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.
“RE: Jules
I’m just trying to figure out why expectations like these are wrong. Unless it ends with a crime such as rape, violence or murder
LIKE ELLIOT RODGERS. You know, the dude this post is about? The guy who MURDERED PEOPLE? Hello?”
Someone already mentioned here he was an extreme case. So both men and women expecting a better partner end up with men wanting to murder women more? I fail to see how.
What LBT said. Women aren’t things and you should never feel entitled to “having” one. Don’t equate a relationship with another human being to money and things. That’s exactly what we are talking. It is not very common for women to think of men as things we acquire. It happens, but it isn’t typical.
We are socialized to believe that if we are rejected it means we did something wrong. Men are socialized to believe that we reject them, we have done something wrong.
Are you admitting that you think women have a moral or ethical obligation to have sex with you if treat her nicely or spend money on her?
That is entitlement and it is wrong. Women aren’t sexual vending machines. We have our own desires and tastes. We have our own opinions on whether or not we feel a connection or compatibility with a man.
Sorry this comment is so heteronormative. Jules doesn’t seem to grasp that anything else exists.
Yes.
Yes. Religion can uphold patriarchy, yes.
The average man makes more money and has more power than the average woman. The average man is taken more seriously than the average woman. The average man doesn’t fear for his safety the way the average woman fears for her safety.
o_O Rape is an example of how men feel entitled to women.
Do i even want to check out this thread, or is the troll to boring/awful to bother?
”
Are you suggesting that mens entitlement justifies their rape? I’m sure for some it does. Im sure entitlement justifies murder for some as well.
Actually, male entitlement and toxic masculinity are behind a lot of the violence out there today. Who kills? Who kills in the largest numbers? Why do they kill? Scratch down, dig deeper. The poison of this insidious doctrine digs deep into everything.”
Of course but what is the reasoning here? Males in every primate specie are similar. How do you justify that?
Fade: Too boring to bother.
Fade: Troll is boring and awful.
Oh, and sorry, to thread: The traditional concept of marriage is a product of patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean all marriages/commitments/partnerships are patriarchal and oppressive! I’m sorry, I should have been more specific.
Jules:
Prove it with citations.
Of course you fail to see how. It’s not about men or women wanting to meet a nice person and have a relationship. It’s men feeling like they have an absolute right to sex and attention from women, and the. Reacting violently when women turn them down.
Thanks for the answers, everybody 🙂
Class privilege is a different topic. Men have male privilege no matter what their socioeconomic status is. Stay on topic.
Are men more pressured to marry than women?
However, wives do a bigger share of housework than husbands. This is true even in households where both works.
After a divorce, despite popular MRA belief the husband typically sees his standard of living rise while the wife’s standard of living falls.
When a couple has kids the mother is more likely to take time off and slow down her career than the father. This keeps women’s earning potential lower than men’s.
It’s a huge risk for a woman to get married and kids. There is nothing wrong with a woman choosing to do those things but it is a risk and it is something a woman should choose freely with no societal or familial pressure. It is far less of a risk for a man to get married and kids. The only things he has to give up are late nights partying with friends. Otherwise his body and career can carry on as before and he gets a live in housecleaner and cook in the bargain.
” I’m sorry but women dont do this? How can he go for her not me?
I fail to see the difference in entitlement here. Also dont we all feel entitled to better everything? Better jobs, money, house etc. Isn’t that a human quality?
What LBT said. Women aren’t things and you should never feel entitled to “having” one. Don’t equate a relationship with another human being to money and things. That’s exactly what we are talking. It is not very common for women to think of men as things we acquire. It happens, but it isn’t typical.”
I didn’t mean they were. I meant wanting to improve ones life. As in be with a woman you find more interesting and like minded. Also I meant both sexes striving for that.
“We are socialized to believe that if we are rejected it means we did something wrong. Men are socialized to believe that we reject them, we have done something wrong.”
Ok, I will take that as fact however, more women reject men so true or not I dont see most women caving into this.
” I’m just trying to figure out why expectations like these are wrong. Unless it ends with a crime such as rape, violence or murder almost everyone has some sense of entitlement.
Are you admitting that you think women have a moral or ethical obligation to have sex with you if treat her nicely or spend money on her?”
That is entitlement and it is wrong. Women aren’t sexual vending machines. We have our own desires and tastes. We have our own opinions on whether or not we feel a connection or compatibility with a man.
Sorry this comment is so heteronormative. Jules doesn’t seem to grasp that anything else exists.”
No, you are putting words in my mouth. I used the word expectations not entitlement. All Im saying is that expecting something right or wrong is human. You are right that men expect sex when they treat a woman nice. They absolutely do and their is too much emphasize on sex in our culture but most men back down when she doesn’t approve. I dont live in the boonies so I cant really speak for small town villages. Fair enough, I guess its hard to generalize because I cant speak for all.
Bonobos.
Biotruths fail, or should I say, flail?
@katz:
1! I call 1!
@Jules
Qouth LBT: “Women aren’t things.”
And I shall repeat the refrain of our writing wonder up above in posts yonder
Women aren’t things
and neither are men
and if both want the other then we shouldn’t pretend
that liking one thing and wanting one thing and sticking one thing inside of one thing
uhm.
erh.
moving on, ‘least I mire myself in hetereonormativity and blasé insipid-ity
is anything like any thing near the same thing as expecting a promotion or a faster car.
Desires are not prescriptive of how other people should act
Longings are never descriptive of other people’s minds, in fact –
reality is different, and neither are predictive
of the kind of thing you might be able to make a claim on.
Feeling desire is wonderful! Wanting more money is probably good. Shelter and housing is a gift when you have it and a curse when you lack.
But being entitled to any of that?
Is rather a different thing all-together. If I were entitled to a home of my own
I’d feel fine tossing someone out from theirs to make it mine
and if I was entitled to someone elses oh-so-pretty smile, I’d stalk them and ply them with gifts and with guile to make them thinking running anywhere else futile
and if I was entitled to being psychologically dependent on my mother and seeing her shadow dance in the eyes of every woman I met, well, it’d get to my head, and frankly I’d come on to a blog and ask for advice about the women in my life and with cry of despair when they only stare I’d probably end up calling them all SPINSTERS
which really does no one any good.
Now let me give you an Instructive Example of Entitlement In Two Parts:
Part The Firste:
I agree with that yes. All I’m saying is that men are under pressure by society to think that way. Don’t women have a role in this pressure at all?
is the claim that mere unfortunate happenstance is what drives perceptions askance
to deny any responsibility of one owns minor short comings and treatment of others
and claim that any bothers
is a question of low intent by “pressure”, “people” and “Proper etiquiette”. Without any self-awareness or attempts at not being rude!
Part the seconde:
They pay more attention to the rich guy, the successful guy. They keep talking about wanting a nice guy to be the father of their children. Indirectly they reward the guy that is successful by our social norms.
Is then the follow-up wail of misery
that all those women-folk only see
stacks of green or quarterbacks
only deign to notice stat tracks of star crossed people at a zenith up max
only end up in shacks with those damn cads
See, one might think that you disparage their choice, accidentally voice an impingement of their poise, infer distaste in their choice of boys,
because you’re being told by All Those Others
than you’re entitled to have them Be Your Mothers
Failing that Sisyphean task they didn’t ask to attempt
it’s not that easy to make it seem as if you’re merely here to converse on the nature of mass murder and misogyny
‘Cause it seems to me
sort of prohibitively
impossible to talk much about sense
when you’re this fucking dense
that you’re spouting bio-truths
that are no such thing
about primates, our lovely next of kin
and I can only ask my final question in a slightly whiny pitch
IF YOU HAVE TO TALK ABOUT MONKEYS, IF YOU HAVE TO SCRATCH THAT ITCH
Why forget about the tamarins? The marmosets? Some of the small prosimians?
What about the baboons or colobus? The bloody barking macaques?
and all those other dancing, prancing primate species
disinclined to think in Freudian terms about female figures
and reiterated mothers in the eyes of lovers?
At least get your Primatology right, ’cause you’re a lost ’cause for People-Knowin’ tonight.
Where’s pecunium when you need him? This child is TEDIOUS.
RE: Jules
I’m sorry I thought we were talking about why men feel entitled to women. I didn’t change the subject. All of a sudden we are talking about rape.
Stay focused, Jules. I’m talking about rape because it was an expression of these men feeling entitled to women. I have explained this to you before.
Someone already mentioned here he was an extreme case.
Yes, but he’s still a case. You can’t just ignore that because it suits you, Jules. If you come to a post on Elliot Rodgers, you’re going to have to deal with him.
Males in every primate specie are similar.
No they aren’t. Bonobos. Learn about them. They use sex for everything. Also, do you honestly know what every species of lemur is like? Come on, Jules. Don’t pretend to be smart.
here is an article linking our violence to chimpanzees. someone asked for
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/demonicmales.htm
Fibi and Katz, I call 2!
It’d be more entertaining than this lout impugning the good name of biology.
Chimps aren’t all primates, Jules.
Also, drawing connections between species is something to be done very, very cautiously.
Hey, if he’s going to go down that path, using chimps rather than, say, beetles is a step up from the usual arguments.
Jules: Chimpanzees are one species of primate.
You said “every species:”
Prove it. Prove that all male primates act similarly. With citations.
Do I lose if I say “one,” and Fibi’s already called “1?”
Or can I just say “2?”
RE: Jules
here is an article linking our violence to chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees aren’t “every primate species,” pal. Nice try.
RE: everyone else
I’ve had enough of Mr. Boring over there. Who wants to talk about something else?
You just say the next number in the sequence.
3
Darn it, now we have to start over! We made it to two…
ONE!
2
Ooh, ooh, are we talking about various animals’ sexual behavior now?
This looks like a job for ANIMAL LIVES! (Cute little comics depicting various animals and their sex lives as though they were humans.)
Clearly you did not get to the end of this article, where it negates the point you’re trying to make. Sigh.