While We're on the Subject...
Lithwick, meanwhile, draws our eyes back to the States and the Columbine killers. It seems that they too had a strange relationship with their desires:
As was recently reported in Newsweek, Klebold, 17 at the time, lamented, "I don't know what I do wrong with people (mainly women) it's like they set out to hate & ignore me." Later he mourned, "Want TRUE love ... I hate everything, why can't I die..."
While this isn't as far-gone as demanding goat diapers, it's still on the same road. Alienation from women has led to fear of their power and self-hatred.
In fact, I think the demographic and social state of Columbine and the several Arab states is similar. In both cases, a powerful elite controls the resources, and in both cases that elite is notoriously not monogamous. Saudi princes have multiple wives, which has the result of skewing the male-female ratio for the rest of the population. So you've got more unmarried men than you would otherwise have, and a corrupt system that cries out for reform but cannot be changed. This is a recipe for disaster!
High schools such as Columbine are similar. There's an elite group of males - commonly but not necessarily jocks - who generally monopolize the most desireable women. While not strictly polygamous, it's serial monogamy limited to a small group of men. It should be no surprise that the same alienation results. I would love to see a study of high schools where Columbine-like violence has occured: what percentage of desireable women exclusively date the elite males of the school? How clique-ish is the school, besides? How does this compare with other schools without a history of violence?
posted by Joshua @ 7:21 PM
1 Comments:
My high school in Houston (Cyprus Creek) was huge, cliquish, and mean. This was the kind of school where people in different groups couldn't even really talk to each other during class, about the work at hand. When movies show high school cliques, they always show them to be clearly differentiated and understood. That wasn't the case at Cy Creek. There was so little contact with anyone outside of your own, that you really had no clue what the other cliques were, or who was in them. All you knew was your own group, and the mass of people you couldn't speak to.
By contrast, Bartlesville High School in Oklahoma was smaller by half, and everyone knew everyone. Not everybody liked each other, to be sure, but if you had a rival, you had to contend that the two of you would still have a few mutual friends. You could still track the "popularity" of students if you wanted to, but it didn't matter. It was only a measure of perceived desirability, carried up from the junior highs, and fairly irrelevent by that point. Not only could anyone speak with anyone, but anyone could date anyone else and it wouldn't seem odd. Needless to say, this was a better place than Houston.
At one point in High School, another student brought a gun to school with the purpose of shooting me personally. He didn't succeed, thanks to an angel of a special ed kid who ran into him as he was loading the weapon, but I bet you can guess (correctly) that it happened in Houston. This is anecdotal, obviously, but the bigger issue than the event is the reaction.
In Bartlesville, one kid stabbed another in the back with an ice-pick during detention. The victim sustained VERY minor injuries, and was back in a day or two. These kids were a couple years younger than we were, so we didn't know them, but it was all anyone talked about for the next few days. In Houston, people heard about the gun from their teachers, but no one cared.
I don't know what this adds to the discussion, but there it is. What I find interesting in the comparison between Islam and High School is how in Islam they go out of their way to prevent all kinds of temptation, and thus keep men from doing what they would otherwise do(as in that culture rape is generally considered to be the woman's fault), whereas in high school the outcasts are tempted non-stop by that which society won't allow them to obtain. But the result is the same. If you're not getting any, you're probably getting violent.
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