I’m going to be talking about violent misogyny in this post, if you’re having a bad day you probably want to skip this one.
For those lucky enough not to have heard about it yet, an especially misogynistic shitstain decided he wanted revenge on the women who wouldn’t have sex with him (and the men he assumed were getting the sex he ‘deserved’) by murdering as many people as he could before (most likely) shooting himself. Google UC Santa Barbara shooting for more details.
One of the things that creeps me out the most is that the murdering asshole left a 137-141 page manifesto (different news stories reported different page counts), and a number of YouTube videos explaining what he was going to do and why he was so angry.
“I’m 22 years old and still a virgin, never even kissed a girl. And through college, 2½ years, more than that actually, I’m still a virgin. It has been very torturous,” he said. “The popular kids, you never accepted me and now you will all pay for it. Girls, all I ever wanted was to love you, be loved by you. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted sex, love, affection, adoration.”
“You forced me to suffer all my life, now I will make you all suffer,” he said. “All you girls who rejected me, looked down upon me, you know, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men. And all of you men for living a better life than me, all of you sexually active men. I hate you. I hate all of you. I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve, annihilation.”
If you’ve ever seen a men’s rights activist page or a particularly angry pick up artist, that’s going to look terrifyingly familiar. I’ve seen that exact kind of misogyny online over and over and over. This may be the first mass murder definitively linked to anti-woman hate speech, but it’s certainly not the first murder caused by that kind of contempt for and perceived entitlement to women, and it won’t be the last.
The media is already reporting that Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown described [the killer] as “very mentally disturbed.” as if his beliefs were any different from a thousand other misogynists’. I would love to be able to write that pathetic manchild off as just some crazy person, but I can’t. His behaviour is just too neatly explained by hatred of women and the belief that he was entitled to their bodies. If that murdering piece of shit hadn’t believed that sex was something those heartless bitches were denying him for no good reason, maybe he would’ve just been sad and lonely, not murderously angry.
No, not all men are murderous wastes of space, but #yesallwomen live in fear that we will be next. All women know what it’s like to live in a culture that hates and fears us, and all women know what it’s like to be treated like we’re less than human.
Dr Nerdlove has written an amazing post on the subject, and the hashtag #yesallwomen was created in response to the mass murder. Read the post, read the hashtag, and for fuck’s sake call out misogyny when you see it. Do that, and maybe the six victim’s deaths can mean something.
The Dr Nerdlove post was excellent, and I agree with it and while very few men may go in a killing spree because they didn’t get from women, the sex they feel they deserve, there are many who are in silent agreement with his sentiment. There are battered woman shelters loaded with the proof.
this entire thing makes me sick, and I’ve been writing up my own things (and trying not to bite peoples heads off, like that one person who’s all like “well objects arent the problem so don’t blame guns and don’t say guns are easier to get than sex toys in the us liar”). This needs to grow. Every goddamn time something happens, it needs to be added. It cannot be ignored anymore.
Also, there are seven dead. He may have been a shitstain sexist murdering fuck, but he was also a person. And his death also should carry a meaning and a message that is as strong as that of his victims.
He is a product of the society that created him, and brushing his corpse under the carpet won’t make it better.
True, I just wanted to keep the focus on the victims. I’m fine with the killer’s suicide being a senseless act of violence, but I want the victim’s deaths to mean something.
obviously. But I get really anoyed when people dehumanise the perpetrators, as if that was better than the perpetrator dehumanizing his victims.
also, I just noticed the guy commenting below. need your teeth sharpened?
Fair point. I’ve updated the post to specifically mention the six victims.
Go to town on the comment below if you’re so inclined, I’ve already stuck him in the mod queue for being too lazy to do his own goddamn Googling and being an an asshole about citations he could goddamn well find himself if he didn’t want to make some point about ‘not all men.’ I’ve got shit to do besides hold his hand.
Edited because I do try not go straight to personal insults unless it’s absolutely blatant douchebaggery, I’m just super pissed about having to hold some dude’s hand through some pretty basic tenets of MRA and PUA.
I acknowledge that blood libels have become an entrenched part of the culture now, no matter how spurious they may be, but how is this murderer’s ravings linked to either MRAs or PUAs? PUAs are about how to do things to become more attractive to women, kind of the opposite of a priori entitlement to their bodies. MRAs talk more about family courts than they do about not getting laid.
I invite you to cite some sources if you want to make the point you’re trying to make more clear. I mean, if ever having seen a men’s rights activist page or an angry PUA would make it “terrifyingly familiar,” that shouldn’t be too hard at all. But I’m not seeing much more so far than 1) this guy hated women and felt entitled to them, 2) some people who identify with some of those movements may express similar sentiments (I’m assuming?) in other contexts, 3) there was a link between the two.
http://drnerdlove.tumblr.com/post/86730939831/shame-virginity-mras-and-the-uc-santa-barbara
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/24/1301671/-Elliot-Roger-Gunman-in-California-Mass-Shooting-was-influenced-by-the-Men-s-Rights-Movement
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/05/25/why-elliot-rodgers-misogyny-matters/#more-11976
http://splcenter.org/blog/2014/05/24/shooting-suspect-elliot-rodgers-misogynistic-posts-point-to-motive/#.U4Eic8s8fQ0.twitter
And the connection between PUA and misogyny, for those too fucking lazy to Google all by themselves:
http://jezebel.com/5720480/american-woman-hater-possibly-the-worst-person-weve-encountered
http://jezebel.com/ladies-quit-paying-attention-to-this-vile-troll-websit-1469942571
http://ardenleigh.typepad.com/blog/2014/02/women-of-the-world-please-stop-fucking-misogynists.html#sthash.utx292r2.dpbs
I’m honestly not willing to wade through the misogynistic crap to find citations for MRAs or PUAs directly, but Dr. Nerdlove (who started in pick-up and left it because or how toxic it was) posted a great take down of what is wrong with PUA here: http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2013/06/trouble-pick-up-artists/
If you think that PUAs aren’t about entitlement, then ou are either completely unfamiliar with pickup culture or have been lucky enough to only avoid going too far down the rabbit hole into their BS.
As far as connections between the shooter and MRA or PUA, I agree with stabbity that what he was saying sounds like a lot of what I have heard from MRAs and PUAs over the years, and will point out that according to some sources (including the post from Dr. NL that stabbity linked to) the shooter had been following a number of MRA youtube channels.
Now that I’ve had a little time to cool down, I’ve figured out why this comment made me hulk out. I know the poster can’t possibly be stupid enough to think that pick up artistry and men’s right activism is some kind of bastion of female empowerment, which leaves me stuck with the conclusion that he’s arguing for the sake of arguing, purely for the fun of watching me get upset. He’s not arguing in good faith, he’s not trying to understand, he’s just entertaining himself by being a complete shit to me. I am not here to provide little shits like this an entertaining “debate” while they shit in my soul and ask each other what on earth I’m so upset about.
For any man who isn’t yet a lost cause, you do not fucking argue with any woman, anywhere, EVER about what’s misogynistic and what’s not. You will never understand what it’s like to be presumed stupid, worthless, and less, no matter where you go, no matter how many years of experience you have, so shut your fucking mouth and listen to the person who has any goddamn business opening her mouth on the subject of misogyny.
Of course, the lost causes will write me off as one more irrational, overemotional little girl, as if it’s remotely reasonable to expect me to be “rational” about people who want to kill me because I’m a woman. I don’t want to die! I don’t want my sister to die! I don’t want my cousins, my female friends, my coworkers, my favourite writers to die! Misogyny is killing us in the very most literal sense, and I will not calm down and be (imagine the biggest possible sneer) rational about it.
Fuck off forever.
This post ties in with your previous posting about the ‘Alpha male’ trope. Rodger’s sense of entitlement was grounded in the belief that he was a ‘true alpha male’. The toxicity of this pervasive metaphor, one of the ‘metaphors we live by’ (in the phrase of Lakoff and Johnson), is clearly evidenced by his actions.
The perverse logic of the Alpha male trope helps to explain why Rodger killed men as well as women. In addition to fostering a hatred of women who fail to satisfy men’s sense of entitlement, it engenders a hatred of other men as undeserving rivals.
I’ve always preferred the company of women, and pretty much every day it seems all too easy to read something somewhere which supports my view that my gender has more than it’s fair share of absolute arseholes. Only yesterday I read about a guy who used a baseball bat on his pregnant wife because she asked him to contribute to the cost of a meal out. That and the current fad for throwing acid at women because they reject unwanted advances… mind you it’s not just men who do that!
To the commenter who wanted recognition for the loss of life of the perpetrator of this crime, really? That sort of liberal bullshit is why the UK needs to get out of Europe and start treating criminals like criminals instead of like victims.
The UK legal system and its policies on incarceration are independent of our membership of the EU. The only area in which the British justice is affected is the operation of the European Court of Human Rights which deals exclusively with human rights issues.
European directives regarding women’s rights, especially employment rights, are precisely the sort of ‘bureaucracy’ that the current British government would dearly love to obtain derogations from.
It is a matter of public record that the UK Independence Party whose aim is to get the UK out of the EU, is full of male chauvinists and disgusting homophobes.
Furthermore UKIP, when it sits in the European Parliament, aligns itself with the neofascist parties that have made huge advances in the recent EU elections.
Really, well I bow to your superior knowledge. Even so, it cannot be denied that the EU causes us a lot of problems when it comes to deporting criminals, allowing them to use the Human Rights Act to their own ends. Frankly I don’t really care if a rapist/murder/terrorist faces persecution in their own country.
Someone posted a twitter screencap on Facebook that I think sums things up nicely:
Everyone: I guess we’ll never know why he did it.
Shooter: I did it because I hate women.
Everyone: I guess we’ll never know why he did it.
I know this is going to sound very strange, but there is a silver lining here. I’ve found that the more acceptable a viewpoint is, the less radical it becomes because the mainstream mellows people out; it’s hard to be angry when most people share your opinion–at least superficially. Minority groups get more extreme as they shrink, causing the remaining members to become violent. I would like to think that misogyny is on the decline in general. Smoking, civil rights, etc., all had to go through a period of public shaming before the numbers really fell off.
I’d like to think that we are in a transitional period where every incident like this creates 10 people who stand up for woman’s rights in the next generation for every 1 person it radicalizes today into hating women.
I think it is a complete mistake to assume, as many do, that this guy was a ‘lone nut’. There is no such thing as a lone nut. There is a spectrum. Every guy like this represents the views of a lot of other people who just haven’t become fully unhinged enough to kill themselves and others yet.
Let’s hope this violence is a sign of shrinkage among those people.