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.
@Shadow
I understand what you’re saying, and I agree. POC communities aren’t more or less likely to have disablism as white communities. To clarify, I didn’t intend to say that white supremacy was the only cause – rather that it was simply one (of many) factors strengthening disablist narratives about violence.
The manosphere is out in force commenting on every article they can about this so as to defend their hate cult. It’s very transparent. I don’t think they’re in the majority but instead, tgwy actively invested in discrediting anyone who shows their hate for what it is.
One thing that I have not seen mentioned in any article which really needs to said; Asperges and Autism is NOT a mental illness. It is a neurological disorder; differently organised neurological pathways. It has no known correlation with violence. Many articles excusing an extreme violent act by saying it was mental illness induced is further stigmatising an already socially stigmatised group. Totally unfair!
Anna
Thank you for the link to the WSJ article; as you say, it’s not the most obvious of homes for that work but it is nailing aspects which appear to be eluding a lot of people.
Pretending that research doesn’t exist is the same old, same old claptrap; the research does exist and Rodgers fits like the proverbial glove. The desire to believe that Rodgers is unique is driving much of the response; if you can convince yourself that he is unique then you can convince yourself that nothing bad is going to happen to you and the people you love, because that uniquely bad person is dead.
If you look at the research, and look at the vast numbers of MRAs ranting hysterically on the web, day in and day out, then it becomes obvious that we are most definitely not in one uniquely bad person territory.
In this sense I am not surprised that the local Sheriff immediately took refuge in the comforting delusion that Rodgers did what he did because he was a madman, since otherwise he would have had to accept that his culture had provided the encouragement and validation of all this crap about a woman’s place, to the extent that his officers were able to ignore the clear evidence of Rodgers postings on the web and conclude that the guy was just fine.
Again, the stuff about Rodgers being mad is helpful in supporting the one uniquely bad person myth because there is another helpful myth he can bring into play, the one that says that mad people are cunning and crafty so ordinary sane people can’t be expected to outwit the cunning and crafty madman who has duped them. This is, of course, nonsense, but it’s nonsense that makes him and his officers feel better…
@Shadow:
You’re right. I certainly don’t want to absolve Rodger of blame; as you say, plenty of men encounter the MRM and are put off by the misogyny (I had that precise experience myself when I was younger; I remember how futile it was trying to be even mildly feminist on PUA fora). It’s impossible to evaluate hypothetical counterfactuals here, so there’s no way to know what Rodger would have done if he hadn’t had his ideas reinforced by the MRM. I don’t think it’s incoherent to hold Rodger responsible and still make the point that the problem is significantly bigger than him.
I don’t have anything helpful to add to the conversation but just wanted to say thank you to the site owner and users. If I manage to have any glimmer of hope left it comes from sites like this.
So thanks.
It’s hard to read past the first paragraph where the author glosses over the fact that he targeted men as much as he targeted women :-/
Until somebody can come up with an answer to that, it seems a bit cruel to use this tragedy to further a hateful agenda 🙁
Misogyny was only a result of the real cause and the thing we should be discussing. Attributing him to an enemy of feminism and a “possible” Men’s Rights activist does nothing but derail the discussion. In my opinion, its very disrespectful on your part to use the tragedy and to try and reinforce any sort of views or push ideas.
He did hate women, and he was a perfect example of a misogynist. But we all live in the same world, and an insignificant amount of us share his views to the extremes he did. What drove him to do what he did is only part of the issue. I would say his hatred towards the world, and particularly sex and couples was what drove him to do what he did.
However that hatred be it towards women only or towards something else did not arise from nothing. I think we can already safely say that mass murders and serial killers have had troubling childhood.
If you read his story and the way he tells is, there is a lot of evidence of loneliness and feeling of abandonment by his mother and father. His first introduction to sex was a pornography at the age of 13-14, that is evidence of extreme negligence by both parents. And because of that he never felt safe to have conversations with them. He tried to explain the world on his own, and he was never equipped by his parents to do so. Learning about divorce and about relationships just came out of the blue for him, with no explanations of why and how..
He was constantly made to do things against his will, which every child experiences but he never got any sort of understanding from his parents.
His condition seamed to get really bad when he learned about sex, in a very bad way. He started having desires and a big sexual drive but he was ashamed of it, He felt unworthy.
This is where his depression started when he started having thoughts of how he would never fulfill his desires but he just thought he could do nothing about it. If you read trough how he writes he felt as people owned him what he wanted. And this is where he started getting angry because he felt people were denying it from him. He started resenting the people who had what he wanted, He tried to build a defense by seeing himself as something more than those people. Racism and misogyny were just his ways of dehumanizing these people so his anger would have room to manifest and his compassion would be pushed aside because of it.
He was always alone and isolated in his world.
So his misogyny or hatred of feminism or similar views as MRA’s do not matter in my opinion.
His hatred towards women and the world, came from the fact that his father, mother and stepmother were never there for him, they did not have a bond with him and he did not have trust in them. He tried explaining everything in the world alone, he did not get the attention he deserved as a child so he though he deserved it as an adult. Those I feel are the real causes and issue.
What you try to put significance on is only a result of a very unfortunate turn of events and very poor handling of those events on the side of his parents. Which in turn caused many issues with his mental health and caused all of these extreme views towards other people.
He seemed to exhibit sociopathic,psychopathic,autism and also asperger syndrome..above all that he was a spoiled brat mangina who only dreamt about pussy….i dont believe him at all…how can one have a BMW,be a hollywood relative and not be able to attract girls..
Effects of Feminism On Men
I posted this link on my facebook and it lead to an almighty shitstorm and I had to defriend one guy who straight up said he sympathised for Rodger and when I defriended him he sent messages telling that I could defriend him but he would still consider me a friend and speak to me if he saw me (this after I told him to never contact me again) and that he would consider me a friend and I had “no say in this” and on tumblr a shitty ableist 18 year old boy who I called out for ableism kept reblogging one of my posts even though I told him to leave me alone repeatedly and was stalking my blog and I have seen so many men excusing and downplay Rodger’s misogyny and being ableist shits and I am very scared and angry and sad right now and men terrify me because they ignore my boundaries and don’t give a crap when I tell them to leave me alone and feel entitled to my attention and friendship even when I tell them never to contact and that I find what they said abhorrent. I am scared. This is the climate of fear that Rodger wanted us to live in. This is what MRA’s want. They want us to live in fear, well fucking done I am scared, you’ve won.
Sorry that happened to you, historophilia. I just had a similar experience – on the South African Skeptics group, no less!
Skepticism my big white ass. It’s really demotivating.
And I completely agree. This was an act of terrorism, terrorism that’s continued by the people defending this indefensible shit. The goal is to have us live in fear – how is that NOT terrorism?
Oh right, because it’s a white guy who did it.
I recently watched a video that was uploaded to youtube called “Elliot Rodger is a feminist”. Not only have I seen MRA’s claiming that elliot rodger was “not a misogynist”…..now they are trying to claim he was even a feminist.
^ That screenshot proves otherwise.
I find it disturbing how many men are going around on social media trying to defend what elliot rodger did, or they are claiming to identify with his world view. By the MRM defending his actions, or trying to claim he was not a “misogynist” or that he WAS a “feminist”…..it is making them sound even more crazy and delusional.
Is it a surprise? Guy was near the movie industry. They make millions selling to white guys the idea that women are rewards to them for existing.
It is absolutely terrorism, but I should point out that Rodger wasn’t white, he was half Malaysian Chinese but he seems to have been white passing.
Lot’s people seem to assuming him to be white and I guarentee you that if he was more visibly PoC then we would not be seeing so many narratives of sympathy or excuses for him.
He himself seemed to buy in heavily to white supremacy, his obsession with white women with blonde hair and with blonde hair in general. In his terorist screed (I refuse to do it the honour of calling it a manifesto) he detailed how he associated blonde hair with all the qualities he admired and several times as a child bleached his hair blonde. Also his racism towards other men of colour (especially his anti-blackness) for “getting” white women which he felt they did not deserve because they weren’t white and that he felt he deserved more because he was half white. Furthermore, the fact that he completely ignores the existence of WoC, his obsession is with thin, white women, they are desirable and objects which covets, WoC are never mentioned.
@jimmy
Good fucking god, you don’t promote mental health awareness by falsely painting mass murderers as mentally ill how hard can this be for you to understand?
There are so many citations that you need right now.
Killer: I did it because I hate women and they won’t sleep with me.
Jimmy: BUT ITS NOT MISOGYNY.
also, no it doesn’t require a “Broken brain” what the fuck is wrong with you I cannot give you enough fuck offs go jump into a box of legos somewhere and never come back.
@historophilia
That sucks 🙁 ::offers internet hugs::
Oh yeah, let’s blame mental illness. Heaven forbid he actually went on a killing spree because of sexisim. Can’t have that now can we?
Absolutely disgusting. MRAs can rot in their pathetic hate filled hole. Sad lot you are.
This whole situation has been hella triggering for me, too, to the point that I don’t even want to watch West End musicals on YouTube for fear of seeing any more comments about this douche and why he was right. How on earth can anyone stand up for a mass murderer? Is it a small but vocal minority defending this creep? Or do more men feel this way about women than I’d previously expected? I don’t have a clear frame of reference here; all my male friends are either feminists, or gay feminists. I’d been thinking about starting dating guys again, but now I’m almost too afraid to try.
On the ableism issue, I’m torn. I’ve lived with a vicious Bipolar disorder all my life, and self-identify as “utterly mad”. It feels dismissive and dishonest to me to gloss over whatever mental health issues he had. The sad truth is that sometimes the mentally ill do horrible things, just like the neurotypical. I had to end a long, fulfilling friendship with a schizophrenic girl after she went off her meds, had a psychotic break, and lured a man she knew to a secluded park in order to stab him. She had self-harmed far too much in the past, but this time she externalized that urge, and I don’t much like hanging around people who stab other people. Yes, we mad folk are orders of magnitude more likely to harm ourselves than others, but it does sometimes happen the other way around.
That said, I’m sickened at how the blatant misogyny in this case is being brushed off by the media. Rodger stated over and over how much he hated women, and how he wanted to kill them. How can that be so easily overlooked? How is this not being used as an object lesson in the harm that misogyny does everybody? When this story first came out, and I read the first details, my immediate thought was that Rodger was an unholy hybrid of Marc Lepine and Ted Bundy. The men defending this vile sack of shit sure know how to pick their role models!
(Sorry for the teal deer rant; I’ve had a lot to get off my chest, and only just feel up to it now.)
@winter walker
Um, no one is saying that they don’t. Just that acting like mentally ill people are more violent, and acting like so many mass murders must have done it because of mental illness, is ableism.
Thank you for this. Its nice to have a *real* ally, and not another “nice guy” or a “not all men.” And your Trigger Warning is the best I’ve read. People mock the Trigger Warnings as being wussy and too dainty “get a grip”. However, women have PTSD too. You don’t need to be overseas in combat to get it. You can get it by being in combat by living as a woman right here in America. I’ve been thrown through a plate glass window, severing my hand. I’ve had a gun held to my head.
I remember watching two 8 y/o boys playing in a fountain and being charmed by the sight. As I walked by, one boy yelled a remark at me, no doubt learned from an elder brother. I was instantly reduced to tears and spent half an hour sobbing in the bathroom. I was very depressed over how the next generation was being taught to hate women.
Cat,
While this study is from around 1980, it does show that men are significantly more likely to comply with women’s intimate requests than the reverse. Even in instances where men reject women’s intimate requests, they tend to do so more gently:
http://www.elainehatfield.com/79.pdf
It is for this reason that I feel that women feel more entitled to sex because male rejection of intimate requests is less expected and often viewed as odd. It is not uncommon for a man who rejects a woman’s advances to have his sexual orientation questioned by that woman or to be deemed by her as “shy” or “scared of girls/women”. The possibility of a man simply not being interested in sex with a particular woman is harder to accept.
What is probably even between the genders is difficulty finding a relationship as in boyfriend or girlfriend.
Jimmy,
Where are you getting this? I’m not aware of a brain scan being done on Rodger’s while he was alive. At least nothing that’s been realized. Link to a reputable source if you have one. I have the sneaking suspicion this is assfax though.
There have been studies done linking murderers to cold, less active than normal spots in the frontal lobe. However, it is a big leap to make the assumption that was the case here.
It should also be noted that neuroscience is a fairly new field and there is a lot we don’t know. We can correlate brain activity with behavior but we still don’t have a handle on what it means.
Another problem with brain scan research is that it’s extremely expensive so only small sample sizes are used. The smaller the sample, the harder it is to universalize the study results.
At this point the fact that there are cold spots in the frontal lobes of killers is still something interesting that merits more research. Not something definite that we can blame all violence on.
This ^^^
I was probably too generous in my response in my response to Jimmy. He seems pretty desperate to not blame misogyny for a crime that was demonstrably motivated by misogyny.
Shit. How can someone who says things like that not see they are part of the problem?
Hugs, historophilia.
“Rodger made clear in his manifesto that he was pretty much only interested in “beautiful blonde girls.” At one point he’s horrified to discover that his fat roommate has a girlfriend in his room with him, and is enormously relieved to discover that she’s “ugly,” so he doesn’t have to feel envious of him.”
He was screwed up, no doubt, but a lot of Guys in the manosphere share this attittude(though less extreme, thank god). Im a frequent reader on Return of Kings, Heartiste and the Roosh V site and I feguently see Guys lamenting how they can’t attract hot women in one breath and then mocking fat, “old”(25+ is old in pua-land) and otherwise uattractive women in the Next.
I have never seen any “nice guy” showing the sligthest amout of sympathy towards women WHO’s in the same boat as they are. It’s sad and appaling.
That chart, by the way, is complete bullshit. According to the CDC, by age 40 85% of U.S. women have given birth and 76% of U.S. men have fathered a child.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr051.pdf
Add in the percentage of childless people who have sex partners, and it looks like just about every stick figure on that chart has mated up at some point in life (making exceptions, too, for asexuals and people who voluntarily abstain for other reasons).
Also, isn’t there some trope that gets bandied about the manosphere that historically, only 40% of men have reproduced while 80% of women have had children? Of course, there’s zero data to back that up, but it isn’t even consistent with the pre-sexual revolution section of the chart.