I have another theory, based on the observation that he was active in bodybuilding forums: roid rage. My guess is that was initially romantically frustrated, with some incidental misogynist tendencies, and he started taking anabolic steroids to help him bulk up. The steroids turned his frustration into a violent rage. If this is the case, gender politics came first, and the mental illness was self-induced, secondary to gender politics.
The coroner ought to run some extra tests. If he was juicing, that might explain his violent impulses. If the police search his home and find steroids, that also works.
Perhaps that’s true in general, but in this case it’s hard to imagine a more privileged individual.
However, his involvement in the fringes of Hollywood elite may have exacerbated the interactions between his mental illness and dysfunctional socialization… the PUA community seems to be all about trying to masquerade as the status and wealth this guy was born to. His sense that his wealth and father’s movie business connections should entitle him to a harem would only be reinforced by the gibberings of the PUA “alphas-in-training” trying to explain to each other why they feel so ungratified. Maybe instead of getting corrective feedback about mistaking “flirtacious glance” for “flesh-craving stare of the psychopath” he found reinforcement in believing that he was not aggressively enough displaying his alpha plumage.
The pro-gun people are still girding themselves for battle, gathering talking points and waiting for the gun control threads to begin. At that point, anything to do with misogyny and mental health will be buried. So enjoy the interlude while you can.
Of course it’s both. Contributing factors contribute, as I’ve said.
But in the face of a shooting, you have to ask yourself “What could we have done to prevent this?”. If we want to prevent shootings, it isn’t enough to tackle individual social ills. We need a concerted, organized effort to implement a system to identify and help people before their mental illnesses get this far.
What I was attempting (and perhaps failed) to convey is that it is more than just a gender politics issue. Even if we could cure the gender politics aspect of the problem tomorrow, we’re still left with mentally ill people not receiving the treatment they need to prevent shootings like this from ever happening in the first place.
The problem I have with the argument that feminism is working to solve men’s problems is that there are influential schools of thought within feminism (which, it must be admitted, is heavily fragmented and hardly monolithic) that are innately adversarial, asserting that men are the problem. Even the term “patriarchy” clearly suggests that men, and men alone, are the problem. That atmosphere doesn’t really lend itself to bridge-building. Beyond that, I think there’s a tendency of many feminists to address the problems of women and then write off the problems of men as inconsequential; if feminism helps men, which it admittedly sometimes does, it’s typically more as a side effect.
That said, MRAs are no better, again because they’re so often adversarial. The whole battle-of-the-sexes mentality makes me cringe, coming from both sides.
For my part, I think the gay rights movement, which has done a far better job than feminism of avoiding antagonistic positions, does more to address men’s issues, especially regarding rigidity of male gender roles, than feminism does.
While normally I’d be all there with you, this guy had a lot more access and resources than The Average Joe. (Most drive-by shootings do not take place from BMW coupes) If “no guns” were a possible target, then sure–but if there are to be some guns in the land, this horrible human being probably would have been able to get his horrible, horrible hands on one.
A thousand times this. As a nerdy, straight kid, my awkwardness and puberty caused my dad to assume I was gay, because of general rural Midwestern cluelessness. My dad was a bigot, and I flat-out denied being gay (noting also in graphic terms that he was being a raging asshole) and disengaged when he ranted about gays, Jews, the Fed, etc. I never took up these notions myself. The topic became verboten for everyone else to talk about and no one in my family talked to me about anything related to relationships or sex or anything. So while I kept myself out of the grips of this nonsense I never had much of an alternative way of dealing with things except disengagement.
I think for a number of decades this was a litmus test used throughout the U.S. on boys to indoctrinate them into patriarchal bigotry. Under this regime, to gain our fathers’ approval we were expected to take up the cause (and vote the politically-approved way). This may be why so many nerdy, anxious men fall so heavily for the message of patriarchal bigotry while their other unresolved issues continue to derail their attempts to grow up. Orson Scott Card, for example, isn’t necessarily a closeted gay man, he just had the bad luck to be an awkward, creative Mormon teenager in the sixties. And in some ways he eventually just gave up and drowned.
The main things that have changed this dynamic have been the gay rights movement and the internet. Feminism is important, to be sure, but probably more as a parallel development and outwardly united front. Gays in the military were much more important to men in general than introducing women, because it reduced the legal power of the bigot faction among us “keeping us all in line”. Gay men in sportball? Same thing. Though it may end up receiving blame for the death of football, inevitable because of the inconvenient brain-scrambling issue.
Guns, dumb porn, mutual outrage societies pouring out of talk radio and certain websites, none of these do a damned bit of good for men. I love my gay brothers for liberating me.
There will always be a subset of people within any movement who are hell bent upon being jerks.
They’re relevant to the situation, but they’re also most often simply a derailing influence, because people talk about them instead of this overwhelming truth:
A huge portion of the problems of patriarchy that feminism has identified are absolutely real and true.
What I see as lacking is real interest among men in looking at how men’s treatment of men is damaging to men. It turns us into monsters. There’s a whole lot of privilege in everything Elliot Rodger said, but at the same time, becoming Elliot Rodger, becoming a mass murderer, that is not a privilege. It’s a horror. It is an undoing.
I think it may have been more accurate for spacedoggity to say that (male) gay rights was better able to avoid the label of “shrill” and “confrontational” because of having deep voices (being just like “regular” men) and having a penchant for hilarious costumes and nudity. The same tactics haven’t caught on for women, for good reason I think.
When considering women’s rights versus (or and) men’s, it will work much better if the menz are not themselves locked in a hostage situation with homophobes.
I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised to see real solutions to a number of issues that MRAs say aren’t being addressed. For example, if you search for male domestic abuse in Google, at least the first page of results is full of helplines, groups and articles that are taking it seriously. I didn’t get a lot of support when I brought it up last year, but there’s actually a men’s day now where positive role models are celebrated and men are encouraged to spend the day with their families and communities while combating negative behavior and perceptions of masculinity. It’s not (and shouldn’t be) a mirror of women’s day, but I think it’s a useful place to work from. Movember combats the idea of men being too macho to care about their health, and there are other examples of positive movements from recent years.
These groups often have elements that are embarrassing or misguided, and they are often hijacked by entitled MRAs. To be honest, I don’t think it’s possible to have a movement of any size without that happening. However, I do think it makes sense to support these movements to some extent as we do need to deal with a lot of issues from a male perspective. This isn’t about men being victims who need to have more rights, it’s about creating a better society for everyone and addressing the obstacles to that.
One of the benefits I’ve personally seen is that I can be a stay at home parent without being looked down on or seen as a threat to children because of my gender (I have heard that other dads in cultures where this is not common have a lot more trouble in this area). I’m very grateful to be living in an area where the sexes are more equal, as there seem to be a lot fewer conflicts and it is much easier to build normal relationships in the community.
It’s important that men feel comfortable enough to support feminism because they know that it’s good for everybody, and that they have an important part in the future too. This is where “not all men” has some validity. Not all men are like this, so we need to celebrate positive behaviour to encourage even fewer men to develop these ways of thinking.
I agree that there is progress in a lot of areas. I just don’t see any coherent movement.
I’m grateful for the progress made by feminism and the gay rights movement too. The underlying social and civil libertarianism of all social justice movements benefits all of us because it pushes us towards a world where we can all be ourselves. I’m an openly poly and gradually more openly bisexual man, and without feminism or gay rights, and without a feminist partner, I could not be these things.
It really doesn’t matter if he was sane or not. That doesn’t change whether or not it was a hate crime, and if he’d targeted other (better protected by law) groups this discussion would be quite different.
Unfortunately, here’s the FBI’s definition of a hate crime, “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.” So unless being a woman is now defined as a “sexual orientation” or “disability” targeting women as a class for murder skirts the law. Crimes targeting women on the local, state and federal level are typically not considered hate crimes only because no laws are written to assign them that identification. It’s in part due to to this legal bias that hate crimes targeting women are deeply under-reported and recorded.
The news is reporting correctly, it’s the law that has failed women.
Can you please talk with a little more respect for the other commenters. There is an incredible amount of snark coming off of your posts and I feel the vast majority of them lack good faith. A post about a mass shooting is not the place for snark. Nor is it a place to intentionally try to derail other valid discussions. If you want to argue something in good faith, then do so. Otherwise, can you please leave this thread?
