On the heels of vigils to remember the vicitims of the Collier Township shooting, the PG's Rob Rogers hit the nail on the head with his editorial cartoon this morning.
The cartoon doesn't appear on the PG's site yet, but check out the August 10, 2009 entry when it does. Link to Rob Rogers cartoons.
Nice work. Let's hope that the paper continues to cover issues involving violence against women. Pittsburgh may be a great place for working moms, especially relative to the kind of place it was decades ago, but there is this huge other side to that story.
4 comments:
While I have found Pittsburgh to be very child-friendly, saying it's a great place for working mothers is definitely arguable. The statistics do not necessarily reflect the experiences of those in the trenches. And it goes far beyond the gender wage disparity.
Is there even the most tenuous evidence that Sodini had propensity for violent video games or movies? Reading his blog doesn't seem to indicate this. Sodini was obviously a sick person, whose targeting of women as a class of people was offensive and, as a father of a young girl who was near the scene at the time of the shooting, personally terrifying. But pulling out the old "the media made him do it" chestnut does nothing for understanding.
The only answer to the question of "how could something like this happen" is clearly mental illness.
(That isn't to say the violent movies and video games and the objectification of women in media isn't reprehensible--but it's results are far more subtle and widespread, effecting far more women than what happen last week.)
I think that the point of the cartoon is not a "media made him do it" message. Rob Rogers isn't making an argument about cause-and-effect. (This comment reminds me of my earlier post on the shootings, which cautioned against shoehorning the tragedy into existing and largely exhausted media-supplied narratives.)
Instead, the point of the cartoon is exactly the point that Anon makes at the end -- that violence against women is part of a broad and sometimes subtle (and often not to subtle) pattern of mistreatment, disrespect, and abuse that permeates Western society. It is an error -- and potentially a tragic error -- to separate the Collier tragedy from that broader pattern. They are inextricably linked.
Sorry - I don't buy it. For years I've been hearing feminists tell me porn objectifies women, but I've never even seen porn with women in it ;)
Post a Comment