The Kirk Assassination Exposes Media’s Reluctance to Confront Violent Masculinity

Despite endless commentary, few in media have grappled with masculinity’s role in political violence.

Charlie Kirk speaks on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson on Oct. 17, 2024. The group hired thousands of canvassers to get out the vote for Trump. (Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images)

Note: people who have followed my work over the years — and more recently — know that I’ve been beating the drum about the need to gender the perpetrators of violence since the early 1990s. In fact, part of the origin story of my first educational documentary, Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity, (2000), was how frustrated I felt in the spring of 1998, when, after a series of school shootings by boys and young men (this was a year before the Columbine massacre), media reports continued to talk about an epidemic of “kids killing kids.”

I had put together a slide lecture back in 1990 (pre Power Point!) called “My Gun’s Bigger Than Yours: Images of Violence and Manhood in the Media” that my colleagues and I at the Media Education Foundation then used as source material for Tough Guise.

I say all this now because once again, a major cultural/political event has happened that should occasion a deep national discussion about masculinities and violence — and yet somehow it doesn’t. That discussion is now taking place in corners of the internet, like here. And among academic and online feminists. But nowhere close to the “mainstream.” Yet.

And one more thing. I want to say something preemptively, in case anyone reading this reacts like some commenters have to versions of the short essay below that I posted last week on my social media. (A small minority of commenters, but still).

One of the main reasons why some argue that the gender of the alleged killer is left out is that everyone knows it’s a man, and a white man, and so why state the obvious? But that very point — that it’s obvious — helps to keep the reasons for it hidden in plain sight!

The point is we need to critically interrogate the obvious, because one of the chief ways that power works, in this case discursively or through language, is by remaining hidden. Making visible the ways in which power operates is a critical step in challenging that power.

If people want to argue that biology/testosterone is the reason why the vast majority of political violence is done by men, and a vanishingly small percentage by women or non-binary people, let’s have a debate. Spoiler alert: sophisticated 21st century debates about the causes of various forms of interpersonal and political violence have long dismissed the nature-nurture dichotomy as cartoonishly reductive. It’s both.

I am focused on the ways in which narratives about violence as the means by which a man imposes his will and asserts his dominance are deeply imbedded in American ideology, cultural mythology, entertainment culture, etc., and thus in the American (usually male) psyche. The rugged individualist ideal that is central to American ideology is deeply gendered (and in many ways, racialized).

The Kirk killing and its aftermath is the latest example of this. Perhaps this time, the “teachable moment” aspect of this tragic event will be more productive.

Thanks for reading.

A quick reflection just after the Kirk shooting.

(I wrote and published the essay below a couple of days after the Kirk assassination. It’s important to note that this is a developing story. As new facts and information come out, I’ll certainly be writing more.)

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a major sociocultural event and media spectacle that has generated a tremendous amount of media commentary and social media discourse. Unfortunately, much of the analysis suffers from the same blind spot that typically characterizes media narratives about violence: It is de-gendered.

One way to see how the lack of a gendered analysis has played out in the shooting and its aftermath is to do the following thought exercise:

Read, listen and watch as much commentary as possible across the ideological spectrum, and notice how rarely anyone even mentions that the alleged murderer is a young man. Or a young white man.

You’ll hear a wide variety of gender-neutral terms: the alleged “shooter.” The college-age “suspect.” The “killer.” The “person” who did this. It’s almost as if the pundits and “experts” are intentionally attempting to avoid saying out loud that this act—like the overwhelming majority of both mass shootings and political violence—was done by a man.

Why does this failure to name the gender issues at the heart of most violence, including political violence, matter?

Because in the subsequent discussions about its causes, and ways to prevent it from happening in the future, one of the key elements is missing.

For anyone who remains unconvinced that it’s important to make the gender of the perpetrator visible, and to examine the ways in which cultural norms and narratives about masculinity and violence might be implicated, imagine if women committed the overwhelming majority of political violence, and over 98 percent of mass shootings.

Would anyone commenting about the latest violent incident talk about the “shooter,” and fail to mention it’s a woman, and seek to explore the ways in which cultural ideas about femininity might factor in?

The failure to name the gendered nature of most violence (political and otherwise) is especially notable because a large part of Charlie Kirk’s success was due to the ways in which he pushed for a reinforcement of a certain kind of traditional—and very aggressive—(white) masculinity.

Not coincidentally, Kirk was also an avowed and often obnoxious opponent of feminism, which (it must be said) has provided the intellectual foundation and political basis from which to examine and challenge the masculinity-violence synergy.

In other words, Kirk has long used his public platform to denigrate and attempt to delegitimize the very people and ideas that possess some of the most important insight into the causes of the violence that tragically took his life.

The alleged killer is now in custody. He is a 22-year-old man who is himself a product of a culture—American culture—that has long glamorized and romanticized violent white masculinity … especially as it is expressed through the ultimate symbol of violent masculine power: the gun.

To be fair, this romanticization is not found solely on the political right. It shows up at many other points on the ideological spectrum, for example in narratives about violent (especially but not exclusively male) resistance to imperial or colonial tyranny.

Feminist and pro-feminist thinkers and activists have long maintained that it’s impossible to have a serious discussion about violence without examining its multidimensional relationship to masculinity (actually, masculinities).

And vice versa.

But here we are, again.

A version of this piece was originally published 9-12-25 in Ms. Magazine