I felt morally embarrassed to look at the events with which I begin—the Isla Vista killings—from the perspective of the women who were targeted and killed. And I felt embarrassed, in a similar way, to dwell on them at all—as if I should be detached and cool where the female victims were concerned, rather than animated, as I in fact was, by moral horror and grief for them, and all of the other women killed in a similar spirit on a daily basis in America. I felt some pressure to turn instead to purely structural cases of misogyny, or else misogyny of the subtle or chronic and cumulative variety.
