For men socialized in a sexist culture where rigid strictures of masculinity dictate that another person’s power over a man constitutes a failure of his masculinity, attraction to a woman can be interpreted as a threat posed by that woman – at least, it can for men of especially weak character. People often experience being sexually attracted to someone as if that person has a kind of power over them, and for a straight, white man like Long, positioned at the top of so many social hierarchies, this is likely one of his most acute experiences of another person’s power that he has ever faced. Why do so many straight men come to resent and hate the women they find attractive? Maybe it’s a question of power.
It was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.” The characterization of a man who killed seven women as the victim of a “really bad day” doesn’t make sense unless the person making that claim understands Long’s hatred of attractive women as at least a somewhat legitimate grievance. At a press conference, Jay Baker, the Cherokee county captain, said of Long’s rampage: “He was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope. There is some evidence that even the police officers who arrested Long feel some empathy with his experience of desire for women as an affliction or affront. Sexual culture abounds with the eroticized contempt of women, and with the understanding of straight sex, in particular, as implicitly adversarial – a needlessly reductive and limiting understanding of heterosexuality, yet nevertheless a popular one.
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The conflation of sexual desire and hate for the object of that desire in male heterosexuality is a pattern that becomes obvious once you know how to look for it. His account of his own motive points to a broader problem not only with the status of sex work, but with the dynamics of heterosexuality in a culture that prizes male strength and female submission: Long seems to have experienced his own desire for the women who worked at the parlors as enraging, offensive and intolerable. Long, if we are to take his own account seriously, seems to have killed the women because he, personally, found them attractive. As a practical matter, these policy interventions are needed for sex workers to live with greater safety and dignity. They will keep working, but under clandestine conditions that make them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. When people cannot work in the open, either due to the fear of arrest or deportation, they will not stop working. Instead, decriminalization will keep sex workers out of jails and prisons – and robust immigration reform will allow those sex workers who come to the US from other countries to work and organize without the exacerbating pressures of possible deportation and debt. As sex workers’ rights advocates have long and eloquently argued, the answer to sex workers’ vulnerability is not more policing, as police have often been the source of sex workers’ suffering. Long’s acts have also illuminated the vulnerability of sex workers, whose industry is largely illegal and unregulated, and who have few protections as workers and few opportunities to advocate for better pay, safer working conditions, or greater control over their own bodies and images, and few avenues to avoid or de-escalate confrontations with the police – who frequently arrest, incarcerate or deport sex workers on the flimsy and paternalistic pretext of “rescue”.
Reports of anti-Asian hate crimes are up 150% over the past year, and many speculate that the rise in anti-Asian hatred has been provoked by the racist fearmongering of Donald Trump and other Republican politicians, who have blamed the Covid-19 pandemic on what they hatefully term the “China virus”. Long’s attacks come after a long year of mounting hate crimes and street harassment against Asian people.