Why #YesAllWomen is Pretty Dumb 2

On Friday May 23rd a mentally ill person whose name I will not mentioned stabbed his three roommates to death and then shot three people to death from his car while wounding many others before killing himself.

Prior to this rampage he posted an abhorrent youtube video in which he expressed interest in killing women because they wouldn’t have sex with him, as well as killing the men who have sex with these women.

So pretty much he wanted to kill everyone who is straight, although he did kill himself.

Shortly thereafter the #YesAllWomen hashtag exploded from its infancy, with an outpouring of opinionated anecdotes, ostensibly in response to the disgusting misogyny presented in the video.

This was seen by many as a tenuous and occasionally self indulgent response to a mass murder incident. The man’s roommates were men. He shot two women to death as well as a man, and failed at doing the same to a mixed-gendered group of others.

While the #YesAllWomen participants were quick to deride the misogyny present in this coward’s video, few mentioned the misandry contained within it.

Being that misogyny is the hatred of women, and misandry is the hatred of men, and the guy ranted about each gender and indeed killed people of each – the men by hand with a knife – many failed to understand how this mass murder was especially relevant to the Feminist movement, and how it had any bearing on this:

I’m either getting my period, having my period or finishing my period. I’m never not it a state of period. #yesallwomen

— Nicole Aimée Schreib (@nicoleaimee) May 31, 2014

Or how it related to this rather esoteric experience:

Because you get “pulled over” by cops when walking or going through a drive through and then you get asked for your number. #yesallwomen

— Vanessa ✩ (@fridasbrow) June 1, 2014

Or this one:

Woman beaten to death for refusing to give men her number. http://t.co/abEhH9Wreb#YesAllWomen

— SpookySandwich (@MarisaLange) June 1, 2014

The entire breadth of the #YesAllWomen trend falls somewhere between one of those three tweets.

Of course, after the shootings, nobody argued that this plethora of documentation regarding the uncomfortable to incomprehensibly vile experiences on the part of women were not, well, uncomfortable to incomprehensibly vile.

Many people did however feel that these experiences were mostly irrelevant to the mass murder, and could, given the tragic circumstances, serve as a distraction to the more prescient issues associated with the tragedy such as gun control or mental health resources.

It seemed to many that characterizing this man’s words and actions as simply misogynist would be an unnecessary deviation from the much more applicable characterization of misanthropic. 

However the main reason that a lot of people, including me, found the #YesAllWomen hashtag to be pretty dumb in said instance is that logically it is pretty dumb.

These responses commit the logical fallacy of cherry picking, or providing anecdotal evidence to tie various agendas and accounts into a largely irrelevant tragedy.

Speaking strictly logically it would be just as appropriate for me to post this in response to the Isla Vista shooting as many of the posts I’ve read:

Because Aaron Hernandez.  #YesAllMen

— Matt Ralston (@Matthewralston) June 2, 2014

Of course, I wouldn’t do that, as it would be kind of dumb and really douchey…