Check out my piece on the Atlanta spa shooter in the Washington Post.
As an explanation for mass murder, it’s a head-scratcher. According to police, after being arrested, Robert Aaron Long told them he carried out shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday because he’d been feeling overwhelmed by his own sexual desires. “He apparently has … what he considers a sex addiction,” a sheriff’s department official said, and viewed the spas he targeted as “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Long has been charged with the murder of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent.
Long evidently wants us to believe that he is the real victim here, a perpetually frustrated man with a “sex addiction” who could not help but lash out at the women he blames for his problems. As bizarre as this reasoning is, Long isn’t alone in embracing it. It’s a logic I often see among the misogynists I’ve been tracking on my blog, WeHuntedTheMammoth.com, for more than a decade.
Warren Farrell makes an appearance, along with The Thinking Housewife (remember her?).
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@Redsilkphoenix; @Bookworm in hijab:
Found what may be the version Bookworm in hijab remembers:
http://i.pinimg.com/originals/4c/9b/18/4c9b18db95c6284e83e3692d55291575.jpg
David!
Glad you’re getting published again. I’d say it was a nice article, but there’s nothing nice about what went down in Georgia.
It’s a very well done write up.
@Ohlmann
I figure the threat of it could work as a deterrent nevertheless. Most of them are already scared shitless about being emasculated anyway, so why not turn those fears into a reality? (I do agree with defunding the police or at least putting some extremely harsh limits on what they can and cannot do, but since it seems many people on this wretched rock we call the Earth can’t be trusted to do the right thing on their own I still believe someone has to do the dirty work of administering the punishments for the people incapable of thinking of anyone hit themselves.)
@Anonymous; @Ohlman:
I figure the threat of it could work as a deterrent nevertheless. Most of them are already scared shitless about being emasculated anyway, so why not turn those fears into a reality?
But once such a law should get passed, what’s betting it’ll be turned against the usual targets as an unofficial eugenic as well as punitive measure?
@Full Metal Ox
And that’s why I also mentioned those harsh limits on what the police are allowed to do. Eh, as long as I’m dreaming I may as well go all in with it.
@ginger
Deleting all your stored tracking information from your preferred browser will often allow you to access a certain number of free articles as well, after which time you have exceeded it you can just delete the cookies and tracking information again to reset it.
So something that someone else reminded me of:
This racist, sexist, murderous thug is a Southern Baptist, and in SBC communities it is common to speak of having a “porn addiction” or “sex addiction” if you had lustful thoughts twice in the last week.
I have no idea what this dude’s deal is, and for all I know he could even have an addiction, but given how often Southern Baptists specifically sit around in groups jerking off about how they desperately need Jesus to save them from their sex addictions, the odds that this is someone using the bullshit, religious definition of “sex addiction” and not anything even remotely similar to the clinical definition of “sex addiction” are quite, quite high.
Anyway, I even knew at some point in the past that Southern Baptists use that phrase commonly (and badly), but when someone reminded me of it, his “confession” clicked for me in a way it hadn’t before, so I thought I share that other person’s wisdom.
That other person, by the way, is Evan, one of the staff writers over on Wonkette.
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Separately, I enjoyed Trollhunter. Good movie, that.
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Lastly for this comment, I just want to say that I had a similar thought to WWTH:
If he hasn’t cut out his eyes, if he hasn’t cut off his own genitals, then he isn’t much of a student of his (barbaric) book, is he?
When we notice more men in our society with self-inflicted blindness than women beaten or killed by men, then I’ll believe we live in a Christian society. Not before.
Ack, I forgot to say to our esteemed host: Nice work on the Post article! Read the whole thing. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting (I thought it would spend a larger percentage of the time on this particular case), but it was very good.
As someone who has struggled with actual addiction. A real, painful, opioid addiction that almost killed me and ruined my life, every time someone brings up the “sex addiction” thing I want to punch someone. Cause it always mean this white guy touched himself 3 times a week or something. It’s an excuse and a poor one. It’s like when an incel or whatever kills a girl in their class and the headline goes “popular girl was killed after rejecting boy’s advance for 3 months”
instead of it actually being “keep little shit entitled boy harassed a girl for 3 months and then stabs her to death when she tells him she rather just be his friend”
Because let me tell you right now, if anyone had an actually “sex addiction”, they wouldn’t kill anyone because they would spend ever single moment they could either having sex or masturbating. Just like how I wanted to spend ever minute I could high or else I’d be in crippling pain.
He wasn’t a sex addicted, he was a normal entitled, racist, 21 year old man who decided he hated one ethnics group and gender so went out to kill a bunch of them. And these cops might have well pissed on the bodies of everyone of the victims because the statement they gave is “he has a bad day and was a sex addict”
@Elaine : also very notably, addicts don’t exactly go on killing spree for their addiction. At *maximum* an addict might try violence to get his fix, but not even all addict do that, and he shooted women dead, he wasn’t threatening them to “provide service”.
We know he is not a sex addict (which is a real thing that can happen, just not all that often ; the point of Dallilama is more to be taken as “it happen so rarely we can safely assume all reference to it to be bullshit”) simply because he don’t act like one at all.
@Anonymous : cruel and unusual punishment that can also be used for frankly racist goals don’t sound good. The very first order of business for punishment is for it to be consistently and swiftly applied more than being harsh. Harshness don’t actually help, or only a very little.
I always wonder what these scumbags think this lust-inspiring “power” is, given they don’t actually ever describe a woman using it for her own ends. They don’t describe a secretary’s cleavage power as getting her a pay rise, or replacing her helpless boss, for example.
I’m starting to suspect these guys are so self-obsessed and unimaginative they really actually think ALL a woman could possibly want is to make them (in particular) horny. Her internal life couldn’t possibly not revolve around provoking his penis – what else would she use this “power” for.
@Anonymous,Ohlmann etc.
If there was a medically safe drug that allowed people to be free of sexual desire*, I do think people should be able to access it VOLUNTARILY. People might want that for a variety of reasons, some I think better than others, but it would be a matter of bodily autonomy.
It would be an extreme abuse of bodily autonomy to coerce people to take it, including making probation or sentencing contingent on it. There is no use of chemical castration by law enforcement that is right. If people with paedophilic or similarly problematic desires want such treatment, it should be between them and a medical professional, not required by courts.
I don’t think it would have helped in this case at all. This guy was willing to commit extreme violence, and he could have perpetrated that far more effectively upon his own self if removing sexual “temptation” was his real goal.
* I know some drugs sort of do this, and are abusively used for law enforcement, but I don’t think there’s anything very effective without serious side effects.
@ mogwitch
Oh I dunno, isn’t the “she must have slept her way to the top” cliche a species of that argument?
@Alan Robertshaw
I thought of that – but honestly, I don’t seem to see really that from the Manosphere because apparently we don’t actually go to work. They talk about pussy passes and so on, but they don’t think we want to work, or I dunno, have hobbies or make art or go dancing. They don’t even believe women who play computer games really want to play computer games. As far as I can tell, they think what women want is to have power over men, so we use our power over men to have power over men.
@ mogwitch
Well people of that ilk do seem very good at doublethink. Like with Shroedingers Immigrant; a superposition where they simultaneously skive on benefits, and nick all the jobs.
I can well imagine they believe women both eat bon-bons all day and get a shoe-in as CEOs, what what how society is rigged in favour of women and you just have to flutter your eyelashes to get promoted.
@Alan Robertshaw
You are right. I’m not taking their superior manly logic enough into account.
I wish “cleavage” power was a real thing and fuckwits would obey when told to piss off.
@Mogwitch
Antiandrogens can do that, but as you mentioned they would have some undesirable effects such as loss of bone mass or breast growth.
As for voluntary access, it seems that most of the men who would benefit from such a solution probably would refuse to access it in the first place because they’d see it as making them less of a man.
@Naglfar. It’s a bit off topic, but I think there are other people than sex offenders who might want their sex drive gone, if it was possible.
There are people who do have sexual desires that are not realisable consensually but who would never act on that. There are some people who are asexual who find their physiological urges inconvenient or even distressing. There are people who just rather wouldn’t have physical desire as part of their life for various reasons, because they find it distracting or frustrating or immoral. I would probably not agree personally with some of the reasons, but if such a thing were available, I should think people should have a choice to take it, just as they should for medication that restored or increased the libido.
If cleavage power was a thing, I’d be running the world by now! Alas, all my big boobs do is make it hard to find shirts and dresses that fit and make my back hurt.
@Mogwitch I can indeed attest that some people have fantasms they cannot act upon in a safe manner. It also have nothing to do with toxic masculinity, even if having both at the same time is a frightening thought.
I however am not sure it’s the good way to deal with that kind of problem. Sure it probably won’t hurt to allow people with that problem to take anti-hormonal products, but also I believe that the problem is deeper if they cannot muster the force of will to ignore that themselves. Shouldn’t we make sure theses peoples don’t have other issues that compound it ?
The hypocrisy is stunning; the people who have said for decades that women can’t be leaders because their hormones negatively affect their behavior also say not only that men’s testosterone-fueled bad behavior is in no way their fault, but also is the fault of women’s behavior.
When I was in grade school and a classmate would “tattle” on another student, we were told to mind our own behavior.
I’ve been following Samantha Field’s blog for a few years now; for those who aren’t familiar with her, she grew up in a rather extreme evangelical sect. Or to quote her blog profile:
Unsurprisingly, she has some insight as to the culture that produces men who kill women:
http://twitter.com/samanthapfield/status/1372621258727288836
@Ohlmann – If sexual desires could be controlled by a drug that people could choose to stop taking when ready, it might actually give people a bit of psychological space to get psychotherapy to treat causes of an underlying distress with their own desire. But even if they wanted to take it for a reason I totally disagreed with, such as a woman taking it because she thought her sexual desire outside marriage was immoral, I think it would be their body, their choice.
Something a contact knocked up; seems pertinent.
@ weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
On a slight tangent, but as a fellow big boob-haver (it’s in the name) She-fit and Molke are brands that are good for the big-boobed. Especially Molke because it’s less expensive, worried about humane production explicitly, and employs overweight and trans models.