… Misogynist, they warn’t
(c) 2019, Davd
The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Pancho and Cisco, Matt Dillon [the hero of Gunsmoke] and his limping sidekick Chester, … the theme1 is at least two generations older than two 19-year-old killers from Vancouver Island: Two men wander the Wild West with guns, having dramatic adventures. In the 1950s [and iirc, late 1940s] the pairs of men were fictional heroes doing good deeds (and selling boxes of breakfast cereal.) This week the pair in the news are real villains.
This is a blog, not an essay, not analysis, and the first thing I noticed as I read through my file of news notes, is that both sexes are named among the reporters (while in a file of notes I have on serial killer Elizabeth Wettlaufer, all the authors named are women. This is not an androcentrically reported story in the way one might perhaps call Wettaufer’s, gynocentrically reported.)
As the story that their bodies were found appeared August 7, I was also reading a “Regarding Men” website article on “Couples Therapy”,2 in which author Tom Golden, a therapist himself, explicated gynocentric biases in that style of therapy, whose essence entails “sitting face to face and talking about emotions and hurt”3. One could call it a cheap laugh, to imagine McLeod and Schmegelsky “doing couples therapy” — but some good science has begun with weird-looking speculation.
What might those two, if still alive, have chosen to “work on in their relationship”? I quite doubt they would have shamed one another for yelling, nor demanded one another hear out long lists of complaints about how he evoked unhappy feelings in the other.
I’ll second instead, what therapist Golden speculates: men are much more forgiving of minor annoyances … which might be one good reason why the Abrahamic faiths endorse patriarchy: “Father have mercy” is a more hopeful request than “Mother have mercy.”
If they sat talking about emotions at all, it probably was shoulder to shoulder, in the front seats of one of those vehicles they drove, and it probably was not about negative emotions toward each other, but toward outsiders. Positive emotions toward each other? — more plausible.
CBC reporting of the story mentioned the two both had strong interest in video gaming; Schmegelsky at least, via the Internet. This is such a common interest among boys approaching the age of majority, that my guess [speculation if you prefer that word] is that not taking any interest in video games would now be “less normal4.”
The fact that many video games include gun violence may be relevant — but since the vast majority of boys who are video-game enthusiasts do not go out shooting strangers, the relevance falls far short of explaining the adventure of McLeod and Schmegelsky. The boys who grew up in the 1950s and watched Wild West TV shows that sold them boxed dry cereal, saw a lot of gun violence in those TV adventure shows, too.
I myself was more interested in Boy Scouts, camping, fishing and hiking; so correct this recollection if I err — but from the TV Westerns of the middle of the past century, to the video-games of this one, wasn’t most of the violence, men shooting and battering other men? — and consistently, Schmegelsky and McLeod are reported charged with killing one man, plus suspected of killing one other, and one woman. Misogyny, that ain’t.
Guns are not part of human nature. “Man the Hunter” killed first with spears, later with arrows. By the time guns became common, hunting was no longer the main way people got meat to eat. But human nature is probably part of the problem and the puzzle, and maybe part of the answer to the story of the gun toting duo from Port Alberni.
“Man the Hunter” is different from “Woman the Gatherer”, and perhaps the ecology of hunting vs. gathering is cause for the ethology difference. Hunters meet the game they kill for meat in different places because meat animals can walk; while gathering spots for roots and berries, with their rewards and dangers5, tend to be the same from year to year. Perhaps those stored up memories conventional Couples Therapy evokes to men’s disadvantage, are the consequence of gathering being women’s work much more than men’s: The speculation is at least plausible.
Gun-toting Wild West adventure is more like hunting than it is like gathering… and so is war. The boys who watched 1950s Wild West TV could grow up and join the military, and a significant fraction of them did. Why McLeod and Schmegelsky didn’t, might turn out to be an important part of this story6 — one I did not find among the news websites this week.
Primitive hunters hunted in groups. Most soldiers fight in groups; (and most of those groups number more than two.)
It is worth asking, whether human overpopulation is part of the problem. Hunting opportunities in Canada and the US are much fewer and briefer than they were when my generation was that age. If men’s nature was formed by team hunting, an overpopulated world is less friendly to our nature than the one in which it evolved… and today’s world, being far more overpopulated than the one in which I grew up and gun-toting TV heroes sold breakfast cereal, logically is far less friendly to “Man the Hunter”.
Gun control is much stricter now. Imaginably, the fact those two carried guns was criminal by itself, which it would not so likely have been 50-60 years ago. Once guilty of a crime, one tends to become more nearly a desperado, as at least one CBC story affirmed. Is it mere speculation that a driver who knows [she or] he is “impaired”, and thus guilty of a criminal offence (US readers can approximately translate that to “felony”) will more likely try to evade police, than one who knows his [or her] tail lights have a loose connection?
No, I haven’t proven that gynocentrism set off two 19 year old Port Alberni lads on a very small scale killing spree… nor that video-games did. Neither have I shown, not even speculated, whether the next such killers will be similarly motivated to whatever motivated this pair… nor have I contended that McLeod and Schmegelsky “were really normal”.
Perhaps, though, some of these speculations can lead to ways to make being a young, male human in an overpopulated, excessively gynocentric world, … well, more human.
Brotherhood is a good thing. If McLeod and Schmegelsky misused it, or downright missed it in some pathological way — we don’t know yet. Most brotherhood is healthy and beneficial. Who knows? maybe making an androcentric variation on “Couples Therapy” and-or developing ways to make “Man the Hunter” more rather than less a part of men’s experience, are beginnings to lessons we should learn.
Notes:
1. I leave out Roy Rogers because he had a wife and a home as part of his TV persona, which even the somewhat residentially stable Matt Dillon, did not have.
2. There is a link to Part Two of the article, at the end of the Regarding-Men “Part One”.
3. As Golden points out, face-to-face is gynocentric: “Men might feel more comfortable taking this sort of problem and hashing it out as they play a game …” (or, I would add, work or even study. Boys learn better when somewhat active; girls, when sitting still {CBC Radio, “The Current”, 2009 10 23). Yes, the stereotypical school is that gynocentric.)
“Couples therapy” might be a way for a man to learn to act gynocentric, if a man wanted to. (Myself, I’d rather learn Greek or Anishinabe.) Is there a parallel, equally encouraged way for women to learn to be androcentric? — not likely! On this website and others, it is old news that gynocentrism is “Politically Correct” and androcentrism, seldom welcomed.
4. For one negative speculation, I’m going to minimize the significance of Nazi imagery. The Nazi regime, especially their Wehrmacht, “had style” (as had knights in shining armour.) A respected professor in the US, who I met when we were both graduate students, was a “Nazi buff”; and while it did not lead to him doing evil, it might rather have been of some value in getting him his first promotion. (I should perhaps add that finding new facts about a fearsome disease would probably help a professor of medicine get promoted, too.)
5… think scorpions, rattlesnakes, wasp nests … and competing species like bears.
6. One response to the draft of this blog, was, “Were the two shooters on psych meds? Many of the American shooters have been.” I have not read any “news” to that effect so far; a search for drug influence might be cause for conducting autopsies; and “being on psychiatric medication” reads like good cause for rejection by military recruiters.
I do wonder “what condition the bodies were found were in”, if autopsies be required to definitely determine their identities.
Wild West 2019: an Exercise in Speculation
… Misogynist, they warn’t
(c) 2019, Davd
The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Pancho and Cisco, Matt Dillon [the hero of Gunsmoke] and his limping sidekick Chester, … the theme1 is at least two generations older than two 19-year-old killers from Vancouver Island: Two men wander the Wild West with guns, having dramatic adventures. In the 1950s [and iirc, late 1940s] the pairs of men were fictional heroes doing good deeds (and selling boxes of breakfast cereal.) This week the pair in the news are real villains.
This is a blog, not an essay, not analysis, and the first thing I noticed as I read through my file of news notes, is that both sexes are named among the reporters (while in a file of notes I have on serial killer Elizabeth Wettlaufer, all the authors named are women. This is not an androcentrically reported story in the way one might perhaps call Wettaufer’s, gynocentrically reported.)
As the story that their bodies were found appeared August 7, I was also reading a “Regarding Men” website article on “Couples Therapy”,2 in which author Tom Golden, a therapist himself, explicated gynocentric biases in that style of therapy, whose essence entails “sitting face to face and talking about emotions and hurt”3. One could call it a cheap laugh, to imagine McLeod and Schmegelsky “doing couples therapy” — but some good science has begun with weird-looking speculation.
What might those two, if still alive, have chosen to “work on in their relationship”? I quite doubt they would have shamed one another for yelling, nor demanded one another hear out long lists of complaints about how he evoked unhappy feelings in the other.
I’ll second instead, what therapist Golden speculates: men are much more forgiving of minor annoyances … which might be one good reason why the Abrahamic faiths endorse patriarchy: “Father have mercy” is a more hopeful request than “Mother have mercy.”
If they sat talking about emotions at all, it probably was shoulder to shoulder, in the front seats of one of those vehicles they drove, and it probably was not about negative emotions toward each other, but toward outsiders. Positive emotions toward each other? — more plausible.
CBC reporting of the story mentioned the two both had strong interest in video gaming; Schmegelsky at least, via the Internet. This is such a common interest among boys approaching the age of majority, that my guess [speculation if you prefer that word] is that not taking any interest in video games would now be “less normal4.”
The fact that many video games include gun violence may be relevant — but since the vast majority of boys who are video-game enthusiasts do not go out shooting strangers, the relevance falls far short of explaining the adventure of McLeod and Schmegelsky. The boys who grew up in the 1950s and watched Wild West TV shows that sold them boxed dry cereal, saw a lot of gun violence in those TV adventure shows, too.
I myself was more interested in Boy Scouts, camping, fishing and hiking; so correct this recollection if I err — but from the TV Westerns of the middle of the past century, to the video-games of this one, wasn’t most of the violence, men shooting and battering other men? — and consistently, Schmegelsky and McLeod are reported charged with killing one man, plus suspected of killing one other, and one woman. Misogyny, that ain’t.
Guns are not part of human nature. “Man the Hunter” killed first with spears, later with arrows. By the time guns became common, hunting was no longer the main way people got meat to eat. But human nature is probably part of the problem and the puzzle, and maybe part of the answer to the story of the gun toting duo from Port Alberni.
“Man the Hunter” is different from “Woman the Gatherer”, and perhaps the ecology of hunting vs. gathering is cause for the ethology difference. Hunters meet the game they kill for meat in different places because meat animals can walk; while gathering spots for roots and berries, with their rewards and dangers5, tend to be the same from year to year. Perhaps those stored up memories conventional Couples Therapy evokes to men’s disadvantage, are the consequence of gathering being women’s work much more than men’s: The speculation is at least plausible.
Gun-toting Wild West adventure is more like hunting than it is like gathering… and so is war. The boys who watched 1950s Wild West TV could grow up and join the military, and a significant fraction of them did. Why McLeod and Schmegelsky didn’t, might turn out to be an important part of this story6 — one I did not find among the news websites this week.
Primitive hunters hunted in groups. Most soldiers fight in groups; (and most of those groups number more than two.)
It is worth asking, whether human overpopulation is part of the problem. Hunting opportunities in Canada and the US are much fewer and briefer than they were when my generation was that age. If men’s nature was formed by team hunting, an overpopulated world is less friendly to our nature than the one in which it evolved… and today’s world, being far more overpopulated than the one in which I grew up and gun-toting TV heroes sold breakfast cereal, logically is far less friendly to “Man the Hunter”.
Gun control is much stricter now. Imaginably, the fact those two carried guns was criminal by itself, which it would not so likely have been 50-60 years ago. Once guilty of a crime, one tends to become more nearly a desperado, as at least one CBC story affirmed. Is it mere speculation that a driver who knows [she or] he is “impaired”, and thus guilty of a criminal offence (US readers can approximately translate that to “felony”) will more likely try to evade police, than one who knows his [or her] tail lights have a loose connection?
No, I haven’t proven that gynocentrism set off two 19 year old Port Alberni lads on a very small scale killing spree… nor that video-games did. Neither have I shown, not even speculated, whether the next such killers will be similarly motivated to whatever motivated this pair… nor have I contended that McLeod and Schmegelsky “were really normal”.
Perhaps, though, some of these speculations can lead to ways to make being a young, male human in an overpopulated, excessively gynocentric world, … well, more human.
Brotherhood is a good thing. If McLeod and Schmegelsky misused it, or downright missed it in some pathological way — we don’t know yet. Most brotherhood is healthy and beneficial. Who knows? maybe making an androcentric variation on “Couples Therapy” and-or developing ways to make “Man the Hunter” more rather than less a part of men’s experience, are beginnings to lessons we should learn.
Notes:
1. I leave out Roy Rogers because he had a wife and a home as part of his TV persona, which even the somewhat residentially stable Matt Dillon, did not have.
2. There is a link to Part Two of the article, at the end of the Regarding-Men “Part One”.
3. As Golden points out, face-to-face is gynocentric: “Men might feel more comfortable taking this sort of problem and hashing it out as they play a game …” (or, I would add, work or even study. Boys learn better when somewhat active; girls, when sitting still {CBC Radio, “The Current”, 2009 10 23). Yes, the stereotypical school is that gynocentric.)
“Couples therapy” might be a way for a man to learn to act gynocentric, if a man wanted to. (Myself, I’d rather learn Greek or Anishinabe.) Is there a parallel, equally encouraged way for women to learn to be androcentric? — not likely! On this website and others, it is old news that gynocentrism is “Politically Correct” and androcentrism, seldom welcomed.
4. For one negative speculation, I’m going to minimize the significance of Nazi imagery. The Nazi regime, especially their Wehrmacht, “had style” (as had knights in shining armour.) A respected professor in the US, who I met when we were both graduate students, was a “Nazi buff”; and while it did not lead to him doing evil, it might rather have been of some value in getting him his first promotion. (I should perhaps add that finding new facts about a fearsome disease would probably help a professor of medicine get promoted, too.)
5… think scorpions, rattlesnakes, wasp nests … and competing species like bears.
6. One response to the draft of this blog, was, “Were the two shooters on psych meds? Many of the American shooters have been.” I have not read any “news” to that effect so far; a search for drug influence might be cause for conducting autopsies; and “being on psychiatric medication” reads like good cause for rejection by military recruiters.
I do wonder “what condition the bodies were found were in”, if autopsies be required to definitely determine their identities.
About Davd
Davd (PhD, 1966) has been a professor, a single father keeping a small commercial herb garden so as to have flexible time for his sons, and editor of _Ecoforestry_. He is a practicing Christian, and in particular an advocate of ecoforestry, self-sufficiency horticulture, and men of all faiths living together "in peace and brotherhood" for the fellowship, the efficiency, and the goodwill that sharing work so often brings.