The Santa Barbara killings

[silkepus]

Originally Posted by candy_coated_bitch

I don't misunderstand this guy at all--I understand him more than I really want to frankly.

I agree with everything you said, my comment was more a response to okieblue that if we cant understand them, we cant ever change it.

I think saying we cant look at why because we just will never understand feels like throwing your hands up in the air and say I give up. I think there will probably always be unpredictable events that we cant stop short term. But we can prevent a lot by the society we build together. There is a reason why these things happen more often in some places than others and by some people way more than others.

And like you and honeybarbara said, there is NOTHING he said that has not been said a million times before. The things he believed about women is the same thing men everywhere think about women.

[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.

[okieblu]

Originally Posted by silkepus

I agree with everything you said, my comment was more a response to okieblue that if we cant understand them, we cant ever change it.

I think saying we cant look at why because we just will never understand feels like throwing your hands up in the air and say I give up. I think there will probably always be unpredictable events that we cant stop short term. But we can prevent a lot by the society we build together. There is a reason why these things happen more often in some places than others and by some people way more than others.

And like you and honeybarbara said, there is NOTHING he said that has not been said a million times before. The things he believed about women is the same thing men everywhere think about women.

Uh, you got the wrong okie. I haven't posted in this thread, at all, until just now. Didn't even know about this latest shooting until just now. That was okiebug61.

[silkepus]

Originally Posted by okieblu

Uh, you got the wrong okie. I haven't posted in this thread, at all, until just now. Didn't even know about this latest shooting until just now. That was okiebug61.

Oops sorry.

[Kobi]

A website popular with the online Pick-up Artist community responded to Elliott Rodger’s murderous Santa Barbara rampage, saying it could have been avoided if Rodger had ‘game,’ like they profess to possess, before concluding that “more people will die” unless society provides men with more “sexual options.”

The Return of Kings article, written by ‘Roosh,’ goes to elaborate lengths to explain that the PUA-hate community that Rodger was a part of held him back from learning the “masculine” art of seduction – which they call “game” – and, combined with the “American media, the blogosphere, men’s rights activists, and progressive organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Rodger was encouraged to hate and ultimately murder women.

“All these groups are complicit for creating a cultural environment that allowed this massacre to occur, ” Roosh wrote. “It is them (sic) who must accept responsibility for these seven deaths and make the moral change to their ideologies in order to prevent such an act from happening again.”

Stating that Rodger was “undoubtedly mentally unstable and required professional supervision,” Roosh concludes from watching Rodger’s YouTube videos that he displayed “an above-average intelligence and the propensity to connect with individuals in certain cases.”

He adds, “I’ve personally interacted with men who functioned lower than him, but were later able to successfully meet average-looking women and achieve intimacy with them.”

Roosh goes on to say, “We live in a society where being shy, normal, or a little awkward is duly punished by entitled American women who have been encouraged to pursue exciting and fun casual sex in their prime with sexy and hot men as a way of ‘experimentation.’”

He then explains that when women have “passed their physical prime” they then select a “nice guy” with whom to settle down, with the understanding that he is “expected to keep his mouth shut when a trickle flow of informational torture reveals that his bride-to-be has experienced more than a dozen different penises in her vagina, anus, and mouth—the same mouth that is supposed to kiss his future children good night.”

Roosh points out that “beta men” like Rodger are constrained by collegiate “anti-male” rape codes, and the American media which has maligned the “manosphere,” where betas might learn “game” and therby improve their chances with desirable women.

He asserts that Rodger’s hatred of women was encouraged at PUAhate.com “…. where he was able to meet other virgins and mentally unstable men to provide him with comfort while encouraging his budding hatred not just against women for serving him rejections—something that pro-game advocates accept as normal—but also society as a whole for not giving him what he believed he deserved.”

“If Rodger came to me, he would have been received actionable and effective advice, ” Roosh explains. “He would have been exposed to material detailing how socially corrupt American society has become, and how being a beta male provider—his principal strategy in trying to get laid—is no longer useful in achieving intimacy with women who now see men as entertaining clowns that should provide them with excitement, drama, and tension.”

Admitting that he was once “no different than Rodger,” Roosh continued, “Seven people are dead because society has decided that shy and awkward men like Elliot Rodger do not deserve a girlfriend and that there is absolutely no way to improve his loneliness and loserdom through learning game or any other social behavior. At the same time men like him are ostracized, there is no legal means for him to solicit prostitution (in California) to release his biological and very pressing urge for fornication.”

Roosh recommends that society change its ways, warning: “More people will die unless you give men sexual options.”

“Until you give men like Rodger a way to have sex, either by encouraging him to learn game, seek out a Thai wife, or engage in legalized prostitution—three things that the American media and cultural elite venomously attack, it’s inevitable for another massacre to occur. Even game itself, as useful as it is on a individual level, is a band-aid fix upon a culture which has stopped rewarding nice guys while encouraging female whoring to benefit only the top 10% of alpha males, all in the name of societal progress.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/2...ect=no&oswrr=1