I wish I were kidding with that headline, but I'm not.
Behold this shining turd in all its misogynistic glory.
There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.
This is immature, insensitive, misogynistic, silly (heave his bucket?), fantastical (rush the shooter?) and it's beyond even the douchiest rationale the typical woman-hater could come up with.
But there's another problem.
There was a single adult male on the school premises that day, and it was the shooter. In fact, men are almost always the shooter. 98 percent of those currently sitting on death row are men.
You would have an easier time convincing me that we should ban men in schools than instituting some kind of machismo quota.
(h/t Jessica Valenti)