Guns and nutters

Bill C-391, the ''private member's bill'' to scrap the gun registry, has been in the news these past few weeks.

That's because the head of the RCMP firearms program Marty Cheliak was inexplicably dumped, the nation's police chiefs had a convention where they unanimously endorsed the registry, emergency room doctors have spoken out and political types finally noticed that the pro-gun government has been suppressing yet another positive report on the registry.

Meanwhile, pressure's on NDP leader Jack Layton to whip his caucus members' votes or otherwise the bill may pass when Parliament resumes next month.

I have lots more to say on all of these matters but I'm holding my fire for a few more days as I am working on a major piece for the weekend paper.

That said, I did want to bring this story to your attention. It's about why Sault Ste. Marie's police chief Bob Davies supports the long gun registry. I added the boldface.

City police officers checked the registry 2,853 times in 2009.

Those inquiries included responding to a 911 call about a suicidal man. By checking the registry, police learned he owned eight weapons. They were removed to protect the man from harm.

When police executed a search warrant at an apartment, they found stolen property including two weapons. Because they were registered, the long guns were returned to their rightful owner who lost them during a break-in.

"Without the registry, we would have no way of knowing whether or not they were stolen," said Davies.

"Without the registry we'd have no proof, and no authority, to seize the firearms from that residence."

Most often, the registry is used when domestic assaults go to court. If an accused appears likely to reoffend, police will request the Crown attorney ask for weapons to be surrendered while the person is on bail.

"They won't volunteer that information," said Davies.

"Without the registry we wouldn't know if they had firearms." 

Now let's consider those last few lines, shall we?

It's true that domestic homicides have been declining for years, even before the gun registry came into effect in the mid-90s. That's mostly to do with how women have gained greater independence, gaining the resources to get out of a bad situation. Also, the legal system has recognized the problem and deals better with it. There are more shelters. There's greater awareness.

But the statistics tell another story about guns.

Femicides by long guns have declined while, by handgun, they are fairly flat. This signals that the registry has had a major effect. In fact, the murders have dropped drastically since 1996.

It's also true -- and this will surprise many Canadians -- that you're more likely to be murdered in the country than in the city. And, if you're a woman, the risk is even greater in rural areas.

More guns plus more isolation equals more bang bang.

Now, given that more people in the country have long guns -- and more of them too -- than people do in the city, the long-gun registry appears to be saving women's lives out in the hinterland.

According to the Ad Hoc Coalition for Women's Equality,

In 2008, in Ontario the RCMP’s Annual Report on the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee (DVDRC) stated there were 165 women and children were killed in domestic violence. The figure increases to 230 when you add male victims of domestic violence – the majority of which were suicides by the domestic violence perpetrator.

A woman is 12 times more likely to be murdered if a gun is in the house.

Not that the HarperCons seem to care about women's lives, unless they are female fetuses.

Just saying, you know?

Image: By Botero, of course.

Ooopsy Date: Almost forgot this bang-on op-ed by The Montreal Gazette's Peter Wheeland!

All the single ladies

Via Dammit Janet:

Crazy right wing lady conbot Phyllis Schlafly, self-styled as America's ''leader of the pro-family movement since 1972,'' exhausted from her travails against gays and lesbians, uppity women, healthcare advocates, liberals, anti-gun activists, etc. etc. etc., has now set her sights on that scourge of western society ... the single welfare mother!

Unmarried women, 70 percent of unmarried women, voted for Obama, and this is because when you kick your husband out, you've got to have big brother government to be your provider."

On Thursday, in an interview with Talking Points Memo, Schlafly repeated her link of single women, Obama and welfare, and added.

"Yes, I said that. It's true too. All welfare goes to unmarried moms.''

No, there are no single welfare dads. No welfare disabled. No welfare elderly. No welfare veterans. No welfare gun victims. No welfare anything except Single! Welfare! Mothers! and their bastard babies (but Heaven forbid that they have abortions, eh Phyllis?)

And you thought the Harris regime was over?

Smoking gun

Well, well. There is justice after all.

Looks like the blogger behind this hateful website, about which I posted the other day, is being charged with uttering death threats.

Jean-Claude Rochefort, 60, is accused of uttering threats against women from April to December 2009. He has already been charged with possessing an illegal firearm.

Rochefort created a website where authorities say he posted hateful, aggressive and menacing comments about women. Rochefort also referred to Marc Lepine, the gunman who killed 14 women at Montreal's École Polytechnique in 1989, as "Saint Marc."

One image shows the Montreal university with the caption "Where it all started."

Another caption says "where it could happen again, with the right people and the right equipment."

Rocherfort has said his website is "humorous," and that feminists made a hero out of the Polytechnique shooter by constantly talking about the tragedy.

Oh yeah. Humour. Just a joke. Haha.

Meanwhile, we feminazis can't win for losing. According to this busted men's rights maroon, we made a hero out of the murderer of 14 women while according to her, her and him, we are perpetrators of some sort of ''misandric'' ''death cult'' if we dare mention that there are some bonafide women-haters out there and maybe they should have to register their guns?

No no. We should just shut up our big fat feminist mouths now and go away.

But, no, there's no woman-hating out there, is there?

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: The mods have closed comments because, as they just reminded me, we don't allow comments on stories where there are or may be charges.

Memento Mori

Some links, comments and thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre...

The guys who don't get it: The Blogging Tories, brought to you by the ever-watchful Canadian Cynic who notes that none of the drooling Con fans care a whit about violence against women. Only one (at the time of my posting) has even noted the massacre, but just to knock down any links to the long-gun registry.

Guys aside from Cynic who get it include POGGE, Matt and Dr. Dawg. 

Dawg raises a number of points worth further exploration.

First, how, in post 9/11 Canada, so much is being made of the Dec. 6 shooter's paternity.

There's a gaggle of xenophobic yokels who call him Gamil Gharbi these days, as though to score some kind of point. The Montreal Massacre as a narrative about Islam? Perhaps for those whose politics are little more than a slobber of prejudice.

Even in the Globe and Mail.

It's almost as if these people, who are harping on the fact that his birth name was Arab/Muslim, are suggesting that his targeting of women students was ''honour killing'' on a massive scale. I won't stoop to providing links to some of the more hateful examples.

Second, and also from Dawg, there continues to be denial that the massacre had anything to do with woman-hatred.

(T)here will be those who argue that the women's movement, too, has long hitched its political wagon to this rotten star. Some certainly made claims of that kind at the time. They insisted that it was "opportunistic" for a movement dedicated to advocating for the rights of women to speak out about the Montreal femicide. I continue to find this very odd. What on earth was the women's movement supposed to do about this horrific condensation of social misogyny? Be silent?

If a man had entered that polytechnic twenty years ago and ordered all the Gentiles to leave, and proceeded to murder fourteen Jews, would anyone seriously criticize the Canadian Jewish Congress for speaking out about anti-Semitism?

Strangely, while some continue to live in denial, others -- as I pointed out in yesterday's post  -- think the killer was a hero. Just read the first comment here, which I found via JJ. (I swiped the rose image from her as well.)

Marc Lepine was a MARTYR in the war against feminism.  

As Dawg reminds us, members of Canada's Airborne once held a mess dinner to honour the killer. As this moving short film by Ling Chiu recalls, in the aftermath, at least two men treated the massacre like a joke, publicly pranking people into thinking another one was underway. Then, there's this. And this. And this.

Why am I posting links to these woman-haters again? Because some readers of this blog think I exaggerate when I say there is real and frightening misogyny in this world. Just read the hatefest compiled by Ruth.

Note that many of the haters just LOVE their guns.

On a different note, you might want to catch up with Pale, Brebis and, especially, Hysperia's thoughts on this how far women have come, or haven't come, in Steven Harper's Canada.

I, for one, want to make it hurt.  I want to keep sorting out the links between these rightwing policies and liberal betrayals and putting them out there.  I want to defeat the HarpyCons but I also want to make it dead clear that, as a woman, I can’t find a blessed party that truly represents me and my sisters and others for whom I care.  I reject a “headlong retreat into fantasy”.  I’ll not sit around waiting for this culture to die.  That might all sound a little melodramatic but there it is and it suits me just fine.

On this day, December 6th, 2009, when I want to reflect and grieve the women’s lives lost in Montreal in 1989 and all the women of this country who died before or since as a result of intimate partner violence and public violence against women – all those whose names we don’t know – I’ve actually had to time defending my right to define, with my sisters, the meaning of the event and the meaning of those lives and deaths.  When women are murdered because they are women, we still have to fight to say so.  We are so far away, still, twenty years later, from doing those things that must be done to begin the end of male violence against women that we still struggle for the definition itself.

I wish no person physical harm.  But I do want to make that hurt by defeating this government and any other government that thinks it can lead a country while ignoring the needs of half its population.

Indeed.

 

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Sharon Fraser has some interesting memories.

At around the same time, a young friend of mine was walking into Tim Horton’s to buy some doughnuts. There were two men in front of her carrying a newspaper with a screaming headline about the murdered women and one of the men said something along the lines of, “way to go, buddy.”

FED-UP WOMAN DATE: Sister Sage brings it on home.

The F-Word

I've just read the front page piece by my Star colleague Catherine Porter, the one commemorating the Ecole Polytechnique massacre of Dec. 6, 1989.

She interviews Nathalie Provost, who was shot four times and survived, when a gunman burst into that engineering school 20 years ago. (I won't name him because I prefer to remember his victims.) Here's a snip:

"We are not feminists."

A young, incredulous Nathalie Provost said those words to Marc Lépine 20 years ago Sunday. It was a bid to save her and her fellow students' lives – the women Lépine had isolated in a university classroom before opening fire on them with a semi-automatic hunting rifle.

Provost was one of the lucky four who survived. "At the time, I thought to be a feminist meant you had to be militant," says Provost, who today is overworked and feeling skittish as the anniversary approaches. She was the young woman who, from her hospital bed a couple days later, urged Canadian girls to not be frightened by the event and to pursue engineering careers. She was also my introduction to feminism in life, not just theory. And to the concept that the personal is political.

"I realized many years later that in my life and actions, of course I was a feminist. I was a woman studying engineering and I held my head up."

If you go through the comments section, which seems to have been invaded by the gun nuts and some of the angrier men's rights activists, you'll see:

1. That there's a lot of denial that the long-gun registry, which Parliament is set on eliminating, has anything to do with preventing violence against women.

This is unmitigated crap, as I have said over and over again. And Statistics Canada proves it. Check it.

Can it be a coincidence that, since the registry was established, the number of femicides by rifles -- which the preferred method of shooting one's spouse to death -- has declined drastically? Fact is, having a gun in the home will make somebody more likely to use it.

True, the numbers were already on a downward trend but, research shows, much of that can probably be explained by the fact that, thanks to the feminist movement, women were becoming more economically independent and a network of shelters and other services was being built. Women who have the means to get out will more likely get out -- although, sadly, that's when they are at the most vulnerable to being stalked and killed.

Just read men's rights activist regular Keith in the comments in my previous post on this subject where he attempts to justify these murders by writing:

''How many women who are the ultimate victim of violence, were killed by a gun due to social policies which enslave men to pay the female victim money, in the form of so called child support, to make the women independant while making the man destitude?''

Charming. The system sucks so you shoot the mother of your children. Poor victimized men's rights activist.

But I digress.

Eliminating the gun registry is not only a slap in the face to the Dec. 6 victims and their families, it's also another insult to women by the Conservatives. But they don't get it, as The Star's Susan Delacourt reports today:

The potential demise of Canada's long-gun registry cast a shadow Friday over any attempts by federal politicians to mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre of 14 women at Montreal's l'École Polytechnique.

In the Commons, Bloc Québécois MP Thierry St-Cyr (Jeanne-Le Ber) said the survivors of the tragedy have been let down by the "hypocrisy" of a government that helped usher in recent private member's legislation to wind down the gun registry.

Quoting Heidi Rathjen, one of those survivors, St-Cyr said: "It is a slap in the face of the victims of Polytechnique, as well as of all other victims of firearms."

But Conservative MP Sylvie Boucher, parliamentary secretary for the status of women, said the Bloc should be ashamed to be playing political games on the backs of women's deaths. Conservatives are proud of all the law-and-order measures they've introduced to combat violence against women and punish those responsible, noted Boucher.

Oh please. Many men who shoot their wives have no criminal records. You can't preemptively lock them up. But the gun registry allowed the police to take away the rifles of men who did have priors.

Get it?

However, one thing they often do have is personality disorders, such as depression. Well, let me tell you, if a guy does go around acting suicidal and has guns, he won't get to keep those guns if the police hear about it.

Get that?

The gun nuts say that the gun registry was too costly -- although the money has mostly been spent. Throwing out the billions spent is like saying ''Oh, the house cost two billion to build, which is too much, so let's blow it up.''

Operating the gun registry now only accounts for some $8 million a year, chump change for the government, especially considering the cost of domestic violence. How much does it cost to try and incarcerate a killer? How much does it cost to place the children under the care of social services?

What's the worth of a woman?

If the gun registry costs $8 million a year, which is the most oft-cited figure, and 16 women are killed by rifles per year, that's $500,000 per woman. Speaking for myself, I think that a woman's life is worth at least that much.

Do you Keith?

2. That, despite all the evidence, there are still people out there who claim that the Dec. 6 shooter was just a lone madman -- who had a violent father, by the way -- and that the massacre had nothing to do with feminism.

Give me a break.

Not only did he deliberately separate men from women, he also wrote this before he packed up his arsenal and shot up the school. Some excerpts:

Would you note that if I commit suicide today 89-12-06 it is not for economic reasons (for I have waited until I exhausted all my financial means, even refusing jobs) but for political reasons. Because I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker.

<CLIP>

Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.

Gee. Sounds familiar. Too familiar.

Happy St. Marc's Day

December 6 is celebrated around the world in English speaking countries as

International Marc Lepine Day

It seem that almost every week some distraught suicidal young man takes a rifle or pistol and shoots people at a school, a shopping mall, or a city. These are called horrible events by our media, and invariably used as reasons to hate men by the feminists, their blue gun thug Gestapo, and their talking head lackeys. The young men are almost always emotionally distraught, driven to desperation by a feminazi society that has tried to trample him into dust.

Every year, every month, every day, every hour, men are driven to suicide by the evil feminazi hate machine...

And:

Marc Lepine tells women and feminists YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MONTERS ANYMORE. He tells these thousands of women and feminists who have stolen their partner's house, their car, their money, he tells those who have stolen their ex-husband's children, their jobs and drove them to suicide: STOP TO BE MONSTERS, stop to secretly dream of killing men and planning gendercide, and we will perhaps begin again to love you some day. This is a powerful message, A MESSAGE OF LOVE, worthy of a new Christ.

I guess the Dec. 6 shooter was not such a loner, hunh?

Yes, dear reader, there are men out there who consider the killer to be a hero.

I wonder if those guys have guns.

One more thing: Here's some mealy-mouthed memorializing on the part of Helena Guergis, the Minister of State for the Status of Women, in today's National Post. It's almost all about what those foreigners do. Nothing about what good old boy Canadians with their guns do.

Just saying.

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Judy Rebick adds this:

I am writing this from Montreal where I am attending a colloquium to examine the massacre twenty years later. Journalist Francine Pelletier,  who was one of the women on the hit list found in his suicide note,  told the hundreds of women attending that she now believes this was a political act, an anti-feminist act, different than the every day incidents of violence against women.  “If he had wanted to target women, he would have gone to a nursing school,’ she said. “He was targeting women who had the audacity to want to do a man’s job.” Dominique Payette of Laval University agreed calling it a classical act of terrorism designed to strike fear in the hearts of women not so different than the Taliban throwing acid in the faces of little girls who want to go school.

 

I think it was both an act of terrorism and an extreme form of the violence women face every day.  As one participant said in the discussion, male violence in intimate relationships increases when the woman tries to become more independent.  It is used to keep women in their place through fear.

 Please read the whole thing.

FED UP WOMAN DATE: Sooey makes the point over in Cynic's comments that the killer's suicide note says almost nothing ''men's rights'' activists and even well-known pundits make on a routine basis.

An extract from his suicide note:

"Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts. For why persevere to exist if it is only to please the government. Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men."

Sounds like any number of Feminist-hating pundits these days to me.

Er, except for that Grim Reaper bit, of course. That's pretty out there.

No country for old-world men

Two weeks ago, Maria Shriver, in conjunction with the Center for American Progress, put out The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything.

According to the CAP release, it is

a groundbreaking examination of how "women's changing roles are affecting our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to our faith communities." For the first time in American history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. Considering that in 1967, women made up only one-third of all workers, this is a dramatic transformation that fundamentally changes how all Americans work and live, "not just women but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities." Unfortunately, America as a nation has not yet come to terms with what this means. "This report tries to chapter those things out and say all of these institutions have failed to adapt to this change that has happened, and that in order for them to survive and become smart about the American worker they must adapt and must change," Shriver said on NBC's Meet The Press yesterday. "Our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past," writes CAP President and CEO John Podesta in his preface to the report. "This report contemplates what a new America should look like after we finally embrace this important new dynamic in our lives and the changes it has caused in our homes and businesses."

Now, while the report deals with mostly US issues -- they have neither the healthcare nor paid maternity leaves we Canadian pinkos do -- there is some relevance to us here. For example, just like in the States, male-dominated jobs have been more affected by the recession than female-oriented jobs. 

That doesn't mean that women have escaped unscathed by the downturn. It's just that they didn't have as far to fall as do men. Except if they are in top executive jobs. There, women are crash landing

But, over all, women still suffer from ''shockingly high rates of poverty.''

Men still have many advantages and way better paycheques.

Men never get discriminated against for being fathers the way women do for being mothers, or having the potential to be mothers. While women may be graduating from law schools in equal or greater numbers than men, men have the major share of legal firm partnerships, for example. Although you'd never know that from the media.

Consider these words by The Nation's Katha Pollitt:

The gains of the last forty years--in political representation, reproductive rights, education, combating violence against women--would never have happened without the steady and massive increase in the number of working women and the transformative effects of all those paychecks. Some might be tempted to spin the magic 50 percent to suggest that feminism's job is done. First it was dead because it was a failure; now it's dead because it was such a success.

Maybe too much of a success. As Reihan Salam worries in his article "The Death of Macho," "The problem of macho run amok and excessively compensated is now giving way to macho unemployed and undirected--a different but possibly just as destructive phenomenon." If 78 percent of those who have lost their jobs in this recession are men, that must mean women's gains are coming at men's expense, right? Actually, no. Women may have a bigger slice of a shrunken pie, but because the labor force is still quite gender-segregated, mostly they are not competing with men for work. The top ten jobs for women are, in order, secretary, nurse, elementary- and middle-school teacher, cashier, retail salesperson, health aide, retail supervisor, waitress, bookkeeper and receptionist. Men have lost more jobs than women in the recession because the ax has fallen more sharply in heavily male fields like construction and manufacturing than in female ones like healthcare and clerical work. As economist Barbara Bergmann wrote in an unpublished letter to the New York Times, "An important reason for the failure to reduce the gap between women's and men's average wages is that little progress has been made in reducing gender segregation in jobs that do not require a college degree." Interestingly, according to the Wall Street Journal, on the professional end of the workforce, where men and women are more likely to have the same or similar jobs, as many women as men have been laid off.

The good news in all this, as Gloria Steinem points out, is that this economy-driven revolution in the workplace could result in a revolution at home.

Personally, I'm rooting for The Shriver Report to be right in its underlying assumption that government and business will have to adjust policies to meet women's needs as parents and workers in order to keep the economy going, and also that more men will get accustomed to women as indispensable co-workers and co-breadwinners, and thus increase their share of housework and childcare. Men will still have more to say about the success of this report than women do, so I recommend the essay, "Has a Man's World Become a Woman's Nation?" by sociologist Michael Kimmel. He offers a long list of benefits to men, women and children when fathers are egalitarian. It stretches from better sex for the parents to children who get along better with their peers and have more friends because they learn cooperation by doing housework with their fathers. This alone could be worth the price of admission.

For the record, that last bit is what feminism is all about: egalitarianism of the sexes.

Endangered specious

This is either good news or bad news, depending on how much you like to eat.

Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving.

Medical advances mean that many people who once would have died young now live to a ripe old age. This has led to a belief that natural selection no longer affects humans and, therefore, that we have stopped evolving.

"That's just plain false," says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. He says although differences in survival may no longer select "fitter" humans and their genes, differences in reproduction still can. The question is whether women who have more children have distinguishing traits which they pass on to their offspring.

To find out, Stearns and his colleagues turned to data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the medical histories of more than 14,000 residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948 – spanning three generations in some families.

<SNIP>

Shorter, heavier women tended to have more children, on average, than taller, lighter ones. Women with lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels likewise reared more children, and – not surprisingly – so did women who had their first child at a younger age or who entered menopause later. Strikingly, these traits were passed on to their daughters, who in turn also had more children.

If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. 

Well, that's assuming the human race lasts that long.

But, leaving that aside, as Echidne of the Snakes points out, the photo (above) that accompanies this New Scientist article is somewhat disturbing.

A bit biased, eh? Note the suit and the briefcase.

Not to mention aggressive stance, the power suit, the whole successful working woman attitude.

Frankly, the photo I would have preferred to see with the story would look more like this.

Lay Lady Lay

Talk about a backlash. Here's an oldie but goody found on Facebook tonight, via the MediaWatch fan page.

Ah Women. If they're not on their knees, they're on their backs.

Why does the corporate world want us so off-balance?

Why, the easier to sell us stuff we think we need, my dear!

Outrageous

Today's treeware column was a riff on last week's massacre at a health club in the US.

Here it is, with links and annotations:

"There's not enough outrage," lamented one women's rights activist at a candlelight vigil for the three women cut down last Tuesday night in a Pittsburgh-area aerobics class.

As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted, only 75 people showed up to mourn Heidi Overmier, 46, Elizabeth Gannon, 49, and Jody Billingsley, 38, massacred by a man, who didn't know them, simply because they were women.

That's unusual as the vast majority of femicide victims are killed by their intimate partners or male relatives.

But, as Toronto author Brian Vallee points out in his 2007 book The War on Women, nobody counts the dead, nobody connects the dots, nobody calls out the problem.

"Compare the raw numbers," he writes of the period 2000-06. "In the same seven-year period when 4,588 U.S. soldiers and police officers were killed by hostiles or by accident, more than 8,000 women – nearly twice as many – were shot, stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death by the intimate males in their lives. In Canada, compared to the 101 Canadian soldiers and police officers killed, more than 500 women – nearly five times as many – met the same fate."

There's not enough outrage.

As we all know now, George Sodini, 48 – whose racist and misogynist online diary reads like a terrorist manifesto – couldn't get a date, couldn't get sex, couldn't lure any women to his modest side-split furnished with, as he points out in a spooky video, "Couch and chair; they match. The women will really be impressed."

Well, they weren't.

And so Sodini's "exit plan" was to go down in history in a blaze of gunfire, taking as many women with him as he could.

Just like Marc Lépine, who hated "the feminists" so much he slaughtered 14 women at Montreal's École Polytechnique in 1989, just like Charles Carl Roberts who executed Amish school girls three years ago, and, arguably, even like Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, a reported stalker of female students who took up-the-skirt photos, yet another violent act of misogyny takes place.

No, no, we say. They were just loners, losers, crazies with guns.

There's not enough outrage.

That only feminist bloggers and a very few mainstream pundits called last week's fitness club massacre the hate crime it was should jolt us out of our sexist complacency.

"We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation's entertainment," The New York Times's Bob Herbert noted on Friday.

"The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multi-billion-dollar industry – much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations."

When I blogged about the massacre last week, my "men's rights activist" regulars – whose comments did not get past the goderators – expressed little or no sympathy.

 Instead, they complained that "feminists" demand special treatment for female victims of crime.

(Here's one comment that did get through.)

 Two blog readers even pointed to the recent Wisconsin episode of the philandering husband – who has since been charged with child and sexual abuse – whose penis was glued to his abdomen by a trio of vengeful women as somehow having equivalence to the Pittsburgh massacre.

Cruise the men's rights forums and you'll be shocked by the sickening posts calling for the legal and sexual subservience of women and praising Sodini as a "hero" and "for being a symbol for the consequences of denying men sex ... But something like this has to happen, perhaps hundreds of times over again, before feminists get the message."

There's not enough outrage.

A couple of things to add to the column.

First, I really don't think that there's much space between a George Sodini and a Scott Roeder, the guy charged with assassinating Dr. George Tiller, not to mention Roeder's fans and supporters. All are white. All have racist streaks. All are misogynistic. All want to control women. All have guns.

They are bloody scary and they seem to be, in the current climate, unstoppable.

Second, as Red Jenny notes:

(C)an you imagine if the gunman was Arab, Muslim or black. The news would be filled with analyses of black violence or Muslim misogyny or whatever. Just look at how some people try to make Mark Lepine into a secret Muslim, so that the violent impulses can be blamed on his Algerian-ness instead of his male-ness. Why is it when a white man commits a similar act, neither whiteness nor maleness are examined?

Can you shriek ''honour killings?''

Indeed, one Montreal radio talk host wrote to me this morning asking ''How come you made no mention of the women killed in the so-called 'honor killings' in Kingston?''

My reply: ''How come when white men kill women it gets no coverage but when brown men do we're all over it?''

There's not enough outrage.

Michelle, no dumbelle

Although I have tackled the topic of Michelle Obama many times, it was worth revisiting several months into her First Ladydom when she's had a chance to establish herself in the role.

And establish herself she has.

So here's today's treeware effort, in toto, with some linky freshness.

Sorry but did I miss the scene in which U.S. President Barack Obama and his political advisers held a gun to Michelle Obama's head and told her she had no choice but to play, in her words, "Mom-in-chief"?

Is she being kept down and away from the West Wing where the big boys and girls play?

Not if you keep up with her schedule.

The woman is always on the go, promoting her husband's policies, making speeches to the United Nations, government departments, community groups, universities, schools and arts organizations, even pitching healthy habits in a Sesame Street public service announcement.

No wonder she bares her arms. Saves her the time it would take her to roll up her sleeves.

In fact, Ms Obama is more out there than any Mrs. President – including Hillary Clinton – has ever been. And she's done it with intelligence, grace and style, breaking all the fashion rules that dictate a First Lady should dress in the pastel suits a former Miss Texas turned Dallas real estate agent would wear.

Sure, as she told a little girl during a charter school visit in February, "the job doesn't pay much."

But that doesn't mean it's worth nothing.

It would be interesting to cost out what all her official duties would make on the open job market, not to mention what her usual – forgive me, I can think of no better term – "wifely" role would earn.

Just last week, Salary.com reported that the time mothers spend performing the 10 most popular "mom job functions" would, to put a value on undervalued "women's work," score an annual paycheque of $122,732 (U.S.) for a stay-at-home mom or $76,184 for a working mom.

Imagine what Michelle Obama's work would be worth.

No, she doesn't have to load the White House dishwasher, nor does she pick up the dry cleaning.

But being on top of the most important residence on Earth, plus being confidante and companion to a man who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, seems like a pretty huge job to me.

To hear Michelle O's critics tell it, the Princeton-Harvard grad, blue-chip firm lawyer, former hospital administrator with a six-figure salary 10 times higher than most women make, plus family breadwinner during her husband's college debt-ridden community organizing days, has betrayed her feminist principles by not resuming her spectacular career track.

What's funny is that most of the criticism seems to come from the very same conservatives who would be the first to smack her down for not knowing "her place" as a wife. These are the same people who also claim that feminism is a forced march to the abortionist's and onto the job market.

You'll forgive me for questioning their motives.

Well, here's a news flash: Feminism is about choice, not just for women but also men.

And, with the tanking economy sinking men's traditional jobs, we'll see that long feminist struggle for choice bear fruit when more couples have to reverse roles.

Anyway, it isn't as if African American women don't already have a long history of working outside the home for pitiful or no pay, from plantation cotton-picking to domestic work. Eventually, they would become teachers and nurses – and now have succeeded in all fields.

It's laughable that some critics also claim Obama must work in order to be a role model to "welfare baby mamas" when the truth is, African American women have long carried double loads, well before feminism "liberated" middle- and upper-class white women from their domestic confines.

Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't.

Sexism and racism are alive and well, on The New York Times' op-ed page no less, where, as Salon.com noted yesterday, pundits Maureen Dowd and David Brooks are "playing into a stereotype of black women as bossy and emasculating."

Can you say "Uppity Black Woman," the ultimate putdown for somebody like Michelle Obama?

You see the dilemma here?

She is breaking new ground, not only as an African American First Lady but also as a woman who is probably more qualified to be president than her husband.

That doesn't mean she has to want the Oval Office.

But don't think for a second she isn't the power behind that big swivel chair.

The email reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, although some of the pro-forced pregnancy types wrote to say that, while feminism may have given women choices, it robbed fetuses of theirs.

One email -- from a self-described feminist -- did surprise me. Here's a snip from it:

I believe that women who choose to support their spouse rather than pursuing their own independent projects likewise sacrifice an important aspect of their autonomous agency. I do not necessarily think that Michelle Obama has done this - she is still very active in society. However, some women do make a mistake when they abandon their own projects to raise their family, and they often later come to regret it.

In general, please remember that feminism is not SIMPLY the doctrine that women should be able to choose certain options willy nilly. Some options are consistent with feminism, and others are misogynistic - even if they are made by women. The option that women choose matters.

Hmm. I would think that choosing to raise children constitutes tending to one's ''projects'' and is perfectly consistent with feminist principles. That many women may come to regret it, especially if they end up alone and short of cash, is another matter. (By the way, the US Supreme Court just screwed older women who took maternity leave. Read this.)

The idea that raising children is a ''misogynistic'' option boggles my mind, especially when feminism promotes the idea that men should and can be part of the process.

In any case, I hardly think that feminists would trade old what-women-should-do think for new what-women-should-do think when it comes to how they live their lives.

What do you think?