#this post has billion typos and I am very tired and will maybe fix it tomorrow

[cloudyrainyspring]

I want to play the devils advocate here for a bit, because I don’t think that the reason why Robby was prioritizing David was specifically misogyny, but the circumstance and evidence that he was presented with. 1) David’s mom poisoned herself to get to the ER, which is in most cases a sign of severe mental disorder (and it’s weird that it wasn’t mentioned at all, BUT I am not usaamerican, I am in fact from a country where school shootings are rare, but parental abuse is very common, so I definitely have a completely different cultural mindset here, but I do have a major in psych and uh, well here she would have been the one to be examined by the psych department, not David, and so I know that we have literally extremely different backgrounds, but red flag anyways), 2) David’s mom didn’t try to talk privately to the doctors when she got to the ER, she only brought it up when she was found out (red flag!!), 3) she didn’t show the list (red flag!!!). None of these are the steps that a present parent is going to take if they suspect their son of being violent to women. She didn’t even call the school psychologist. She didn’t even remember the names of the girls! All this while David presented himself as a severely depressed teenager, but not a violent one.

So personally, I want to cut Robby some slack. I think Robby has a holier-than-thou attitude that affected the way he spoke to McKay negatively (and also the way he spoke to Mohan, and Jake, and Langdon, and I would argue Whitaker, too, but Whitaker is very thick-skinned), and I think that he was also quite passive in the case of David, but he definitely wasn’t prioritizing David’s quality of life over some list that was maybe written and was never shown. He saw a vulnerable, visibly depressed teenager with a mom that is probably mentally ill and both of them definitely needed his help. They were his patients, not the girls on a list that was not shown to him.

McKay is correct that Robby doesn’t think about the girls, and she is right to call that out. But! She herself is shown to be prejudiced, she is never shown to care that David wrote suicidal notes, calls him incel and not by his name repeatedly and doesn’t care about him until she is forced to be in the same room with him, while he is crying for his mom, handcuffed. Which would have been fine and cool and justified if she didn’t work in the ER. If you think that it’s ok (my opinion: it’s not for a person who works in ER, but it IS perfectly fine for a person who does not work in a medical sphere though), please remember that we are literally shown her releasing a post-partum woman because she was fat and nearly killing her because of that. She is a forty year old doctor who is going around calling a high schooler “the incel”. Like that’s bonkers. She was also prejudiced.

Anyway, it’s a very difficult situation, and I am sort of displeased with the way it was written (like WHY did they make his mom poison herself and never made a comment that that literally never happens unless the person isn’t mentally stable). Again, I am not from USA, and school shootings are not a problem here, so my reading of the situation was that David’s mom was having a psychotic break and David was acting erraticly because of that. I was very surprised that it wasn’t the plotline. I’m not sure that it’s entirely because of misogyny.

The realism of Robby being a little bit of an unintentional misogynist is so, so important to me. Like he is a good boss and a great teacher, he is friends with women and works with women and teaches women and respects women greatly. And yet—it’s Langdon, and then Whitaker, who Robby adopts as his mentees. It’s David, not the girls on the kill list, who Robby prioritizes care for. It’s the dad accused of grooming his daughter who Robby refuses to report, while informing the authorities about the mother drugging him without a second thought. He reams Langdon out for berating Santos, but doesn’t check in on Santos until Langdon refuses to let it go and Robby becomes suspicious of there being an actual problem.

And obviously we are seeing Robby on the worst day of life, and maybe even calling him a “little bit of a misogynist” is a bit too much because he’s not, really. But he does have ingrained biases and he does seem to only be able to fully see himself in and completely empathize with other men. And that is just. So true of even the nicest, kindest, most wonderful and feminist men I know.