Tag: Elliot Rodger

  • That’s completely different

    The Washington Post has some information on yesterday’s installment of the required daily mass shooting that has become such a hallmark of the US summer as well as autumn and spring.

    The shooters who killed a pair of police officers and a bystander who tried to stop them on Sunday in Las Vegas had expressed anti-government views, according to police, who are working to officially determine a motive in the violent episode.

    “There is no doubt that the suspects have an ideology that’s along the lines of militia and white supremacists,” said Kevin C. McMahill, assistant sheriff of Clark County, during a news conference Monday.

    WAIT WAIT WAIT WHAT ARE YOU SAYING THAT IS BESIDE THE POINT IT IS MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT THEY WERE CRAZY NEVER MIND THEIR VIEWS.

    While authorities said they believed this was an isolated, random act, they also said they were investigating the ideology of the two shooters.  They believe that the fact that they placed a swastika on the bodies of one of the people they killed Sunday suggested that they equated law enforcement “with the Nazi movement,” McMahill said. Police also said they are investigating reports that one or both of the Millers went to the Nevada ranch of Cliven Bundy during a standoff with federal authorities earlier this year.

    SO WHAT SO WHAT IGNORE THAT LOOK AWAY IT WAS JUST ISOLATED AND RANDOM PLUS COMPLICATED NEVER MIND HIS VIEWS.

    A neighbor told the Los Angeles Times that on Sunday morning, Jerad Miller had pulled out swastikas and an Army insignia and said he was going to put one on every police officer they killed. ”I’m thinking, ‘Right. They’re not going to do that,” Kelly Fielder said. “I should have called the cops. I feel I have the deaths of five people on my shoulders. The signs were there.”

    No no no they weren’t. That was just some passing whim that had nothing to do with the shootings. The shootings were because Jerad Miller was mentally ill. That’s totally all there was to it. Plus, it’s complicated.

    Fielder described Jerad Miller as hateful of the government and of President Obama, while she said Amanda Miller was “a good girl who would do anything to make her man happy.”

    See? See? They cancel each other out, so the views don’t count.

    The pair then took the slain officers out of their booth and laid them on the ground, covering Beck with a yellow Gadsden flag that read “Don’t Tread on Me” and placing a swastika on his body.

    They also pinned a note to Salvo that read, “This is the beginning of the revolution,” McMahill said, and they repeated that phrase to people in the restaurant before leaving and heading to a nearby Wal-Mart.

    Mental illness, that was. Nothing to do with ideas at all. The guy was cray. Plus? It’s complicated.

    Jerad Miller had posted a lengthy statement on his Facebook page last week writing that the country was facing oppression that could only be stopped “with bloodshed.”

    The couple apparently was committed to an anti-government belief system typified by hatred of law enforcement and the notion that the federal government has no authority over them, said Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

    “This isn’t the first attack from people who show these kinds of beliefs,” she said Monday in a telephone interview from the organization’s headquarters in Montgomery, Ala. “They come to see the government as the enemy. The fact that these two shot cops is right in that line of thinking.”

    But…that has…nothing to do with it…

    In 2010, a similar strain of anti-government rage resulted in two family members killing two police officers in West Memphis, Ark. That episode concluded in a Wal-Mart parking lot, as Jerry Ralph Kane Jr., and his 16-year-old son, Joseph, died in a firefight with law enforcement officials.

    Earlier this year, a man plotted to kidnap and kill police officers in Las Vegas as part of the anti-government “sovereign citizen” movement, which believes that governments operate illegally. The FBI has called the sovereign citizen extremists a “growing domestic threat,” one that has had violent and fatal encounters with law enforcement officials.

    There were 43 violent incidents between law enforcement officials and extremists, with 30 police officers shot and 14 killed, between 2009 and 2013, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

    Well maybe there was some connection.

    End of sarcasm. Any bets on how many of the people who have been telling us Elliot Rodger’s shooting spree had nothing to do with misogyny will be making a parallel claim about the Las Vegas shooting spree?

    My bet is not a fucking one.

     

  • “How dare you besmirch the good name of misogyny?!”

    Amanda Marcotte takes a jaundiced look at the contorted defenses of misogyny people are being driven to by the inconvenient actions of Elliot Rodger.

    I call it the “How dare you besmirch the good name of misogyny?!” gambit. The idea is to deny and deny and deny that Rodger was motivated by misogyny. Which is weird. Since 95-99% of misogynists deny they are misogynists, what’s it to them to admit that he was motivated by misogyny? The only reason I can think to deny he’s a misogynist is that you secretly know damn well you are a misogynist, and you want to deny that your misogynist ideology played any role in the killings.

    Well yeah. It’s their misogyny, they don’t want some weirdo like Rodger bursting in to wreck it for them.

    Some variations I’ve spotted:

    Rich Lowry: “Even without any of that background, it is obvious that Rodger’s final YouTube video and his 140-page manifesto promising to exact vengeance upon the women who spurned him are the ravings of a deranged person; as such, it is the derangement itself, not the content of the ravings, that is most important.” Translation:  Misogyny is clearly blameless here, and the fact that it showed up in Rodger’s rantings should be regarded as utterly irrelevant.

    Add to that Jaclyn Glenn and J T Eberhard. Oh and Richard Dawkins, since he thinks Jaclyn Glenn’s revolting video was so “rational.”

    Then there was the sub-genre of the “how dare you besmirch the good name of misogyny” gambit, which I call the “just because that guy killed someone doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with misogyny generally” argument. This card was played in response to women pointing out that Rodger’s spree was simply the worst manifestation of a constant drumbeat of male entitlement and anger when it’s thwarted, a combination commonly known as “misogyny”.

    Katie Pavlich: “This issue is not about women and I think it’s kind of insulting for women to go on Twitter and talk about how them getting hit on in the bar is equal to being shot in the street, because it’s not.” Translation: Misogyny is utterly blameless and just because this one guy shot someone doesn’t mean anything. Misogynists who enjoy making life hard on women, carry on, so long as you make sure to stop short of violence. (By the way, no one talked about merely being hit on in bars. They talked about being harassed, which means being hit on by a man who is not going to take no for an answer.)

    There’s more. It’s all shrewd good stuff.

  • She talks sense faster than most of us can think, says Dawkins

    Oy, not another one.

    Someone called Jaclyn Glenn, who I’m told is hugely popular among Teh Atheists, did a manic YouTube video echoing the much-echoed complaint about those filthy feminists exploiting that nice Elliot Rodger tragedy for their own filthy selfish self-centered how dare they ends. I could watch only a short bit of it because she’s so annoying. By way of refreshment I found her on Twitter, and lo, only five or six tweets down, who should appear but –

    daw

    She talks sense faster than most of us can think, says Dawkins, and goes on to call her “the ever rational @JaclynGlenn” while linking to her video – right, because obviously trashing feminism is the epitome of rationality and sense. Or could it be that Dawkins just slaps the label “rational” on any opinion he happens to like? Especially if it’s uttered by a hawt woman? (more…)

  • Guest post by Maureen on the comic book definition of madness

    Originally a comment on Venn explains.

    We may be edging towards something useful here.

    We have already dismissed those who just want to say that Rodger was mentally ill therefore we need think about it no more.

    What we need to do – and it is going to be difficult with the subject of the discussion dead – is pick apart the important question of whether Elliot Rodger was both mentally ill and also mentally ill in a way which rendered him insane and thus not in control of his actions or with any insight into their effect. This, I understand, is what M’naghten was about but I don’t know enough to say more than that.

    There are vast numbers of people who have made the odd visit with a psychiatrist, who have had the odd couple of weeks on diazepam and could sometimes have used the support of a mental health worker – who are more often social workers than medical people. We are the people all around you who have manageable levels of SAD or bi-polar, who have the odd panic attack , who don’t and never will present a threat.

    No way are we insane. Part of the problem with mental health stigma is that we are actively discouraged from making that distinction, from acknowledging that mentally and emotionally we all have bad days, better days and good days. Just like everyone else does with their wonky knee or their digestive system. Oh, no. To suit the simplistic worldview we must each be entirely normal – not a useful concept – or totally and permanently dangerous like something in an early Victorian novel. Either or. That is why Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde scared the wits out of its first readers, though in the longer term it simply cemented the comic book definition of madness.

    There is also the whole question of the etiology of mental illness. I know that Maudsley in London has been doing a lot of work on this, especially on the links between drug dependency, symptoms of what we used to call schizophrenia and the stresses and strains of poverty and detachment from social and geographic roots. It seems to be a very complex chicken and egg puzzle so that the old “born with a brain prone to …” and “it was the drugs wot caused it” explanations no longer work.

    The finer points of this are way above my pay grade but is there someone here who could explain better than I have?

    The good bit about researching that conundrum is that in inner city South London there is no shortage of live subjects. Mass killers tend to come one or two at a time and in many cases they are delivered to us dead. Not an ideal situation if we are trying work out the interface between political motivation, anger at some section of the population and the tip over from violent fantasy into violent action.

    When Anders Behring Breivik was safely in custody the cries from the US to kill him pronto could be heard on this side of the Atlantic. Never mind the guns for a minute but is there something in the American psyche which would rather risk it happening again than understand why it happened this time? With Breivik we may eventually know why. With Rodger we never can but we should not be dissuaded from asking political questions – by the NRA or the Santa Barbara police or by anyone else.

     

  • The exercise in narcissism

    At The Federalist Society, Mollie Hemingway lets us know how much she hates #YesAllWomen. It’s the Federalist Society, so you know what to expect.

    Elliot Rodger did what he did.

    Social media responded by accepting the murderer’s hate-filled screed as a legitimate point of discourse and the starting point for a massive act of hashtag activism: #YesAllWomen. Traditional media followed suit: the narrative was found. Eleventy billion tweets describing how all women were victims of men spread throughout the U.S. and Europe and the media breathlessly covered the exercise in narcissism. They all agreed it was “powerful.”

    Narcissism. That’s the kind of shit that makes me want to stab things. How is it fucking narcissism? I’m not the only woman in the world, so if I talk about issues that affect women, I’m not talking exclusively about myself, now am I. To repeat my questions of a few days ago, was it narcissism to see the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church as a racist attack? And to discuss it as such?

    Narcissism would be, perhaps, taking a selfie of yourself crying or fuming, or perhaps tweeting “Never mind Elliot Rodger, what shoes shall I put on?” But talking about misogyny and misogynist culture? I don’t think so.

    She goes on to give a list of “the ten most asinine things about #YesAllWomen”; take number 6 for example:

    6) It’s A Mockery Of The Real Problems Women Face Throughout The World

    As the #YesAllWomen craze spread, a woman was stoned by her family in Pakistan for marrying someone of her choice as opposed to someone of their arrangement. While the #YesAllWomen crowds talked about the unbearable horror of being whistled at on the street, annoyingly being told to smile, and being given gendered McDonald’s toys, more than 200 Nigerian girls remained in slavery to Islamist extremist rebels. While we turn the murder of six into a narcissistic contest of victimhood, a Sudanese Christian woman married to an American Christian man gave birth to a daughter in prison. She awaits her martyrdom for supposedly converting from Islam (because her father, who left her family, had been Muslim).

    Oh yay, another Dear Muslima! Just what the world needs. Why? Because we can’t do both; we have to choose one; we can’t discuss both Islamist horrors and homegrown misognyist shooters. Except wait, what, why can’t we? No reason. Just a sneery snotty Dear Muslima from someone who hates feminism.

     

  • Behold the false dichotomy

    JT Eberhard sees a mistake and comes to the rescue:

    Elliot Rodger was mentally ill. That conversation needs to take place.

    Huh. One, how does JT know that? Two, that conversation already is taking place, to put it mildly.

    Ok so let’s read beyond the title.

    There is a debate going on as to whether or not Elliot Rodger, the man who recently went on a killing spree in California, was mentally ill or if he was sane and driven by sexism.

    No. That’s not the debate that’s going on. Hardly anyone is framing it as “either mentally ill or misogynist.” Also, the issue is not “driven by sexism” but “driven by misogyny” – intense, enraged hatred of women. What we see in Elliot Rodger along with far too many other men is beyond mere everyday sexism, which seems almost cozy in comparison, but inflamed rabid loathing of women as women.

    When this all went down, it struck me that Elliot Rodger was probably suffering from some form of mental illness.

    Whoa, how shrewd and percipient! Except that it struck everyone else in the population too, including people who know better than to take such snap judgments seriously. It’s not really worth mentioning that one’s first thought on hearing the news was “wo that dude was cray.” It’s certainly not worth treating it as a wise insight that should be followed up on.

    Then JT tells us of his good fortune in having a friend who has a friend who wrote an article in Time minimizing the role of misogyny. Yes indeed, what a piece of luck. This two-degrees-of-separation friend is one Chris Ferguson – probably no relation to my friend Craig Ferguson, who is my friend because I watch his Late Late Show occasionally. Chris Ferguson hits the right patronizingly dismissive note:

    Misogyny, in all forms, remains a significant problem for society. Women still don’t enjoy pay equity with men, and are underrepresented in core positions of power in business and politics. Violence toward women has thankfully dropped over the previous two decades, but remains intolerably high. The last election cycle brought us odd comments about “legitimate rape” and fights over women’s rights to contraception medical coverage. It’s not difficult to understand why women would perceive the deck being culturally stacked against them. That misogyny can, and certain does, spill over into violence in the case of (one hopes) a small percentage of men whose anger toward women is beyond control.

    Linking cultural misogyny to a specific mass shooting is more difficult, however.

    And so on. Take-away: don’t worry about it, laydeez. JT echoes the take-away.

    Like Jaclyn said, this does not mean that sexism is not bad and that it should not be discussed.  Anybody saying that is wrong.  But by treating Rodger as sane so we can attribute the fullness of his rampage to our ideological enemies, we are missing the chance to get at the root cause of the mass murder (according to the psychological experts on mass murder).

    Ahh yes, “our ideological enemies”; that’s what this is about. It’s about the same old shit – stop “dividing” the atheist “movement” laydeez, with your complaints about misogyny and harassment. Think of The Cause and shut up about it. We are all in this together and your concerns about misogyny and harassment don’t matter.

    Nope.

  • Guest post by Rob Tarzwell: #YesYouBuddy – Hopeful Confessions of a Recovering Misogynist

    Rob posted this on Facebook, following up on a comment he made on a Facebook thread of mine about Elliot Rodger and misogyny (one of many this past week). I and others suggested he expand on the comment and this is that expansion. He gave me permission to publish it.

    On 6 December 1989, a 25 year old failing Engineering student in Montreal roamed the corridors of the Ecole Polytechnique.  He separated the male from the female students, screamed “I hate feminists!” and in 20 minutes, 27 women were shot or stabbed.  14 died.  He then killed himself.  His suicide note revealed he blamed women for his failures.  He had also intended to target a Quebec female union leader, firefighter, and police captain.

    I don’t remember how I got that news.  As it spread, deathly silence was everywhere on my undergrad campus.  What few conversations occurred were whispered.  The atmosphere around the campus Women’s Centre was thick and tense.

    Up to this point, I had viewed the Centre with disdain.  What do women need a centre for?  Why aren’t men permitted inside?  Why am I forced to subsidize a facility with my own student fees to which I have no access?  Of course, never once did it occur to me that I also did not have access to most science labs, engineering labs, faculty offices, janitorial closets, etcetera.  Even if it had, I’d have quickly rationalized that limited access as quite reasonable:  “I don’t know what I’m doing in there, and I could easily damage something.”  If you take that exact rationale and replace “something” with “someone,” it’s immediately clear why I didn’t belong in the Women’s Centre.  It’s also immediately clear I had more respect for glassware and microchips than for human beings.

    That disdain was, furthermore, buttressed by fundamentalist Christian ideology.  I nodded along sagely when a woman in my church said, “See what happens when just one man turns on women?  Feminists have brought this upon themselves.  God has given women a place subordinate to men.  Feminists have moved outside the will of God, and this is his punishment.”  Somehow that never quite sat right with me.  Unfortunately, I never examined that inner discomfort and solved my own cognitive dissonance by simply pursuing my degree and preparing to head off to the Air Force.

    At the same time, because of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a number of test cases established that women could not be denied access to combat roles.  Again, I justified my disapproval of this decision with thoughts like, “Who on earth would go to the Supreme Court to gain the right to fight in war?  Why renounce the ultimate get out of jail free card?”  The irony that I myself was preparing for a combat role in antisubmarine warfare, proudly and voluntarily, was completely lost on me.  Hypocrisy compartmentalizes the soul in fascinating ways.

    The next disconfirmation of my self-satisfied sexism occurred during my operational tour.  By coincidence, a woman I had graduated from SFU with went through basic officer training at the same time I did, then air navigation school and operational training within a few months of one another, ultimately being posted to the same maritime patrol squadron, pursuing our craft essentially simultaneously.  On squadron, LCol (then Capt) Joy Klammer progressed much faster than me, and because of those Charter test cases, she became the first female TacNav (Tactical Navigator – the quarterback of the antisubmarine warfare mission, ultimately responsible for detecting, localizing, tracking and attacking an enemy submarine) in Canadian history.  And she was good – really good.  Of course, I’d only have grudgingly admitted that at the time:  vanity and sexism are highly assholeogenic.  Although Joy and I lost touch many years ago, I never once heard her brag about that achievement, and she even neglects to mention it in her military CV.

    Luckily, reality is a relentless foe, and it became undeniable when I hit medical school.  Female extended family members reached out to me saying they’d been raped, asking how to get help.  I’d never have guessed.  One didn’t even have the language to articulate it:  “I don’t know.  Was it rape?  We were making out, which I liked, but it went too far.  I asked him to stop.  He apologized after, but every day I want to kill myself.  I think I need help, but then I think about how many people in the world have real problems.”

    How do you not have the language to articulate when you’ve been raped?  How do you end up not being able to understand if your problem is a real problem?  It happens when you are inside a culture, one you are prevented from seeing, that equates your worth with your sex appeal yet simultaneously equates your worthlessness with actually having had sex, whether you wanted it or not.  It is a culture where young men genuinely feel ripped off when merely being a decent human being to a woman only results in gratitude, not sex.  When this, and a thousand other small and large systematic attitudes are pervasive, then everywhere you turn, the world looks the same, and that world is implicitly accepted as the norm.

    So, of course, when an Elliot Rodger states that he killed because he did not get the sex he deserved, few notice or question his notion of “deserving” sex.  Few wonder how such a notion could arise, because so very many do not find the notion problematic.  Thus, if his stated rationale is not problematic, then his actions must surely have been driven by madness.

    I agree, his actions were driven by madness.  But it is a madness in our culture, not a disease uniquely in Rodger’s mind.  It is a disease in you and in me, one which is stubborn and pernicious.  Getting rid of it is like scraping barnacles off a dock.  However, as long as you view those barnacles as just the nature of the world, then why would you ever start scraping?

    Nathalie Provost, one of the Montreal survivors, in a bid to prevent violence, said to Lepine, “We are not feminists.”  He fired 3 rounds at her.  Two hit.  The third grazed her temple.  She said, from her hospital bed, “I ask every woman in the world who wants to be an engineer to keep this idea in their mind.“

    She is now a senior engineer in the Quebec civil service:  “I realized many years later that in my life and actions, of course I was a feminist.  I was a woman studying engineering and I held my head up.”

    One day, I’d like to think I might earn the privilege of being able to look her in the eye.

     

  • They talked about modernity and tradition

    Soraya asks when we ask unpleasant truths in the wake of Elliot Rodger’s destruction.

    I watched the media’s erasure of Rodger’s hatred of women and the depressingly predictable narrative of the lone, mentally ill mass shooter disconnected from it. Computer-less, I occasionally checked news on my phone and, not wanting to derail the morning, I tweeted.

    image

    She tried to get on with a Saturday with her daughters, but she

    was quietly seething that the media was still not connecting the dots about male sexual entitlement, the hatred of women that men’s rights and PUA groups cultivate, the hegemonic masculinity that fuels a cruel, dangerous and corrupt gun culture. As women began to flood Twitter with this information the depressingly familiar #NotAllMen responses began. A woman on Twitter, in an effort to provide a space for women to describe what we live with, created #YesAllWomen. So I said very little and instead tweeted. 

    Meanwhile, when a buggy full of Mennonites went by, we talked about modernity and tradition. I did not say anything about my friend, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who grew up in a Mennonite community and understood that the veneer of justice, peace and non-violence did not apply to her or her mother, who’d been raped by her father. She has built a community for herself and many others previously smothered in damaging silence. None of this was evident in the buggy or its occupants, out for a lovely ride on a lovely day. It was not part of people’s consciousness as they tried to peek through the windows from afar or guess the vintage of the vehicle.

    By noon I was having a loud and busy lunch with many relaxed people whose company I enjoy, who were saying the words “mass shooting,” but had never heard the term “aggrieved entitlement.” I could not explain that Rodger’s language and sentiments, while extreme, rippled through out media and women’s lives every single day. That women recognized in them and his actions the logical, sick efflorescence of the everyday culture Decoupling the actions of an isolated “madman” from this helps no one.

    Except that it makes sociable lunches easier, because people don’t like to hear that things are desperately fucked up.

    Complexity sucks for some people. I am frustrated with people willfully and destructively portraying mental illness and the hatred of women as mutually exclusive, binary, polarized and ranked. No one seems to care that a huge part of our issues treating mental illness is that it is feminized and that men, laboring with rigid gender norms, see admitting to this particular sickness as a sign of “female weakness.” These are marginalized issues, like women’s experiences.

    But she kept trying, through the afternoon.

    By dinner, I think, if Rodger was “just mentally ill,” what about all of the men who are using his language, trading in his fundamental ideas about deserving sex from women, and quietly believing that sexism and misogyny aren’t really all that bad? When someone suggests gender symmetry in violence I don’t have the energy to explain that there are 160 million missing women on the planet out loud.

    There is a huge labor of education ahead of us all. Huge.

  • Movies powerfully condition what we desire and feel we deserve

    Ann Hornaday responded to the Rogen-Apatow outrage, again at the Washington Post blog.

    I was surprised Monday morning to discover that an essay I’d written over the weekend – about the YouTube video posted by Elliot Rodger, who took six lives and his own in Isla Vista, Calif., on Friday – had earned the wrath of filmmaker Judd Apatow and his frequent collaborator, actor Seth Rogen. (Rogen turned down a request from The Post to film a video segment in response to the original column.)

    As un-fun as it is to be slammed by famous people, I could understand Apatow and Rogen’s dismay. Why would a movie reviewer even weigh in on the Isla Vista tragedy in the first place? It happened that Rodger taped a somewhat rambling, 6-minute rant, during which he explained that a combination of social and sexual rejection, loneliness and chronic feelings of unfairness contributed to the murders he was about to commit.

    The video was startlingly well-produced – featuring rich lighting, careful staging and a classic California backdrop of palm trees. That, combined with the fact that Rodger himself grew up surrounded by the film industry, led me to write about how Hollywood movies – specifically wish-fulfillment fantasies and revenge-driven vigilante thrillers – might have informed an unstable young man’s ideas about what his college years and life in general were supposed to look like. Movies aren’t accurate reflections of real life, as I wrote in the essay. But there’s no doubt they powerfully condition what we desire and feel we deserve from it.

    Because why wouldn’t they? How would we go about being immune to their influence? How would that work? How can Rogen and Apatow possibly be certain that their movies have zero influence on any human beings? Advertising works, doesn’t it? It influences people. If it didn’t, at some point capitalists would have figured that out and stopped spending all this money on it. Does advertising work solely because it comes with a label “advertising” so that we know we’re supposed to be influenced, and we comply?

    I say no. How are movies fundamentally different from advertising?

    They’re not, except for being much longer and thus more so. Yes, Seth & Judd, movies have power over us. Yes, yours too. Yes, even the stupidest ones.

    I was not using the grievous episode in Isla Vista to make myself more famous; nor was I casting blame on the movies for Rodger’s actions. Rather, in my capacity as a movie critic, I was looking at the video as a lens through which to examine questions about sexism, insecurity and entitlement, how they’ve threaded their way through an entertainment culture historically dominated by men and how they’ve shaped our own expectations as individuals and a culture. At a time when women account for less than 20 percent of filmmakers behind the camera and protagonists in front of it, I suggested that it’s long past time to expand and diversify the stories we tell ourselves.

    And we get to do that, without entitled sexist thoughtless frat-boy moviemakers pitching rage-fits.

    My observations struck a chord of recognition with University of Maryland graduate student Isabella Cooper:

    I have taught Women’s Lit courses in the English Department several times, and did so this past semester. Sadly, I am never short on fodder to show the students how rampant misogyny and sexism still are in our culture, and this article gets right to the heart of the way Hollywood so often bolsters men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, their belief that their sexual drive amounts to a right (as Adrienne Rich put it all the way back in the seventies!).

    There’s plenty of fodder. I would happily do without the fodder for the sake of better stories, with women as central characters who have a place on the mattering map.

  • Not all directors of frat-boy movies

    Among the NotAllMen crowd are those persecuted neglected deprived dudes Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow, who are furious that a movie critic – a woman – suggested that frat boy movies might have effects on some boys’ ideation about women. By a funny and startling coincidence, Rogen and Apatow specialize in frat-boy movies.

    Actor Seth Rogen has taken issue with a suggestion, published in The Washington Post, that his films — most recently the frat-boy comedy “Neighbors” — contributed to Elliott Rodger’s bloody rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., on Friday.

    Rogen was responding to film critic Ann Hornaday’s column, in which she wrote:

    as important as it is to understand Rodger’s actions within the context of the mental illness he clearly suffered, it’s just as clear that his delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in.

    “How dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage,” Rogen tweeted to Hornaday. He added: “I find your article horribly insulting and misinformed.”

    Oh yes? You know what? I find Seth Rogen’s entire view of and portrayal of women in his movies horribly insulting and misinformed. Mind you, his portrayal of men is equally insulting, but he does make men the center of the universe while women are the dim little satellites that hobble around them.

    Rogen isn’t specifically named in the piece, but his movie “Neighbors” is.

    Hornaday wrote that Rodger, who is the son of movie director and producer Peter Rodger, grew up in a world dominated by Hollywood visions of manhood and adolescence.

    How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like “Neighbors” and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of “sex and fun and pleasure”? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, “It’s not fair”?

    How many indeed; but you’re not allowed to ask questions like that. You’re allowed to treat movies as capable of influencing how people think about the world ONLY IF you are praising them. Doing it the other way around is heresy and blasphemy.

    Apatow even trots out that old favorite about click bait.

    apa

    Judd Apatow @JuddApatow

    Remember everyone – ads next to articles generate money. They say something shocking and uninformed & get you to click on it to profit.

    Uh huh, and that applies to all material we don’t like, but not to material we do like. Also, Judd Apatow makes movies pro bono. He doesn’t take a dime for himself. This being so, he doesn’t the least bit tailor his material to a mass audience. Nope, not Judd Apatow.

    #NotAllFratboys

  • Women have had enough

    No I’m definitely not the only one. Jessica Valenti is another (and so are most of the people on #YesAllWomen).

    Women have had enough. The stares. The butt-grabs. The little comments. And now this: a man writes a 140-page misogynist manifesto before killing six people, and yet – still – women are called hysterical for insisting this tragedy was driven by sexism.

    And “cruel”; “selfish”; “child-molesting” – ok I made that last one up. I think.

    Valenti quotes Soraya Chemaly and Lindsay Beyerstein – a bit of a Women in Secularism roll-call, which is nice.

    As journalist Lindsay Beyerstein wrote on her Facebook page, it’s infuriating for people to pretend “that there’s some deep mystery about why Elliot Rodger did what he did, or worse, that there’s something unseemly or self-serving about feminists pointing out that he was an explicitly misogynist terrorist.” She continued:

    Rodger told the world exactly why he went on this killing spree. He spelled it out in excruciating detail and sent his narrative of the killings to the media. In case that wasn’t enough, he made a series of YouTube videos to cement his narrative of his own crime in the public mind.

    Truly, he couldn’t have made it any clearer. Why do some people nonetheless doubt his laid-out, explicit motive?

    Part of the obstinate disbelief seems to be a need to protect the privileges of sexism: associating misogyny with a mass murder would mean having to recognize just how dangerous misogyny really is and – if you’re partaking – giving it up. Some men want to believe that they can continue to call women “sluts” and make rape jokes without being part of a broader cultural impact. But they can’t: sexism, from everyday harassment to inequality enshrined in policy, pollutes our society as a whole and limits our ability to create real justice for women.

    Of course it’s about protecting sexism. There are a lot of men – and a few women – who think it’s fun to call women “sluts” and make rape jokes, and the backlash against #YesAllWomen is just more of that. They want to do that, they want to have fun doing it, and they want not to admit that there’s anything wrong with it or harmful about it.

    They want a lot. It’s almost as if they feel entitled.

    Someone asked me over the weekend if I thought this shooting – and the aftermath of activism – would be a watershed moment. I replied that I was hopeful, and I still am, because being cautiously optimistic is the only way I’m able to do this work and get up in the morning. But I’m also exhausted, and fed up.

    If this shooting isn’t the clearest example of sexism turned deadly – then what is? What will it take for Americans to get real about how profoundly misogynist our country really is?

    I seriously have no fucking clue.

  • If you seriously want to contend that Elliot Rodger wasn’t motivated by hatred of women

    A Facebook friend, Brian Murtagh, has a public post expressing fury at the “oh it wasn’t hatred of women” trope. It’s good to see such posts (and I’m seeing a lot of them), because this trope is truly disquieting and despair-inducing. I quote him with permission.

    Look, if you seriously want to contend that Elliot Rodger wasn’t motivated by hatred of women, I don’t want you to unfriend me. I want you to explain your reasoning in a comment to this post.

    I will then eviscerate your arguments, mock and castigate you thoroughly, then *I* will unfriend *you* – unless you convince me. Go on, give it your best fucking shot.

    Excellent, and even better is his response to an article stating the obvious “it wasn’t misogyny ALONE”:

    …it’s a decent article but entirely beside the point. It doesn’t deny that the guy’s primary motive was hatred of women, it admits it unequivocally. I don’t know whether the coverage is terribly different in the UK (it usually is) but over here the media is dancing an unbelievable pavane of denial saying that that is simply *not* the case and that misogyny played little or no part in his motivation. They’re not saying he was made angry at women by some mental illness or other factor and that’s why he was so angry at women he went on a killing spree, they are saying that his blatant, admitted misogyny was largely if not entirely unrelated to the killing. Racists who kill aren’t excused their racism as a motive, religious bigots who kill apostates or heathen in their view aren’t excused that, but a man who flat out said he killed from hatred of women, in pages of online comments and a seven minute video and a 137 page manifesto is said to have had no such motive. It’s utter bullshit. The media in this country have no qualms about calling the most reasonable of feminists “man-haters” for calling out a sex-based institutional injustice, but they will *not* admit this man was motivated by hatred of women.

    At least I’m not the only one who is disgusted.

  • Try staying quiet for a while and actually listening

    Phil Plait has a great article at Slate on #YesAllWomen, with a shout-out to Amy at the end for giving him a helpful idea – that’s how good it is.

    The murderer was active on men’s rights fora, where women are highly objectified, to say the very least. They are seen as nonhuman by many such groups, and at the very least lesser than men—sometimes nothing more than targets or things to acquire. What these men write puts them, to me, in the same category as White Power movements, or any other horribly bigoted group that “others” anyone else. While it may not be possible to blame the men’s rights groups for what happened, from the reports we’ve seen they certainly provided an atmosphere of support.

    Horribly bigoted group that others and also dominates and despises.

    He says the defensive reactions of a lot of men on Twitter were unhelpful.

    …the people saying it aren’t furthering the conversation, they’re sidetracking it.The discussion isn’t about the men who aren’t a problem. (Though, I’ll note, it can be. I’ll get back to that.) Instead of being defensive and distracting from the topic at hand, try staying quiet for a while and actually listening to what the thousands upon thousands of women discussing this are saying.

     

    Fourth—and this is important, so listen carefully—when a woman is walking down the street, or on a blind date, or, yes, in an elevator alone, she doesn’t know which group you’re in. You might be the potential best guy ever in the history of history, but there’s no way for her to know that. A fraction of men out there are most definitelynot in that group. Which are you? Inside your head you know, but outside your head it’s impossible to.

    This is the reality women deal with all the time.

    He says he can’t know what it’s like because he’s not a woman, and it’s taken him a long time to adjust his thinking to reflect that.

    Over the weekend, I retweeted a few of the #YesAllWomen tweets I thought were most important, or most powerful, and saw that again and again they were misunderstood. In almost all the cases I saw, the men commenting were reacting to it, being defensive about the hashtag instead of listening to what was being said.

    Earlier, I mentioned that the conversation is about the men who are the problem, not the ones who aren’t. Well, at this point, a conversation needs to be had about them, too. Even though we may not be the direct problem, we still participate in the cultural problem. If we’re quiet, we’re part of the problem. If we don’t listen, if we don’t help, if we let things slide for whatever reason, then we’re part of the problem, too.

    We men need to do better.

    That would help. It would help a lot.

    And one final word on this. As a man, having written this post I expect there will be comments insulting me, comments questioning my manhood (whatever twisted definition those people have of such a thing, if it even exists), and so on.

    But you know what there won’t be? People threatening to stalk me and rape me and kill me for having the audacity to say that women are people, and that we should be listening to them instead of telling them how to feel. Yet that is precisely what every woman on the Internet would face if she were to write this.

    And that is, sadly, why we so very much need the #YesAllWomen hashtag.

    My thanks to Surly Amy for a helpful suggestion she made to me about this article.

    That was good. No “concern” about feminists furthering their agenda, no alarm at the “cruelty” of feminists saying misogyny played a bit part in the actions of Elliot Rodger, no tutting about feminists “grandstanding” or turning a “tragedy” into something [gasp] “political.” #Notallmen yo.

     

  • Guest post by Antonia Bookbinder on the normalization of misogynist ideology

    I recall being a twenty-something woman and being tremendously attracted to one or another sexy, smart man. These men almost always friend-zoned me for being butch and sarcastic, saying how great it was to be friends with me because I wasn’t “really a girl” and whining about their far more conventionally feminine girlfriends. It hurt, a lot, and I eventually learned to avoid that particular sort of male “friend”. Somehow, though, I never ranted about how all men were evil or depraved or contemplated purchasing firearms to massacre popular students. This is mostly because I was never told that I had an inalienable right to male bodies. I was told instead that I should focus on enjoying life without a sexual relationship, that my sexual satisfaction or lack thereof was not the single most important fact of my existence, and that even good, fulfilling relationships were inevitably also complicated and painful.

    When we teach boys (explicitly and implicitly) that they are incomplete or inadequate unless they have access to a woman’s genitals, that sexual relationships can be had by following certain manipulative rules, and that compliance with gender norms is required for satisfying sexual relationships, we teach children to become rapists and murderers. This is not to excuse men who perpetrate violence of the Isla Vista sort, but it is worth examining where such perpetrators come from.

    Our collective failure to notice or address the prevalence of extremist misogynist ideology in mainstream culture creates more such men from today’s boys. Every time we hear and do not confront a child or youth repeating misogynist “humor”, and every time we avoid discussion of pick-up-artist ideas in our conversations about gender-related violence, we are each complicit in tomorrow’s Isla Vistas.

  • Their depraved emotions and vile sexual impulses

    Amanda Marcotte has some thoughts on PUA ideology and Elliot Rodger.

    This theory—that ordinary and worthy men are oppressed by women who refuse to have sex with them—was articulated in Rodger’s 141-page manifesto he sent to newspapers.

    Women are incapable of having morals or thinking rationally. They are completely controlled by their depraved emotions and vile sexual impulses. Because of this, the men who do get to experience the pleasures of sex and the privilege of breeding are the men who women are sexually attracted to… the stupid, degenerate, obnoxious men. I have observed this all my life. The most beautiful of women choose to mate with the most brutal of men, instead of magnificent gentlemen like myself.

    This sort of rhetoric is fairly common on some of the more embittered PUA forums, and the “men’s rights” forums that have quite a bit of overlap with them. 

    And it is what it is. It’s not all that belief-defying that one very warped guy would take the rage and channel it into violence. It’s surprising that more warped guys don’t. (But many of course do it one at a time, in private, without a manifesto.)

     

  • Rodger told the world exactly why he went on this killing spree

    Lindsay Beyerstein has a brilliant public post on Facebook that has 392 shares as of this moment.

    I am so tired of ostensibly smart, liberal men pretending that there’s some deep mystery about why Elliot Rodger did what he did, or worse, that there’s something unseemly or self-serving about feminists pointing out that he was an explicitly misogynist terrorist. I read Rodger’s manifesto twice. I wish all English comp students could formulate a thesis and support it as clearly as he did.

    Rodger told the world exactly why he went on this killing spree. He spelled it out in excruciating detail and sent his narrative of the killings to the media. In case that wasn’t enough, he made a series of YouTube videos to cement his narrative of his own crime in the public mind.

    The only thing I would add to that is that there are a few ostensibly smart (but not liberal) women doing the same pretending – Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, Miranda Hale and other slime pit types, women like that. I haven’t seen one ostensibly smart, liberal woman doing that though…

    Lindsay points out crisply that Rodger said why he did it; he said it very clearly; he said it repeatedly.

    A person’s own account of their behavior is never the final word. But when the person outlines their motives as lucidly and in as much detail as this guy, that is the starting point for any reasonable interpreter. Yes, we can talk about mental illness. Yes, we can talk about gun control. But none of these factors negates the fact that Rodger was a textbook misogynist terrorist, on the model of Marc Lepine and George Sodini.

    Is it “grandstanding” to say that? Is it “cruel”? Is it “selfish”? I can’t see it.

  • Attitudes that generally put down women

    The Wall Street Journal reports on #YesAllWomen – not with anything earthshaking to say, but it’s interesting that it reports on it at all.

    Hours after a shooting rampage in this coastal college town that the alleged gunman said was “retribution” against women who’d rejected him, a woman launched a conversation on Twitterabout what it’s like to feel vulnerable to violence.

    “As soon as I reached my teens, I didn’t feel comfortable being outside in the evening on my own street,” the woman wrote in one of her first posts under a Twitter hashtag called #YesAllWomen. The woman declined to be identified for this article.

    The hashtag had garnered more than 500,000 tweets by Sunday afternoon, according to Internet analytics firm Topsy.com, making it the most active on Twitter.

    Oh no! Grandstanding!! Selfishness!!! Talking about misogyny just because a shooter created a misogynist video just before going on his shooting spree!!!!

    Comments started pouring in as soon as the hashtag was started, with women from around the world—including Saudi Arabia—chiming in and using the hashtag as a vehicle to air their feelings on issues from criticism of their dress, to men’s behavior. (A response from men quickly started under the tag #NotAllMen).

    And from women eager to disassociate themselves from the filthy feminism.

    On Sunday morning talk shows, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said deputies who visited Mr. Rodger weeks before the shooting at the request of family members, concluded that he wasn’t a threat. “At the time the deputies interacted with him, he was able to convince them he was OK,” Mr. Brown said on the CBSprogram “Face the Nation”.

    In a 141-page document posted online, Mr. Rodger described the visit, expressing relief that they didn’t search his room, which was filled with weapons and ammo. “That would have ended everything,” he wrote. Instead he was able to convince them it was “all a misunderstanding,” the manifesto says.

    So it turns out he wasn’t completely lacking in social skills. He couldn’t get women to like him, but he could convince sheriff’s deputies that he wasn’t a threat. B+.

    #YesAllWomen has especially touched a nerve, in part because Mr. Rodger’s video exemplified attitudes that generally put down women, Ms. Sklar said. “It’s not just about violence against women, but the attitudes that were so chillingly on display in his video–that he was unfairly deprived of attention from women, which was his due,” she said.

    That is correct. It’s not healthy – it’s not healthy to have a culture in which it’s just normal for group X to express endless venomous hatred of group Y in public. Not healthy, not productive, not the way to foster peace and kindness among people.

  • What elephant in what room?

    On the other hand, more cheerfully, I’m seeing a lot of good mini-essays (which is to say, paragraphs) on Facebook by angry male friends expressing their anger at all the anxious misdirection oh no don’t look at the misogyny look over there at the purple rabbit in a fedora.

    Like Martin Robbins for example, who gave me permish to quote him.

    A man who was part of a community of extremists who hate women, wrote a manifesto about his hate for women, then went to a female sorority house to kill women.

    But it definitely wasn’t about his hatred of women. Oh no sir, it was because of his Asperger’s, or some undefined mental illness. It clearly had nothing to do with his hatred of women because he killed men too, on his way to the female sorority house. More men than women in fact if you count them up. And even if it was related to misogyny, we probably shouldn’t talk about it because hey, if we air these sort of views publicly the terrorists win.

    That’s one of several I’ve seen, and that’s just among my friends and just the ones I’ve happened to see. There’s a lot of fedupness – male fedupness – with this “it wasn’t misogyny!!” bullshit. Never doubt it.

     

  • “All of you girls who rejected me”

    The Boston Herald reports on Elliot Rodger and his multiple murders in Santa Barbara.

    “On the day of retribution, I am going to enter the hottest sorority house at UCSB, and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see inside there,” 
Rodger said in his final video. “I will be a god compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals, and I will slaughter you like animals. I hate all of you. Humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species.”

    The Santa Barbara City College student complained of being a virgin who had never been kissed and was constantly rejected by women who prefer “obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.”

    “You think I’m unworthy of you. That’s a crime I can never get over,” he said. “If I can’t have you girls, I will destroy you. You denied me a happy life and in turn I will deny all of you life. It’s only fair.”

    And then he did.

    Which is not to say that misogyny is all that’s going on here. But to pretend it’s irrelevant? I don’t think so.

    “All of you girls who rejected me, looked down upon me, you know, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men … ” Elliot Rodger said during the final moments of his video. “I hate all of you. I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve — annihilation.”

    …

    Experts say the shooter appears to be the product of a sick modern society that encourages violence against women, and that he is suffering from one of man’s oldest mental ailments — envy.

    “You’re looking at someone who’s unhinged. In a culture that legitimizes violence against women — whether it’s video games or pornography — this violence is sexualized,” said Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College. “When you hear something like this, he’s picking up on cultural cues that women are less than him and don’t deserve to live.”

    Again, not necessarily the only factor, but a factor? It certainly looks that way.