in the US: Masculinity, Masculinity, Masculinity by Soraya Chemaly October 5th, 2015. Chemaly (2015) showed great insight into why men may be committing such horrific acts of violence, with gender, sex, media, hegemonic masculinity and mental health as the key reasons as to why men continue to express their lack of control and turn to violent killing to assert their dominance. This article is about how men are committing mass murders such as school shootings, targeting mostly woman and children. The theme of this article is to explain and help people understand the men committing such violent acts and possibly gain a better understanding as to why such things happen. At no point did the author defend any of these …show more content…
Throughout the article, there are articles referred to which refer to men committing acts of violence, which are accessible to read, although they are not the focus of this article. The author attempts to give some insight as to why men are committing such horrific acts of violence by relating to other sources.
Chemaly (2015) gives some insight into the possible reasons as to why these men do what they do. This could be coded into what was referred to as the “Beta Rebellion” (Chemaly, 2015, para. 1), which was a term coined by the Philadelphia shooter in reference to the Oregon shooter. This construction of the “Beta Rebellion” can be linked to what Watson (2007) referred to as the ‘boy code’ (p. 733), as the ‘beta rebellion’ is going against everything socially constructed about
…show more content…
11). This data has been taken over the last 30 years (Chemaly 2015). Chemaly (2015), referred to the Huffington Post and an analysis, which indicated that, “64 percent of the victims of mass murders are women and children” (Chemaly, 2015, para.10). When looking at these statistics and with what Kivel et al, (2009) noted from Connell (2002, 1995) “hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practices that embody the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees the dominant position of men and subordination for women” (p. 110). It would conclude that hegemonic masculinity is a problem in today’s society, and that men need to have control of woman at any