A mass shooting in Santa Barbara last night left seven dead, including the man suspected of being the killer. Local authorities say that this chilling video, titled Elliot Rodger’s retribution, “appears to be connected” to the shootings. It is a supremely disturbing real-life villain’s monologue in which a young man, evidently the killer, explains on the day before the massacre why he intends to kill: because women have rejected him.
As the person who sent this video to me this morning noted, it sounds almost like a parody of the misogynistic beliefs and rhetoric that I write about on this blog. His language and his melodramatic tone both echo the writings of many of those young men who consider themselves “incels.” His anger is the same anger we see from the rejected men who lash out with insults and threats on OkCupid when their often crude advances are turned down. He reminds me of every so-called “nice guy” who is inwardly seething with resentment born of sexual entitlement denied. He even, at one point, calls himself a “gentleman.” He also calls himself an “alpha.”
It is clear that his resentment at women was stoked by what I call the “new misogyny” and by steeping himself in at least one online community that reaffirmed his exaggerated, unwarranted sense of victimhood. So far we have evidence that he was a commenter at PUAhate, a site ostensibly designed to critique PUAs but which has degenerated into a haven for misogynistic “incels” and angry trolls. I suspect we will find that he was also a reader of, or a commenter at, some of the other sites I critique on this blog.
For those of you who cannot make it through the video — I found it very hard to watch — here is a transcript of what he said.
Hi, Elliot Rodger here.
Well… this is my last video. It all has to come to this.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge against humanity. Against all of you.
For the last 8 years of my life, ever since I’ve hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires. All because girls have never been attracted to me.
Girls gave their affection, and sex, and love, to other men but never to me.
I’m 22 years old and I’m still a virgin. I’ve never even kissed a girl.
I’ve been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin.
It has been very torturous.
College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex, and fun, and pleasure. But in those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness.
It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me.
I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.
It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentlemen.
I will punish all of you for it. (laughs)
On the day of retribution I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB… and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there.
All those girls that I’ve desired so much, they would’ve all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.
I will take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.
You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true alpha male. (laughs)
Yes, after I’ve annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I’ll take to the streets of Isla Vista, and slay every single person I see there.
All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness for all these years, they’ve all looked down upon me every time I try to go out and join them. They’ve all treated me like a mouse.
Well now, I will be a God compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals, and I will slaughter you like animals. I will be a God, exacting my retribution, on all those who deserve it.
And you do deserve it, just for the crime of living a better life than me.
All you popular kids. You’ve never accepted me, and now you’ll all pay for it.
And girls, all I’ve ever wanted was to love you, and to be loved by you. I’ve wanted a girlfriend, I’ve wanted sex, I’ve wanted love, affection, adoration, but you think I’m unworthy of it.
That’s a crime that can never be forgiven.
If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you. (laughs)
You denied me a happy life, and in turn, I will deny all of you life. (laughs) It’s only fair.
I hate all of you, humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power, I would stop at nothing, to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood, and rightfully so.
You deserve to be annihilated. And I’ll give that to you.
You never showed me any mercy, and so I will show you none. (laughs)
You force me to suffer all my life, and now I’ll make you all suffer.
I’ve waited a long time for this.
I’ll give you exactly what you deserve.
I will have more on this as the story develops. My heart goes out to the loved ones of all the victims.
Misogyny kills.
EDITED TO ADD: Elliot Rodger seems to have been a commenter on PUAhate, the anti-PUA message board that is as misogynistic and generally awful as the PUAs it critiques. PUAhate has taken itself offline, so all evidence of this may end up scrubbed. I added a paragraph about this.
I will keep updating as I track down more information on this story. Please post anything you find in the comments as well.
EDIT 2: This will be a NO TROLLS thread. Anything gratuitously argumentative or less than respectful of the victims will be removed.
Oh. I stand corrected.
I compiled all of Elliot Rodger’s comments on PuaHate into a storify here: https://storify.com/NewSecular/elliot-rodger-manifesto-puahate-comments
Yeah, that’s totally the easy way to fame and fortune. /sarcasm
I’d unfriend him too.
I…. dunno. I’ve been in quite a few situations where people have tried to derail conversations of homophobia by talking about how sexist and racist gay men are. I kinda feel a little uncomfortable about the way some people are talking about gay men… it’s crossing the line slightly from “gay men can sometimes be sexist” to “a gay man’s gayness is somehow relevant to him being a jerk.”
Then it’s a good thing that’s not happening here. No one is saying that, but to ignore the misogyny apparent on the part of some gay men is just foolish.
@Ted
Idk. Lots of times white, gay, cis men tend to try to get away with a lot of horrible stuff and then act like it’s homophobia when it’s critiqued.
exs:
1) acting like touching women’s bodies is okay because they aren’t attracted to women
2) using the ‘sassy black women’ stereotype.
3) equating vagina’s with women, and then talking about how gross they are, which hurts both trans men and cis women and nonbinary people with vaginas. (as well as just erasure of trans women.)
/rambes.
It isn’t ignoring that gay men can be sexist to feel weird about someone saying, “A dude did a sexist thing, and also let me mention that he’s gay.” If the gayness is orthogonal to the sexism, why mention it?
Unless there’s a huge movement of people trying to convince everyone that gay men are immune to sexism (which I’ve never heard), I don’t get the importance of telling a bunch of ways that gay guys specifically are sexist.
@marie
I get you, and 1 in particular is something I’ve had to call out myself a few times. The guys who do that are terrible people, though… and that’s why they do it; it’s not because they’re gay.
I just get uncomfortable about saying that one marginalized group is prone to be against another marginalized group. Gay men are often sexist; straight women are often homophobic. Attributing those to the fact that the people are gay or women doesn’t seem helpful at all.
@ted
Uhh because sometimes sexism is different between gay men and men who are attracted to women.
Because sometimes they will try to act like it’s okay for gay men to touch women without permission because they aren’t attracted to them.
So there are people who will say that :/
And there are gay men who will act like critizing their sexism is homophobia.
@Ted
Okay you are fighting a straw man? because nobody is saying it’s cuz they’re gay.
Ted, I think what people are actually trying to say is that being gay isn’t a magic shield that prevents a man from being misogynistic.
@Simon
Thanks for putting those storify compilations together, they make for a fascinating reading. A little ghoulish perhaps, but fascinating none the less.
@tedthefed
For the same reason it’s important to talk about the racism, cissexism, homophobia etc that occurs in feminist circles for white, cis- women. For the same reason it’s important to talk about the sexism, homophobia, cis-sexism etc that occurs in antiracism activist circles by MOC. There is a consistent trend in that group of people that undermines the causes that they are working towards and harms people in a specific, and different, way because of the groups that they belong to. Furthermore, it is extremely important to discuss the ways that members of one marginalized group undermine/oppress members of another marginalized group because it is very common for marginalized people to deny their privileges, and to refuse to stop the harm that they cause because of that denial.
Jessica Valenti’s piece for the Guardian is . . . exactly right.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/elliot-rodgers-california-shooting-mental-health-misogyny
Also, the touching issue really is a thing. I personally am way more comfortable with a gay man being handsy with me than I would be with a straight man doing exactly the same thing, but even so, sometimes people cross the line (grabbing my boobs would be an example of crossing the line), and a lot of women aren’t comfortable with as much handsyness as I am. There’s a weird sort of cultural assumption that women shouldn’t mind gay men being handsy with us because we know they don’t want to fuck us, and while I think that the way we relate to gay men versus straight men really is different (it certainly is for me), there’s still a point where that’s being taken too far, and an assumption that women shouldn’t complain if they feel that line has been crossed, and that if we do we’re being poor sports. Which a lot of women resent. I think that’s what folks were trying to get at.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! This, all of this.
@grumpycatisagirl
thank you for linking that, what great article.
Sorry for the wall’o’text, btw. I need coffee.
I have seen people in other places do this so I get your discomfort, but I don’t think that’s what people are doing here. People are just pointing out that sometimes people who are marginalized in one way but privileged in many others are sometimes prone to fail at intersectionalism. It’s not just white cis gay men who do it. So do some white cis straight feminists. So do some black cis straight men in civil rights movements.
It’s important that we all be good allies and that means calling each other out sometimes.
@drst
So, “all the time” equals ONE example? Couldn’t he think of any others? Because if it happens “all the time,” then that means “ALL the time” and he should be able to think of waaaayyyyy more examples of fake rape than real rape. He should be able to just rattle the names off, like a grocery list.
Good for you for defriending him. Aaaah! Auto-correct changed that to “defending him.” Thank goodness I checked.
@tedthefed
Dude, gay men’s transmisogyny is a thing. Gay men’s misogyny is a thing. And we all should call them out. I’m not demonizing gay men. I’m calling out shitty behavior from men who are often granted automatic ally status in ostensibly progressive communities.
This is horrifying. Seriously, it gets easy to think sometimes that these guys are just whining on the internet and that’s it, and that as awful as they are they wouldn’t be awful enough to actually seriously consider their violent fantasies. We all have fantasies of doing awful things. But then, I guess they don’t seem to make much distinction between the world in their head and the world as it’s playing out before them when they’re making these arguments in the first place, do they? And then something like this happens, and it’s not just ridiculous Saturday morning cartoon villainy anymore. My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the dead and wounded, and the young man’s family who tried to put the brakes on this in the first place.
It sucks, too, because most mentally ill people in my experience really want not to be seen as making excuses due to their illness and not to be stigmatized like this for their problems, and of course now there’s going to be another round of blaming mental illness for all of the things that went wrong in this case. Our access to mental health care should be more robust, yes, but this was an instance where he had that access and the people in his life tried to do what was right and he still killed people anyway. People using this as an excuse to point fingers and say it wasn’t in his hands just…don’t really understand mental illness, I think. Yeah, sometimes it’s hard to make yourself do things or not do things because of those problems, but it INFORMS your actions rather than creating them. There are things you can’t help and things you can. This absolutely was something he could have helped, should have helped, and was probably made aware of in his treatment and decided nevertheless to ignore. He made his own bed there.
Ugh, gonna go watch happy things for a little while.
@tedthefed –
Nah, it’s not so much that people are using misogyny as an excuse to try and say homophobic things about gay men. It’s just that white, cisgendered, affluent gay men – who get the biggest voice in the LGBT movement anyway – use the fact that they’re gay to act as if it’s a magic shield against accusing them of abusing privilege in any way. As others have said, there’s a lot of cases of gay guys groping women or making gross comments on their bodies because “haha I didn’t mean anything by it,” or putting on a sassy black woman act, that kind of thing. That first part is just as much feeling entitled to women’s bodies as it is with straight men, you know? Personally, I’m more welcoming of physical contact from gay men because I enjoy touch and I can be pretty sure it’s mostly platonic on their part, but someone touching my breasts or making intimate gestures without permission is going way too far regardless of gender or orientation. One time a strange boy in the Castro came up and held my hand and walked me a ways down the street on a night of bar-hopping, and we joked around and had a nice time, and it was fine because it was a small and simple gesture I could easily back out of if I wanted to; but if he’d put his arm around my shoulder or something more restricting and/or sexual, you can bet I would have been much more uncomfortable and shoved him away, even though he was pretty clearly gay and out to hit on guys. It’s like that, yeah? Personal space is personal space regardless of whether someone might be interested in fucking me. And some people are definitely not okay with that contact at all, and they deserve to have their wishes respected too.
I’ve also often noticed a feeling among some gay guys that because they aren’t attracted to women, they don’t have to respect women. Hell, I love drag queens but some of them are super shitty people and act out some really ugly prejudices under the excuse of it being just a role they put on. It’s not specifically that these men are gay that makes them misogynist or racist or any number of things – it’s that being gay shapes the way in which that’s acted out, and sometimes they specifically act like they’re immune to criticism for it because they experience prejudice too. It’s frustrating. They deserve to have it called out as much as anyone else would.
@franticcaps, unfortunately it’s only one of a handful, Laurie Penny has said some good stuff as well. But it’s all been comment pieces and none of the mainstream reporting has mentioned it. Disgustingly, the Daily Mail managed to focus more on the hatred of women Rodger displayed than the BBC. The BBC completely ignored the misogyny and instead went on for ages about autism. When the Daily Mail gets it better than the BBC then you know things are messed up.
Here is the Laurie Penny comment piece for anyone who is interested: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/05/lets-call-isla-vista-killings-what-they-were-misogynist-extremism
Are you fucking kidding me!?! JFC, all the people at the BBC responsible for that should punch themselves in the face on the air. FFS. I AM GODDAMN LIVID.
@tedthefed, the bigotry of white gay men specifically is an issue. Many of them use what privilege they have to access the mainstream and achieve this partly by stomping all over others who are oppressed. There are lots of benefits for white, gay cis men for getting access to mainstream society and many are willing to do that and hang everyone else they step on as they climb.
It is an issue for privileged parts of oppressed groups of all kinds, so white women, cis women, men of colour etc. etc. but it is something I have particularly noticed with white gay men, especially when it comes to misogyny. A lot of them are as woman hating as straight men or refuse to understand that being gay doesn’t strip them of male privilege and will throw out accusations of homophobia at women who call them out on it. I’ve seen them throw accusations of homophobia at LGBTQ women when they called them out for misogyny or ignoring their privileges.
Calling out bigotry within groups that are in some way oppressed is not dividing people or setting people against each other.