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.
What I have learned from Spinning For Difficulty: Bullets are magical and go exactly where the shooter wants them to. Therefore, the people who are shot are just exactly who the shooter wanted to shoot, and this all has nothing to do with chance or opportunity or any silly feminist concepts like that. Killing six people means you are insane. If one fewer person had been seriously wounded instead of killed, we’re not sure what that means, but Spinning certainly would have had an opinion on it. People who have hatred towards a group are only ever and always violent towards that group, because people who are consumed by hatred, unlike everybody else, always express themselves in a perfectly logical manner. That about right?
Shiraz:
If it makes you feel any better, this made me giggle over coffee.
@spinning for difficulty
More spinning I see. White folk need to stop with that “black people are a threat to white people” nonsense. Here’s an exhaustive statistical analysis to show how conservatives dont understand jack about crime.
http://www.timwise.org/2013/08/race-crime-and-statistical-malpractice-how-the-right-manipulates-white-fear-with-bogus-data/
You are literally too stupid to insult.
No, he wanted to kill men as well from the start. It’s just that his main target was college women.
Also, seriously, shut the fuck up about mental illness. YOU HAVE NO FUCKING EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THAT CLAIM SO JUST FUCKING STOP JESUS FUCKING CHRIST IS IT THAT MUCH TO ASK YOU DISABLIST SHITHEAD
:: breathes deeply ::
Intragroup violence is very common among male supremacists, white supremacists, etc. It doesn’t cancel out their own bigotry. If you knew anything about bigotry functions in society you would know this. Just because they benefit from the social privilege doesn’t mean that they care about helping anyone else in their privileged position.
Also, in case it’s not blatantly obvious to you yet, Rodger was also racist. His first victims were men of color. So he was killing the men mainly out of racism, not misogyny.
Also, drop the disingenuous false equivalencies. They aren’t fooling anyone, dipshit.
What Ally S. said, and also:
The point that seems to escape those who wish to claim that misogyny was not a huge motivator for Rodgers is that he started from a position of seeing women as things, things to have or not have. It led him to try to kill women and those who “had” women. But when you view the acquistion of women and sex from women in much the same way that you do the acquisition of money – and he did; he wanted money (from the lottery) to drop into his lap without effort, and he wanted women to do the same – you are misogynistic. It is that simple and not difficult to grasp; why do we have to keep pointing it out?
SfD,
What nearly everyone else said. You are being an awful, awful person. Pleases go away.
Come back when you get a grip on why claiming evil people must be insane, because only insane people are evil is so awful.
Also, if you can’t conceptualize why misogyny can hurt men, please think seriously about the examples presented here of other hateful people killing victims not in their specific hated group. I know they’re really, really hard to think about, because of how awful they are, but please, do it.
Also, stop pretending we hate all men. Good grief.
Please don’t come back until you stop spinning just to be difficult, ableist, and hateful.
Why, because women are things, and one doesn’t listen to what things have to say to actual people, does one?
::hurl::
What pisses me off the most about SFD to be honest is that he insists that “mentally ill” people and people who don’t have mental disabilities have mutually exclusive thoughts. What kind of bullshit is that?
Okay, I don’t know if you’ve read ER’s manifesto/autobiography of personal anguish and hatred, but I’m doubting it at the moment. I have, and I’ve come to different conclusions.
[MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING: quotes and some description of scenarios in ER’s manifesto below. Though I’ve tried to sanitize as much as I can, it’s still awful]
In his manifesto, ER laid out his plans *and his motives* plainly. He murdered his roommates because he was planning to use his apartment as a torture chamber/abattoir (and of course your housemates would get in the way of this kind of plan, y’know?). He said he was going to lure people in there and dispose of them, by hand, as cruelly as he could. “The first phase will represent my vengeance against all of the men who have had pleasurable sex lives while I’ve had to suffer. Things will be fair once I make them suffer as I did. I will finally even the score.”
After that was done, he was going to go the sorority house, shoot as many happy, pretty girls as he could, and then torch the place if he had the time. “The Second Phase will represent my War on Women. I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex. They have starved me of sex for my entire youth, and gave that pleasure to other men. In doing so, they took many years of my life away. I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can dliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts.”
Then he was going to go to his dad’s house and kill his long-suffering stepmother and his poor little brother because “It is very unfair how some boys are able to live such pleasurable lives while I never had any taste of it, and now it has been confirmed to me that my little brother will become one of them. He will become a popular kid who gets all the girls. Girls will love him. He will become one of my enemies.”
The drive-by shooting and smashing part of his plan was supposed to be the climax of it all. He would take out as many random people as he could before he ended with a distribution of trophies from his earlier kills and his own suicide.
Did his plans go exactly the way he wanted? Obviously not, but you can see that he stuck to some of his outline; only ER knows why he didn’t decided to kill even more people in the comfort of his apartment, and why he skipped his plan to visit vengeance on his dad’s second family. Did he want to kill guys as well as girls? Sure, but he gave us his rationale for those decisions:
“The males deserve to be punished for living a better and more pleasurable life than me, and the females deserve to be punished for giving that pleasurable life to those males instead of me.”
“I desired girls, but girls never desired me back. There is something very wrong with that. It is an injustice that cannot go unpunished.”
He had desires for sex, human connection, and above all, status. ER believed that women were the key to achieving what he wanted, and when they didn’t enthusiastically throw throw a happy life at him as a reward for breathing, he got angry. Angry at men, too, because they were thieves who stole his birth right. He was *furious* at the female half of our species, because “women represent everything that is unfair with this world, and in order to make the world a fair place, they must all be eradicated.”
Dude, do you really want to argue that he didn’t hate women?
WAAAY TL;DR – ER told us exactly what he wanted to do, and why he wanted to do it. I just listed quotes. Why do so many people want to ignore this? Because he failed in the execution of his plan? Because he was under care of mental health professionals, and getting mental health care somehow erases all rational thought and agency? Because it’s easier to throw mentally ill people under the bus than admit that, yes, there really are people who blame women for all their problems and feel perfectly justified in hurting them – and the people they love – as retribution? Nuts to that. When someone tells you who they, are believe them.
Interesting conversation. I see comments on both sides pouring abuse on each other and wonder; if they had knives and guns and an SUV it they would be cutting and shooting and running over each other? The hate I see thrown back and forth is not at all unlike the hate expressed by ER. I’m not perfect and I have strong feelings too, so maybe we should all take a look at ourselves and what we write and see of it is really safe lobbing our stones in this big glass house.
@gdgdurden
Get off your high horse.
@boring ableist troll who’s name is a mash up of letters that I’mnot going to bother to spell
Yeah, you keep being convinced of that, without any evidence, you piece of shit.
God it’s like why are ableist shitheads drawn so hard to this thread?
1. This man was so misogynistic that he went on a gun rampage to specifically murder women.
2. His plans to murder only women were thwarted
3. So as a last resort he changed his plans and ended up murdering more men instead.
Which is consistent with what happened. Or are you saying that he wouldn’t have killed anyone had he gotten past the door of the sorority?
MRA Logic:
P: Dude makes a plan. P: Attempts to carry out plan. P: Is thwarted.
Conclusion: It wasn’t really his plan.
1. Misogynists do not murder men, just as vegetarians do not slaughter cows.
Have you heard of PETA?
racists do not persecute their own race
Ever heard of “The Order”.
terrorists do not buy their enemy flowers
Pehaps not, but I have seen them apologise for “needing” to kill innocent people to make their point.
So far you’ve taken three swings, and missed three times, back to the bench for you.
2. If he had claimed, before going on his killing spree, to be from the planet Zarkon on a mission to wipe out the human species, that does not mean he actually is from the planet Zarkon….. it just means he has serious mental health issues
There are two failures of “logic” here. 1: He didn’t claim a counterfactual as his basis. He claimed to hate women. There is nothing to indicate he had any ulterior motive in writing 140 pages about that hate, nor in the (voluminous) other writings, video-postings, interactions with his friends, to contradict this conclusion.
2: Anecdotally I know one person who believes himself to be a member of a non-terran race of people. I know several people who think they are of some-non-human race of terrestrial creatures/fanstastic beings. These are not the sort of “serious” problem you imply in your statement. They are decidely not a menace to themselves or others.
3. His actions reveal that he was not really a misogynist, he was just a deranged and violent lunatic with serious mental health issues.
4. We know he had serious mental health issues because people of sound mental health do not go on a killing spree because they can’t get a girlfiend
No true Scotsman, married to question begging. Tres cliché.
5. We know he was not a misogynist because he murdered more men than women, and because he was a deranged gunman with mental health issues (see point 4)
See reply above. We know he was a misogynist because he said so, long and loud. That he was a crappy planner, inept killer and all around somewhat less than logical thinker doesn’t mean he wasn’t a misogynist.
It just means that in the same way he couldn’t see the problem wasn’t women (and actively resisted seeing this simple fact); and didn’t deal well with not being catered to, he didn’t have any way planned to carry out his scheme if the women in the primary target refused to just let him in to carry out his movie-plot attack.
To use the actions of a mentally deranged person to try to demonise all men is absolutely disgusting behaviour.
Good thing no one is doing that. I’m a man. I am not offended in the least by people saying misogynists are assholes. I’m not offended by them saying this dude killed people because he was a misogynist (of a particularly virulent and violent stripe).
I am not offended because while I am not a misogynist. So the critque doesn’t fall on me.
I was an Army interrogator. Some soldiers commit atrocious acts in war. Some committed atrocious acts in the war I took part in. Some did it while I was in theater. Some of them were soldiers I knew.
And when when someone condemns those soldiers who committed atrocities I don’t get bent out of shape and say, “OMG, they hate all soldiers,” unless, of course, someone does say that, which I have seen. I also been asked, “So how many people did you torture?”
BUt since that’s not happening here I have to wonder why you are so offended. IS there something you aren’t telling us? Perhaps there is.
That is how twisted, hateful and disgusting [my] arguments are. I won’t even take a person’s last words as being indicative of what they believe, because it makes misogynists like me look bad.
FTFY
marie: God it’s like why are ableist shitheads drawn so hard to this thread?
Because that ableism absolves them not only of passive complicity, but of any need to examine what they might do which supports societal misogyny.
And that’s for the people who aren’t active misogynists.
It’s easier to see from up here on this horse.
gddurden Interesting conversation. I see comments on both sides pouring abuse on each other and wonder; if they had knives and guns and an SUV it they would be cutting and shooting and running over each other? The hate I see thrown back and forth is not at all unlike the hate expressed by ER. I’m not perfect and I have strong feelings too, so maybe we should all take a look at ourselves and what we write and see of it is really safe lobbing our stones in this big glass house.
Ooh… A spock-droid. A clueless one to boot (but aren’t they all?).
You, my good man, are confused. You think that anger at fools, bigots, liars, and charlatans is the same as the hate which the misogynists, and their apologists are pouring out.
You are wrong.
You also think that being angry about hate is bad. Sorry, it’s not. For all that I wish the world were full of comity, and that reason alone would sway people to being better to each other, so we could “all just get along”, the Messiah hasn’t come yet (and I’m not gonna hold my breath while I wait).
I have to assume that people who apologise for Rodger, that people who dismiss his stated motive, that people who cheer his actions, and encourage others to emulate him, have an animus against women.
Maybe they haven’t realised it. Maybe they have acquired some blinkered ideas about “how women are” from someplace outside their own experience (oh, I don’t know, from a film where a man says, “”only birds get breast cancer”?, as if women were some alien species to men), but their hostility to the plain facts means they aren’t willing to see the huge amounts of misogyny which is present in society.
And when they insult people who do see it. When they slag attempts to make the world more equitable by accusing those who do of “hating men”, well contempt isn’t out of line.
But if you want to coddle assholes, and be polite to them, and pretend they aren’t assholes and allow them to shit on the rest of the world… go ahead.
But I’m gonna treat you like an asshole. Because you are telling me that the assholes deserve to be handled gently as they shit on everyone.
So, according to Spinning for Difficulty’s logic… (if it can really be called that)…
If a white racist, who spent lots of time on racist forums and wrote a racist manifesto, went on a killing spree in which he targeted white men in interracial relationships, and his manifesto clearly outlined that he was killing them for being race traitors, we wouldn’t be allowed to talk about his racism because he killed white people. Especially if that white racist had ever in his life been in therapy.
Not only wouldn’t we be allowed to talk about his racism, and what a toxic environment is being promoted by those racist forums, and how those attitudes are often mirrored and supported in media and culture, but we’d be the real bad guys for even bringing it up.
Yeah, I’m not really seeing the logic there.
Sorry if I’m repeating anyone, I haven’t read through all the newer comments.
*bangs head on wall* yes dear, I’m sure if I had my license I’d go around shooting random men cuz they might be misogynists. Or something. I’m not sure your point really.
Things that annoy me, besides those expounded on in detail already: the assumption that he hit exactly who he was aiming for, and with the desired degree of lethality. It’s hard enough to shoot moving targets in the first place, to shoot them while you’re also moving AND ensure fatal shots on only the ones you intend to? We’re into sharpshooter terrority here, and except for military elite, I doubt many of them could manage it if you swap “target” for “person”.
Where am I going with this? The genders of the people he killed say a hell of a lot less about his motives than knowing the genders of who he was aiming at would (if he was aiming at all by that point). Seeing how he can’t answer that, we’re left with his manifesto and video, which, quite clearly, say he was out to kill women.
cloudiah: You aren’t repeating. You are finding other ways of illustrating the world-class failure of logic which is SfD’s oeuvre.
Given the amazing levels of fail in his post, it would be incredible were we to have run out of ways to demonstrate it.
And yours was very good.
Wow, pecunium, did you just issue a manifesto?
And according to gdgdurden, if one set of people are saying hateful/bigoted things, and another set of people critique them, sometimes angrily, both sides are equivalent. The NAACP & SPLC are just as bad as the Aryan Nation folks!
Yup, not really seeing the logic there either. Especially since misogyny/racism/bigotry are actually frequently correlated with violence (as in multiple times/day), whereas critics of bigotry are rarely associated with violence.
And now, because ER wrote something long, and pecunium wrote something (much shorter but still kind of) long, they have both written manifestos. pecunium is clearly a mass murderer! (How he finds the time with all of his other hobbies and interest, I’ll never know.)
Note to gdgdurden: Why don’t you spend a little time actually reading and trying to understand what pecunium wrote? It’s only 9 paragraphs if you remove the one quoting you.
“Wow, pecunium, did you just issue a manifesto?”
*dies laughing* oh boy, if pecunium ever writes a manifesto it will 1) be WAAAAYYY longer than that and 2) be substantially above your reading level.
And probably be about growing your own fruit trees and using the fruit in mead, or something.
Pecunium — speaking of plants, your African violet is in my window. Broke down the terrarium after your wedding and it’s doing just fine out in the open. 4″ pot currently, but I’d make room for a 6″+, things getting big and will be yours next time I see you.
…you open your wedding gifts yet? ^.^
Lotta human kindness in here. You guys go on with your party, and make certain, DEAD certain, that nobody with a dissenting opinion spoils it. Time for me to get out of Mom’s basement and go play in the sun.
dgdurden: Wow, pecunium, did you just issue a manifesto?
No
BUt I can see how a guy who writes just shy of 1,000 words to admit he has no clue about how to solve any of the problems Rodger’s attack points up; before moving on to more than 3,000 words about watching movies in France might be confused by the pointedness of 286 telling him he’s a fucking idiot.