Saving Philip Martin
Moving takes forever. Downsizing takes even longer. Hence, I’ve been spending a lot of time sorting stuff, getting rid of as much as I can, while boxing the rest for storage—hoping I’ll later discover I don’t really need it after all.
This process led me to an old Philip Martin column I clipped from the Democrat Gazette. Wrinkled and discolored. About why men kill. It concludes that “we live in a society where misogyny is normalized, boys will forever be boys and men will be offended whenever anyone suggests they possess the capacity for darkness.”
I see why I clipped the column. I’ve said similar things, publicly, in the past. But when it comes from a man, it’s more striking. That, in itself, is disconcerting. But that’s where we are.
Re-reading this column—in the midst of boxes and trinkets strewn across my floor—made me realize something about myself: I have long thought I held an inexplicable prejudice against some cultures. When seeking male companionship throughout my life, I clearly preferred certain cultural stereotypes to others. It seemed I had somehow internalized an irrational intolerance toward men of particular backgrounds.
Perhaps it was Martin’s words, “these dark men,” that made me realize my apparent prejudice wasn’t entirely my own doing. When I was young, I watched cartoons about olive-skinned men with swords who did evil things to beautiful young maidens. When I grew up I learned there were—are—cultures where women are subservient by law. Where husbands have the legal right to punish their wives with physical abuse.
My distrust—my fear—of these dark men was not my own fantastical invention. It was rational to feel uncomfortable around men who grew up feeling so entitled. Men whose culture tells them this is the proper way of the world. But in reality, the dangers are not unique to any given culture.
I haven’t read Martin’s column in months. Not since my mother passed away—because the subscription to the Democrat Gazette was in her name. So, I Googled him and was allowed to read one recent column before the website told me I had to subscribe to get more. The one I picked was entitled “Ordinary Murderers” and it essentially illustrated how we can’t ever tell who might be a murderer—even though we think we can.
All of Martin’s examples of killers were men—save one, who was a very young girl. And I wondered if some general statistics would support this gender pattern.
It was hard to get up-to-date figures on the fly, but according to the Almighty Google, in 2019 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime stated, “About 90 per cent of all homicides recorded worldwide were committed by male perpetrators.”
Maybe female perpetrators have closed the gap since then, but I doubt it.
The wrinkled discolored Martin column nailed it: “… I do not want to call it male entitlement, though I suspect that is exactly what it is; something all us boys carry around and have to learn to bank. It is a species of pride, the idea that we are here to bend the world to our desires—and that the inability to do that is to fail at being a man.”
I have known a few men who really grasped the perversity of this norm. My departed husband was among them. I can’t throw out the Philip Martin column. It moves with me, wherever I wind up—a physical reminder that some men get it.