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.
@brooked, yes it was bloody ridiculous and the issue with the BBC web articles is that the bulk of them don’t allow comments so I couldn’t even call them out on it in the comments.
You’re welcome Ken. Hope Valenti’s article gets read widely.
@cassandrakitty
You said it!
And about the handsyness, after high school, and my harassment there, I went for about 6 months, where I couldn’t stand to be touched at all by my very dear female friends, let alone men. I could be touched by my family, but that was it. And any man, gay, straight, or in between, who grabbed at me in any way, even for a side-hug, became persona-non-grata for me.
This made it very hard for me, because I was at college, where dating was encouraged not only by society, in general, but the church (church-run school), as well. And there were plenty of guys there upon whom I was crushing. But as soon as they crossed that line, the terror kicked in, and that was it! No one was entitled to touch me without my permission. If I’m freaking out, I have darned good reason to, and don’t tell me I don’t have the right, because it’s “not sexual.” It’s still triggering.
Now, I’ve dealt with it, and I can be touched now. But I still hate being grabbed.
Oddly, I never had any problem, whatsoever, with toughing during a dance. Ballroom dancing, even held close, never held any triggers for me. But off the floor? Triggering.
Meanwhile, in my family, we are very huggy, and I always felt completely safe with that.
So, it’s not necessarily who is doing the touching, but how the touch is happening. And telling me that someone has the right to touch me in a way that would be triggering from someone else? It’s not on. The touch is still triggering. And no one gets to dictate to me what my triggers are.
@cassandrakitty
Just me, here, but you have a good posting history, so if I see your name, I’ll read it, anyway.
WWTH – Yeah, intersectionality can be hard. We need to teach each other.
Touchy-feely-ness is an opt-in rather than an opt-out thing, basically. In theory it’s supposed to express warmth and affection and associated fuzzy feelings, so why would you do it to someone who’s visibly uncomfortable with what you’re doing? If you’re not sure if they’re comfortable with it or not, why not ask? And if the answer, either verbal or non-verbal, is no, and your motivations really are warm and fuzzy, then it makes no damn sense to get upset/angry with someone who’d prefer not to be touched. If I, person who tends to cuddle up with my friends and family in something resembling a puppy pile, can understand this, I really don’t see any good reason why other people can’t get it too.
Ohhhh fuck you, Fox News.
OH MY FUCKING GODS I AM GOING TO SCREAM.
Ugh, the comments on the Laurie Penny article. Some of those guys are the perfect illustration of the “fish has no word for water” concept.
TW: involuntary committment
Yeah, idk about Cali, but in my home state you can’t hospitalize someone involuntarily unless they actively want to harm themselves or others more or less right now. So, as I understand it, if Rodgers told the police in my state that he had an elaborate plan for how to kill a bunch of people, but no intention of acting on it, even though he totally had the means, they’d have to leave him be.
There are actual good reasons to make it difficult to involuntarily commit someone, so I’m not entirely opposed to this, but I do feel like the standards should be lower for homicidal ideation vs suicidal.
I think, things like groping are not about desire, but about power.
Gay white cisgender etc men are only one step removed from the base of the privilege tree. Imagine a typical SWM MRA motivated primarily by power, and give him one actual oppressed/minority trait, and he’ll milk it for all it’s worth, kinda like a Wounded Gazelle gambit. So it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to me that some gay men are like that. They’re at the root of the privilege tree within the scope of LGBT.
Besides, if “It’s okay because I’m not attracted to you”, then… why are you doing it?
That is the question, isn’t it? I asked it once of a gay man who’d just grabbed my boobs (why? for what possible reason?) and got sulking, accusations that I was being mean and unfair, and no actual answer.
I am reminded of a great tweet I’ve seen floating around tumblr. It goes something like…
Everyone: I guess we’ll never understand why he did it.
Shooter: I did it because I hate women.
Everyone: I guess we’ll never understand why he did it.
@cassandra
Yeah. It’s just another way of trying to act like women’s bodies are public property :/
Seriously, dudes, women in public spaces are not a fucking petting zoo.
That’s pretty good. Except I feel like it should be more like:
Shooter: I did it because I hate women.
Everyone: Maybe he did it because he’s autistic/mentally ill.
Shooter: I did it because I hate women.
Everyone: Maybe he did it because he’s from a broken home. .
Shooter: I did it because I hate women.
Everyone: Maybe he did it because guns are too readily available.
Shooter: I did it because I hate women.
Fox News: He probably did it because he’s gay.
And then comes that moment when it occurs to you that maybe the reason those people are looking for an alternate explanation is that they’re thinking to themselves, well, I hate women too, and the dude had a point with the stuff he said, but I haven’t killed anyone, so maybe it was because he was gay, because hating women is normal, right?
@cassandra
what you’re saying reminds me of this post on tumblr… (srryi’m sharing lots of links but lots of people say stuff better than me…
@ Fade
Yep, cosigned. People don’t see that misogyny is the cause because misogyny is too normalized.
Sitting in his beamer, at a good school in a first world country, bitching about how shitty his life is and how much he has “suffered”. No wonder women didn’t want to sleep with him, what a fucking creepy little whinger he was. This guy was a spoilt, shitty misogynist with a gun-pure and simple. He wasn’t mentally ill, I’ve met tonnes of entitled, nasty guys like this. Our society breeds them like a fungus.
Hi, y’all. I found this site in the wake of the horrific Santa Barbara shooting. I have a question.
My college-student son has been sucked into some of this manosphere stuff. He is not a deranged, homicidal whack-job like Elliot Rodger…just a good-looking, gregarious GDI at a frat-dominated school who would like to have a girlfriend. (Several girls have pursued him, but he was too unsure of himself to know how to respond. He does have close male friends, and he is generally a happy kid, except when he starts fretting about this manosphere stuff. He has a 3.95 GPA in a demanding double major, history and classics; he’ll be a senior in the fall.)
Anyway–when he talks to me about this stuff, I find it very disturbing, and I think it’s a bunch of hooey, but I don’t know how to respond. What can I say to all that nonsense about 80/20, hypergamy, alpha/beta/sigma/omega blahdeblah, “game,” etc. etc.?
Are their online resources available refuting the hypergamy and alpha/beta myths?
Guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Gaaaa–are THERE, not THEIR, online resources…. I can’t believe I did that. #InnerSchoolmarmFAIL
dianeski, hi, welcome!
My first thought might be the Yes Means Yes blog. It’s not about MRAs specifically, but about rape culture and consent and taking on that nonsense.
I’m sure others will have more and probably better suggestions, though!
For that matter, We Hunted the Mammoth is specifically about taking down and mocking MRAs and their kind. If your son’s not inclined to get defensive about that stuff, he could do worse than read here (though be warned, he won’t get treated gently in the comments if he does push MRA nonsense).
In the meantime, have a Welcome Package. 🙂
dianeski: Welcome. There may be some resources here, and what Kitteh mentioned is a good start for him.
Please don’t use words like “deranged” and “homicidal whackjob.” Rodgers was entitled little shit, which is not in the DSM. Armchair diagnoses are frowned upon here.
Thanks for the welcome, y’all. And sorry for the armchair diagnosis, but…um…don’t you think this kid was just an eensy-weensy bit batshit-crazy?
Nothing is mono-causal. Like y’all, I blame his rabid misogyny. But I do think there were other variables at work, too. There wasn’t just one cause, any more than there was one cause for the French Revolution (despite what my high school history teacher told me ;)).
But leaving that aside…thanks for the tips re resources. I will definitely use them. Thanks again!