The Santa Barbara killings

[silkepus]

Also something that I find almost funny. These guys often refer to themselves as alfa males, and yet they are so fragile that even the slightest rejetion or just disintrest by women is enough to force them into a cloak of whining, self-pity and ego anger.

[Martina]

This is a pretty awesome article in The Daily Beast by Arthur Chu.

Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds

This is maybe the second half of it --

I’ve heard and seen the stories that those of you who followed the #YesAllWomen hashtag on Twitter have seen—women getting groped at cons, women getting vicious insults flung at them online, women getting stalked by creeps in college and told they should be “flattered.” I’ve heard Elliot Rodger’s voice before. I was expecting his manifesto to be incomprehensible madness—hoping for it to be—but it wasn’t. It’s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto, except for the part about mass murder.

I’ve heard it from acquaintances, I’ve heard it from friends. I’ve heard it come out of my own mouth, in moments of anger and weakness.

It’s the same motivation that makes a guy in college stalk a girl, leave her unsolicited gifts and finally when she tells him to quit it makes him leave an angry post about her “shallowness” and “cruelty” on Facebook. It’s the same motivation that makes guys rant about “fake cosplay girls” at cons and how much he hates them for their vain, “teasing” ways. The one that makes a guy suffering career or personal problems turn on his wife because it’s her job to “support” him by patching up all the holes in his life. The one that makes a wealthy entrepreneur hit his girlfriend 117 times, on camera, for her infidelity, and then after getting off with a misdemeanor charge still put up a blog post casting himself as the victim.

And now that motivation has led to six people dead and thirteen more injured, in broad daylight, with the killer leaving a 140-page rant and several YouTube videos describing exactly why he did it. No he-said-she-said, no muffled sounds through the dorm ceiling, no “Maybe he has other issues.” The fruits of our culture’s ingrained misogyny laid bare for all to see.

And yet. When this story broke, the initial mainstream coverage only talked about “mental illness,” not misogyny, a line that people are now fervently exhorting us to stick to even after the manifesto’s contents were revealed. Yet another high-profile tech CEO resignation ensued when the co-founder of Rap Genius decided Rodger’s manifesto was a hilarious joke.

People found one of the girls Rodger was obsessed with and began questioning if her “bullying” may have somehow triggered his rage. And, worst of all, he has fan pages on Facebook that still haven’t been taken down, filled with angry frustrated men singing his praises and seriously suggesting that the onus is on women to offer sex to men to keep them from going on rampages.

So, a question, to my fellow male nerds:

What the fuck is wrong with us?

How much longer are we going to be in denial that there’s a thing called “rape culture” and we ought to do something about it?

No, not the straw man that all men are constantly plotting rape, but that we live in an entitlement culture where guys think they need to be having sex with girls in order to be happy and fulfilled. That in a culture that constantly celebrates the narrative of guys trying hard, overcoming challenges, concocting clever ruses and automatically getting a woman thrown at them as a prize as a result, there will always be some guy who crosses the line into committing a violent crime to get what he “deserves,” or get vengeance for being denied it.

To paraphrase the great John Oliver, listen up, fellow self-pitying nerd boys—we are not the victims here. We are not the underdogs. We are not the ones who have our ownership over our bodies and our emotions stepped on constantly by other people’s entitlement. We’re not the ones where one out of six of us will have someone violently attempt to take control of our bodies in our lifetimes.

We are not Lewis from Revenge of the Nerds, we are not Steve Urkel from Family Matters, we are not Preston Myers from Can’t Hardly Wait, we are not Seth Rogen in every movie Seth Rogen has ever been in, we are not fucking Mario racing to the castle to beat Bowser because we know there’s a princess in there waiting for us.

We are not the lovable nerdy protagonist who’s lovable because he’s the protagonist. We’re not guaranteed to get laid by the hot chick of our dreams as long as we work hard enough at it. There isn’t a team of writers or a studio audience pulling for us to triumph by “getting the girl” in the end. And when our clever ruses and schemes to “get girls” fail, it’s not because the girls are too stupid or too bitchy or too shallow to play by those unwritten rules we’ve absorbed.

It’s because other people’s bodies and other people’s love are not something that can be taken nor even something that can be earned—they can be given freely, by choice, or not.

We need to get that. Really, really grok that, if our half of the species ever going to be worth a damn. Not getting that means that there will always be some percent of us who will be rapists, and abusers, and killers. And it means that the rest of us will always, on some fundamental level, be stupid and wrong when it comes to trying to understand the women we claim to love.

What did Elliot Rodger need? He didn’t need to get laid. None of us nerdy frustrated guys need to get laid. When I was an asshole with rants full of self-pity and entitlement, getting laid would not have helped me.

He needed to grow up.

We all do.

[candy_coated_bitch]

Thanks for the article, Martina. This is really the main thing that gets me with this shooting:

"And now that motivation has led to six people dead and thirteen more injured, in broad daylight, with the killer leaving a 140-page rant and several YouTube videos describing exactly why he did it. No he-said-she-said, no muffled sounds through the dorm ceiling, no “Maybe he has other issues.” The fruits of our culture’s ingrained misogyny laid bare for all to see."

This. We know EXACTLY why he did what he did. It's not a fucking mystery. There have been a lot of school shootings and never has the killer made YouTube videos about why their victims deserve to be killed. In this case, it is targeted directly towards women. This is explicitly stated by the killer in his manifesto. He wrote a fucking 140 page manifesto!!!! It blows my mind that people are trying to make this into something else. It's surreal. STILL, we are looking for other reasons as to why this happened.

The fact that more than several women in this thread have stated that there was nothing new under the sun in what Rodger said makes me wonder if that's the exact problem with people (mostly men) being in complete denial of what this crime was really about. Maybe it's BECAUSE his manifesto and videos contained what we already know about our society's attitudes towards women. I feel like that thin veil that cis men shroud themselves in is in danger of being pulled away. The line between what the shooter did and what other men do every single day is very thin, I'd venture to say.

Women are raped, beaten, harassed, stalked, bought and sold (without their consent), and violated in a myriad of ways EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. How is it a stretch from that to some guy busting out and shooting women because he felt he was not given what he was due (i.e. access to women's bodies)? Yeah--the shooting is more dramatic and visible, but it feels like more of the same to me. Like the author of the article pointed out--the motivations behind it are the same. I think THAT's why people, mostly men, do not want to talk about the motivations behind this act of violence. Because if we examine it, if we really admit that misogyny and rape culture are the motivations behind this killing--it forces us to admit the extent to which those things exist. The extent to which these things are ingrained in our society. Men would have to stop clutching their veils and stop trying to separate themselves from the truth. And really--men in general as a group do not WANT to see. Why would they? It's a terrible realization. Why would any man want to admit they are complicit in perpetuating rape culture in any way? The sad truth is they don't want to see it. Especially the ones with mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, women friends. How could they POSSIBLY have anything to do with misogyny if they "love" women, right?

Right now I am just so disgusted. I feel like this guy only really did what our culture tells him to do: If women don't give you what you want you are entitled to your rage and entitled to take what you want with force. He did it in a large, overblown way. But we know why he did.

I feel like I am repeating myself at this point, so I am just going to stop.