Shortly after 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, son of a second-unit director on The Hunger Games, shot and killed six in a rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara on Friday night, authorities found his disturbing 140-page manifesto, detailing his frustrations with female rejection and expressing his vow to punish all women for not being attracted to him.
And in a separate YouTube video posted just hours before the shooting, Rodger can be heard spewing his misogynistic views, voicing his struggles with women, virginity and loneliness:
“I will slaughter every stuck up, blonde slut I see inside there … You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one, the true alpha male,” the young man says in the video. He then describes how he plans to “take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person.”
“You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me. But I will punish you all for it,” he says. “It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy. Yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men. Instead of me. The supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it [laughter].”
But Rodger’s misogyny, while extreme, is far from an anomaly. In fact, the culture of violence towards women has spurred some shocking numbers:
And while the shooting highlights a lack of mental illness health care, it also reflects a societal norm of hating women and justifying violence by sexualizing and demeaning them.
It’s a scary reality — a young man frustrated with rejection from women resorts to misogyny to cope. The truth is, his misogyny is what caused his rejection.
It’s a reality a lot of “men’s rights activists” weren’t ready to accept.
From Think Progress:
Hours after 22-year-old student Elliot Rodger shot and killed 7 people near a Santa Barbara university campus in California on Friday night, an internet user on a messaging board site asked, “Will [A]merican women become nicer after today’s attempt?” “I heard that New Yorkers became a lot nicer after 9/11,” he wrote. “Could this happen to women as a gender after today’s events? I’m seeing that some feminists subreddits are toning down their anti male vitriol after today’s incident.”
The message was posted on the PUA Hate Reddit, one of many pages dedicated to exposing the tricks, lies, manipulations of pick-up artists (PUA) who purport to teach men how to attract beautiful women. The internet’s numerous anti-PUA sites aim to prevent professional pick up artists from shaking down young impressionable men who are desperately trying to meet women. But several websites reviewed by ThinkProgress, including ones Rodger himself posted to, betray deep rooted misogyny and homophobia, as well as users who feel entitled to have sex with beautiful women.
But it’s a reality women know all too well. This weekend, feminists took to Twitter to dismantle the idea that lives would be saved if women gave men more sexual options (an argument posted to the popular Pick-Up Artists site) and to highlight just how often women are harassed, abused and demeaned after “denying” men.
Using the hashtag #YesAllWomen (spurred by Twitter user @GildedPpine), users called for an end to misogyny and violence against women. Here’s an example from political analyst and writer Zerlina Maxwell:
Lethal misogyny hurts anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when the person becomes violent. Men, women, and children. #YesAllWomen
— Zerlina Maxwell (@ZerlinaMaxwell) May 26, 2014
For more inspiring and eye-opening tweets, visit #YesAllWomen.
SOURCE: Think Progress, Huffington Post, YouTube, Twitter | PHOTO CREDIT: Think Progress, Handout
