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.
He hated his roommates because one or more of them had sex and because they had the nerve to complain about some of his behavior. He was going to target his little brother (poor kid) because the brother was going to eventually have sex with one of Those Girls he deserved.
He hated women because they were women.
I have managed to read his 130+ page screed. He can recall and dwells on dozens of slights he felt in his childhood. He categorizes them. He knows and recounts the names of bullies for such crimes as looking at him funny. He talks about throwing crying fits over not getting his way repeatedly. He gives up on anything that requires more than a very limited amount of practice. He drops college courses and quits jobs after a few days or weeks because they are beneath him. He hates complete strangers for having a boyfriend, for being pretty, for not automagically becoming his girlfriend.
You know what he doesn’t do? Talk to girls. Never mind he doesn’t ask girls out- he doesn’t talk to them. He can manage, barely, to interact with a handful of guys. But it just goes on and on about he’s being rejected and despised by girls and women, denied the sexy times he is owed- but he doesn’t seem to think it might be helpful to talk to them.
He doesn’t hate women because they rejected him. He hated women for being women.
Only a dude could say shit like this with a straight face. Yo, brosef, your privilege is showing.
Note to self: never get mainpaged on WordPress.
Tracy — made sense to me! Something like “man risks life to save baby” (headline), and then the story details how he’s struggled with suicide and was thus willing to risk his life, but became a hero. Or “how a bipolar woman cured cancer!”…cuz she was seriously manic and thought she could, but lo and behold, she actually did! “PTSD hyperviglience saves hundreds when bomb is spotted!”
Yeah, instead it’s always “despite”, like…Van Gogh produced masterpieces despite his mental illness. Um, one could EASILY argue that that’s a because, not a despite.
(I refuse to involve myself in playing whack a troll with the ableism)
Holy shit, are those lying ass feminists saying that misogyny exists again?
How dare they!
There is no evidence of any such thing!
*realizes where she is*
Oh…that’s right. It is a thing that exists and claiming that women talking about their lived experiences of misogyny is “hate speech” is ridiculously misogynist.
No, dudebro, no. Don’t try to pull that shit. The people calling out bigotry are not the “real” bigots.
Seriously, did somebody put several gallons of stupid in the drinking water?
His misogynistic and racist motivations are crystal clear, and there is no evidence that he was mentally ill, and even if he was mentally ill, he still chose to act from misogyny.
Mentally ill people are just as capable of being misogynists and racists as people who aren’t mentally ill. Plenty of mentally ill people recognize the wrongness of misogyny and racism. And while mental illness can obviously make one’s thoughts different from another’s thoughts, there is no mutual exclusivity between the beliefs and behavior of mentally ill people and those of people who aren’t mentally ill. This is basic stuff which should not need explaining, but you’re a disablist shithead so I guess you do need the explanation!
What the fuck are you talking about? He shot the men because a. they were people of color and b. Rodger perceived many of those men as unworthy of those women he himself wanted to possess and control.
You know what’s actually disrespectful of victims? Scapegoating mentally ill people for the sake of ignoring systemic factors that cause this suffering.
Don’t you dare say shit about respect while disrespecting mentally ill people. Fuck off.
Whatever helps you sleep at night. The vast majority of men I know are absolutely terrible people who are very much in favor of a system that objectifies and dehumanizes women.
The MRAs brought themselves to disrepute a long time ago you ableist fuckwit.
Mental illness caused this man to go on a murder spree and feminists are all mentally ill?
I see.
That’s some weapons grade wrong you got there.
No women ever invented anything. And the legal system is not the cash-and-prizes giveaway to women that you think it is. Again, how does it feel to have everything set up for you?
Like the MRM needed help bringing disrepute. They do that fine on their own.
Tell us more about how you aren’t a misogynist, butthurt whiny bigot. It’s fascinating to hear just how not an awful bigot you are in your own words. They say so much that we could not.
Really.
It is fascinating.
The macabre always is.
What the fuck are you talking about>
Truth. And I’m sorry that it’s true for you, Ally.
“Consult numerous studies,” eh?
I mean, it’s not like the World Health Organization found that 35% of women worldwide have experienced physical and/sexual violence, that most of this violence is commited by an intimate partner, most of it commited by men. It’s not like WHO comes to the conclusion that promoting gender equality and ending discrimination against women will go a long way towards ending this violence, sorta like what feminists are saying.
Its not like the American Bar Association found that:
But, no, obviously, there’s no such thing as misogyny and women as a group have absolutely nothing to fear from men as a group.
@spinning for difficulty
Well at least your name ia accurate bc that whole wasteful screed was so much spin.
For one thing no just no. Law enforcement was certainly not established to protect women, not in any country on earth. Also even if women weren’t around men STILL would’ve invented all the things they did. Oh and what hellkell said.
@cloudiah
On my local NPR this am they take a moment every friday to speak with this woman from the Making Sense of the Media project and the discussion was about rodgers videos and manifesto and what the medias journalistic duty was in disseminating them. The NPR guy asked this leading question about whether sharing rodgers stuff would lead ppl to come to the wrong conclusions to which the woman responded by saying the media does a disservice to the public when material like rodgers is shown without context. This really burned me up bc the question seemed to imply that taking rodgers at his word, that he did it bc he hated women, may not be the correct takeaway from his videos/manifesto. Ironically the media is also pushing the mental health angle and the gun issue which burns me up even more. Especially since this dude WAS seeing multiple doctors. And he bought his guns legally. I am no gun fanatic but I am not a fan of the idea that someone with any form of autisc should ever he denied the right to purchase a firearm merely bc of said diagnosis.
I love how MRAs and ppl who think like them suck at logical debate.
No. 1 if its not about you its not about you! I simply cant relate to ppl who defend something, anything, if it does not reflect them in some way. Thats why I find “not all men” to be silly beyond reason. Too defensive the lot of em. And whiny and apparently clueless about the reality for women despite 1000s of women tweeting on #yesallwomen. I really think they just dont care. It doesnt affect them,they know this and probably deep down are all phew.
No.2 absence of mentioning something does not mean we dont believe it exists. It means it isnt related to the topic at hand. That is why derailing is a thing. I have never been in a forum where the topic is gender, usually relating to women, where it wasnt flooded by doods claiming “but women do that too waaaah” yeah jag off we know women are capable of doing horrible things, bc surprise!, theyre human!
Whenever I am in a forum and an mra inevitably comes along spouting inane nonsense usually all I hear is ” she’s trying to control me!” Actually I’ve come to find, in general, this is an unreasonable concern that A LOT of men seem to have. Has anyone noticed that? Is that also a byproduct of how we learn gender? Because that belief is central to how a lot of men view sex. She was wearing a lowcut top to make me want her! Then when she rejects me I get angry bc she wanted me why else would she dressed like thatso how dare she reject me? Or men who have complained about what women they work with wear – one guy tried to tell me that women couldnt possibly understand bc men cant help but think of sex when they see a woman. Will men EVER understand that wanting to feel sexy is NOT the same as wanting sex? Or even wanting attention for that matter but that is exactly what we raise our boys to tthink. Thus what a woman is wearing becomes part of rape culture.
One more thing in this lil rant here. I wish the “not all men” dudes would engage in just a little self introspection regarding their immediate defensiveness to the discussion women so clearly want tohave bc they seem not to understand is that they are so defensive bc throughout pretty much all of history it has only been the last 10 yrs or so where they have been receiving criticism about the way theythink, act and talk which is something women have dealt with forever. Criticism is “new” for them and thus rocks their entitled world in which they are constantly overestimating their abilities. I said it before, but bears repeating, most guys who make MRA arguments firmly believe that the sexes are diff in most ways and the ways they are diff are bc of biology. They actually believe all the things society hates most about men are innate especially as it relates to sex. THAT is at the crux of all their defensiveness. They also believe all the things society hates most about women is innate and that is why they think so horribly of women bc she cant hell but be immoral blahblahblah.
I think I just ninja’d myself bc I had one more thing to add.
Their defensiveness, as an offshoot of what they believe about the sexes and biology is EXACTLY why they keep blaming us for hating men, manliness, masculinity even when the criticisms are valid. They REALLY believe this is just how men are thus boys will be boys.
Well, most people base their idea of what’s normal on what’s normal for them, right? Especially privileged people who’ve never been forced to see things from someone else’s perspective. So when they act like being a rapist is normal, or wanting to beat the shit out of women is normal, what they’re doing is a. telling us about themselves and b. projecting that sense of normal-for-them onto men as a whole.
This is also why when women recoil in horror from them, because they’re unable to conceal the seething rage they feel towards women or don’t even see why they should try to, they interpret that as a sign that women recoil in horror from all men, hence the belief that misandry is a thing.
Adding to that: because of course there’s something wrong in recoiling from someone who feels violent rage toward you. It’s so unreasonable to do that!
From their perspective it is unreasonable, because that’s just how men are, which women should understand, hence it’s misandry when it makes us recoil rather than asking them what we can do to make the boo-boo of the day feel better.
For our ‘statistically’ troll, nathansach:
As a math and stats geek, I find the throwing about of ‘statistically’ highly offensive. Not nearly as offensive as people insisting that a mass murderers stated intentions have nothing to do with what they did, but I digress.
People like you are why the phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics” exists.
No, ratio of the genders of those murdered by this evil and entitled slime ball were not ‘significantly different’, ‘statistically’ speaking.
We know that for the point sample, he murdered more men than women. We also know he was denied the target he really wanted, and shot at a bunch of people at different locations. However, to say it’s significant, we’d have to show that it’s significantly different than if he went and just shot at a bunch of people, randomly.
So, what we really want to know is, “Could he have killed these proportions of people, at random?”
Since you brought up “More men than women, statistically speaking”, we have to test the null hypothesis of
Then, our alternate hypothesis is
Rodgers the murdering slime killed 4 young men and 2 women, each of whom deserves so much more than just being remembered as his victims. That means the sample proportion of men murdered is 2/3.
Using a binomial test, which assumes the population of potential victims is randomly assorted between male and female at a ratio of 1-1, we get a resultant p-value of 0.3437, meaning that for any reasonable alpha, we cannot reject the null hypothesis.
Let me repeat that in more accessible language:
This analysis does have some flaws.
Our victims weren’t randomly assorted, because they were people, choosing where they wanted to go and who they wanted to go with. They weren’t just little data points, with cute independence between each other. They were people.
Our killer didn’t move randomly. His success and aim might have been random, based on the number of people he shot at, accounts of his misses, and the people injured but not killed, who weren’t considered here.
We don’t know the names and genders of the injured. We didn’t account for them. They matter, too.
Oh, and we have a small sample. Technically, our sample is large enough, barely. You have no idea how I hate that he actually killed enough people for me to say we have a large enough sample size. Damn it.
No one should ever murder enough people to give me a damned sample size large enough for analysis.
No one should ever murder. ,Damn it, damn it, damn it!
So, troll who thinks that, ‘statistically speaking’, he killed more men than women, no. We can’t say he wasn’t just shooting anyone he could. We can’t say he was targeting men.
We can say, from the evidence of his own awful bloody manifesto and videos that he was motivated by his hatred of women and his hatred of men with more ‘success’ with women than him.
He thought he was superior.
We can say he targeted women, at first, by his choice of his primary target. He wasn’t let in, and rampaged from there.
He was an evil, misogynistic, misanthropic piece of slime, who wasn’t above murdering others for the ‘crime’ of existing independent of him.
He wasn’t an “Equal opportunity hate monger”. Maybe an “Equal opportunity bloody murderer, after his plans to shoot up a sorority house where mostly women tend to be were bloody thwarted by some of his victims.
I feel sick just thinking about it. I feel sick looking over at my calculations, and seeing the numbers. These people weren’t just numbers. Dammit!
There are two links, for those that want them. These are the people that he murdered, condensed down to a couple paragraphs, each. They were more than just a couple paragraphs. They are more than just a prop for people to rant that ‘But he killed more men than women’.
That doesn’t freaking matter. He murdered people. He wrote a manifesto. He shared his hatred. He shared his entitlement. I tried to listen, and tried to read, and it was just too sickening.
Hell yes, his misogyny matters. Anything that he laid claim to and used to justify this atrocity to himself bloody matters. If this opens peoples eyes to the sheer hatred out there, then that will be the only good thing to come from a damned ocean of badness.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/names-faces-elliot-rodger-victims-article-1.1805488
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/UC-Santa-Barbara-Students-Killed-in-Isla-Vista-Rampage-260775671.html
Sorry, to every non-troll out there. This rant’s been building for a while, through the other trolls. It was just too much, this time. Limit reached, ability to just be ridiculous to stop the tears, gone.
Trolls, no apologies to you. Go be awful somewhere else. Come back when you’ve figured out how to be decent humans.
Yes, and of course it’s totally outrageous to suggest that recoiling from violent hateful people who want to rape or kill you is just how women are, and men should really accommodate that.
Amazing, innit. Men are the great heroes, the inventors, the wonderful brainy brainz ones, women are the mere animal fuckmachines – yet somehow it’s men who have these natural brutal instincts they can’t possibly overcome with their superior manbrains, while women manage to go against our natures all the time.
Also, fight or flight! When trolls come here to scream and rage at us and they refuse to leave, they have removed the “flight” option, so “fight” is all that’s left. So really, isn’t it a bit unfair to call us mean meanypants bullies who are very mean? After all, fight or flight is one of the most basic instinct patterns of all.