When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
On A Voice for Men, for example, Janet Bloomfield (who goes by the name JudgyBitch), notes that Rodger killed more men than women, and thereby declares that
Elliot was an equal opportunity hate monger, torn between wanting to kill women and wanting to kill men. …
Jessica Valenti proclaims that “misogyny kills”, blithely unconcerned with the fact that more men than women were killed. Killing men is misogyny? That’s an interesting interpretation.
Bloomfield ignores the reason more men were killed than women: Rodger’s planned massacre of sorority women failed. He was unable to get inside the sorority house. And so he was forced to improvise.
On Twitter, meanwhile, cultural commenter Cathy Young, long sympathetic to Men’s Righsters, seems to think that Rodger’s rampage was entirely due to “mental illness” and argues that connecting Rodger’s rampage to a wider culture of misogyny is a form of “anti-male hate speech.”
Even more strangely, the proudly racist Steve Sailer – a hero to Heartiste and others in the “alt-right” wing of the manosphere – has declared that Rodger wasn’t motivated by misogyny but rather by “anti-Blondism,” and that his targeting of “ blonde sluts” in a popular sorority house was “an extremely intentional racial hate crime.” Never mind that the half-Asian Rodger idolized blonde women as superior (even as he hated them) and that his comments online are littered with rather crude, rather traditional racism against people who weren’t white.
But Sailer’s claim is little more than an attempt at a derail.
The fact is that Rodger made his misogyny very clear — in his videos, in his internet postings and most of all in his 140-page “manifesto,” which is filled with angry denunciations of women and elaborate fantasies of violent “retribution” towards them. As with many misogynists, his misogyny was largely driven by thwarted sexual entitlement: he desired women intensely but they (wisely) wanted nothing to do with him.
Consider the following passages from his manifesto. I’ve put some of the most disturbing bits in bold.
The most beautiful of women choose to mate with the most brutal of men, instead of magnificent gentlemen like myself. Women should not have the right to choose who to mate and breed with. That decision should be made for them by rational men of intelligence. If women continue to have rights, they will only hinder the advancement of the human race by breeding with degenerate men and creating stupid, degenerate offspring. This will cause humanity to become even more depraved with each generation. Women have more power in human society than they deserve, all because of sex. There is no creature more evil and depraved than the human female.
Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such. … All women must be quarantined like the plague they are, so that they can be used in a manner that actually benefits a civilized society. …
The first strike against women will be to quarantine all of them in concentration camps. At these camps, the vast majority of the female population will be deliberately starved to death. That would be an efficient and fitting way to kill them all off. I would take great pleasure and satisfaction in condemning every single woman on earth to starve to death.
I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds just a little bit like misogyny.
Rodger saw his “Day of Retribution” as part of a war against women. Elsewhere in his manifesto he wrote:
Women’s rejection of me is a declaration of war, and if it’s war they want, then war they shall have. It will be a war that will result in their complete and utter annihilation. I will deliver a blow to my enemies that will be so catastrophic it will redefine the very essence of human nature.
Now, there is no question that he also hated certain kinds of men and boys – the “obnoxious brutes” he so often saw with the “pretty blonde girls” he simultaneously desired and despised. His manifesto is dotted with denunciations of them, as well as with denunciations of humanity as a whole. At one point, he posted a fantasy on PUAhate about killing all the men on earth with a virus so he could have all the women for himself. But he thought about, and wrote about, killing women all the time.
Indeed, even when he was bullied as a youngster, he directed most of his anger not at the bullies themselves but at their girlfriends.
Remembering one bullying incident from high school, he wrote
Some boys randomly pushed me against the lockers as they walked past me in the hall. One boy who was tall and had blonde hair called me a “loser”, right in front of his girlfriends. Yes, he had girls with him. Pretty girls. And they didn’t seem to mind that he was such an evil bastard. In fact, I bet they liked him for it. … The most meanest and depraved of men come out on top, and women flock to these men. Their evil acts are rewarded by women; while the good, decent men are laughed at. … I hated the girls even more than the bullies because of this.
Rodger was not only a misogynist; he was explicitly an enemy of feminism. While he doesn’t seem to have ever identified as a Men’s Rights activist per se – the only “rights” he seemed to be interested in were his own – his postings online echo the extreme and ignorant denunciations of feminism seen amongst MRAs and other manospherians.
This, too, has been denied by Men’s Rights activists. On AVFM, the “non-feminist” would-be “philosopher” Fidelbogen declares that
We have no evidence yet that Elliott Rodger was anything but apolitical in regard to feminism as such. He was not outspoken about feminism … He was only a sexually frustrated chump with mental issues, who apparently “hooked up” with PUA literature, and websites like “the Manhood Academy”.
In fact, Rodger attacked feminism explicitly in a number of comments on PUAhate, where rabid antifeminism is essentially the default ideology. In one comment, he declared bluntly that “feminism must be destroyed.” In another he predicted that
One day incels will realize their true strength and numbers, and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system.
Start envisioning a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.
And while he saw PUAhate itself as “a putrid pit of despair,” he argued that
it does give a view of what the world is really like, what women are really like, and the evils of a feminist society.
Every male should read the posts here so that they can be awakened. There are too many delusional males worshipping women who would only spit in their faces.
There is no question that Rodger was a very disturbed man. I’m not a psychiatrist, nor do I have access to his medical or psychiatric records. But I would not be shocked to find that he was struggling with some sort of mental disorder or disorders. He was seeing several therapists, and a psychiatrist prescribed the antipsychotic Risperidone for him; he refused to take it. This prescription in itself doesn’t prove he was psychotic; psych meds are often prescribed for off-label uses, and Risperidone is also used to reduce irritability in people with autism. (Rodger was reportedly diagnosed as having aspergers.)
But, as someone who has himself dealt with depression for decades, I cannot help but think, reading through his manifesto, that his thinking was, as mine has sometimes been, distorted by depression.
He was also clearly a narcissist, in the colloquial sense if not necessarily in the clinical sense, whose resentment of others was driven by narcissistic rage. And some of his pronouncements, particularly towards the end of his life, were so grandiose it’s hard to know whether these reflected his tendency towards melodrama, fueled by his love of fantasy literature and video games, or if they are symptoms of a delusional disconnection from the real world.
I don’t think, given the considerable evidence there is of his troubled state of mind, that raising these issues detracts from the main point, and that is:
Rodger was a misogynist through and through. In many ways his misogyny was his life. If you watch his videos and read his manifesto, you’ll see that he related anything and everything in his life to what he saw as the grand tragedy of his rejection by “girls,” a state of affairs he blamed entirely on the girls of the world and not on his own “magnificent” self.
He was utterly consumed by his sexual obsession with “pretty blonde girls” and their utter lack of interest in him, and, increasingly, by his elaborate fantasies of “retribution” against them, which ultimately led to his killing spree on Friday night.
To deny that he was driven by misogyny makes as little sense as denying that Hitler was driven by anti-Semitism.
The evidence is as clear-cut as it can be on this point. Anyone who can’t or won’t admit this is either an ideologue or a liar – or both.
—
Thanks to Melody and several other readers for pointing me to some of the examples used in this post.
Yes, you are, asshole. Funny that you say that, then go on to say:
Because people with a mental illness just sometimes go on shooting sprees, right? Wrong. Prove it asshole, link the studies that back this nonsense up.
And going in shooting sprees isn’t a bad thing? Wow, you’re a really creepy asshole.
I think MawBTS meant something like “it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to stigmatize just those mentally ill people who go on shooting sprees”.
Of course, what he wrote still did stigmatize all mentally ill and/or non-neurotypical people anyway.
Incidentally, I don’t actually know of any mentally ill people who’ve gone on killing sprees because of their mental illness.
Oh, please do so.
Monotrollgamy!
@Pear_Tree
“I don’t mean to imply that people with aspergers wouldn’t see killing people as wrong. Rather I consider lying to a figure of authority, in person, about an issue that is emotive to you to be something that requires a high level of social ability.”
I’m able to do it convincingly to anyone who doesn’t know me well…but then I took a few years of acting classes when I was a teenager to help with socialization.
I find the point of view on this thread warped and really, really, reaching. Yes, Elliot Rodger had internalized a lot of misogynist materials he had read. Yes, there are misogynist groups out there on the internet, just like there are homophobic groups, and racist groups, etc. However, the vast majority of these people, though they are spewing vile words and ideas, do not kill people. We can use this opportunity to shine the spotlight on this hateful neer do wells, and bring their crazy out into the light of day.
But, we do not need to minimize the role of mental illness her in order to accomplish that.
It is not stigmatizing people with mental illness to say that many, if not most, mass murderers have mental illness. They may have different fixations or delusions, that come out in their writings or interviews, but what they all have in common is mental illness. I am a mental health consumer and activist, and it is just foolish to deny that some people with mental illness become violent as a result of their illness. That doesn’t mean that we all do. But I do think it gives a serious blow to the argument that involuntary commitment should be opposed. One of the sad features of mental illness is the fact that many people can be very sick with it, and have no insight or idea that they are sick.
“Incidentally, I don’t actually know of any mentally ill people who’ve gone on killing sprees because of their mental illness.” Do the names Jared Laughner, James Holmes, or Adam Lanza ring a bell?
Yes, there were features of misogyny in Elliot’s rampage. But, of all the asshole men’s rights activists in every chatroom tonight, how many of them are going on killing sprees? How many killing sprees have been directly related to women hating speech like this one?
Yes, Rodger planned to kill women. But he also planned to kill his roommates at the group home, fellow disabled men, such as himself. And he also planned to kill his brother and his step mother.
This young man was enraged that he never fit in with other people and the biggest symbol of that was is inability to attract a girlfriend to give him, not only sex, but also social legitimacy. People who’s brains are just wired badly suffer and look for an explanation for their suffering. Most blame themselves, but a few turn that anger towards others. that is what happened with Elliot Rodger.
@vegwell
1. Citation Needed
2 Fuck you and your abelism
Seconding Aylin, but WTF is a mental health consumer? Sounds…vaguely demonic.
I’m just amazed at how many people claim to know things about Rodger that he never actually said, while somehow not believing or noticing the things about himself that he actually did tell us.
BRAINSSS
@vegwell
However, the vast majority of people with mental illness, do not kill people either.
“I could find many examples of crazy feminists doing bad things and crediting feminism.”
oh really?
Could you find one that shoots random people because she hates men?
@mawBTS
“Do you really want to double down on your “mentally ill person is completely sane and it’s his philosophy that’s responsible” position?”
The main problem was ‘his’ philosophy wasn’t unique. Browse the manosphere and you’ll read the same hateful bile a hundred times. It was learned from a series of internet hate groups that operate under the umbrella of the manosphere.
@vegwell
“However, the vast majority of these people, though they are spewing vile words and ideas, do not kill people.”
No, they just encourage others to do it, write articles on how to get away with rape, intimidate and threaten women, and hero worship mass murderers.
Only Adam Lanza, and was his mental illness actually part of the cause? I’ll have to look up the other ones.
George Sodini, Marc Lepine, guy in California who shot 3 women for refusing sex with him
Sadly, I’m sure there are many more. 🙁
@Cassandra and Stevie,
Thank you both for your sympathy and advice. I have only met this man once and barely remembered who he was when he added me on facebook, I don’t think I would even recognise him by sight. I do not and have never considered him a friend, in fact I’m not sure I even had a conversation with him when we met. So yeah, that is immediately creepy that he calls me a “friend”, never mind everything else.
He is on the other side of the country to me, I am at University in the north of england and he is in London where my parents live. So he cannot get to me and does not know where I live. I blocked him on facebook and he has no other way of contacting me.
At least for the moment, my issue is that he attends a martial arts dojo that I go to in London when I am back during the holidays. It does worry me that if I go and he is there he will insist on talking to me and I DO NOT want that! Y’know because when you say to a man “don’t message me” and he replies with “I will message you”, that is kind of scary.
So yes he is a scary man and not a safe person. I have read the Gift of Fear and I am very glad I did, especially in this situation.
I am not quite sure what to do about the dojo, the people there are very kind but I don’t know how they would react of I spoke to them privately and explained that I am not comfortable around him and would like their help in ensuring he does not talk to me. He is a regular member and will have far more social clout than I, who attends only sporadically. But neither do I want never to go back to avoid him.
What is less of an issue is running into him at martial arts tournaments, our martial art is a very small world and that is likely, however I would be attending with people from my university who are my friends and who I can completely trust to act as a buffer or to tell him under no uncertain terms to get lost if he tries to bother me.
However it makes me very sad, as up till now my martial art has been something that gives me joy and a place where I feel safe and happy.
The worst part also is that I am still getting twinges of guilt because this man has autism (this was partly why, apparently, he sympathises with Rodger) but that is my socialisation talking. There was no way he could “misunderstand” what I said, I used my words and completely emphatically clear that he was to leave me alone, not contact me and that I did not want to associate with him. His behaviour cannot be blamed on autism, it can be blamed on male privilege and entitlement.
historophilia – is there anyone at the dojo you could phone, who might listen? It sounds to me like this guy’s the sort of predator who’d have done this stuff before, and if he’s been attending there for a while, what are the odds he’s tried it on other women there? If he has – either the management know and have done nothing, in which case they’re in the shit, or they don’t, and need to know.
I have been following this thread from the dark, but I’m really left speechless by all this. So I’ll just quote what seems to summarize this huge WTF in my brains:
@kittehserf, I’m not sure, part of the issue is that the Sensei who runs it is lovely, but her english is not great and I’m worried that, particularly over the phone, it might be hard to communicate what the issue is. Especially as it’s not actually like he’s, I don’t know straight up assaulted me or anything, or even just been weird in person, it’s solely on the internet.
His behaviour sends up big red flags for anyone well read on these issues and feminists but I’m worried that if I tell them what he’s done they might be like “that is all? what are you worked up about? he’s harmless!’.
I do have one or two friends who attend the dojo, I might try speaking to them and ask if they’ll help me out and act as buffer if he tries anything. Luckily I’m unlikely to go back to the dojo for months so it’s not a problem that will rear it’s head for a while.
My guess is that literally nothing qualifies as misogyny to MRA’s and the MRA-adjacent.
As Shaenon said a few posts above, if Rodger’s “manifesto” doesn’t qualify as misogynist, what the hell does? Pathological loathing of women – usually not specific women, women in general – is saturating almost every paragraph.
I simply cannot fathom how a rational, dispassionate analysis of what he actually wrote, at great length and presumably over a period of some time (since we’re talking many tens of thousands of words) could reach any other conclusion.
And if MRAs don’t want to be associated with him then they should stop posting identical screeds about how they’re “owed” sex but can’t get it because bitchescuntswhores. Because the other thing that leaped out of Rodger’s screed is a depressing and ultimately overwhelming sense of déjà vu (or déjà lu).
Elliot Rodger was not simply a misogynist – it’s much more complicated than that.
His behavior, his writing, all point to narcissism, a very deep rooted narcissism.
I don’t care how ugly or dejected/rejected you are as a person – you do not fantasize equally about killing women and then killing every man on earth.
No body wants to admit the child was displaying psychopathic behavior. Maybe because he was not throwing corpses off the side of a freeway or writing cryptic messages to the Police Department for the FBI to solve, he’s just stereotyping women.
I could understand if he was just one of those suburbia dudes who are intimidated by women having jobs or power outside of standing in a kitchen with a baby squealing on their hips, barefoot in a ratty moo moo dress.
I find it sad, too, that we have gone to the point of near glorification of a person who had obvious problems. I have seen people going off into tirades about feminazis, people not getting their facts straight and not caring enough to correct them, said glorification of some little boy with deep emotional and mental issues, and a world underground world of little boys who think with their penises and not with the brains nestled inside of their skulls.
Yes, it was horrible what this person did, but do we really have to go on and on and on and on and on about him? That’s not to say we have to ignore these issues, but we shouldn’t let them consume us to the point we make these people look like inadvertent ‘heroes’ in the eyes of like-minded individuals who may be compelled to do the very same thing. Just because they haven’t acted upon these impulses doesn’t mean that they won’t, at some future point and time. When one person does something, it might encourage ten more people who didn’t have the nerve to do it to actually commit the same crime.
These people who are deep in the PUA/seduction community have obvious problems that stem deeper than disgusting sexual behaviors. A lot of these ‘men’ (I hate to call them that) are acting on impulse. They are narrow-minded, near-sighted, half-blind, and dangerous. They act more like predators by an African riverbank, waiting to snatch some unsuspecting animal into the deep, dark depths of their depravity. Some of them are pretty ignorant, but there are quite a few who seem to have narcissistic tendencies, i.e. picking on a certain ‘type’ of woman, feeding off of ‘seducing’ women in active relationships to cheat. There was one blog I came across where this person went into great detail about how he manipulated, bullied, and coerced women who were already in active relationships to have sex with him. He was very calculating at it, and that is what makes these people disturbing. Who knows what else they might do.
historophilia
I do sympathise with your concerns about your martial arts dojo; oddly enough, my daughter also comes from London, spent many years studying martial arts here and went off to medical school in the north of England. I know she would have been really disappointed if someone she had trained with had pulled a stunt like this on her, but I also know her mentors would have come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who had failed to display the respect due to ones fellow human beings.
I appreciate that he’s here and you are away, but it is, in fact, a big deal when a practioner of an art fails to understand the most fundamental principle of that art; he isn’t defending himself, he’s attacking you. If he is a senior belt to you then it’s even worse; he’s the person who is supposed to demonstrate by his actions that he deserves that belt. Clearly that part of the art has escaped his attention.
I’m sorry I can’t offer a wonderful plan to get through this; I know how hard it is to give up something you love. On the other hand, if he has not been around for all that long the problem may solve itself; he may demonstrate by his actions in the dojo the sort of craziness he’s tried on you, and be gone by the time you come back for the summer. In the meantime I think you should award yourself some treats- I’m into chocolate but your tastes may differ- for the way you have handled a scary situation; you’ve done exactly the right thing.
One last thought; there are a surprising number of self-diagnosed autistics out there, which means that someone claiming to be autistic may not be telling the truth. They batten on people who are genuinely neuro atypical, as well as everyone else, because they see it as a route to sympathy and a free pass on behavior which would otherwise get them booted out. I really don’t think you need to feel guilt about this guy…
Thank you very much Stevie.
I shall worry about him when and if I go back to that dojo and in the meantime I shall open the packet of chocolate digestives that I just bought.
Just been on the phone to chat about it to my boyfriend as while he meant well he didn’t quite get why I was reacting like this. But he understands now and has apologised and in the process of explaining my thinking to him I helped work through a lot of it in my head and I feel a lot calmer.
This guy is a creep and my gut feeling is that he is not safe and I shall have a think and put together a contingency plan to deal with him if the situation presents itself.
But you’re right about him being a poor representative of a martial artist. I don’t know his grade (I do Kendo, which doesn’t use a belt system so you can’t tell just by looking) but I know he is senior to me. But Kendo places a huge emphasis on the responsibilities of the senior to the junior practitioners and his behaviour utterly fails in that. It is also disturbing that in a martial art, where you are doing things that are potentially very dangerous and require trust and good communication, that he cares so little for consent and boundaries. I would not wish to fence or train with him.
It is a shame as up till now I have only met with good things within my martial art.
Not “craziness”, please, Stevie. Using that word to discribe unpleasant and abusive behaviour is ableist.
I should have read my draft more carefully before posting it; my apologies for using the term ‘craziness’ when I should have found a better one. The best I can come up with at the moment is ‘abusiveness’, so the sentence would read:
‘He may demonstrate by his actions in the dojo the sort of abusiveness he’s tried on you…’