Katha Pollitt’s Got Some Strange Ideas about Violence Against Women
On May 6th, of this year, a student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut was gunned down at her place of work. The killer apparently was a young man who had stalked her previously. Stephen Morgan has been described as a troubled loner who had few, if any, friends. What his victim, Johanna Justin-Jinich had done to excite his enmity, no one seems to know. Her friends describe Justin-Jinich in glowing terms as smart, outgoing and caring. Her senseless death is a terrible tragedy for her family and loved ones.
Unfortunately, certain feminists have seized on her death as an opportunity to misrepresent the facts about the dangers women face in the United States. One such feminist is Katha Pollitt at The Nation, who wrote in the June 1st issue of that magazine here, "But in one way, she (Justin-Jinich) was far from unusual. She was a woman killed by a man because she was a woman." (The Nation, 6/1/09)
Really?
Pollitt went on to describe Morgan in some detail, so you'd think she would have noticed what seemingly every article about him or his crime repeats - that, in addition to being deeply troubled in other ways, Morgan is a rabid anti-semite. He kept close at hand a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book faked by Russian secret police in the 19th century to assist them in persecuting jews; his journals were full of hatred for Jews; his parents knew of his anti-semitism. Of course Justin-Jinich was Jewish. And as far as we've been told so far, there's nothing to suggest Morgan is misogynistic. But none of those facts deflected Pollitt from her single-minded goal of claiming that Justin-Jinich was killed because she was a woman.
But even if Morgan had been the most ravening misogynist on the planet, how does Pollitt figure that his crime was "far from unusual?" Unless she's using some definition of the word 'unusual' that the OED hasn't discovered yet, Pollitt's statement is simple nonsense.
The facts, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, are that, in 2005, there were a total of about 18,000 homicides in the United States. Of those, 22.7% or about 4,100 were female victims killed by male perpetrators. If all of those were murders and all done because of the victim's sex, that's about 1 woman out of 37,000 in the country. That, to Pollitt, is "far from unusual."
If one out of 37,000 is not unusual to her, maybe she'd like to know that women killed men almost half as often (42%) as vice versa. So that rate must qualify, by Pollitt's logic, as at least fairly common. But of course, that's not common enough for her to mention.
Pollitt takes a single, horrible crime committed by a man with a lengthy history of psychological problems and tries to use it to promote the ever-greater incarceration and psychiatric "treatment" of men. From her article, you'd think her ideal world is Nurse Ratched's ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which all the men are either jailed or too stoned to care that they can't leave.
But when Pollitt calls one death in 37,000 "far from unusual," I think I know who's cuckoo.
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