AP Photo: Eric Gay
byTom Ciccotta14 Nov 20170
A professor at Kutztown University, in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, argued recently in a series of tweets that “toxic masculinity” is to blame for the recent Texas church shooting.
According to a report from Campus Reform, Kutztown literature professor Colleen Clemens argued recently in a series of now-deleted tweets that “toxic masculinity” motivated the November 5 Texas Church shooting that claimed 26 lives.
Just a day after the massacre, Clemens tweeted that “toxic masculinity is killing everyone.”
Like a broken record, she tweeted: ““Toxic masculinity is killing everyone. REPEAT. Toxic masculinity is killing everyone. REPEAT. Toxic masculinity is killing everyone. REPEAT.”
“Most gender theorists have shown that there is very little difference between the brains of men and women, and that in fact the reason people act differently is not because of brains or other biological characteristics, but instead because of rigid societal norms created around femininity and masculinity,” she argued.
“Some men will feel like they fail at being a man and end up taking out that lack of agency on those around them — often the women in their households or the children in their care, as we see in the most recent shooter in [Texas] who followed the similar pattern,” she added.
In addition to her teaching duties at Kutztown, Clemens is a prolific writer. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on representations of Islamic veiling in literature and popular culture.
After her “toxic masculinity” tweets circled on social media, she was invited to appear on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program. She declined the offer. “They wanted me on that night, but I had teaching obligations. Plus, I was not sure I wanted to go on a platform that would engage more with me than with my ideas,” she wrote in a blog post entitled “Why I Said No to Tucker Carlson, and Why My ‘No’ Didn’t Matter.”
