Ends and Odds: The Ravingsof An Old man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Nine, Part One

        Why Men Kill and Women Don't. Part One. by Dave Jaffe.




     "Why can't a woman be more like a man? " sang Rex Harrison, playing Professor Henry Higgins in Lerner and Lowe's 1950's musical 'My Fair Lady'. The musical was based on George Bernard Shaw's drama 'Pygmalion'. In the play and the musical, professor Higgins teaches a cockney lass to speak what some call 'Proper English'.
     Higgins succeeds in his task but then falls in love with his student. Yet his plea for women to be more like men, maybe should be reversed. Perhaps we should be asking instead, "Why can't a man be more like a woman?" The reason for this is simple: Women don't usually kill other human beings. Men do.
    Years ago on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, a feminist of the 1980's told me, "The most dangerous man a woman will meet is an angry former lover." Yet most men who've been rejected by women don't go out and kill women. Yet some do. The recent killer of 10 people in Toronto who also injured 18 people by driving his van into a downtown crowd, did feel rejected by women.
    So that feminist's statement is partly true. Men who hate women do sometimes kill women. Women who hate men rarely kill men. Not only that. Men can be dangerous especially if they're young. More than eight in ten murders every year are done by men. Nearly 90 per cent of rapes, violent robberies and assaults in Canada are committed by males. Women can kill and do commit crimes like.shop lifting and fraud. Yet even here, men's proceeds from these crimes .always outrank money that women get.
    Men drive more dangerously than women, are far more likely to kill themselves, much more willing to shoot up speed and heroin, snort cocaine and  join the armed forces of their country. In Syria right now troops from seven or eight armies are killing, shooting and dying. I'll bet that more than nine out of ten soldiers in these armies are men.
   Take the terrible mass murders erupting so often in the United States these days. The really first wave of these murders started in about 1966. Since then mass murders have struck in many places. Who's the person pulling the trigger or sitting behind the wheel of a car ramming into crowds? It's usually a man. In Canada Marc Lepine a young disturbed man killed 14 female engineering students and injured ten others in Montreal in the 1980's.  Recently Alexandre Bissonnette, went into a mosque in Quebec and killed six Moslems. The latest mass murderer in Toronto,Canada was a man too. If you want to see someone go on a rampage look for a disturbed young male, especially one who's single.
   "Women civilize men," a female therapist once told me. This is true. Young single males, especially sexually frustrated ones can be dangerous.