What parents of boys should bear in mind about the 'spurned' Texas school shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis

If only Shana Fisher had said yes. This is the implication of countless headlines following Dimitrios Pagourtzis’ decision to slaughter her along with nine of her teachers and classmates.

According to a Facebook post by Fisher’s mother, Fisher “had four months of problems from this boy” where “he kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no. He continued to get more aggressive”. So a girl endures several months of harassment, until her harasser kills her. How are we supposed to see this?

“Spurned advances spark Texas shooting.” “Texas school shooter ‘killed girl who turned down his advances’.” “Spurned advances provoked incident at Santa Fe high school.”

The message, in case you’ve missed it, is that Fisher’s rejection – her “spurning” – of Pagourtzis is what caused his murderous rampage. (As a point of interest, try looking up all news articles with the word “spurned” in the title. So many men driven to murder! Truly, spurning is the scourge of our times.)

There’s something truly depressing about finding the world view of a killer reflected in the reporting of his crimes. Then again, belief that women and girls exist to tend to the sexual and emotional needs of men and boys is everywhere. It does not confine itself to those murky message boards where incels, MRAs, PUAs or whatever the latest misogyny hate tribe call themselves have decided to congregate.

It’s there in every romantic comedy and pop song that recasts male stalking and harassment as the plucky determination of the underdog. It’s there in every parenting manual which tells mothers that boys require more attention than girls. It’s there every time we lecture girls on how much harder boys find it to express their feelings without using their fists.

It’s there in our very concepts of manhood, masculinity and male pride. Men and boys, we are told, have something precious to lose whenever a woman says no. There’s no comparable concept of female pride. Girls who feel ugly, who are mocked for their appearance, who don’t get the boy they desire – the vast majority of us, that is – are simply expected to suck it up.

Teenage girls can be cutting and starving themselves before our very eyes, yet their pain doesn’t register. Instead we ask ourselves whether there might not have been something, anything, these girls could have given to the Pagourtzis, Elliot Rodgers and Alek Minassians of this world to make them feel a little less murderous.

Women and girls, as Kate Manne notes in Down Girl, are coded as “giving” beings.

“A giver is the obligated to offer love, sex, attention, affection, and admiration, as well as other forms of emotional, social, reproductive, and caregiving labour … misogyny is then what happens when she errs as a giver – including by refusing to be one whatsoever – or he is a dissatisfied customer, not least because a personalised giver fails to materialise whatsoever.”

As a mother of three sons, I’m tired of seeing male unhappiness cultivated and weaponised in this way. A feminist approach to raising boys must go beyond allowing our sons to wear dresses and play with dolls. It must even go beyond teaching them the basics of sexual consent. There has to be a fundamental change in how our sons conceptualise their place in the world.

The female half of the human race does not exist to comfort them, validate them, define them, reflect them back at twice their actual size. Not only is such an expectation deeply dismissive of the needs of women and girls, it is bound to make men and boys unhappy. They will always, sooner or later, run up against some form of female refusal to bend to their needs.

Male pride rests on the delusion that females can always be dominated (or “persuaded”, as it is so often recast). It is a delusion that is poisoning the minds of boys, creating a sense of grievance – and actual pain – where there should be none. For all the bullshit we hear from the Jordan Petersons of this world, there is no possible social arrangement in which men and boys can be guaranteed the willing, uncontested sexual and emotional labour of women and girls. You can brainwash, harass and threaten girls all you want, but even in the most extreme of circumstances they will carry on having minds of their own. It’s far easier and kinder to change the expectations of boys.

I believe this can be done, but not in a world which seeks to guilt-trip dead girls for their failure to pander to the male ego. And what, one wonders, would have happened had Shana Fisher said yes? How long can a woman serve as a buffer to absorb male disappointment with the world? And when she starts to flag, isn’t she always the first to go?

As Manne writes, “you can’t do much to help or give to someone who, yes, is in genuine pain and lashing out – but only because they feel too needy and illicitly entitled to getting such moral attentions to begin with”.

There is nothing Shana Fisher could have given that would have been enough. We can, however, challenge the rage and entitlement she faced. We can all raise our voices to echo her “no”.