Readers React: The message of #YesAllWomen

I usually enjoy Meghan Daum’s columns, but I am furious over this poorly reasoned and inadvertently sexist response to the recent Isla Vista shootings. (“Misogyny and the co-opting of the Isla Vista tragedy,” Opinion, June 4)

If a mentally unhinged person had written a violent screed denouncing any other group of people — be it Jews, Muslims, blacks, Latinos, gays, whomever — before embarking on mass murder, I doubt that the hate-crime aspect of the incident would be so flippantly dismissed. It is true that more males than females were killed in this rampage, but that is only due to circumstance.

Gunman Elliot Rodger tried to enter a sorority, but thankfully he failed. Can you imagine what would have happened if he had gained entrance?

Misogyny is a sickness in the soul of humanity. Belittling of women and violence against them is so commonplace that it is usually experienced as unremarkable unless something truly horrendous occurs. Mental illness, failures of the mental healthcare system, our gun culture and much more laid the groundwork for this incident. Misogyny and the entitlement that goes with it lit the fuse.

Diana M. Granat

Altadena

Since Aeschylus’ “Eumenides” featured the goddess Athena representing the woman who sides with the oppression of women (“There is no mother who gave me birth … I am always for the male”), there have always been women who will voice the “safe” viewpoint, making the same excuses as the oblivious mainstream.

The #YesAllWomen movement is not co-opting the Isla Vista tragedy any more than the civil rights movement co-opted the church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. Both events were tragedies that occurred amid oppression and were born out of that oppression, but both events woke up more people to the need for change.

This movement should not be silenced now or at any later time. To paraphrase a well-known male songwriter, how many deaths will it take ‘til we learn that too many women have died?

Lynne Bronstein

Van Nuys