This post grew out of an exchange with Benjamin Franz on my post This Is The Patriarchy: When Talking To The Master, Speak In A Civil Tone. I felt the exchange itself was worth promoting to a post, with some additional commentary, especially since we are getting so close to the anniversary date of the Montreal massacre.

For those who are not familiar with this tragic event, you will find a case study at Gendercide.org. Here’s a summary from their site:

December 6, 1989 is a date that lives in the collective consciousness of Canadians, and many others worldwide. On that day, a deranged young man walked into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montréal, systematically separated female from male students, and shot 14 women to death. The massacre was a rare example of a gender-selective “cull” that targeted women while preserving men. It cast into sharp relief the misogyny (hatred of women) that usually manifests itself in less obvious but much more destructive ways around the world.

The exchange with Benjamin was sparked by my writing the following in my original post:

I can’t think of any discipline in which men were shot and killed just for being men in that discipline. I never forget, however, that Marc LePine shot and killed 14 women because they were engineering students.

I was referring, of course, to the Montreal massacre.

Benjamin Franz wrote with a link for a news story on very recent kidnappings in Iraq:

news story link

A female professor visiting at the time of the kidnappings said the gunmen forced men and women into separate rooms, handcuffed the men, and loaded them aboard about six pickup trucks. She said the gunmen, some of them masked, wore blue camouflage uniforms of the type worn by police commandos.
The abductions appeared to be the boldest in a series of killings and other attacks on Iraqi academics that are robbing Iraq of its brain trust and prompting thousands of professors and researchers to flee to neighboring countries.

Note that the women *were not* abducted. Only the men.

To which I replied:**

Benjamin, this is a truly horrific incident. And clearly gender was a central issue in the mass kidnapping. In this incident of religious/sectarian violence, (from the article you cited)

The academics apparently were singled out for their relatively high public stature, vulnerability and known views on controversial issues in a climate of deepening Islamic fundamentalism.

But gender intersects in a somewhat different manner in this tragedy than it does in the Montreal massacre. In Montreal, the women were killed merely for being women who dared to study engineering. The shooter was personally offended by the notion of women being engineers. In Iraq, the men were not kidnapped merely for being men who dared to be professors. They were kidnapped because professors were chosen as a high public stature target that would garner attention, not because the kidnappers were personally offended by the notion of men being professors. Once the target of professors was chosen, a decision was made to kidnap only men, not women. This is when gender comes into play, as some twisted version of chivalry. The Iraqi kidnapping is not a mirror image of the Montreal massacre. Saying so should not in any way lessen the horror or diminish the meaning of either.

And then Benjamin replied:

You are correct that it is not a perfect mirror image of the Montreal massacre. It is a matter of subtle emphasis in the phrase “…just for being men in that discipline” vs “…just for being men in that discipline.”

But in both cases the statement is correctly specific (although shaded differently): Just for being men in that discipline.

My point (obviously) being that you were being over-general in your original assertion and perhaps insensitive to the fact that men are also frequent targets of gender-based mass killings.

It is in no way intended as a defense of the rampant gender discrimination present in many aspects of life. It is just a nudge to remember that women are not the only ones targeted by gender discrimination, gender role stereotypes and gender based violence. Are women the recipients of the most frequent ‘routine’ daily gender based discrimination and violence? Hell yeah. Are men also targets based on their gender? Also: Hell yeah.

A site you may find interesting: http://www.gendercide.org/

Thanks, Benjamin, but I don’t need a nudge from you or anyone else. I’ve linked to gendercide.org before where I mentioned the Montreal massacre. I have always known that gender stereotypes exist for men as well as women and this blog has addressed them many times, most recently in a post dealing with how male gender stereotypes negatively impact men’s reproductive health. Throughout the history of this blog, including before it moved to Scienceblogs.com, I have made it quite clear that I believe rigid gender stereotyping is harmful for men just as much as for women, and that the gender policing that men do among themselves is a source of a great deal of harm for both men and women.

Gendercide is a special horror, whether the target is men, as seems to be frequently and increasingly the case in present-day Iraq, or women, as was the case in the Montreal massacre. With all that said: nuances do exist, and they have significance. It does matter that the women in Montreal were killed because they were women who chose to study engineering, because their killer had a hatred for women who dared to achieve in areas he considered off-limits to women. It does matter that the men in Iraq were rounded up and kidnapped because of their high public stature, not because the kidnappers had a hatred for men who chose to achieve in areas they considered off-limits to men. The difference is subtle, but it exists, and it is meaningful. In both cases: gendercide. In each case: the meaning behind the gendercide is different. In Montreal, a crazy man killed to punish women in “male” fields. In Iraq, organized groups kidnap and kill prominent men to create terror and/or to advance a political agenda. Not to punish men in “female” fields. That latter motivation is what it would take to make the kidnappings and killings in Iraq a mirror image of the Montreal massacre.

It’s also an illustration of the asymmetry in gender stereotyping and gender discrimination. It’s hard to imagine a discipline such that men’s choice to engage in it would spark enough rage in women that they would be motivated to kill. THAT would be the TRUE mirror image of the Montreal massacre. The reason it’s hard to imagine such a mirror image gendercide is because there is not a large, overt pool of female hostility against men that is expressed and tolerated in our society. Note I’m not saying there isn’t any female rage against men. I’m saying that in our society, female rage against men is kept in check and subdued, while male rage against women is given more or less free reign of expression. (Don’t believe me? Read your local newspaper. Pay attention to the daily reporting of rape and incest, and women beaten or mudered by current/former partners or spouses. Or just go to the movies or look at popular video games and see what passes for “entertainment”. See how much female-on-male crime you read about, or how many movies there are in which female-on-male violence is lovingly depicted, even eroticized, in incredibly beautiful cinematography.) When female rage against men does escape its normal suppression, it seems so bizarre that they make a movie about the woman and call her Monster.

It’s worth thinking again about the similarities and differences between the Montreal massacre and the kidnappings/killings of the professors in Iraq. Academic settings, culling by sex, violence to only one sex – that much is similar. That culling is what makes it gendercide in both cases. In both cases, academics – students studying to be engineers, professors at a university – were considered to be high enough profile or significant targets for the expression of the attacker’s agenda. The difference lies in the specifics of the gendercide, the motivations of the perpetrators, and their gender. And that, as they say, makes all the difference in the world.

**The Chronicle of Higher Education later reported :

In a grim escalation of violence against Iraqi higher education, gunmen raided a government education agency in Baghdad on Tuesday and abducted scores of male employees and visitors. Some of the men were released within hours of the attack. Then, shortly before midnight in Baghdad, the rest were freed in police raids in the capital, a security adviser in the Iraqi president’s office told the BBC.