As you may have heard by now, there was a drive-by shooting near the UC Santa Barbara campus last night. The gunman is suspected to be Elliot Rodger, a 22 year old with a bad attitude and a BMW. There are a lot of things being written about Rodger right now, ranging from articles about his father, a second unit director for The Hunger Games, to articles about gun control and mental illness. As is customary, the mass media is taking this chance to reinvigorate the tired conversation about guns and their implications on society. I'm not going to talk about that today. Nor am I going to dredge up the newer, albeit just as exhausted, argument of mental illness. I don't mean to imply that these are nonexistent problems, but I do mean to address a far more sinister and less discussed issue at hand. The issue is hard to reduce to a sentence or sound bite. It is complicated and without extensive scientific study. The problem is the way men perceive women and their relationships to them.
For the sake of brevity, I'll cut the introduction short in favor of diving into the relevance this problem has to current events. Elliot Rodger shot a video of himself before carrying out his now infamous actions. In the video, he suggests his motive is driven by feelings of rejection and loneliness. He goes on to complain about how he is a virgin and has never even kissed a girl and that, because of this, women deserve annihilation (a word he uses far too liberally). If you're interested in watching the full seven-minute video, you can find it here. Originally on YouTube, it has now been removed. Honestly, the video itself really isn't all that disturbing. It looks like a jaded kid bitching about how the world has dealt him a bad hand and how he wants to exact revenge in retaliation.
What is truly disturbing is how unperturbed I am by the whole video. It's a song and dance I have heard time and time again, albeit with less intention to shoot up a bunch of sorority girls. Rodger is the classic example of a guy who makes himself the victim in a world that is hellbent on denying him the right to have sex with women. His entire argument hinges on the idea that he is deserving of sex and love. (Note the order he has listed them in) He believes, as many men do, that merely being a "gentlemen" grants them some divine right to have sex with the woman of their choosing. As a man, I say this: bullshit. This isn't fucking Chuck E. Cheese where you rack up enough points to get a prize. Women aren't a prize to be won based on your perceived merits and they aren't obligated to have sex with you because you were nice to them. Besides, if you are being a nice person or a gentlemen to get into a woman's pants, you aren't actually being nice.
Elliot Rodger is merely the most recent poster child for socially awkward men who resent women. He is indicative of a pervasive problem that has been exacerbated by movements like men's rights activism (MRA). To be entirely clear, I am not saying that being a men's rights activist makes you more prone to murder women, nor am I implying that the movement itself is directly responsible for people who do. I am, however, saying that the movement certainly doesn't help the problem and that it has the capacity to egg the idea on. If you'd like to learn more about MRA, I suggest you visit their subreddit here.
My point isn't to crucify MRA here. My point is to suggest that there is a growing culture of awkward teenage guys and young men that have placed the blame for their virginity and lack of love anywhere but on themselves. I have read (but not confirmed) that Rodger believed his height (5' 9") was a major factor in his lack of success with women. Allow me to quickly disprove this theory. I am 5'7" (supposedly), 120 pounds, and my hair is in a recession to rival the US economy and yet I have not lacked the attention of females. This isn't an opportunity for me to give my anecdote as scientific proof that all men have the ability to have sex with women. It is an opportunity for me to say that you don't get to claim that women don't want to have sex with you because of your perceived physical defects. There is a great line from The Social Network where Rooney Mara (playing Zuckerberg's girlfriend) leans in and tells him this:
You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.
Men like Rodger believe that women just aren't seeing the good parts of them and that they are eschewing them in favor of lumbering alpha males who smell like Old Spice and scratch their balls too often. Rodger called himself a gentlemen (right before he shot six people) and honestly believed that women just weren't seeing that he was a fucking catch. And therein lies the problem. These men and this culture that they have thrown up around them don't take into account a woman's point of view. They adopt a bullshit idea concocted by their own insecurities that makes women into two dimensional caricatures that are waiting for a gentleman in a fedora to save them.
To all you self-proclaimed victims out there, bullied for years and ignored by women, I say this: I am so sorry that your social life sucks. I really do. I've been there. I know what it's like to not get what you want. But don't trot out the same bullshit about how you respect women and you've earned the right to have sex and love. You completely misunderstand the definition of respect. Respecting women isn't about softening them up to the point where they'll hop into bed with you; it's about being understanding of their desires and accepting their decision to not have sex with you. True respect doesn't manifest before rejection, but after. So, no, Elliot Rodger, you are not a gentleman. You had no respect for women and you demonstrated that quite perfectly when you shot a bunch of them with a handgun. I have pity for you insofar that you obviously felt very lonely in this world, but I will not commiserate with you on your cockamamie idea that you deserve to be loved. Love is not earned through desire to have it and it most certainly isn't earned through bitching about it on your YouTube channel. It's earned through forming a bond with another human being on an equal playing field. It's about actually having respect for a woman as an individual and as someone who has the right to make decisions on her own. I'm sorry you died misunderstanding this, but I hope that the many men that think very similar to you will not make the same mistake.
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