Seven people were murdered and another seven wounded in a drive-by in Santa Barbara by a deeply disturbed MRA/PUA. He considered himself a frustrated Alpha Male who was owed sex by women, and when he couldn’t get it, he decided to punish random women. Dave Futrelle has a complete transcript of his manifesto, along with the video he made (the video may disappear; youtube has been busy deleting copies).
Hi, Elliot Rodger here.
Well… this is my last video. It all has to come to this.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge against humanity. Against all of you.
For the last 8 years of my life, ever since I’ve hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires. All because girls have never been attracted to me.
Girls gave their affection, and sex, and love, to other men but never to me.
I’m 22 years old and I’m still a virgin. I’ve never even kissed a girl.
I’ve been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin.
It has been very torturous.
College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex, and fun, and pleasure. But in those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness.
It’s not fair. 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.
It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentlemen.
I will punish all of you for it. (laughs)
On the day of retribution I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB… and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there.
All those girls that I’ve desired so much, they would’ve all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.
I will take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.
You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true alpha male. (laughs)
Yes, after I’ve annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I’ll take to the streets of Isla Vista, and slay every single person I see there.
All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness for all these years, they’ve all looked down upon me every time I try to go out and join them. They’ve all treated me like a mouse.
Well now, I will be a God compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals, and I will slaughter you like animals. I will be a God, exacting my retribution, on all those who deserve it.
And you do deserve it, just for the crime of living a better life than me.
All you popular kids. You’ve never accepted me, and now you’ll all pay for it.
And girls, all I’ve ever wanted was to love you, and to be loved by you. I’ve wanted a girlfriend, I’ve wanted sex, I’ve wanted love, affection, adoration, but you think I’m unworthy of it.
That’s a crime that can never be forgiven.
If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you. (laughs)
You denied me a happy life, and in turn, I will deny all of you life. (laughs) It’s only fair.
I hate all of you, humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power, I would stop at nothing, to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood, and rightfully so.
You deserve to be annihilated. And I’ll give that to you.
You never showed me any mercy, and so I will show you none. (laughs)
You force me to suffer all my life, and now I’ll make you all suffer.
I’ve waited a long time for this.
I’ll give you exactly what you deserve.
You know, I think I kind of understand why women wanted nothing to do with this guy.
It doesn’t help that this severely mentally disturbed individual was feeding on a steady diet of the misogyny pouring out of various so-called “men’s rights” channels and websites.
I would be more comfortable if the diagnoses of mental illness would stop.
True. However, as one who has done a tremendous amount of work on himself, I can say that I could see how an untreated/undiagnosed individual could act the way Mr. Rodger did. How he sees the world as a dark grey place with no kindness or love, or how he’s totally alone forever.
No excuse for what he did, of course. And no way that what he did was “normal” or the actions of someone who was in control of themselves. He was out of control, period.
PZ Wrote: “It doesn’t help that this severely mentally disturbed individual was feeding on a steady diet …”
Not to mention that he seems to have had access to some pretty potent firearms.
No doubt Paul Elam & pals will use this tragedy to paint the murderer as the “real” victim.
You know, wmeon have turned me down all of my adult, dating life. I haven’t had an intimate relationship in 17 years. I’m lonely, sad, and I get easily frustrated and bitter.
However, I have never felt compelled to think less of women in general for my personal and physical failings, much less harm them. (I’m not trying to sound superior, I just can’t comprehend what was going through this kid’s mind.) I can’t blame women for not wanting me: I’m overweight and ugly. I’m old. I have mental health issues that kind of scare people who don’t know what to expect from me. I wouldn’t want to date or fuck me either. I’m the reason I’m single, not some mythical feminist conspiracy designed to deny me sex out of spite.
Rodgers had at lot of advantages I certainly don’t: He had youth and he was comparably quite handsome. If going by looks alone, I find it very hard to believe that he couldn’t find a woman who’d be interested in him. Yet, I’m with PZ. I imagine that his personality had a lot to be desired and I don’t think it ever occurred to Rodgers that the problem was with him, not the women he hated.
This horror hits close to home. Both my husband and I attended UC Santa Barbara and lived in Isla Vista. It is a very good university, but it is a party school on the beach filled with beautiful people. Not a good place for a misogynist with delusions of persecution.
We live in a strange world. Is is getting stranger, or we simply more aware?
@Morgan #6:
A bit of both. The longer we live, the more outliers we’re likely to experience. That makes the world seem stranger and more extreme to each of us personally, even though it was always like this. And because the range and ease of access to communications technology has increased, we’re now also aware of events on the other side of the world rather than just on the other side of town.
Ughhhhhh ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! SO SO gross.
Reminds me of creepy “loner”-type guys in high school that I had an ungodly ability to attract as a teen. (Actually, I still do. I think it’s because I try hard to be nice to everyone and since they’re regularly shunned by others, they gravitate toward me because my basic minimal civility screams “potential romance”.) The friendless, creepy type. Like one of them would come to my house in the dark mornings and try to cajole me into dating him even though I was visibly always uncomfortable, he would follow me around, he would bring me a long string of gifts that made me feel like I was obligated to “consider” him, and in fact the entire theatre department at my school (including concerned teachers) became keenly aware of my Freaky Guy Problem.
The dude in question, like so many others, would go on to blame me for his loneliness, and that’s who this shooter guy reminds me of.
I will never get it. How hard is it to have no-pressure conversations with people, to have your own hobbies and interests and an easygoing attitude, and ideally shower sometimes? Like it’s not THAT HARD. Learn to listen, maybe read a little. Make friendly jokes. Relax, observe, and be respectful.
And, look, I’m not promising that that’s the formula to becoming Mr. Popular #1, but it’ll at least let you be Mr. Not Socially Inept.
I wish this hideous shitbag had figured that out. Oh, those poor people!
Here is his YouTube channel.
The worse thing we did at UCSB was burn down a bank. Oh, those sweet, innocent good old days. [/satire]
And you kids get off my fucking lawn.
On a serious note, my heart breaks for all the people killed or injured. Even for the murderous young man.
Well even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Hold up, how do I do the Comic Sans gumby quote thing? <blockquote class=”creationist”> doesn’t seem to work down here in commentland.
One of the hardest things about attraction and interest is how very much of it is out of our personal control. We cannot control other people. We cannot make other people become romantically or sexually interested in us. There are people who are fat, who would be considered “ugly” by conventional aesthetics, who are old, who are considered “weird”, who have all found love. There is nothing about a person that makes them unworthy of love, because love isn’t handed out based on worth. We don’t earn it.
There are people who are loathsome, sexist, violent assholes like Rodgers who have sexual/romantic relationships. There are people who truly are very kind, very generous, and within the range of what’s considered conventionally attractive who are single and will live out their lives without a long-term relationship.
It can be frustrating to be without a relationship when you want one and it can be tempting to try to blame something for that fact, but it really does come down to a lottery in the end. Will you cross paths with someone who would be interested in you that you would also be interested in? Will the both of you be romantically available? Will the both of you make all of this clear before your paths diverge? Sure, there are ways those lottery odds can go up (frequent places where people with compatible interests/genders/orientations will be, express your interest, etc), but the interest of other people is always a wildcard that cannot be accounted for. Yes, being conventionally attractive and being good at navigating the social rules of neurotypicals of your culture is another way to increase the odds in that lottery, but it’s still not a matter of merit. It’s not happening because someone is “better” than someone else. Being a heterosexual immensely increases your opportunities to form a relationship just because there are so many more potential partners and that has nothing to do with worth.
Relationships aren’t owed. They aren’t earned. That they can be earned, that they are something we are owed if we do everything “right”, is the toxic lie Rodgers operated on.
For fuck’s sake, PZ! Severely mentally disturbed? I wasn’t aware he had any form of diagnosis. I see the Pharyngulean tradition of lobbing mentally ill people under the bus continues apace. I predict the usual excuses that do severe violence to the term “severely mentally disturbed” as if it doesn’t mean what it clearly does.
Whilst this LEVEL of violence is relatively uncommon, this TYPE of violence is horribly frequent. Gee, I’d have thought the message that on average 2 women a week die at the hands of their loved ones in the UK (to pick one example) alone had got through by now. This isn’t severe mental disturbance, this is boringly prosaic violence against women by men who not only believe they have an entitlement to women’s bodies and attention but are raised to believe this and who have every aspect of this belief culturally reinforced. Non-severely mentally disturbed people kill all the time. Last I checked anger, for example, was a common emotion well within normal human parameters and can cause people to act impulsively and with horrendous consequences. Invoking mental disturbance or madness is an erroneous excuse and an evidence feel harmful “explanation”. One I’d have thought was too obvious for anyone, you, PZ very much included, to make.
Even if diagnoses are forthcoming, causal connections have not been established. This is mental health stigma plain and simple. The lazy reference to “severe mental disturbance” as if it is a) true or b) even related to his acts is pathetic. Evidence of mental disturbance is, AFAIK, not present. Emotional disturbance? Combined with huge entitlement, the inability to correct oneself, the “game” PUAs play and that this chap was openly influenced by? Nothing more is needed.
Every lynching wasn’t done by mentally disturbed people in any meaningful sense of that term. Entitlement, fear, racism. All you need. Kristallnacht? Entitlement, fear, deprivation, bigotry. All you need. Genocides and atrocities aplenty don’t require “severe mental disturbance”, evil is banal. This isn’t news. Perfectly sane, perfectly not “severely mentally disturbed” {cough transparent euphemism} people pull horrendous shit every minute of every day.
In the words of the Internet: I am disappoint.
Actually I’m not. This “bad=mad” shite flies freely here and elsewhere alllllll the time. But hey, who gives a fuck about one of the most vulnerable groups in society when there’s rhetoric to be a-spouting?
Louis
I was going to try and do an analysis of how the thinking of possessive, entitled violence begins and how it perpetuates.
Instead I’m just going to say, “Fuck. Fuck the hell we inflict on each other. Fuck it right out of the universe.”
There’s a Hassidic poem/saying/proverb/teaching of which I’m reminded. In English, I’ve heard it go something like this: Always assume that the person sitting next to you is the Messiah, waiting to experience simple, human kindness. When you do, you will soon come to weigh your words and watch your hands. And if the messiah then chooses not to appear in your time, it will not matter.
That’s Hassidic beauty that any atheist might cry to read.
I am with you, Razzlefrog: I also attracted this kind of loners (only stopped when I managed to get into a relationship). Two years ago, I had to dismiss one of these guys. I would have forgotten him completely, but then, one month ago, I discovered that while I had been able to ignore him and ban him from my circles, he had kept tracking me, posting about me and how I had hurt his feelings, about the things that he would like to do to me, about how he would destroy me, had published pictures where he would be torturing me with hammer and nails. That unsettled me to no end.
I find the view of these guys fairly scary. This guy would insist in relying on my shoulders the responsibility of being nice to him after every woman before me (40, he whined about being a virgin, too) had rejected him. Because “he deserved it” for being such a nice unrecognised guy. I tried to make him understand that he wasn’t nice, that he should change his manners and his attitude, but I have the impression, after him and a few others, that they don’t want to change. They prefer the rest of the world to act following their wishes. And if the world does not follow, they have the perfect excuse to retaliate for wrongs past in a way they always want to. They don’t want to better themselves, they was revenge.
Isla Vista is a playground for the pampered, and it’s a terrible thing that Mr. Rodger wanted so desperately to be a part of all that, and ended up going with a violent end. It’s even worse that he was caught up in the deep currents of aggrieved entitlement and misogynistic thought, which is everywhere you turn now.
I’m sad for them all.
Woah, dude. Calm down before you hurt yourself.
From Boston.com:
I hate crazy-blaming as much as the next depression-haver, but “severely mentally disturbed” is not a diagnosis.
The language isn’t what I’d choose. I think “cognitively” is better, more precise, & more accurate than “mentally,” but “mentally” is miles better than “psychologically”.
PZ has responded to calls to remove “crazy” from posts where the actual problem is “violent” or “willing to harm others” or “evil”.
I don’t think it’s wrong to provide further constructive criticism – especially that this is violence born out of quotidian rather than exceptional thinking. [I will follow this line of thinking in a moment, but in these brackets I wish to point out that PZ didn’t say such thinking was unusual or disconnected from reality or everyday experience. Merely that it was “severe”.] But if it is born out of quotidian thinking, there must still exist some process by which others curb their impulses to shoot dozens of bullets at crowds of other human beings. That process was lacking or fucked in this shooter.
We should be able to say that. We have to be able to say that. PZ didn’t proffer a diagnosis or conflate crazy with evil.
It’s you, here who are equating the two when you say:
The only thing that might have been a synonym for “mental disturbance” PZ provides is “misogyny”, and the semantic connection between them could easily have been something more cause-and-effect than equation-of-terms.
I’m on your side in this fight, Louis. I think that your aim is arguably off here.
Razzlefrog:
I always went out of my way to be nice with, and engage with the “creepy loners”, men and women. A lot of people are desperate for friendship, for contact. Yeah, some of them can be trouble, and it can be difficult to disentangle, but I ended up with some very good friends, and maybe the willingness to be a friend can go a long way in preventing bad situations.
Usernames are smart,
Patronising much?
So being under psychiatric care and diagnosed with autism = severely mentally disturbed = dangerous?
Good to know. Also good to know you missed the point.
Louis
It was a false flag event!!! And the fault of liberals and Obama.
At least according to the rightwing nuts.
I guarantee you, someone will come up with that in a few hours when what passes for the wheels in their heads finish turning. They always do this.
PS And a few people will claim the dead people aren’t really dead. It’s all a conspiracy. This always happens too.
@usernames are smart:
That quote from Boston.com? That’s exactly the kind of shit we don’t need. How the fuck do they think that *any* functioning Asperger’s is related to shooting people to death?
There’s the kind of crazy-blaming bullshit that deserves rage.
I haven’t recently reviewed the psych lit on this topic, but the last time I did – around 6 or 7 years ago – the literature was clear that those people who had been formally diagnosed with a condition appearing in the DSM were **less likely** than the general public to commit violent crime for all diagnoses except substance abuse disorders and very specific subtypes of schizophrenia that constituted a small minority of all people with schizophrenia.
Moreover, propensity to violence was even **less** if the diagnosed person was actually experiencing ongoing supervision and/or care from a qualified provider.
Boston.com should be ashamed of itself and deserves all of Louis’ barrels plus more than a few of the rest of ours.
I honestly don’t know how you think you’re helping in quoting them here, Usernames are smart.
And oh yeah, if all those young adults had been carrying guns, this wouldn’t have happened.
You’ll hear this too and soon.
The news reports said everything happened in minutes and few people figured it out very quickly. Even if they were wearing colt .45’s in hip holsters and the fastest draw in Isla Vista, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference.
Usernames are smart:
That was absolute shit reporting, and I’d like to think a regular here would know better than to propagate it. This is othering at its most insidious, and people on the non-neurotypical side truly don’t need yet more shit poured on their collective heads.
Of course it would have made a difference!
The slow-to-understand wouldn’t have seen a gun concealed in a car, but would have seen one-or-two fast drawers firing their guns on a crowded street at other people. They would naturally have targeted the fast drawers, who, under reasonable apprehension of deadly force, would have legally fired back at them.
Very quickly it would have been apparent that a full on war had hit Isla Vista and the Red Dawn types would have organized a Wolverine Force to blow away all those who hate america’s greatest freedom: the freedom to own guns!
And, as a result, in 6 months time I could have picked up a great beach house at a steep discount that more than covers the cost of patching a few hundred bullet holes and redoing the severed wiring.
…Ugh. I feel so much more capable of replying with snark to the GunRightsers’ likely-to-be-used hypotheticals than to the actual tragedy.
Crip Dyke,
My aim isn’t off, first offence this isn’t.
Quibbling to exonerate PZ butters no parsnips with me. The entire phrase “severely mentally disturbed” borrows from extant mental health stigma in the exact same manner that “c*nt” borrows from extant misogyny. The power, the damage, in the term and its use is derived from derogation by reference to **mental** abnormality, difference, perceived “badness” just like misogynist terms derive power from the perception of female as “lesser”.
I disagree that the use of “mentally” is better than “psychologically”. I disagree that some hinderance to violence was lacking. Othering and excuses. It ain’t necessarily so. Anger is enough, to name one example.
The point is this kind of speculation over MENTAL states is utterly unnecessary and hugely harmful. It is no more innocent than veiled appeals to extant bigotry on other axes of oppression. Last time I checked neither you nor PZ was qualified to make any form of diagnosis of mental state. Neither are the various quoted media organs. And even if you were, unless you were involved in the treatment of this individual you would be grossly unprofessional in pontificating over the web. Whatever your experience or qualification.
We’re so used to folk psychologies and making appeals to various forms of mental othering it’s second nature. I do it, cursing myself each time, and end up correcting myself if I remember. Holier I ain’t. There’s already a clueless fuckstick above quoting some psychiatric aspects of this person as if they’re demonstrably relevant. They ain’t, and they aren’t justified inferences either. Here’s one for you, imagine the killer is a woman and some genius chimes in with “Hurr Hurr, time of the month”, are you telling me that, true or not, that isn’t a misogynistic inference? An othering based on misogynist stigma about “hysterical hormonal women”?
More than this, this attempt at othering harms women. Trying to shift any aspect of this away from the rich vein of cultural misogyny and well nurtured entitlement that so clearly informed the actions of this person does great violence to the major problem. This man killed women because he felt they had wronged him by not giving him what he believed he was entitled to. Pontificating about mental states not in evidence, or tangentially so, dilutes attention on the starkly obvious problem at hand.
Louis
And Crip Dyke, if I appear angry, it is not at you, so apologies. iPad typing and mardiness about yet another instance of mental health bigotry (which I hate to tell you this is, however much I might not want it to be) is possibly not helping me express myself well.
Louis
Fair enough, Louis.
I have a much bigger problem with Boston.com, but aim your barrels where you think best.
He considered himself a frustrated Alpha Male
The problem with that particular ideology is that it sucks to think you’re not an alpha. Presumably, they all think they are alphas and, gosh, didn’t Dunning and Kruger have something to say about that?
For such people it’s not that they are “frustrated alphas” it’s that they are “losers in denial”..
This is sheer speculation on my part…… When I attended university in Santa Barbara, then subsequently lived in the town for many years it was a quiet, moderately wealthy place. Over the years the number of violent events there have increased, especially near the university. The grotesque wealth disparity in this country was not much in evidence when I attended the school, but I visited the place recently and did not recognize it. There is very expensive luxury housing for students, and Isla Vista is not the near slum it was years ago. Although the young man who committed this crime was from a privileged background, could the obvious disparity of wealth reflected in places such as UCSB become a magnet for the truly disenfranchised? Will these sorts of places become targets in class warfare?
I’m not generally an alarmist, but I do believe our class warfare has every chance to become bloody. I hope I am wrong.
Marcus Ranum:
I really dislike this, it not only smacks heavily of othering, it’s a form of quick label judgement, a convenient way for us to dismiss people.
Crip Dyke,
Ha! Oh my barrels are aimed wider than just here. Maybe I expect better from this place and its denizens than I expect elsewhere.
Louis
Fuck it, Louis, even if you were angry with me, that would be okay.
You targeted my argument, and my argument is admittedly weak in some areas. It really was more a tactical argument than anything else, and my tactics are just as likely to be wrong as anyone else’s.
I think you’re expressing yourself well, and crazy-blaming needs to be taken down. We’re good.
“Well now, I will be a God compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals, and I will slaughter you like animals. I will be a God, exacting my retribution, on all those who deserve it. ”
at least he isn’t an atheist. they can’t blame this on us
morgan @ 31
It already is quite bloody. People are dying every day as a result of class warfare. They’re just poor, so nobody in the media notices or cares.
This is a story of frustrated entitlement, of a very privileged young man who didn’t get what society told him he was owed. Us poors don’t need to be dragged into it.
Okay, this thread has accelerated and I need to start attaching numbers to things – that I was replying to Louis was not in doubt, but exactly to what was.
My #29 was in response to #27.
And my #34 was in response to #28.
Further comments, if any, will be made with more obvious references from the get go. Sorry for any confusion my laziness might have caused anyone.
This next bit is for #33 from Louis:
I hope you do – two edged as that may be. Being held accountable is how I grow as a person.
Crip Dyke,
Well we all know *I’m* perfect and never make errors or commit acts of dubiously unquestioned dozitude!
Hell, I’ll even apologise to PZ for {cough} “indelicately intemperate phraseology”. The points stand, but maybe I could work on the delivery.
Louis
In all fairness to PZ, CNN has been describing him as “severely mentally disturbed.” I do agree with Louis that the mentally ill = dangerous trope needs to die. I suffer from clinical depression, and the only one I have ever been a danger to is myself.
The Mellow Monkey @36
I quite agree. But my point of speculation was only that acts of seemingly random violence can reverberate out into the society in unforeseen ways. We are a culture that might be ready to explode. What will trigger the explosion? It is a topic for another conversation.
God forbid we other and dismiss the views of misogynists and a murderer who actualized their hateful rhetoric. It would be terrible if they somehow got impression we were excluding them from our welcoming and healing community.
*screeches his Razor scooter to a halt, flips fedora out of eyes*
NOT ALL MEN
*tips fedora to all the woman and screeches off leaving his home number and address printed on little cards with a fedora logo and “call me for sex”*
@Jemoi Jemoi, #35
You underestimate the duplicity of apologetics:
To the apologist, atheists set themselves up as gods. Thus, “I will be a god compared to you,” will be the first evidence trotted out by the apologists that Elliot Rodger is **really** an atheist.
Assuming ER turns out to have been correctly ID’d as the hit-and-runner, shooter, and killer the convinced will be only more convinced that Darwinist Evilooshunists are responsible for all the violence in the world.
Ryan Cunningham,
No one is complaining that his views are dismissed. The dismissal of HIM as a person, making him something “other”, different, not “normal”, special, apart etc etc etc is the problem. It is a psychological pitfall fallen into when dehumanising someone who has done something bad. This is a problem because it fails to address the humanity of the person who has done something bad, not in a welcoming healing touchy feely wishy washy aren’t we all grand way, but in the sense that very “normal”, not special, not apart people do horrendous things for very “normal”, not special, not apart, not hideous reasons.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, similarly those who try to pretend people who do bad things are not frighteningly similar to themselves more often than not are doomed to follow in their footsteps.
Louis
Tashiliciously Shriked,
You win the internet as far as I’m concerned.
Louis
Thank you, Louis, for standing up against that horrible, ableist and wrong nonsense that is crazy-blaming here. As someone who is ~”seriously mentally ill”~ partly as a result of trauma at the hands of a creep not unlike Rodgers, I don’t exactly like to hear that because I was hurt, I’m the one to watch out for. Especially from people who should goddamn know better.
I’ve also got a history of being a magnet for weird loner dudes. I’ve only had to call the cops on one, and nearly died at the hands of another, whom I dated. (They don’t get any better when they finally do get the magical sex they think they’re owed.)
Apparently the MRM is aalready lionizing him as a hero and a martyr.
The fact Rodger’s father is a film director should lead to a thousand religious types going on about how evil Hollywood is, and that the only solution is put God into everything.
But’s it’s “ableist” to point out that genetically inferior sperglords shouldn’t have access to guns. First Lanza and now this reject. This is, in general, the kind of damaged brain attracted to MRA ideas. It’s mostly bitter divorcees with horrible prior marriages and terrible divorce experiences or fat “aspergers” types with no social skills, job, intellect, or any other trait that may attract the opposite sex. They should just learn to accept their perma-virgin status, but instead they take out their frustrations on the rest of the world. People like this failing to reproduce is just natural selection in action. Any woman who would fuck these people is a traitor to her genes.
The Mellow Monkey @ 13
And with most lotteries, you lose.
I met my first (and only) girlfriend back in college. I met her out of sure chance and she actually asked me out on our first date. We lasted for about a 1.5 years until she got tired of my personal baggage and dumped me. I was so much in love with her, I blissfully unaware that there were any problems until the very end. The day she broke up with me is still the worst day of me life.
Since then, I’ve been rather gun-shy about relationships. I didn’t want to go through the same shit as before. After I meet someone I liked, I spend months working up the courage to ask them out, only to be (politely) shot down. The last time was about a year ago with a young woman I met at the local freethought group. We started out watching indy films and episodes of Cosmos, but when I offered to be “more,” she turned me down. I cried all the way home from her place. We’re still friends and we talk from time to time.
Since then, I’ve grudgingly resigned myself to the forces of biology and probably and have given up on trying to find a mate. Face it, I’m pushing 40., my last weigh-in put me at 360 lbs, and I suffer from depression, anxiety, and I get these tourettes-like tics or fits when I’m stressed out. While I have a college education, I live at home with my father because I can’t find a better job that will allow me to make rent, much less a house payment. Going back to the lottery analogy, I think you can say that the odds of me finding someone are statistically so close to zero they’re virtually non-existent.
That is, unless someone here knows a single woman in the SE Wisconsin area who is into fat, poor, atheist guys, with no self-esteem who likes tabletop RPGs, miniature wargaming, and a host of other “geeky” pursuits?
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
You know, i heard a rumor that his favorite recent film was “God’s not dead” and that the last thing he did before he went on his shooting spree was see it in the theater for the 7th time.
I use the existence of this rumor to prove that “God’s not dead” is a wishy-washy movie that portrays atheists too sympathetically. What Hollywood needs is a new breed of movie, “God’s not dead: you are!” In it, the atheist doesn’t die as a result of an unfortunate accident, just slowly enough to be saved. Instead, christian men rule over women, children, and heathens as “co-sovereigns” with god and the atheists are tortured into recantation before being burned at the stake.
If that doesn’t create a non-violent world, then nothing biblical will!
P.S.: And don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of feminists either. This whole generation is filled with lazy, entitled brats who think they’re all owed something because they’re special snowflakes. Feminist types tend to be either the freshman “I just took a women’s studies class and now I want to be an activist to impress my professor.” stereotype or the female version of the loser MRA, fat, lazy, unattractive, majored in non-technical field in college so lacks real job skills, etc.. The former infest Tumblr and other blogging networks. The latter become radical feminists and pretend lesbians.
Tashiliciously Shriked @ 42
Hey! I like fedoras! I will never forgive the libertarian, MRA, assholes for associating my favorite hat with their jackassery!
Clean up on Aisles @48 and @51!
universalanimosity:
There isn’t the least bit of danger about that.
Akira:
So do I. I own several, and I don’t even own a penis!
Cooool… UA there thinks I have no job skills because I’m a registered vet tech, neverminding of course that I do everything an RN does… only more.
Odd that I’m supposedly a radfem and pretend lesbian. I guess I’ll have to inform my boyfriend of this change. I’ll bet he’ll be as surprised as I!
I’ve posted something on my own blog about this, and somehow managed to avoid being as darkly sarcastic as my first comment here.
this needs to trigger conversations about this. About the MRAs, the Red Pillers, the LoveShy, and everything in between. The sexism inherent in the system creates, protects, and emboldens these people. And the gun and violence culture in the US is only going to serve to bring *more* of these events to light.
@51
What part of NO TROLL THREAD did you fail to comprehend?
“Losers in denial” precisely describes the views of the MRA/PUA community. It’s the core of their entire philosophy. Their raison d’etre is blaming women for their personal shortcomings. If rhetoric that forcefully rejects that view shortly after it resulted in the tragic deaths of real people leaves you rushing to look for ways it might seem to “other” the murderer, you might want rethink your priorities.
Also, my boyfriend wears a fedora. I think he looks nummy in them. Super angry at their use by the MRAs, and so is he. I’ll read him stuff off here and he’ll yell back “Make them stop ruining my hat!”
Inaji @ 55
I own but one fedora, but I do own several penises.
…well, penis-like objects.
So do I, and I also will never forgive them for taking it. I wore mine with a suit, as it’s fucking supposed to be worn. I think it’s classy as fuck and so much better than the current hats people wear. Fucking baseball caps with the stickers still on them.
Here is a helpful suggestion for angry, frustrated MRAs… embrace bisexuality. According to my favorite pervert, Woody Allen, “Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.”
Fuck off you false-equivalence pushing doucheturd. Feminism and the MRA are in no way similar, not in goals, means, and activities.
Oh dear, per UA I lack the traits to be a feminist… yet I identify as a feminist because I think I’m a person, just as men are people. Damn. I must be a *fake* feminist or something because I don’t fall into UA’s definition!
p.s. UA is also shorthand for ‘urinalysis’. That is your username in my head from now on. Maybe you should consider it, and piss off.
Tashiliciously Shriked @ 65:
Seriously, UA. That’s some good advice for you. Fuck right the fuck off, asshole.
Monitor Note:
Alert sent for #48 & #51.
ekwhite,
And if he was black, CNN described him using the N-word and PZ therefore did likewise that would be grand? Gotcha. Repeating shite doesn’t metamorphose it into honey. Even when PZ does it. Unless turning shite into honey is PZ’s atheist messiah power. In which case I stand corrected.
Sorry, sorry, I might be a *leeeeeeeeetle* bit harsh about this because it pisses me off massively. Like Crip Dyke I’m not mad at YOU, or even PZ really. I am mad this stuff still goes largely unchecked.
Actually, believe it or not, the fact that it pisses me off massively is the second most important thing. The most important thing is that every week of my life I see the IMMENSE damage this kind of thinking does to dozens of people that I am trying to help access better mental health care/benefits/etc. I spent three hours on Thursday night, to name just one example from the last month, trying to talk a friend* of mine out of killing himself because he had so internalised the “mad = bad”/”bad = mad” tropes that the fact that he had a day off, a bit of a lazy day, a procrastinate-the-day-away day meant that he was wrong, and lesser, and bad, and a waste of life, and a loser, and a failure, and not human and…
…yeah. This stuff actually matters. Even mild versions. Even when done by people I like or am well disposed towards. Even when I do it.
Louis
*Actually not the most accurate description. But it’ll do for simplicity’s sake. “Client” etc sound wrong to me.
Universalfuckosity spewed the same bullshit in the Cult of Macintosh thread:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/05/10/another-reason-to-join-the-cult-of-macintosh/
In my opinion this kind of violent behavior is at least partly a result of our glorifying Dirty Harry, John Wayne and Rambo. Those are our heroes and we act like them.
Or we excuse faults in ourselves by telling stories in which our faults are our heroes’ virtues?
I think god is made in the image of man.
I doubt it. We up here in canada glorify and enjoy the same fictional heroes as you do. But we don’t have a culture of guns and using guns as the first and only line of objection to opposition.
As was rightfully pointed out on twitter, it’s been about what, a week or so? since a girl was stabbed to death for turning down a prom invitation. This ain’t no isolated exceptional kind of event.
I see you still haven’t fucked off. Maybe you should get on that.
UA probably considers himself ‘people’. How cute.
Congratulations on saying the stupidest thing I’ve seen this month, and you were up against stiff competition.
Terska:
I’d say that if that factors in at all, it’s very little indeed. This has a great deal more to do with the complex stew of sexism, classism, and aggrieved entitlement a whole lot of people are currently swimming in. I rather expect a fair amount of young people would respond with “who?” to those actors/movies.
Preserved for posterity from universalanimosity’s inevitable bannination and UA’s comments inevitable erasure.
I want it known just exactly how utterly evil and contemptible this troll’s comments are, and I can’t resist preserving such a classic the-response-to-the-seemingly-obvious-feminist-truism-proves-the-need-to-spout-seemingly-obvious-feminist-truims-more incident.
“at least some are”. :spits:
Oh boy! A misanthrope! How edgy!
Akira MacKenzie @ 49:
…and who complains about all of the above in a thread about a guy shooting down women because he felt entitled to one?
Dude. FFS. I sympathize with you, and I say yet again I’ve had close friendships and even crushes on folks who matched basically every attribute on your list (most of which I also match), but I think a lot less of you *now* for bringing it up in this thread of all places. At the very least, you could have taken it to Thunderdome.
oh holy shit I just saw/read Mackensie @49
not the time or place. like, seriously. no.
@nich, 82:
Yes, “UniversalAnimosity” is indeed well named. Such bravery UA displays, in coming here to speak difficult truths to power!
Just don’t tell UA that insulting all the members of both the most common genders hasn’t made UA’s animosity quite “universal” yet.
I really would hate to see the mess splattered here if UA understands that concept before PZ brings the banhammer down.
What’s being objected to is not the dismissal of misogynist views, but the dismissal of views by “person with a mental disorder”. It matters why his views are dismissed.
I don’t think the views should be dismissed.
Dismissal implies that you just go “nope” and throw it out. That’s nto going to have an effect on much in the culture because then all you have is the MRAs going “DSKIFHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOO” and with no reply from the rest of society.
Not dismissal. Destruction. Pure and unfilted unmaking of their ideas.
@crip dyke 43
they would be contradicting themselves and the definition of atheism. as soon as he mentioned GOD he was out f the atheist circle.
It seems that the family of Elliot Rodger was very concerned about what he might do. Sadly, the police the interviewed found him a “perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human,”.
It seems that there were warning signs and family members were worried. But this concern was dismissed.
Sorry about the typo.
Yes, how dare a fat man share his thoughts on rejection… The nerve of him!
And your evidence is where? Your unsupported mere opinion is dismissed as lies and bullshit without evidence. Try again with real links to back up your “lies and bullshit”….
“humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species.”
And he aimed to prove it!
I think it would be rather pointless to respond to anything said by him. It would be like responding to someone who says “the sun is made of celery”. It’s just wrong. And stupid.
I think the objection was not sharing thoughts, but rather the venue in which he chose to do so. Which was stated in the objecting comment…
@Jemoi Jemoi:
I was responding to your statement:
They can and they will. Self-contradiction and logical, definitional contradiction are no barriers to theocrats blaming atheists.
So your 88 may be correct, but it doesn’t save your assertion that “they can’t blame … us” contained in your #35.
Well. This kind of event sure brings out the worst in people. I would hope it would bring out the best: desire to change circumstances in which this kind of thing happens on semi-regular basis, sorrow, this-is-the-fucking-world-we-live-in anger instead of lol-losers-murderers-can’t-get-laid anger which sounds more like amusement.
the real question right now is why hasn’t wayne lapierre appeared on all national stations to tell the story about the good guy with a gun and the bad guy with a gun..and why hasn’t this be blame yet on hollywood and on VIDEO GAMES. quick what music was this kid listening to? these will be the real questions the nra sloths will be digging into the next days to deflect attention
@tacotaco 91
yes that is entirely the point good job on being so great at reading subtext *golf clap*
And thank you to Crip Dyke and Louis for their exchange regarding the ‘seriously mentally disturbed’ business above. I was parsing it out myself and found both of your comments to be very helpful.
You appear to have missed the part where he killed seven people!
His words alone were quite problematic, since they did more than express his personal frustration, but also blamed other people for it. It’s one thing to be upset (we’ve all tried that, I assume), it’s quite another to say that it’s other people’s fault and that they deserve to die because of it.
Tacotaco was talking about the reaction to post 49.
LykeX,
I believe he was responding to criticism of Akira MacKenzie’s post, not the shooter.
Ptyrexx @ 83.
I’m sorry. I was trying to be humorous and I failed miserably. I’ll try harder to be a little more sensitive next time.
How could any woman resist such a fine looking gentle-specimen who approaches her to ask her for sex? It’s just not right. With a right supreme gentlemanly line like “Why don’t we go to your place and so you can fuck me?”, how could I miss? It certainly sounds like Elliot did everything right.
Apparently, I misread the flow of the conversation. My apologies, tacotaco. I’ll take a time-out and re-check.
Just to set the record straight, Elliot Rodger murdered six women. I do not consider his death to be part of the death toll.
Every death is part of the death toll.
It was my fault for not making it clear who I was replying to.
Louis and Crip Dyke,
I’m all for not promoting the idea that mentally ill=dangerous, but do you object to the points that:
1) Some mentally ill people are dangerous;
2) some mentally ill people are dangerous because of their mental illnesses;
3) the dangers posed by such people might be prevented or mitigated by better attention to and treatment of mental illness
And if you agree with that, then how can we talk about these issues without saying that so-and-so was mentally ill? Without people bursting through the wall to declare “Not All Mentally Ill People”?
I don’t jhave access to the links right now, but the mentally ill are *DRAMATICALLY* (as in, IIRC, at least 10x) more likely to be VICTIMS of violence than be PERPATRATORS of violence.
It seems that Elliot Rodger was also very racist.
Funny because I just saw neo-confederates call him a product of a liberal feminist society.
109
He murdered six women. If seven people are dead, fine. But he murdered six. Let’s not confuse the two.
Three more bodies have been found in his apartment. source.
Akira @104, I appreciate that you’re willing to back it down. *nods to* /derail
A This just gets better and better..
Just in case it has not been clear before.
I fucking hate MRAs.
They laid cover and encouragement for these types of actions.
Pteryxx @ 116
When you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I was wrong. /derail
also I was going to second HappiestSadist up at 46:
QF, sadly, T.
Spotted my first bit of slyme claiming that we are taking advantage of this murder spree.
Thankfully, some people have called him out on that.
Shut up and go away UA.
You are neither funny nor clever.
In fact, you make the muck I scrap off of my shoes seem pleasant in comparison.
As he is, so are you?
Did he? I haven’t seen any information about the victims released yet.
UA makes me wish there were moderators on this blog with, at least, the ability to delete posts when needed.
Nope, just citizenship. For humanity, you must show empathy only to victims like the dead at the hands of the MRA/PUA fuckwit. Not the MRA/PUA fuckwit.
Tacotaco, it does appear that the body count is going to be higher.
Kyle Sullivan, 19, a student at Santa Barbara City College, said he came upon three young women — all shot — on a lawn in front of the Alpha Phi sorority in Isla Vista.
One woman appeared to be dead. Another was struggling and “just barely able to move her eyes,” he said. A third, with a kidney wound, was on the phone with her mother, saying she probably wasn’t going to make and “how much she loved her,” Sullivan said.
So there’s at least half.
You haven’t shut the fuck up….
@111screechmonkey
Is this some sort ‘1,2,3,???,profit’ scheme? Where do you go from paying good attention and giving good treatment to people with mental illness to ‘therefore media needs to obsessively mention mental illness to the point where they’ll already dismiss someone as crazy/mentally ill even without evidence?’
This dismissal of people who act out violently as crazy is harmful to everybody because it lets us not tackle the systematic societal issues that cause these reactions, and it is especially harmful to the people society decides to scapegoat instead.
A citizen of The Land Of false Equivalencies has spoken.
@126
Who are you, the Bene Gesserit?
Well, for starters, your screeds bare a striking similarity to Rodger’s “suicide note” posted above.
@Allan Frost, #125:
There is one with that power: PZ.
The mods are just here to let him know of problems like UA’s comments so he doesn’t have to read every word of every thread.
That’s been done. When he has time, he’ll clean up.
@screechymonkey, #111:
No, I don’t object.
No, I don’t object.
No, I don’t object.
Don’t use violence as proof of mental illness. Don’t use “these issues” to say “so-and-so is mentally ill.” Use a documented illness with a known mechanism to cause violence and evidence that mechanism was at work in a particular case to justify saying “so-and-so’s mental illness caused this violence.”
If you use violence to prove mental illness, you are of necessity asserting that those without mental illness never (or very rarely, sufficient to justify an inference of mental illness) commit violence.
That’s crap. Don’t do it. (I’m not saying you did, just saying don’t.) It would even be crap if it didn’t reinforce problematic social dynamics and oppression because it’s simply not fucking true. So why say it?
You could look at my post above. I didn’t cite any literature – I’m not a psychologist, and even if I did cite something you shouldn’t take that to mean that I have an authoritative assessment of the state of the literature – but I do value my reputation here on Pharyngula and I’d be damned surprised if what I was reading at the time I was researching this a while back either has been superseded or was not in fact representative of the understanding of the topic at the time.
I relied – some might say disproportionately as their is no methodologically perfect study – on the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study and the literature discussion of that study and its data and methodologies when making my decisions about the most credible data sets and conclusions. I can’t say this is the perfect choice. You can read the study and decide. Further, I found Dr Heather Stuart helpful and credible. She wrote a review article for World Psychiatry (Jun 2003; 2(2): 121–124) on the topic that mentions the study and further discusses it in more detail in other venues.
Any discussion that explicitly denies the conflation of violence with mental illness and uses real data sets and studies and facially valid methods and analysis will be received well by me.
You don’t have to agree with me in my conclusion about which studies best represent the hard-to-find truth about violence risk. You just have to agree with me that conflating violence with mental illness is bad and with Dr Stuart that:
If you agree with these basic premises, and make a good faith effort to use only reliable datasets and good/ logical analysis, I think a productive conversation can be had.
If not, then I don’t know exactly how one could be…unless you can find data to convince me that Dr. Stuart and I are wrong about what I consider to be important foundations of these conversations.
Please expand on what are the systematic societal issues.
Compare universalanimosity’s comment here to Four Sided’s comments here. See any similiarities?
Also, they have identical IP addresses. Four Sided was banned some time ago, and also snuck in under the pseudonym “Irrational Rationality” for a while.
His new pseudonym has now also been banned, and I’m about to purge all of his comments. Say bye-bye to the asshole.
Tashiliciously Shriked wrote:
Actually, given some of the other posts in this thread (or as Beatrice referred to them, “lol-losers-murderers-can’t-get-laid”), it absolutely is the correct time or place for that. When you sneer at people suffering from lonelyness and rejection like that and blame them for things like this, you’re also sneering at people like Akira who haven’t really hurt anyone.
This is a horrible tragedy, and while I don’t want to take away from that, you can see reasons why it happened displayed in this very thread. You put people in a situation where they can suffer and smoulder in silence for years, deny them help by telling them that getting help is weakness and will diminish their manhood, sneer at them for their failure and then we act shocked and dismayed when these people do horrible things. You want to know what? They’re not the truly horrible ones. We are.
universalanimosity wrote:
So, do you identify as a neo-nazi, or are you just a fan of their work?
universalanimosity @118:
To some people, I would be considered surplus population. Who gets to decide?
@126:
So someone who is poor, supporting a family on a couple of minimum wage jobs, someone who is elibible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, someone who, in other words, pays negative federal taxes, is not a citizen? therefore they are not human? Really?
@129:
Have you shown any towards the victims?
PZed @138 (or whatever the comment number will be after the purge):
Bye-bye!
ck @ 139
Dude, relax. They had a point. I was in the wrong. I wasn’t thinking and I made an inappropriate joke about my love life in a post involving the murder/suicide of 7 people. Let it go, please.
That’s some nice things that I never did that you’re railing against.
I too suffer from loneliness and depression issues, and a lot of things that the LoveShy people and this murderer did. But I also recognise those as *my* issues, not a problem that the women who aren’t sleeping with me have.
What I (and most others in here) are sneering at is not that they are unmanly if they seek help, or their failures. It’s for their sexist and woman-hating screeds.
I seriously don’t have a problem with Akira and hir issues. Fuck, if they were to talk about it in thunderdome or the other open thread with the prefix “this event made me consider my own loneliness problems”, I’m sure there’d be support.
Hell if Akira wants to get in contact with me (like through here or mah blag my nym links too) they can feel free.
But the idea that, somehow, us telling Akira that his comment was out of line is equivalent to the MRA/PUA/RP bullshit that is encouraging the behaviour the OP was about? That’s just heinous.
Dang, I was looking for without success a clip of Babylon 5 where Vir waves bye to Morden’s head on a pike. Does such a clip exist?
PZ, you’ve linked to the wrong pages.
#1
“Mentally disturbed” is not a mental illness diagnosis. It’s a description of the the mental state of someone who was clearly very troubled.
yes
page links fixed now.
Thanks Tashiliciously Shriked. Now bookmarked.
What Tashiliciously Shriked just said – I don’t have a problem with Akira, or with anyone talking about being a lonely nerd, but not in THIS discussion.
Also, quote-“rejection”-unquote is not even an issue here, just because the killer said it is. I’m watching CNN right now quoting his manifesto, I think, saying his life is a “living hell” and how nobody recognizes his “magnificence” and taking revenge on the entire human race. Does that sound like the ordinary sort of relationship issues that some advice from Captain Awkward would help? There’s no grand hetero-feminazi conspiracy of Capital-R Rejection, and it does all awkward lonely folks a huge disservice to conflate their sadness with entitled and violent misogyny.
Gonna second ck. I get a vibe of “loser” shaming, as I might call it. The murderer in question is Toxic Masculinity made flesh. Reinforcing the idea of a Sexual Hierarchy by essentially mocking his sexual frustration, inadequacy, etc. is just feeding into that shit.
Tashiliciously Shriked @147
Ah yes. Best dramatic payoff… EVER!
@Akira MacKenzie,
Very well. As you wish, I’ll speak no further of it.
you’re going to have to back that shit up right now.
@Tashliciously, 154:
As that comment happened just before ck backed off to preserve this thread for other things, maybe you could step back as well? Or take the conversation elsewhere?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor…_response.html
Another shooting victim’s dad speaks out. here
whoops I fucked up my link in 156
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/24/elliot_rodger_the_pick_up_artist_community_s_predictable_horrible_response.html
I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s not random citizens who go on these shooting sprees. For example we could probably wait until the Sun burns out and never see a working-class African-American woman aged 50+ who has a rich and diverse social life and votes for the left go on a shooting spree.
One has to be able to talk about the patterns and potential underlying mechanisms without being accused of excusing the behavior itself, although maybe today isn’t exactly the best time for that.
Pteryxx wrote:
At one time, perhap it would’ve helped. People like this are almost never built in a day, or fully form in-utero. They absorb the toxic elements of the society around them, and without any moderating influence or tie to the larger world, they stew in that toxic soup. It’s how our society transmogrifies a moderately average person into a monster, and then denies all responsibility for them while also robbing them of their humanity.
This guy became a murderer not because of the loneliness or rejection. He became a murderer because society has set up a system where a certain percentage of people will end up like this.
This is exactly what I meant. How has society failed the shooter? If you can’t/won’t discuss it, then society didn’t fail a person whose personal problems got ahead reality. Essentially, how does society identify and bring into treatment persons who would engage in a murder/suicide spree?
It’s been over 15 years since the last time I was there, like you, I recall Isla Vista as a bunch of rundown student housing units and old, battered apartments complexes.
people were pretty damn laid back, and the only “violence” i saw there was during the intercolliegiate Rugby tournaments, where the violence was typically done to cars after the tournament was over and the big block parties started.
has it really changed that much?
*sigh*
it reminds me of what happened to Huntington Beach over the same time period. When i was growing up, it was miles of empty beach, with wetlands behind, and the only blemish really was the power station.
now?
it’s all condos as far as the eye can see, no more wetlands.
I gotta think that has had an impact on the communities as well as just the landscape.
Tashiliciously Shriked
In fairness, it did it pop up that much. And when it did, it was mostly the troll’s doing. But….
Marcus Ranum 30
Ryan Cunningham 59
(Also, in fairness, Ryan Cunningham’s previous comment before that one had also already outted them as an asshole, so….)
In 163: “Did it” = “Didn’t”. Can’t even manage to avoid fucking up a comment that is mostly quotes.
“Hopper said she knew the victim, who she identified as Chris Martinez, a second-year student at UC Santa Barbara. She said she tried to help administer CPR but was so flustered by the incident she was unable to render aid until paramedics arrived. She said, though tears, that Martinez was among the deceased victims.” – source
Crip Dyke @136,
Thanks for the thoughtful response with good points raised. I’m not able to respond in more detail now — and I may not have anything further to say at all – but I wanted to acknowledge and thank you for your post.
This kind of thing always strikes me odd; the entire concept of Alpha Male (I know, I know, but this is what they claim to mean by it) is that if you are and Alpha Male, you have the kind of charisma that makes women attracted to you and men want to emulate/follow you. Thus, if you can’t get laid, that pretty much makes you not an Alpha Male by definition, doesn’t it?
screechymonkey#111
Check CD’s post 23 more carefully.
Notably, very few mentally ill people are dangerous (to others) because of their mental illness, and therefore your 3 is pretty much irrelevant, although we do need much better mental health care in the U.S. for pragmatic and humanitarian reasons.
Nerd #137
Well, just for starters, there’s a load of toxic misogyny going on that we can directly point to in relation to these particular murders.
OK, tacotaco, what the hell is your intent? Is there a bonus score for murdering women rather than men, or vice versa?
There are six dead human beings so far. You don’t get pedant points for accurately tallying the corpses by sex, so knock it off.
ck, I’ll repeat, again, HappiestSadist from 46 above.
and send everyone here.
https://proxy.freethought.online/brutereason/2014/05/24/masculinity-violence-and-bandaid-solutions/
tacotaco – you’ll notice I already linked to that information several comments above yours, unless you were just so intent on scoring a point that you didn’t take the time to read the goddamned thread first.
Thank you to Crip Dyke and Louis for the discussion on mental health stigma. Boston.com was absolutely out of line. Funnily enough there are a lot of similarities in Rodger’s situation and mine…I have asperger’s (as Boston stated he did), I’m 25, never had a relationship and quite certainly never will, and only managed to get laid once years ago…and I’m sure as hell not murdering anybody.
I’ve even had the discussion with myself of becoming a “god”. Never even considered Rodger’s route. Being a murderous thug is weak-ass shit and such pettiness does not make one a “god”. It just makes you a common, banal murderer.
I don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been discussed mental-health wise, but I am gladdened that at least some people aren’t on the bandwagon “does horrible shit – must have mental health issues”. Thank you again.
Miri’s post that Pterryx just linked to also includes this comment from the killer:
I just can’t over the sheer degree to which this person thought of Women As Monolith. To the degree that he might have legitimately thought that his personal rejection, rather than being an example of Life Ain’t Fair, was an active, feminist conspiracy against him. It just makes me wonder how much is a figure of speech and how much did he actually think that all women had somehow managed to plot together in order to somehow make his life worse?
@Pteryxx,
If you’re thinking that I’m saying he just needed to get laid, you’re severely underestimating and misunderstand what I’m saying. I’m saying this young man was disconnected from the rest of the world. I’m saying he was angry and frustrated, and rather than get help with that anger and frustration, he found the MRAs and PUAs that simply allowed him to stew in those feelings rather than resolve them. I’m saying he absorbed harmful, toxic ideas about what it is to be a man, and tried to act upon them. I’m saying that all these things combined into a perfect storm that allowed him to become a mass murderer. I’m saying that there are dozens of points in this where society as a whole failed this young man, where we need to accept that we have these young women’s blood on our hands as much as this individual does.
And maybe, just maybe we ought to look at trying to prevent these kinds of storms in the future rather than convincing ourselves that it’s all the MRAs fault, or some loner who was going to blow up anyway.
Okay. Alea jacta est, I suppose I am going to have to do this:
1) The folk psychologies being expressed here about people with mental illnesses and the relationship between mental illness and violence are typically wrong, heavily influenced by extant cultural prejudice and harmful.
2) If “mental illness” made people violent, then mentally ill people would kill at higher rates than people without mentally illness. And they don’t. They are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of violence.
See, for example, here or here, or here, or the entire book here. Most of those are behind pay walls. Clever googling can (possibly) find you free sources.
I’ll expand on this with reference to Screechmonkey’s #111,
I’m glad you think you aren’t for promoting the idea that mentally ill = dangerous. Why then do you do it? Allow me to explain:
If your comment, and numbered points, are meant to form an argument, then what I take away from your “argument” is this:
A) Some individuals are dangerous due to a specific mental illness they have, and some mentally ill people are dangerous (from your 1) and 2) ).
B) Policy (how best to treat people with mental illnesses and combating the dangers posed by people with dangerous mental illnesses) in some way derives from A) (from your 3) ).
C) It is impossible to discuss policy (or perhaps events like the one in the OP) without reference to individual’s mental health status (from your last paragraph, first sentence).
D) Your comment re: “Not All Mentally Ill People” is borrowing from similarity to the “Not All Men” trope, implying that I am somehow trying to excuse mentally ill people from their culpability in some fashion, or that I am trying to hide the relationship of mental illness to violence, or that I am trying to silence discussion by preventing you from discussing someone’s mental illness in the manner you so desire, or that I am in some dishonest manner divorcing the link between an individual’s mental illness and their violence, or some combination of the above (from your last paragraph, second sentence).
I hope that is a fair (if brusque) assessment of your post.
Re: A) So what? What matters, in terms of general discussion and policy, which is the point of your post, is not an individual’s diagnosis but the larger statistical picture. The general, not the individual. If you can access the linked materials you’ll see that the overwhelming correlation of violence and mental illness of all kinds is that people with mental illnesses are less likely to commit violence than people without (both at the time of violence and before/after), i.e. the association of mental illness and violence is a poor one. Even if you focus on the specific mental illnesses with the greatest association with violent acts alone, and exclude the others, people with these diagnoses are violent at a rate less than population without these diagnoses (including people with other mental health diagnoses). More than that, correcting for other factors (experiences of violence, social factors etc) even THAT correlation vanishes into insignificance in all but a very few cases. Guess what those cases are? Alcohol and substance abuse.
Not bipolar disorder, not schizophrenia, not autism, not psychosis, but alcohol and substance abuse. So unless the individual you desperately want to discuss has a demonstrated alcohol/substance abuse diagnosis, you’re accidentally or intentionally perpetrating the “mentally ill people are violent” stigma that is oh so common.
You’ll also see that at the more descriptive level that the correlation between mental illness and violence is that people with mental illnesses are the victims of violence at a rate exceeding that of people without mental illnesses. Again, a correlation that demonstrates the falsity of the relationship you are appealing to between mental illness and violence.
I’ll expand on the discussion of individuals in a moment.
Re: B) No. The best general approach does not derive well from considering isolated individuals. The first article I link above, for example, details the relationship between forced hospitalisation and community care with the incidence of violent offending by people with mental health diagnoses. Formulating policy to (for example) force the hospitalisation of people with certain diagnoses based on the low incidence of violence BY people with those diagnoses would be like formulating a policy to ban private cars because of the number of road deaths. In other words “statistically and logically invalid”, to be very nice about it. The incidences you allude to are TINY when compared to a) the number of violent incidents, and/or b) the number of people with any specific mental health diagnosis (or even all of them).
The relationship between mental illnesses, even very specific diagnoses, and perpetrating violence doesn’t exist (of course excepting those things noted above).
Re: C) Ahhh discussing individuals. Here’s something I said, at length, elsewhere:
I could expand nigh on infinitely on the harm I have seen really MINOR mental health stigma do in the last ~6 years (since I have been doing the things alluded to in a previous post). Counterfactual is one aspect of these things, the harm they do is quite another.
Re: D) Yes, clearly the problem is that nasty people like me are preventing poor dears like you from discussing these topics. There couldn’t be any problem with HOW you discuss them that is relevant to, for example suicide rates or the fact that suicide is the biggest killer of young men (18-35) in the UK as another example. Or could there?
3) Re: “severely mentally disturbed” not being a diagnosis. Oh fucking PLEASE! If we saw Rush Limbaugh talking about “urban culture” or Paul Elam talking about “hysteria” we’d all know what the hell they were talking about. Of course PZ is not Rush or Elam, but come on, knock the apologetics off. Explicit appeals to “mental disturbance” are not subtle references. Do I have to make the point that bigotry is not some huge Godzilla-like monster rampaging about knocking over buildings? Do I have to point out that individual acts of bigotry are not committed by monsters? Do I have to point out that tiny tiny tiny unthought unexamined things can be bigoted and that they can be committed by really rather nice people like you or PZ? Or maybe even me….but then I’m not so nice! This is 101 level stuff. Please can we do each other the honour of not pretending this is not a direct comment on the mental health status of this individual?
4) AGAIN! How many women are dead? How blatant was this guy’s misogyny? How involved was he with PUA (then misogynist escalation and disillusion with PUA horseshittery) nonsense? How much of a problem is the easy access to guns? How obvious and odious does someone’s entitlement need to be before people will consider it a problem? How hard is it to grasp that “his family were concerned”/”previous diagnoses of autism etc” does not necessarily equate to “he was mentally ill in a manner that contributed to his attacks” (it might, but YOU DON’T HAVE THE EVIDENCE AND YOUR UNEDUCATED SPECULATION IS NOT WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE!!!!!!! CLEAR YET?)? How hard is it to discuss a tragedy so obviously engendered by extant misogyny, so obviously informed by the entitlement so many men feel to women’s bodies, time and attention without throwing mentally ill people under the bus with your ignorance and references to extant mental health stigma? Call me a fucking stickler, but I thought on an obviously feminist blog, with a largely feminist commentariat, who are largely intersectional feminists to one degree or another, who appreciate different axes of oppression and privilege this might be fucking easy.
5) It’s late, I’m knackered, my ability to remain unsarcastic and unirritated by this is dwindling, and I have an assignment due this week. So fucking about explaining basic mental health stuff for the UMPTEENTH fucking time to people* is possibly not the most effective use of my time. If you have been, you shouldn’t.
Louis
* I deal with this fun day in, day out as part of my volunteer work. It’s even more fun explaining it to medics. Admittedly a tad more politely and with a large folder of paper references at my disposal. And a greater willingness to be understanding.
Wow I am away from town all day and come back and this happens. My only thing to add is to say like a broken record, mass shootings and guns seem to strongly correlate. But our politics seem to be totally immune from recognizing this, much less even in the most pissant way try to address this, so we can and should expect these things to continue, whatever the specific causes are, into the indefinite future. I’m reluctant to even call this a tragedy, since it is so common, and so completely predictable given the flood of easily obtainable guns, legally or illegally. All we can hope is that we are not at the wrong place at the wrong time. The only “solutions” we can expect is of course – Georgia like, arming every segment of the populus in every nook and cranny that people congregate. A rational sane country would actually have addressed this issue a long long time ago. Our politics is almost permanently broken.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
http://www.latitudenews.com/story/gun-unlike-other-countries-mass-shooting-may-not-change-laws-in-u-s-newtown/
Seconding the Brute Reason post Pteryxx pointed to. Miri nails it.
Yes, the shooter took things to extremes, but he was fed toxic masculinity and misogyny throughout his life. We need to recognize how we’re all affected by these views and how we might stop perpetuating them. As much as I wish it was confined to them, it’s not just MRAs. It’s not “losers” or “crazies”. This stuff is woven into the fabric of society.
Pteryxx @ #169: And, expanding on this, the people who make excuses for him, like they do all of these misogynist murderers, saying “if only someone had given him an chaaaaance, if only he’d had the love of a kind woman”… fuck off, and do not fuck back on again. Vicious misogynists don’t change when they get sex, and the people who are naive enough to try to help get hurt. I say this as a survivor of one, and someone who’s been girlfriendzoned and stalked by others.
That, and you are actually ransoming the lives of potentially all women by threatening that there will be deaths if a few women don’t give up the sex and sympathy quicklike.
Live statement from sheriff starting now here. They’re just doing intros now.
From the feed:
Our agency has had 3 previous documented contacts with the suspect. 1st occurred July 21 2013, when he was contacted at the hospital where he was treated for injuries and claimed to be the victim of an assault. Received information that he was the aggressor in the incident, suspended pending additional leads.
Jan 2014 second incident, he contacted the police to accuse one of his roommate of stealing 3 candles at $22. Made a citizen’s arrest for petty theft, roommate was booked into jail, cited and released, case referred to DA who filed a petty theft charge in that case.
3rd incident Apr 30 2014, deputies contacted him following request to check on his welfare from a family member. Deputies found him to be polite and courteous, he downplayed concerns, deputies cleared .
Incidentally, the essential feminist point here is easy to miss:
To “other” this guy, however this is done, via “loserdom” or appeal to “mental disturbance” (HAH!) or whatever, is to ignore the normality of his actions and expressed motives. Like I said above, 2 women a week (on average) are killed in the UK by their “loved ones”. 2 a week. 2 a fucking week. Is this not common enough? What number will people accept as being indicative of the everyday, business as usual, misogynist violence that passes for prosaic in our societies?
His entitlement and misogyny are not fringe, they are frighteningly, terrifyingly mainstream. They are in everything, from the normalising of woman as sex objects on Page 3 of the Sun “newspaper” (in contrast to men just getting on with things like sport or government), to the nigh on automatic disbelief female victims of violence and sexual abuse face when dealing with authorities or people supposed to help them. Just how common does this have to be? How many screeds directed at Rebecca Watson, or Anita Sarkeesian, or any woman you care to name, that have near identical content to this killer’s screeds does it take? Just how bog standard, banal, normal, prosaic, quotidian…does this have to be before you realise it?
Shall I go further? If he was a regular on Stormfront and posted a screed about hating “N-word”s to YouTube, would the rush to other him as “mad” or a “loser” be as popular? Or would we just look at what he did and understand he did this because he was a racist? Isn’t it explicitly a feminist point to acknowledge and understand that the overwhelming contributor to this man’s violence was his existing towards one end of a spectrum of male behaviour informed by cultural misogyny?
Louis
Jemoi Jemoi:
Keep your fingers off the keyboard, this sort of shit is just…shit. It adds nothing except assholism to an already contentious thread.
From feed:
10 separate locations where criminal activity took place, in some locations there are more than 1 crime area.
1. Appears that he murdered 3 victims within his residence prior to last night’s shooting. 3 male victims, all repeatedly stabbed. Still processing crime scene and identifying victims.
2. Beginning of last night’s shooting, at Alpha Phi sorority house. Several members of sorority heard loud and aggressive knocking at front door for 2 minutes. No one opened door. Then reported seeing 3 women standing outside be shot by suspect from across the street. 2 fatally wounded, 1 in hospital. Katherine Cooper, 22 and Veronica Weiss, 19 year old, both killed. 3rd did suffer mult. gunshot wounds.
3. Deli. Shot and killed Christopher Michael-Martinez, 20. Foot patrol deputies heard and responded, saw him fleeing in BMW.
4. At top of road loop, drove on wrong side of road and shot at 2 people.
5. Then traveled to next location, where brandished handgun at female victim. Fired additional rounds, turned around, drove off. Lone deputy on foot was shot at by suspect. Returned fire, suspect drove off .
4 deputies pursued on foot, he shot at them, they returned fire, possibly shot suspect in left hip. Drove off.
Something needs to be done to crack the mainstream media blindspot to the rank misogyny evident in this case and cases like it that have come before.
From feed:
Sped up, struck another bicyclist (I missed 1st due to bandwidth handup)
Came to stop, suspect removed from car, handcuffed, but dead with gunshot wound to a head.
10 locations, 12 crime scenes in all. 7 fatalities, 6 victims, 1 suspect. Additional 13 people injured, 4 by suspect’s vehicle by being hit, 8 sustained gunshot wounds, 1 minor unknown origin injury. 3 9mm semiautomatic handguns recovered from vehicle.
Why is it these cockless little fuckers take themselves out last?
can we not use gendered anythings in here?
From feed:
All weapons were legally purchased, all registered to suspect. Also had 34 10-round loaded magazines for one, and 7 10-round magazines for the other.
Suspect shot himself in the head at the end.
Turned podium to doctor Stephen Kaminski, trauma director for hospital for information on victims.
4 patients treated last night, 7 moved to trauma. 2 now in serious condition. Cannot provide any further info.
We are all so fragile.
Which is why we should none of us be let near weapons.
That appears to be it. They are wrapping up now.
I really dislike this, it not only smacks heavily of othering, it’s a form of quick label judgement, a convenient way for us to dismiss people.
Point taken.
However (Louis) The dismissal of HIM as a person
I didn’t do that. I agree that calling the guy a “loser” or an “MRA” is othering him. But, in the context where everyone else including PZ is describing him as an MRA it might be a convenient handle for describing his attitudes and beliefs. And, if you accept that, calling someone a “loser” might be a convenient handle for describing the actions of someone whose response to his own displeasure is a murderous outburst. “Insufficient adjectives” perhaps? What, call him an “asshole”? I mean, seriously…
Oh, I’ll be willing to take discussion of my personal problems to THUNDER-Dome. I’m out of house though. /derail.
Q&A:
Video shows “severely mentally disturbed”, one posted just prior to attack is chilling.
When deputies contacted him, the check was on HIS welfare, to see how he was doing. Deputies concluded he did not meet criteria for involuntary mental health hold, was shy and timid, did not meet criteria. Deputies discussed options with him and offered resources to him.
Not going to go back and Monday morning quarterback, still researching, fairly routine type of call that is quite commonplace, deputies are well trained and did contact him, did not believe that he required further care, will not second-guess them.
It appears that he took his own life, not that the fatal shot was by deputies.
Q&A cont’d:
fatal victim total: 3 at apartment, 2 at sorority house, 1 in deli.
All 3 weapons were purchased prior to contact by deputies in April.
Did not have any 911 calls related to stabbing victims, not known until apartment was searched after the incident.
Switched from sheriff to their PR officer, wrapped up.
Laurian @ 185:
Do you realize your need to use “cockless little fuckers” makes you part of the wider problem? It would be nice if you gave that some thought.
Louis wrote:
How about Anders Breivik (doesn’t quite match your scenario, but it’s fairly close)? If I remember correctly, “he’s crazy” and “he’s a loser” were quite popular as rationalizations for what he did (even here), and why everyone else need not change a damn thing. There might’ve been a few more people criticising the “he’s crazy” position, but… There was an acknowledgement that he was a racist, but I don’t think that ends the question of why this happened. “Why was he racist?” is perhaps a far more important question.
@8:
Your compassion comes streaming through. Did you stop to think that desperately lonely, socially inept people (women as well as men, “creeps” in your argot) might not be entirely to blame for being shunned? And might mistake civility for romantic interest because they experience so little civility, or friendliness, or any other kind of human warmth, that they have no baseline to work with?
Louis and Crip Dyke:
My apologies. As I said, I suffer from mental illness myself, and I in no way want to perpetuate stereotypes against mental illness.
Marcus,
1) “Loser” is an explicit othering of him as a person. “Oh it was just some loser who couldn’t get laid who did this”, as if “winning” is defined as “getting laid”. Insert correct commands, get laid, win! Erm, no. That’s bullshit. Dismissing him are merely an MRA (or whatever) is equally dappy. DISMISSAL is the problem.
2) I was correcting Ryan’s misunderstanding, not yours.
3) My criticism of its use (which is a seriously MINOR part of any point I’ve tried to make) is not in any way based on how to properly condemn his actions.
4) Read again. You snipped out important things.
Louis
Ekwhite,
No need to apologise. I make worse fuck ups on a nigh on hourly basis. It’s the people who persist unapologetically that need to apologise! ;-)
Hmmm is that impossible to achieve?
Either way, mental illness, it’s a bit of a fucker*, I wish you the very best.
Louis
*Contender for understatement of the year and the new slogan for the charity Mind.
The Santa Barbara sheriff has called the shootings “the act of a madman.” It seems we are already seeing the role of the Mens Right Movement being swept under the rug. This is no more an act of madness than the actions of the Oklahoma City bombers or Eric Rudolph.
In his video, Elliot Rodgers spouted MRM rhetoric. He was known to frequent PUAHate.com. He made misogynistic posts on various other websites. He was clearly influenced by a toxic view of masculinity so common in the Manosphere.
The MSM needs to shine a light on this toxic corner of the internet.
It is the authoritarian mind that assumes simple good behavior deserves reward. Not to Godwin the discussion but Hitler asked for nothing but compliance and wore but one decoration on his uniform, a good conduct metal. Sex, as with any other favor, is not owed to anyone. It is a matter of negotiation. Negotiation with one’s self and any other/s one might feel are necessary to fulfill the need.
I guess it is in the further nature of the authoritarians, deterred by shame and myths about masculine sexuality, to fulfill their own needs. No doubt this man was deeply troubled and pained by his inability to physically or mentally handle his biological needs.
Seems to me what he really needed was a friend to talk him through either handling the problem himself and/or the fine art of negotiating for sex. A few visits with a good therapist might have largely eliminated the issue or allowed him to place it into a more manageable context.
As it is he was caught between his needs and mythology of what is allowed and how to handle normal human desires. Unresolved conflicts turned to resentment and anger.
carlie
Thank you.
ck, #195,
Good point(s)! Maybe the Brevik thing did get “But he was CRAZY” a lot too, I honestly don’t remember the extent of that and it would be an interesting thing to study. My entirely anecdotal, notoriously unreliable memory of things is that overtly racist attacks are less likely to be considered the products of “crazy” than are misogynist attacks. If only because racism is largely less socially acceptable than misogyny. However, that’s a bit handwavy and not very concrete. So possibly wrong!
I heartily agree. The only cavil I have is first we have to acknowledge the racist motivation (hard not to with Brevik) to note its origins as worthy of understanding. In the case of this recent shooting it seems a LOT of people are trying very hard (not here necessarily) to find reasons for it that really, really aren’t misogynist. Which is naughty.
Louis
Thanks for the actual information, carlie!
Terribly sad all ’round.
They interviewed him about 2 weeks before the shootings according to some of the reports I read.
Funny, they didn’t think he was a madman then, even though his parents were concerned enough to call the cops to interview him.
Fuck. Just. Fuck.
Thanks – I was typing as fast as I could, but left out a lot of the noninformative or repetitive sentences,and the feed dropped a couple of times for about 15 seconds each. To summarize: comments
178, 179, 182, 184, 187, 189, 192, 193 form the majority of the press conference the sheriff held tonight.
You have a problem with referring to this guy as “severely mentally disturbed”?
Really?
Seriously?
*shakes head slowly and returns to Real Life*
Yes Chas, I do. Mental health stigma isn’t real life? Excuse me whilst I just go and tell all those people who have to deal with it.
Incredible. Any chance to be odious eh Chucky?
{golf clap}
Louis
Louis, kittehserf over at Mammoth sends thanks and applause for your comment @14.
Lurker here. Just registered to thank Louis–along with other commenters–for comments against mental health stigmas (After Sandy Hook, I saw some suggest we should register people who take certain psych meds rather than register weapons, and that attitude disgusts me) and for calling out the blatant misogyny in this story.
I don’t know how many times I’ve had the conversation. I worry about the vitriol and threats that frequently come from the “Manosphere” and nearly every mainstream news comment section, and I am always told that “it’s just the internet. I mean, have you ever actually met someone who admits to these views?” It’s as if we won’t recognize that these comments are attached to people who truly feel this way, so we should ignore it. But this is one of many examples of these views finding the real world and destroying real people.
Thanks for letting me know Pteryxx, I hadn’t yet read the comments at Mammoth. Late night procrastination hadn’t got me that far yet! And thanks to Kittehserf of course. And you too Toska.
Louis
Ok, I’ve made it through all the comments, and have processed what occurred a bit better.
Louis, CD, Chigau, thanks. This was a learning moment for me, even as someone with mental health issues.
My condolences to the families.
Quite so (whether you imagine badges on those armed people or not). It is in fact illegal to shoot at a fleeing vehicle, except under very specific circumstances, so the time window in which it is (a) practical and (b) legal to shot at a drive-by shooter is likely to be 1-2 seconds, which is almost exactly equal to the time it takes a well-trained person to react, draw, aim, and fire. If each victim were accompanied by a particularly capable cop, each one would have a bit worse than a 50% chance of returning fire on time, and about a 25% chance of getting him if they did. Under those improbable conditions, it does add up to about an 82% chance one of these cops would have got him over the course 13 drive-by shootings (6 people killed and 7 put in the hospital, last I heard).
Unfortunately, all those assumptions are wildly improbable. Everyone doesn’t have a cop nearby, most cops have considerably worse reaction time than the 1-2 seconds required, most are poor marksmen, etc.
Although in general terms I support the right of victims to defend themselves, fantasies about guns as talismans or about cop-show marksmanship are just that: fantasies.
it also doesn’t include the chances of a stray bullet causing injury to someone else.
which, given the scenario you just laid out, would likely be around the same percentage as that of hitting the suspect.
Not meaning to respond exclusively to the gun angle, but this does speak to the relative ineffectiveness of magazine limits. Every year I pass a law-enforcement qualification test using two guns: an autoloader with six rounds per magazine; and a five-shot revolver. I can reload both in 1-3 seconds. With a messenger bag of magazines or speed loaders, I could keep up a steady barrage pretty much until the gun burns my hands or my arms go limp from exhaustion.
I’m very grateful that he didn’t manage to expend all 410 rounds.
PZ, not everyone is lucky as you are.
Have you ever felt utterly hopeless, abandoned, frustrated and cheated by destiny?
Horrible as it is, I can relate to this guy.
I felt very much the same, up to the resentment for women and I consider that my darkest moment.
And yes, I suffered of mental illnesses.
I like to think that rather than going on a spree of killing innocents I would have committed suicide instead.
I was lucky enough to struggle past my resentment, and you might be surprised to know that I managed to do this mostly thanks to the fringe non-misogynistic parts of the “PUA community”.
Until desperate men are offered no compassion, no support and no alternative but only summary judgement like yours they will be easy prey to whoever promises to restore their ego, be they the MRA or the PUAs, and women will suffer the most.
Ichthyic, #215:
I disagree: I’d say the odds are much, much higher. In my hypothetical scenario, a dozen or two rounds would probably be fired, each having a 75% chance of missing the killer–but every single one of them would land somewhere. In a densely populated area, the odds of hitting someone else are pretty high.
Don’t forget the man who killed his boss in the Empire State Building, pocketed the gun and set out for home. Cops arrived, opened fire, and hit nine bystanders with bullets or ricocheting debris.
That’s one of the major reasons it’s illegal to shoot at someone fleeing in a vehicle (every police drama to the contrary notwithstanding).
you make a good argument for that.
HappiestSadist:
Seconded. Thank you, Louis.
Crip Dyke:
I agree that PZ seems to be trying to avoid ableist language. “Mentally disturbed” is a bit unfortunate, because the distinction between that and “mentally ill” or “psychologically disturbed,” assuming one was intended, is probably a bit too subtle for folks to pick up on.
Good terminology is really hard to come by here. This guy seems to have plenty of hate, particularly for women. He also seems to have some serious cognitive distortions that might or might not have called for CBT. There’s clearly something really “wrong” with him, but there isn’t a really good way to talk about it. Simply calling it “evil” is a bit too pat; it dodges the hard problem by suggesting that (a) this guy is anomalous, and (b) there’s really nothing that we could have done about it, or could do about others in the future. Psychologizing it, on the other hand, suggests that we could have prevented it if we’d caught him in time, and treated or institutionalized him–and it does so at a high price in splash damage on people with diagnosed mental illnesses.
The best I can come up with is, “There’s obviously something seriously fucked up in his thinking.” But I’m not sure that avoids all ableist connotations.
From here. I agree a very great deal.
The use here of “Mentally disturbed” is not a subtle distinction. Nothing’s been missed. It’s slap bang in the middle of ableist terms for people with mental illnesses. Or rather for blaming a “bad” person’s acts on them being “mad”. It’s practically the hallmark of associating mental illness with violence. Person does violent thing, handwave a phrase that references their “mental” state in some fashion, keep it nice and vague so you can slip and slide around when caught. Thank me all you like, there’s no magic here. It’s an obvious reference and plenty of great ways to discuss these things without pontificating sans information. I may have even hinted at a few above.
Louis
FO,
I am wincing but I just gotta ask:
A few questions spring to mind:
1) What “compassion” and “support” should sexually desperate men be “offered” and how?
2) Who should offer it to them?
3) Why should women be the ones to suffer the most?
Louis
Crap! Was out all day and missed this.
I have nothing to contribute to this discussion except:
1) My sincere condolences to the victims of this (latest) atrocity, and
2) Fuck the Man-o-Sphere and all its works.
This seems strange to me. I live just a few miles north of a fire that has destroyed ten thousand acres of the most beautiful land on earth (Oak Creek Canyon), but has killed or injured no one, has not destroyed one human building (thanks to those fighting it), and there are people screaming to ban fire. Meanwhile, this happens in CA, and NO ONE MENTIONS banning guns? Well…………?
Y’know, besides all the other wrongness with the poor-desperate-man-pushed-over-the-edge business, I can’t remember ever hearing anyone express concern for a woman’s ego, no matter what she’d been put through or how desperate she was.
FO… I offered support, encouragement and friendship to a lonely guy with low self-esteem. He told me later he had planned to commit suicide the day I asked him for help in chemistry and befriended him.
Over the course of months he morphed into an emotionally manipulative stalker who attempted to break up my then-engagement. In fact, 5 years after I finally ceased all contact with him, he randomly showed up on AIM and offered me ‘one last chance’ to be his girlfriend.
Not every lonely guy out there will suddenly be okay if they just get a friend and a little attention. Sex would not have magically made the shooter become a wonderful, happy and fulfilled human being.
The problem is misogyny and a feeling of entitlement among men to women’s bodies.
This statement, repeated by many, while not completely false, is nowhere near the whole truth. YES, we have a misogynistic society which, if men accept its tenets, leads them to view women as pieces of meat. BUT. There is more to the picture than this.
This is like saying in Communist revolutions the problem is hatred of the rich and a feeling of entitlement among the proletariat to the possessions of the rich. Sure, these revolutions wouldn’t happen if the proletariat would just shut up and stop complaining and realize that the bourgeoisie doesn’t owe them a damn thing, not food, and certainly not healthcare. Damn them for standing up and demanding what they claim to be their “rights”. (In case anyone somehow fails to understand my satire, I am pretty much as anti rapacious Capitalism as it gets.)
So, back to the topic at hand, for most people, sex and sexual intimacy are not an optional extra like a luxury yacht or Gulfstream jet. It is a normal human need. Yet there is absolutely no sympathy for those who cannot fulfill this need. In fact there is just the opposite, complete contempt (“the loser who can’t get laid” or the “fat ugly chick” memes). Does this mean that any particular woman “owes” any particular man sex? Of course not, any more than the fact of unemployment means any particular business “owes” anyone a job. What it DOES mean is that there is a real societal problem that needs to be looked and addressed, and if it is not, then violence will inevitably result.
So, Neuroguy, what we should be advocating for is legalization for sex-work for both genders, right?
Do you think that would *honestly* reduce violence? Or would now these people hate that they have to pay to get sex?
Though, I must add, I am *totally* for legalized sex work. I see no reason why it is not legal, since we don’t outlaw massage, or salons, or barbarshops.
A human need is something you die from going for a shortish bit of time without.
Going without sex for short or long periods of time can become a source of stress.
Perhaps you’d like to share your unique definition of the word “need” with everyone?
@FO
So I, and all other women out there, are to be human sacrifices upon the altar of this man’s ‘feelings’?
He couldn’t get laid. I can’t use public transportation without being harassed.
He couldn’t get a date. I can’t walk down the street without getting cat-called.
He couldn’t get his ideal woman to talk to him. I can’t sign onto a game server without being told to go make a sandwich or suck a cock.
So pardon me, please, if my fucking pity machine is broken.
Why should I put myself in harm’s way, sacrifice my peace of mind, put forth effort and change my routines for this jackass?
Why should women change? He didn’t give enough of a shit about himself to do a little introspection, so why should we? Why should I risk groping, stalking, harassment, rape, and death in the name of being ‘compassionate’ to one that clearly had no compassion.
—-Have you ever felt utterly hopeless, abandoned, frustrated and cheated by destiny?—
Why yes, jackass, I have. See, I was born female. And I have to live in a world with people like you, this jackass, and all the PUAs and the rest of your misogynistic ilk.
I am not an object. I am a person. Do not offer me up as a human sacrifice.
—-Until desperate men are offered no compassion, no support and no alternative but only summary judgement—-
Oh bullshit. If his only problem was that he was ‘desperate’ there would be plenty of compassion and support for him. Genuinely decent guys can find womanly companionship if that is what they want. Unfortunately, for most, that isn’t what these guys want. They want a woman that meets their ‘standards’ and so ignore all the other women out there. They don’t just want her, they feel entitled to her and thus never bother to actually see her as a genuine person.
So why, exactly, would she want to kneel down and suck his cock? What’s in it for her? All you’ve offered up is ‘do it or you might get hurt’. Do you really think that’s acceptable?
If all he wanted was to get laid, he could have gotten a less flashy car and purchased the services of a prostitute.
If all he wanted was the companionship of a woman, all he needed to do was get a hobby or develop some sort of shared interest.
But that’s not what he wanted. He wanted a trophy, a fucktoy, an object.
How, exactly, do you think he’d have actually treated any girlfriend he actually managed to get?
We legalized sex work here in NZ about 10 years back.
it has its ins and outs.
pun aside, anyone who is interested can read the five year report on the effects here:
http://www.justice.govt.nz/policy/commercial-property-and-regulatory/prostitution/prostitution-law-review-committee/publications/plrc-report/documents/report.pdf
Ichthyic… I don’t know whether to hope that pun you made about sex work was deliberate or on accident… but it’s awesome. And thanks for the link to the report; I’m reading it now.
yup, that’s an excellent rejoinder. Will be using that if you don’t mind.
Neuroguy,
I won’t call someone not being in a position to be able to exercise their perfectly normal and laudable sexual needs a “loser”. I think that’s a shitty thing to do. Hell, I’m a huge fan of sex, I think we should all lie in a great big pile and go at it like knives. Consenting adults only of course. I feel only sympathy for that person, not pity or anything negative, sympathy and empathy. I get it.
If I accept that people not being in a position to have sex is a serious societal problem, and I might be able to credit that for the sake of argument, I agree it is an important need that varies along a spectrum after all, what interests me is part two: Addressing it.
Could you flesh that out for me a bit, so to speak? How does society provide “sexual healthcare for people’s bits”?*
Louis
* Okay, serious bit over, this opportunity I am not passing up. I think we should have state employed government standardised prostitutes. That way, in the UK, when they strike as they surely will, the Army has to fill in and do their job for them. Which amuses me no end. Also, European Hand Job Directives? A bureaucratic committee I could get behind! A standard Eurowank. I can see the Daily Mail headlines now…. Also, I’d appoint Silvio Berlusconi as Minister to be immediately opposed on all matters sexual. Basically we take his advice and do the opposite. I’m not sure I can stop….this is a rich vein of comedy gold….help!
@lorn #201 & neuroguy
Sex isn’t a favour, bestowed or withheld. Neither is it a commodity that must be negotiated for.* It’s an activity that people decide to do together, with fully informed consent of all participants. Speaking of it otherwise is to perpetuate the problem.
*except under special circumstances: i.e. with the involvement of a sex worker
I can’t wait to hear what you think the cause of problem is and how you propose to remedy it–that doesn’t treat women as sexual objects.
While I made the last post, I see a few other posts in that vein.
@222:
Here we go, beginning with putting scare quotes around “compassion” and “support”, and using the pejorative adjective “desperate” instead of something neutral like “unfulfilled”.
How about therapy and therapists that realize this for the problem it is, for starters? Those that can teach social, attraction, and coping skills. Especially those that can teach that whether any woman finds you attractive or not has nothing whatsoever to do with your worth as a person.
Question 3) is a deliberate misquote; the original statement was: women will be the ones to suffer the most, not that they should be. This is debatable; the next round of bullets may well be fired at us, the “manginas” in MRA speak.
@225:
Oh, really? You must not be reading women’s magazines (which mirror our culture to its core, even including its misogyny), where it is oh-so-awful about how “he won’t commit” and how the woman has an implicit “right” to this (after all, she’s had sex), and how she can possibly manipulate him into so doing.
Oh, and you can put me down as another woman who “let a guy down gently” and was even so “friendly” and “nice” to him that I allowed him to take pictures of me even though I had no sexual interest in him whatsoever and ended up being threatened with rape because that ended up not being enough of what he felt entitled to. So no, I don’t feel I should be sacrificed to anyone’s ragey ego for the greater good. What about putting the responsibility on the men instead for once.
I tend to think “Withinthismind” has it about right. people like that would see it as a “defeat” to have to pay for sex, which is yet ANOTHER set of stigmas that has been artificially maintained in most western societies.
if it were really so simple to address… alas, it is not. hundreds of years of overlapping privileges and false dreams and lies to untangle.
there is no easy way to address all the victims of this young man’s rage, including the young man himself.
all we can hope is that it will encourage others to see this rage in themselves, and start a dialogue to deal with it, rather than allowing it to turn inwards and become depression, or outwards and become violence.
why is it his parents could see there was something wrong, but felt powerless to do anything but call the police to talk to him?
for others that say they empathize with the feelings he expressed in his video, did you not ever discuss these feelings of your own with your parents, or peers?
is it self-imposed isolationism, and if so, what is causing that? It does seem Western society in general has encouraged isolationism; I thought at first it was just a natural reaction to the world getting more crowded, but I see it here in NZ as well. neighbors don’t talk to each other; nobody communicates.
it’s puzzling.
WithinThisMind #231
So very well said.
Thank you.
Louis @ 222:
I think it’s a mistake to consign this all under ‘sexually desperate’. There’s usually much more to it than sex. As I noted in #20, I’ve befriended a lot of “creepy loners”, and for the most part, there was a deep desire for friendship which superseded a desire for sex.
Naturally, it doesn’t always go that way, and some people go a very negative route with attention, and yes, things can get bad. That doesn’t mean that things never, ever go well. I might add that a desperate man who finds himself without any positive relationships with women, often don’t have any positive relationships with other men. There are times that reaching out can make all the difference.
whoah. is this really a common meme in a lot of Women’s magazines?
Neuroguy,
The use of the word desperate and the quotes were not done for scares or pejoratively, they were used because those were the terms FO used. I was mirroring and quoting his words. I want to know what HE meant, not what I thought he might mean. I also didn’t make a deliberate misquote, you’ve interpreted it one way, I meant it another. I am asking why should it be the women who suffer most, not the men or the sheep? He asserted that it would be women who would suffer most, I am asking why he thinks that should be the case. Perhaps poorly phrased.
I also want to know what you propose. Therapy for people keen to have sex but who have yet to achieve their goal? Therapy to train people in interpersonal skills better? I’d agree, I’d also say this needs to go on in sexual education in schools. Teaching un squeamishly about relationships. Normalising fears, showing them for what they are so that people don’t feel isolated. I think that would be a great start.
Louis
—–How about therapy and therapists that realize this for the problem it is, for starters? Those that can teach social, attraction, and coping skills. Especially those that can teach that whether any woman finds you attractive or not has nothing whatsoever to do with your worth as a person.—-
These already exist.
These guys could easily go seek them out.
But they don’t.
There was this one lady, you might have heard of her. Her name is Rebecca Watson. She tried to give a little friendly advice to a guy so that he could improve his ‘game’ and maybe have a better shot next time he tried to pick up on a woman in whom he was interested.
Do you, by any chance, recall what the fallout from her attempt was?
The culture of toxic masculinity tells them that the problem isn’t them, no, no, no, it’s all these bitches, amiright?
And here you are, doing it again. They DESERVE our compassion and support. We should help them. We could completely ignore that they won’t help themselves and that providing them with our compassion and support puts us in very real danger.
They fear women will laugh at them. Those women fear they will be raped and murdered. So try getting just a tiny bit of fucking perspective.
@Laurian, #185:
And why do you always find your sexist deepities in the very last place you look?
Come back when you’ve learned something, not before.
@Rowan, #228:
Seriously? In a thread about some asshole who buys into sexist gender role crap, you leave this for us?
You’re better than this. Don’t be the fucking problem.
Inaji,
Good point, I shouldn’t have narrowed. I presumed that’s where the narrowing was going. Naughty Louis.
Louis
—–How about therapy and therapists that realize this for the problem it is, for starters? Those that can teach social, attraction, and coping skills. Especially those that can teach that whether any woman finds you attractive or not has nothing whatsoever to do with your worth as a person.—-
These already exist.
These guys could easily go seek them out.
But they don’t.
There was this one lady, you might have heard of her. She tried to give a little friendly advice to a guy so that he could improve his ‘game’ and maybe have a better shot next time he tried to pick up on a woman in whom he was interested. She said, ‘hey, guys, don’t do that’.
Do you, by any chance, recall what the fallout from her attempt was?
The culture of toxic masculinity tells them that the problem isn’t them, no, no, no, it’s all these bitches, amiright?
And here you are, doing it again. They DESERVE our compassion and support. We should help them. We could completely ignore that they won’t help themselves and that providing them with our compassion and support puts us in very real danger.
They fear women will laugh at them. Those women fear they will be raped and murdered. So try getting just a tiny bit of fucking perspective.
FO
The PUA and MRA communities reinforce the cultural narratives that cause this stress and resentment in the first place. You will not compassion from them: you will get techniques. You will still be expected to be controlling and overly sexual in order to be A Real Man. They will speak of things in terms of scoring points, as some sort of virtual, sexual competition where not having sex diminishes your self worth. That’s pick up artists are all about! They might have helped you, but they sure as hell aren’t helping.
neuroguy
Sex is not a luxury but it isn’t an absolute necessity either. And I think we need to put more emphasis on the fact that most of the “need” of sex is psychological and social. You can be sexually satisfied by just masturbating, but the sheer stress and anxiety and feeling of worthlessness you get if you aren’t having sex with other people is not inherent to lack of sex and is deeply psychological and cultural.
Louis wrote:
While he spent most of his rant talking about sex, did you catch the part about the people at Isla Vista? It seems like he was desperate for a connection with other people in general, rather than just for sex. There is so much resentment in there, it’s hard to take it all in, but I get the feeling that this was outright isolation combined with the toxic attitudes he held (i.e. that he was entitled to sex).
I do as well.
It’s been interesting to see education ministers here in NZ actually try to implement those very things in the schools…. only to be immediately attacked by people suddenly indignant that the government wants to teach “sex” to children (won’t someone think of the children!). It’s weird, given how little influence religion itself appears to play in politics here, but I think there is a STRONG irrational streak of puritanism? victorianism? still running through Western society. I think we need to figure out a way to deal with that first, before we can make progress on the other issues.
neuroguy
Wow. Just wow. Could you phrase that a little more spitefully next time? Try a little more spin. You can purchase O’Reilly brand and dip in A Voice for Men sauce to best suit your purposes.
Oops. Inaji beat me to the point I wanted to make, and expressed it better than I.
Even more posts. Terrific.
@228:
Yes.
Not if having to pay to get sex weren’t branded with the stigma of “loser”, but was just accepted as something normal.
@230:
Seriously? You won’t actually die from your broken knee and subsequent inability to walk, so I guess getting it fixed isn’t a real “need”, and if you don’t have health insurance or the means to pay for it out of pocket, too damn bad, and how dare you claim this as a “right” (again, if anyone fails to recognize my satire, get a life). Maybe you’re the one who needs to clarify your unique definition of “need”.
@235:
Legalized sex work without stigma is certainly one thing that could be done. Also, as I mentioned, therapy. I’m open to other suggestions.
@236:
I’m curious just how I spoke of it otherwise?
Well part of the problem is that patriarchy says to men that sex is something that is earned, and if he isn’t getting it he is therefore a failure. Patriarchy also says to women that sex is something that needs to be earned, and she “gives it away” too readily she’s a “slut”.
ck:
Indeed. Key parts
He obviously hated the women who dared to not sleep with him, but he also had quite a few resentful words directed towards “the popular kids”. Possibly because he viewed them as more successful Alpha Males he was competing against, and also possibly because they were broad social networks that he felt barred from.
neuroguy:
I think more to the point:
In a patriarchy, sex for men is an achievement. The more you get, the more of a man you are. The less you get, the less of a man you are. (As you have said)
Sex for women is a stigma because Purity, Virgin/Whore Dichotomy, Other Bullshit. (Also as you have said). Women not having sex also outrages men, because it means that they can’t run up their scores. Women are damned if they Do, damned if they Don’t.
Pteryxx wrote:
I said both genders, because if I said ‘for women’, I fully expected to get called out for implying that men aren’t ever sex workers. It would also imply that only cis males are incapable of getting sex when they want it and thereby would shove out those gay men who are unpaired but would like to be.
So fucked if I do, fucked if I don’t I guess for attempting to be gender neutral.
@249:
Oh so that’s OK huh. Men manipulating women into sex = how dare they. Women manipulating men into relationships = AOK. If that’s what you think, you’re part of the problem.
Ibis3 @ #238: Hey, sounds like you met my ex. Yet another lonely, misunderstood guy who just needed someone to reach out.
Contrary to Inaji, I long have lost the desire to reach out to those poor lonely souls. Too many of them proved to be alone because their seething hatred of women and others came off them like a bad stink.
I knew my comment @ #177 was prescient, as there’ve been a few people who came and argued that if only these dudes just had love and maybe pussy but especially ego support, there’d be fewer mass murders. Especially the bullshit idea that people are owed sex and intimacy. Yes, it’s important, and yes, many people want it. But nobody inherently deserves it. And also they’re not entitled to be terrible people just because they can’t get any.
And if the problem was the use of the word ‘both’, for that I apologise because I’m tired and the whole non-binary thing slips out of my brain at times. The angry response for a slip like that though is a little over the top for an honest mistake.
Neuroguy, your conflation of the need for labour rights for sex workers with your belief that it’s a terrible crime that some people can’t get anyone to touch their genitals is beyond inappropriate. It’s fucked up to claim that there would be no more mass murders if only angry and horrible men could just get the sex they feel entitled to.
neuroguy @ 256:
No, you don’t get the high horse on this one. You’re trying to go tit for tat, with “well women do _____!”, instead of realizing that women and men are swimming about in a toxic pool of sexism, most of which has been duly absorbed. People do get desperate where relationships are concerned, and you aren’t helping with your tit for tat, because it’s simply another way to avoid the primary problem.
Short form: you aren’t helping.
@259:
Nice rant against a strawman. Now maybe you’d like to address the actual argument made.
HappiestSadist:
I don’t that much anymore (at least AFK), because I’m not social at all.* I do reach out on the ‘net a fair amount, though. Anyway, I wanted to quietly point out that as far as I’m concerned, I reached out to different genders, not just cishet men.
*And I have had a reach out go bad on me, so I do understand why a lot of people won’t reach out.
@260:
The comment made was in response to this:
The point was that this isn’t true, in our culture. It’s regarded as AN AWFUL THING if the man won’t commit.
Uh, no, my comments weren’t “well women do ___!” they were related to how things are in our toxic sexist culture.
@257:
You’re the feminist libertarian. Because, it’s the men’s own fault for not having it, if they weren’t such narcissists and assholes, they’d easily find a woman willing to give it to them, right?
Yep, and I must additionally decry especially the bullshit idea that people are owed food and healthcare. Yes, they’re important, and yes, many people want them. But nobody inherently deserves them.
Because, it’s the poor people’s own fault for not having them, if they weren’t such lazy good-for-nothings, they could afford them, and they’d easily find an employer willing to hire them.
I’m now reminded of the scene in Game of Thrones where Tyrion tries to curb Joffrey’s violent sadism by… buying him a roomful of whores.
how did that one work out?
*shudder*
@Rowan, #258:
It was. That’s why I chose that word to bold.
Accepted.
More than understandable, even if the language is not acceptable.
In your opinion.
I had a reasonably long career working with and for trans and intersex survivors of domestic and sexual violence. The existence of binary gender ideology was itself used as proof to nearly all of these survivors (both in internal monologues and in the words of others) that an abusive fuck was actually a good partner, or at least the best partner for which a tranny could hope, given their willingness to look past the freaky trans-ness long enough fuck or snuggle or buy a dinner once in a while.
Moreover, abusers would sometimes overtly tell trans survivors that “we asked for it” and that “we had to know we were asking for it” by being trans.
Intersex kids were literally raised with genitals mutilated on the basis that those kids’ bodies could never earn another’s love and so the bodies’ “ambiguity” is justifiably hidden, a desperate dark secret that, if revealed, would prove to any potential lover that any kindness is undeserved, any love literally tricked from those potential lovers.
I know. I know better than even most other trans and intersex folk how gender binary ideology leads to violence and the toleration of violence.
And I don’t want it in this thread.
You, I want.
“both genders”? No. Fuck the whole idea behind that right out of the solar system.
HappiestSadist, Repellent Little Martyr wrote:
Seriously, I gotta learn to preview (even though it often messes up formatting when links are involved) before posting. Terrible borkquotes from me.
You know what? As a 24-year old, white, cis, male virgin, I totally DON’T get it. He clearly had some expectations that just weren’t justified. And sure, you can go around blaming society for manufacturing those expectations, but fucking hell! This man (and that is what he was, not a boy, but a man) murdered seven or more people. There’s absolutely nothing that could ever justify that.
I mean, sure, maybe I got some anxiety issues, too. Maybe I suck at forming healthy relationships, too. Maybe I am frustrated by never having been in love ever, too.
That sucks.
But guess what? The world doesn’t owe me shit. Women don’t owe me shit.
This is not a conclusion you have to work towards. It’s the common-fucking-sense default. It’s a concusion you have to work away from to get wrong, This is not something that just so happens. This is something that is informed by a very toxic and very dangerous ideology. An ideology you have to invest a lot of personal time and energy into to put into action. I have no sympathy.
And I am devestated that people died in the name of that bullshit. Its so awful, I don’t even know what to say anymore.
neuroguy sez:
I’d like a second opinion, doc. Osteomyelitis. Is there anything which you’ve said which wasn’t a concoction of your ass to fill the open faced turd sandwich called your Agenda? I’m not finding such.
@Razzlefrog #8, “How hard is it to have no-pressure conversations with people, to have your own hobbies and interests and an easygoing attitude, and ideally shower sometimes?”:
It can be very hard. I don’t think you understand just how well off you are. I myself have a great deal of experience with this, so let me see if I can explain it.
It starts with a simple nervousess, or shyess. So that you find it easier to avoid people. Say, instead of playing with the other kindergartners, you hang out by yourself-make pretty patterns with the blocks or something. You lose out on some social skills, but you don’t understand that that’s a problem yet, so you don’t worry. But then maybe later, you decide that maybe you’d like to have feinds after all. So you approach them. But they’ve already made all their friendships, and developed social skills, so you seem like a creepy wierdo. So they don’t want to play with you, so you go back to your blocks. The fear and uncertainty that orginally held you back grows heavier. Time passes, the attern continues. Now you’re in grade school. Hey, you think, maybe I’ll make some friends! But no, you’ve lost out on too much experience, you’re too afraid. You embarass yourself, no one wants to be your friend.the weiht grows heavier, and an invisible wall begins too grow between you and everyone else. Time passes, now you’re in middle school. You’ve come to deeply distrust everyone else, they only want to hurt you. Nothing good can come from talking to them. It begins to get chilly on your side of the wall. You see people being happy together, making friends. You think to yourself, that looks nice. I’d like that. You approach people, but by now your years behind and staggering beneath a weight of fear and distrust. The invisible wall has become too high, and you’re freezing in the darkness. Predictably, It doesn’t go well. You think to yourself, there must be a secret! You listen to all the cultural memes flying about above your head “Men should take the initiative.” “Men should buy women flowers.” “Sex is the only expression of affection men are allowed to indulge in.” You try harder- perhaps now you have the secret! but no, things are the same as always, if not worse. You get deserate. You bang on the wall, you beg, “Let me in! PLease, I’m dieing, please!” You’d do anything for a smile. For someone to laugh with you, to hold you. “Please, you beg. please…” But it doesn’t work. They don’t understand. “What’s wrong with you?” “Why are you so creepy?” “Go away, leave us alone.” You despair. You consider ending it all, anything to get out of this cold. And then it happens- You find people who understand. They welcome you, they tell you why you are so miserable. They tell you who to blame. You know what to do…
You get yourself a gun. The story ends.
This isn’t the only way it happens, of course. Some people get lucky, and manage to cross over the wall. Some get rescued, someone comes and pulls them through. Some find something else to care about- ath science, art- they lose themselves in it. Others, like myself, gain enough understanding to at least figure out why they are where they are, and to begin doing something about it. But some don’t. Some check out in that moment of despair. And some make it all the way to the end of our story.
I like the comment made by Crip Dyke at #15. It closely reflects the way I’ve resolved to behave, even if I’m not very good at it. Because I’ve come to the realization that everyone has a reason for everything they do. Not necessarily a good reason, no… But all the same, I don’t think it’s right to judge another human being simply on your own perceptions. If you don’t know everything they’ve been through, if you don’t understad them at least as well as they understad themselves, then who are you to judge?
And so I can feel sorry for all the poor victims who got their lives cut cruely short. and I can feel sorry for the poor damn fool who’s life came to such a sad end. And I can wish for a better world, and try and do what litle I can to bring it about. And I can wish you all a good night.
Peace,
Angle
@Louis in early posts – I like the cut of your jib. Can’t wade thru hundreds of comments to see if you kept up that level of badassery, but tentatively, I say huzzah!
And before people take my post the wrong way, I don’t mean to suggest that women were somehow responsible for this, or that they should be they ones who are responsible for comforting all the poor broken fools. I would actually suggest that our cultural norms are responsible. It seems, to me at least, that in our culture, men are not allowed to feel emotions. They are not allowed to desire companionship in any form oter than sex. “Men want sex and nothing else. Get lots of sex or you’re not a man!” is very much the dominant paradigm, and I think that’s stupid.
OR, you know, you don’t. Get a gun, that is.
I have been at a point (I no longer am, thank goodness) where I woke up with suicidal thoughts every morning, partly because of social ineptitude and acute shyness like you describe. Becasue of having no friends, no-one to connect with at all. But you don’t fucking think about hurting others. In fact, when you’re feeling suicidal, you try to think of ways to off yourself that will hurt the the smallest number of people the least. Don’t wanna cause any splash-damage, don’t wanna be their problem, don’t wanna cause a fuss. You try to limit the pain. That’s the point. That’s my experience anyway.
Going out and murdering people is a whole ‘nother kind of thing, with a completely different motivation.
what the fuck?
the bait you are using is obviously rotten.
don’t even flounce. just… go.
I think people miss another less noxious but still damaging part of MRA culture.
They view other male associates value and comparative worth only by their ability to obtain sex.
Are you an “Alpha male”? Or are you some lesser sad “Beta” because you don’t have sex?
I don’t have much compassion for this, because participating in this damaging culture is completely voluntary; but the shooter being so involved with this culture that gauged his worth solely on his lack of sex probably had an effect.
@Klatu, # 275:
I agree. That is how things should be. But that isn’t how things always are. We live in a society where one of the dominant ideas is that “You can’t let people push you around. If they hurt you, you need to hurt them back. You need to hurt them harder, so they never even look at you funny, ever again!”. I know better than that. You know better than that. But not eveyone else does. and so, when a person has picked up on that idea, and they feel the whole world has hurt them…
I don’t think this is good. I think this is a tragedy. But you won’t get very far blaming the symptom. You have to treat the underlying causes if you wish to see progress. If, for example, that young man had picked up a different idea, say “People have reasons for everything they do. Not necessarily good reasons, no, but reasons all the same. Don’t hate them for it.” then perhaps things would be different.
Not only that, he’s making a claim about how this is some sort of common strategy/advice given to women without offering a shred of evidence in support of that claim.
@ Louis # 180
Indeed.
Above is the secular pundits’ version of the goddists’ :
It explains nothing and lulls us into not looking into the problems.
Who says he couldn’t?
I’m sure that if his actual goal were to find a woman he had some things in common with that included a mutual interest in enjoyable joint intimacy, he would have managed. He wanted a trophy, some,strike>one“thing” that would satisfy the narrative of masculine entitlement he’d been fed, and impress the other PUA scumbags.
And when the universe wouldn’t bend to his conceit like he was promised he threw a temper tantrum with full automatics.
@Jemoi Jemoi:
Your comments started off naive (“They can’t possibly blame us!”) and have now devolved to horrifying.
Let’s play a game of fuck-off-from-this-thread-forever. I’ll even let you go first.
@Jemoi Jemoi:
For starters?
yup. squicky troll is indeed squicky.
I get the impression that extreme negative reaction to any mention of someone being mentally disturbed has very little to do with the fact of someone being mentally disturbed as much as it does with the treatment of people who are mentally disturbed.
My suspicion is those who react so negatively have themselves been subject to discriminatory treatment for reasons of perceived mental disturbance or none normality.
does anyone think that the particular person who is the subject of this post was acting in a reasonable way? I do not know what his personal history is or how he came to think it was a good idea to act out in that way but it is at least on the surface delusional.
Was he taught and learn to think in this way? If so does that make it reasonable?
If you are living in a delusional state and act according to reason within that delusion which is counter to objective reality are you acting sanely?
If education is a good thing why do we not teach socialization in any meaningful way ?
From the rants he himself gave he seems not to have had the experience of receiving love and affection. His actions led to this elaborate violent acting out, while the more common form of self destruction is drugs and alcohol he chose suicide by criminal justice system.
He is not mentally disturbed?
It seems to me that it is those who deny that he is mentally ill may be just as much othering him as those who condemn him because he is mentally ill.
uncle frogy
The ad hominem fallacy fallacy page for those with no clue what the term “argumentum ad hominem” actually means.
angle @ 271
That’s an awfully apt description of how things go, I could tell you felt it and I did too…and an awfully highminded resolution you’ve made. My commendations. It’s similar to a resolution I considered, though I rejected it for my own philosophy. I certainly don’t go around trying to hurt people but I realized I’d be bled dry if I kept subjugating myself as a “minion”, as many of my friends called me…I shifted my focus to #1.
My purpose is not to better anyone else, any more than their or society’s purpose is to better me. I owe 25 years of debt on my existence, and any aid I render anyone is similarly a form of debt, unless I decide otherwise. As I may do, for I am the “god” of my universe, the arbiter of what is True for and about me, the gatekeeper of who and what is allowed in, and the sole bearer of responsibility for any decision I make. Everyone else is only as relevant as I deem them to be.
I am not responsible for sacrificing myself for anyone else’s sake or comfort – though I may do so if I wish. And as I see it, shifting blame for everything to everybody else, as Rodgers did, is the ultimate weakness. What kind of “god” is unable to even justify its “self” apart from others?
angle has my respect for being able to have such a prosocial philosophy…personally, though, it sounds just less repugnant than losing the willpower of “self” to gun down others. As a philosophy, of course; the actual “gunning down others” part makes Rodgers’ ideas infinitely worse than pretty much anything else.
That’s probably it for my drunken ramblings.
@louis, thank you for expounding on this topic. Nothing struck me as off when PZ described the guy as “severely mentally disturbed” but I see now that it is indeed an unfair characterization. I’ve never before read through so many comments on any website as I did here today, let alone learned something important.
From what I see of the video transcribed, he didn’t want a girlfriend, he wanted to fuck a sorority girl or someone like that. He didn’t want friends, he wanted to be a popular kid. He makes it very clear that that was his target.
So no, I don’t buy this whole “he was just a frustrated boy rejected by all women”. He, like so many others like him, wanted a specific kind of woman (conventionally attractive, “hot”, popular) and got upset when that wasn’t granted to him the way he felt he was entitled to. From my experience, these men never even LOOK at the lonely girls, the fat girls, the girls who are seen as “ugly”, who suffer just as much from loneliness and lack of intimacy yet somehow manage to not go on shooting rampages.
I’m not saying everyone who is lonely acts like this, I’m saying that it’s a dynamic that I’ve seen time and time again – the guy complains that he is so lonely, he can’t get a girl to go out with him, but when you ask him who he asked out, and had he ever considered X, the answer is ‘Ew, who wants to tap that?’
Also, and once again this is my experience talking, these guys don’t want a meaningful relationship – they want a fuck. They are not interested in becoming friends with someone from the opposite sex, they want to “tap” that and live in horrible fear of the dreaded “friendzone”.
Jemoi Jemoi
Here we go:
and again:
… are what will get you banned.
On the other hand, here:
, makes you appear to fail to realise, that it is your own doing, your own use of slurs, that will get you banned. Nothing Crip Dyke says about you.
Just to make it clear again, I’m not saying everyone who is lonely acts like this, it’s just the case for the majority of what I’ve personally seen and seems to be the dynamic with the shooter here from what he said in his video.
The murderer released a 140 page autobiography.
You recall the “boy raised by wolves” stories?
this reads like what you would expect if a kid were raised by “Game of Thrones”.
he totally disconnected from reality at an early age, and evidently his parents didn’t notice until years later.
Imagine if you felt you were the character Joffrey, and never could grasp why nobody was treating you like a king.
fucking narcissists… how do they work?
Jemoi Jemoi The things you have said are disgusting and you deserve to be told to fuck off for saying them.
“Joke?”
Do you see any of us laughing, asswipe?
You’re exceptionally clear, and I’m glad I’m not the only one noticing. “Loneliness” is at best (at worst?) orthogonal – ditto “lack of social skills” or “ineptitude.” The problem is entitlement, coupled to a dehumanizing attitude towards everyone else..
You’re really so fucking ignorant you conflate schizophrenia with dissociative identity disorder?
Really?
That’s…kinda sad.
dear jemoi,
your attitude is what cause seven people to die when they would still be alive today
best wishes
fuck off
troll wants to make this thread all about troll.
CLEANUP ON AISLE 7.
You keep using that term
i don’t think it means what you think it means
And of course, right on cue, here comes Ally to explain that the shooter wasn’t a MRA (because reasons despite reports otherwise), he was bullied and THAT’s the real problem here.
I’m off to get some brain bleach.
Monitor note
Troll alert regarding Jemoi Jemoi sent.
It seems everyone is reading into my post that the burden and responsibility of helping men should fall on women, it is definitely not what I think.
By the way, sex in not the problem, power and the perceived lack of it is.
@Louis #222
“1) What “compassion” and “support” should sexually desperate men be “offered” and how?”
I honestly don’t know.
Acknowledging their suffering as real, for starters.
It is entirely self-inflicted, but being dismissed just means that you don’t have anywhere to turn to.
“2) Who should offer it to them?”
Other men who have a healthy and successful approach to women.
“3) Why should women be the ones to suffer the most?”
They shouldn’t.
@Rowan vet-tech #226
I’m sorry your compassion brought you such a bad experience and did nothing for him.
Unfortunately this kind of men have no use for neither friends neither your good feelings.
A competent psychologist and a better role model would probably help though.
@WithinThisMind #231
“So I, and all other women out there, are to be human sacrifices upon the altar of this man’s ‘feelings’?”
No.
Like, really no.
I understand where you are coming from and I apologise if I have been unclear.
I think that misogyny is a problem, I think that men are utterly blind to their privilege and I think that our society is not safe for women.
But please reread what I wrote. Nowhere I suggested that it’s your or women’s fault.
This kind of people must be stopped and prevented from harming others.
But after we stop them, we have to try and understand why they got there in the first place, because otherwise this will continue.
I hope you will agree with me that if we want our society to be safer for women, we need better men.
If we need better men, condemning violent against women while necessary is only half of the solution.
The other half is understanding why they become violent and frustrated in the first place.
No matter who your enemy is, dehumanizing them rather than trying to understand them will make you fight blind.
@anteprepro #246
Dude, you can’t tell ME what I got from there. I was there, you weren’t.
Yes, the overhwlmeing majority of the PUAs are about being a manipulative dick.
I still learned to get past my resentment from some of the fringe parts that actually reject misogyny.
Accept it or call me a liar, but you can’t change MY subjective experience because you don’t like it.
So tell me, FO, how many fat and “ugly” girls did you ask out for dates?
Actually, ignore that. I’m posting out of anger and will stop now.
Jemoi Jemoi
Your bullshit is repugnant. You are splashing it about all over the place.
That is the whole point: you might not focus on offending anyone in particular, but you somehow manage to offend a lot of people around you. Do you ever stop and think about why that is?
You do realise that being a boring troll is a bannable offence across the entire blog? Thunderdome included.
So, after reading the whole thread, let me extend a heartfelt FUCK YOU to the world and many of the people in this thread who are trying to turn the conversation from misogynist who felt entitled to women’s bodies to poor lonely people.
Let me tell you something:
I’m not a pussy dispenser.
I’m also not a friendship dispenser.
It is my duty and your right to treat you with basic friendlieness and decency in normal everyday interactions*.
It is my duty and your right that I don’t treat you like an asshole would, that I don’t bully you, that I don’t actively try to fuck with your life.
Deciding that you’re not the kind of person I would like to spend time with is not a crime. It is not bullying.
Is it sad for you? Sure it is. It’s not like I ever was a popular kid myself, that’s why I’m probably willing to pay more attention to people who are also not popular. I don’T care if me and my friends end up looking like the “weird loser kids table” in American high-school TV-programs. But I’ll still set my own fucking boundaries for good reasons.
Right now on Twitter there are guys telling women that they should learn from this and think twice before they turn down a guy the next time. Does that speak of lonelieness or off misogynist entitlement?
Louis
Spot on!
neuroguy
You’re an asshole. The reality is that men and women and non-binary people are all having a hard time finding partners and fuck-buddies. Because life is complicated. If it doesn’t happen it it’s not like it’s anybody’s fault. I’ll type this for you alone again: Nobody is entitled to sex or relationships.
*cold propositions or personal comments from near-strangers do NOT belong in this category
I think this is the wrong answer here. The answer should be, “People who feel willing and able to help.”
The premises of PUA thought seem to be based principally on misogyny (hell, even the name); your description of this “fringe” group is (at least by me, and I’m guessing by most everyone here) seen as a contradiction.
screechymonkey, #111:
It’s more like you’ve burst through the wall to declare “But SOME Mentally Ill People…”
Holy shit. I… what the fuck? Are you actually trying to be a world class asshole? You’ve succeeded.
Sex and intimacy are not food and healthcare. Giving everyone the right to food and health care does not violate the personal autonomy of others; demanding the right to sex and intimacy does. It’s
If someone is feeling put upon and frustrated due to lack of sex and intimacy, they can go to a fucking therapist (i.e. health care).*
What’s especially pathetic is you’re not even addressing the argument in question, and you, for some bizarre reason, seem to ignore that women also find themselves lacking sex and intimacy. Somehow, that gender neutral argument got turned into a whine entirely focused on men.
*This assumes that one lives in a reasonable country that takes mental health care seriously. One probably does not.
FO, Thanks for your input and your patient responses to disagreements and misunderstandings. You are the kind of person I like to be in a discussion with.
Good to know there is some good in some of the PUA.
And I agree that men (obviously not only men) should take it upon ourselves to befriend these guys and try to demonstrate a better way. One big reason is that it is not risky for us as it is for women as several women have pointed out in this thread. I do think that women help each other relate to men a lot and we do very little of that.
I think a problem for us relating to misogynists is that we feel our own shame and would rather judge than understand or help. And they do hurt our relations with women keeping women afraid as they do.
FO,
Also I would like to know more about the help you received from the PUA fringe. That strikes me as something we men could get involved in. More useful, seems to me, than just throwing rocks at them…Yet it likely would be very frustrating but maybe good exercise.
Unclefrogy, #293,
I’m going to take this piece by piece:
1)
Bolding mine.
Whether or not it is true that I have personally experienced prejudice on the basis of mental health issues or not it’s irrelevant to my arguments. Whether or not I have seen the effects of mental health stigma on others this is a classic ad hominem logical fallacy. The truth of the arguments doesn’t rest on any aspect of me or my experience.
As for your use of “extreme reaction:. Yes, those uppity n**gers are so terribly upset about their civil rights….oh sorry that’s far too offensive and discriminatory…I meant yes, those uppity wh*res and c*nts are so terribly upset about their equal rights…oh sorry, offensive and discriminatory again…of course what I meant was that yes, those uppity f**gots, d*kes and tr**nies are so terribly upset about their equal rights…
…I apologise my tone wasn’t suitably pleasant enough for you.
Do me a favour, could you please go up to your nearest black friend and tell him or her than the only reason they don’t like the word “n**ger”, and how racist white people use it, is because they’re black, and therefore insufficiently reasonable to deal with it. Please report back to me with the results.
2)
Not reasonable = “mad”. Good to know. No, no one is claiming he was acting (to use your ever shifting weasel word) reasonably. That doesn’t make him mad. It doesn’t mean he has a mental illness. It doesn’t mean he is “severely mentally deranged”. This is classic othering. It’s a blatant attempt to make him something “not like me”.
Whether or not he is mentally ill, whether or not that had an influence on his actions, you simply don’t have the qualifications, experience or position to comment meaningfully (see the large, self-blockquoting section of my #174, for why). Your comments also do more harm than good. You are not “innocently just saying”, you are playing into an already fraught area of social disadvantage and furthering the problem. Please stop.
Why is it that generally, although it is stopping here, the use of the word “prick” is less problematic than the use of the word “c*nt” as an insult? It’s because the latter is inseparable from a huge cultural misogyny. A profoundly well demonstrated network of individual disadvantages, ideas, hierarchies etc that systematically devalue and disadvantage women. This is not news, it’s not rocket science, for the average familiar Pharyngulean (like yourself) it’s the basics. 101 level. The weight of social context around the two words is not equal.
The same applies to how we discuss mental illness/health and especially as it relates to difference and violence.
Again, if you can, access the very few papers I linked in #174. They explain the consequences of your bigotry (and it is bigotry). They explain it in stark terms of how many bodies it produces. The Thornicroft book, by the way, is superb. I recommend it to everyone.
3)
Are Christians “reasonable”? Are they “delusional” to the point of “insanity” (a claim relevant to your comment, the next part I will quote)? Muslims? Jews? Jains? Sikhs? Hindus? Republicans?
The answers for the vast majority of these people is “yes they are reasonable” and “no they are not delusional to the point of insanity”. By definition following the whims, mores, social attitudes and religions of your environment is not “delusional to the point of insanity” regardless of how true, real, accurate or reasoned those whims, mores, social attitudes and religions might be. Make your mind up, either every person on the planet including you is so delusional in some manner as to be insane, and this discussion of this individual’s sanity in the manner you are doing it is as meaningless as discussing his hair colour, or you’re doing immense violence to the words “reasonable” “delusional” and “sane” that they themselves are rendered meaningless.
No one is claiming his acts are reasonable (Straw man. Another fallacy! You like those don’t you?). What I am saying is that HIS STATED MOTIVES are clear, his track record with misogynist
Being “reasonable” and being “insane” are not overlapping in the manner you are alluding to. You are simply perpetuating “bad”=”mad” and “different”=”mad”. Both of which are bullshit. See #174 and references therein for starters.
Again, where is the claim that this person acted REASONABLY? I’ll save you sometime: NOWHERE.
The opposite of “reasonable” is not “insane”.
4)
Define “delusion” for me. No, don’t go to the dictionary, YOU do it. Christians live in a “delusional” state. Their beliefs are demonstrably false. Demonstrably “delusions”. Some of them go to church every week. They must be insane. Remember: YOU BROUGHT SANITY INTO THIS. Or is it a bit more complicated than that?
Again, this weasel worded bullshit is just so you can maintain your bigotry. It does such violence to these terms, “delusion”, “insane” etc, that they are rendered meaningless. What makes you so sure you’re free from delusions my oh so reasonable Straw-Vulcan friend? Everything you think is 100% fact based, entirely based on evidence, reasoned perfectly? I doubt it. Maybe there’s even a few deluuuuusions in there….GASP! OH NOES! You may have even acted on imperfectly accurate or reasoned beliefs….ZOMG….YOU’RE INSANE! ARGHH!
Gosh I wonder if psychologists and psychiatrists and all the relevant experts in the various fields of study relevant to this have ever given this any thought? I wonder if there’s some way to search the internet and find out? Hmmmm. Nah. Can’t be.
If you’re trying to claim this person was PATHOLOGICALLY deluded, then you have to demonstrate that. Res by no means loquiturs ipsa in these cases. (and yes I know what violence I did the Latin there. It am an joke. Deal with it)
Again, I refer you back to my #174, to your own stark ignorance. You are not a psychologist or psychiatrist AFAIK, your experiences (if you have them) permit you to talk about your experiences in a valid manner, you’re not this person’s therapist/primary mental health physician. YOU DON’T FUCKING KNOW. Your speculation is ignorant, uninformed and borrow heavily form that redolent mixture of cultural ideas that are deeply damaging to people with mental illnesses. It’s not innocent speculation, it’s ignorant, likely untrue, and harmful. Yes that goes for PZ, yes that goes for the media, yes, that goes for everyone. Grow up and cope with the fact that your ignorance on this subject is not a licence for you to pontificate.
5)
Fuck me! A nugget of gold! Education IS a good thing, we SHOULD teach socialisation and various social skills as far as they can be taught. Ask the politicians why they don’t value it.
6)
Why does he have to be “mentally disturbed”? Why not “angry”? “Bitter”? “Emotionally disturbed”? Or one of a billion other things.
To reiterate: In the UK alone 2 women a week are killed by their “loved ones”. Because of domestic violence. The incidence of violence BY people with mental illnesses (diagnosed before, at the time of the events, or after) is much lower than the incidence of violence by people without mental illnesses. Even if you focus on those few specific diagnoses where there is an increase in violence by people with those diagnoses, controlling for social and other factors causes that correlation to almost vanish (certainly into the noise of such studies). It’s all linked above in #174, you can start there.
Your association of “violence” with “mental disturbance” is COUNTERFACTUAL. It is not supported by the data. Whether or not this incidence was in part due to this man’s mental health (which as I have said, you know too little about to speculate).
I’ve also mentioned the harm this counterfactual belief of yours entails. Wait a minute….counterfactual belief….one that causes demonstrable harm and results in bodies…THAT’S A HARMFUL DELUSION!!! LOCK HIM UP!!! LOCK HIM UP!!!!
Here’s some links on the effects of stigma for you. An eclectic little mix (paywalled mostly, but probably possible to find for free). If that’s not fun enough for you, read the Thornicroft book I linked in #174.
Perfectly “sane”, perfectly “normal” people kill all the time. One angry lashing out. One punch in self defence. One moment of inattention or negligence. One person pushed too far by a bully. One solider in a combat zone… the list is endless. None of them require “insanity”. This guy, from all we know of him, has been wound up. He’s been raised with the belief he is owed. He wanted what’s coming to him. He’s been bullied. He’s been told that he should play certain games to get what he wants and those games haven’t worked for him. He’s been reinforced in his bitterness. No “madness” is needed to make someone in that place kill.
7)
Oh well done! Classic victim blaming and even more bullshit. You’re a right fucking star aren’t you?
I am not denying he might be mentally ill. He might be. I won’t even deny that if he has a specific mental illness diagnosis (like clinically significant, pathological alcohol abuse) then he’s even more likely to have been violent because of that. That simply isn’t the point. Read my #174 again, if you ever read it, this time for comprehension.
What I am saying is that none of us have sufficient information to make any reasonable claim about his mental health. Making such claims in overtly (or even subtly) stigmatising language actually has measurable, real world consequences for people with mental health issues. Focussing on speculation about his mental health detracts from the very stark misogynist motivations for his murder.
Unless you can demonstrate his mental health has a causative effect on his actions, and let me be extremely fucking blunt, you can’t, then why speculate about it in a demonstrably damaging way?
Louis
Oops links put me in moderation, unless I’m in PZ’s bad books.
Ha!
Louis
@ rpjohnston, #295:
I don’t feel that I owe anoyone anything else. I do this because I choose too. Because the universe is vast and cold and dark, and has a nasty habit of crushing anything anyone cares about, and this is my little way of rebelling against it.
Working my way down the thread…
anteprepro @ 248
Are you a man?
I’m not sure if your answer to this question makes much difference.
I’m asking it because I have always been suspicious of this “man’s sexual NEEDS” narrative
but
because I am a woman, felt that I was not in much of a position to assess the question.
Still, I have always wondered about it.
More specifically, I have wondered to what extent any sexual NEEDS were due to hormones/anatomy/biology or to issues of power, control, status, self-esteem and the belief in a right to women’s bodies. Or, to what degree these different factors play a part. As well as the part played by factors I’m unaware of.
And that’s why I asked if you are a man. Because I feel (rightly? wrongly?) that men are in a better position to address the question of men’s sexual NEEDS than women are. And, I’d like to believe what you have to say about this.
But then, man or woman or queer, who is to speak, in general, about the sexual needs of people other than themselves? And yet, people have the damnedest time figuring out what in their own feelings and motivations is generated by physiology and what by culture. And, that dichotomy physiology/culture is insufficient anyway.
What I’m trying to say is I don’t know what weight to attribute to different sorts of arguments from different quarters. Deciding who can legitimately speak about men’s sexual needs is just one aspect of finding some sort of method to arrive at something that might resemble a truth about such matters.
My temporary solution is to believe that my own feelings and needs and observations are representative of something or other. On this basis, I go about trying on arguments for size. I go through a lot of thought experiments. Like, I imagine my self as I am today posting a video on YouTube like What’s-His-Name did, in which I declare that I have a black BMW and $300 Armani sunglasses, therefore hot blond 20-somethings should be interested in fucking me. I run this video through my mind and discover that I feel it is even more ludicrous for a woman my age to do that than it is for a 22-year old rather handsome man to do it. I note the dissymmetry, I question myself about the biases and assumptions involved in my own reactions.
Or, I just start with myself, assuming I’m representative of something. I’m a 57-year old woman who is rather nice looking for her age (if you overlook the visible handicap). I have not had sex for 7 or 8 years. I once had a very active and fulfilling sex life. In fact, I thought it was the best thing in life, that, and poetry by a Mark Strand for instance, or hearing leaves rustle in the wind as I did on my walk yesterday, basically I thought that sex was every bit as important as the feeling of being alive itself. So, why am I not all pushed out of shape because I’m not having sex? I ask myself, is it because you don’t believe you have some right to it? So, I imagine believing I have a right to sex and attempt to feel wronged by it. O.k., now, feeling this way, how is my behavior going to change? I imagine myself approaching people I find attractive, approaching them in some way or form, even subtly, with the intent of having sex with them. My immediate reaction to imagining that is deep shame. Why? Then I examine all the possible reasons for this shame. The reasons are many and a lot of them have to do with how women are supposed to behave.
Through this kind of examination, I have pretty much come to the conclusion of what you, Anteprepro, say above. And yet, I have this conclusion filed away in my mind with all sorts of “doubt” or “to be revised” or “to be verified” tags attached to it. A working hypothesis, let’s say.
In any case, I address this question to Anteprepro and all the other people reading here, am I right to want to attribute more weight to what men might have to say about men’s sexual needs (or NEEDS or “needs” or whatever) than to what people who are not men might have to say about it?
Jacob Schmidt at 323 had an excellent response to this. I’d really like to see what you have in response to him.
In addition: I DID provide my definition of “human need” in the original post you’re responding to. If you had replied in kind then we might be having an interesting conversation right now. I said, “It’s a thing that humans will die if they go for a shortish time without.” Yes, under that definition, having a permanently twisted leg from an poorly healed broken bone won’t kill you immediately isn’t going to kill you within a year or so, so it is, under the definition of “need” I offered, a human need. So what? I more or less agree, but would categorize access to health care as a human right, which is a more expansive category than human needs. You haven’t offered a competing definition to explain why we SHOULD regard sex as a human need. I’m still not convinced that access to sex and intimacy should be seen as either a human need or a human right, mostly because, as Jacob notes, it violates nobody’s bodily autonomy to guarantee the entire population has access to food and health care; not so with sex. Also, in the absence of the same services that guarantee access to health care, having a bum leg does have the potential to kill you, via eventual starvation if you can’t find employment in a cynically capitalist economy. So.
I guess you don’t really want to engage with all of that, though, neuroguy. You seem to be just lashing out, bringing unrelated personal grievances about the things women do into the conversation now.
Sorry about the editing error in that. One of these phrases
was meant to be deleted.
Geez, I did that twice. Time to get some coffee.
A misogynist fan of the manosphere goes on a murder spree, targeting mostly women and what am I completely unsurprised to see?
“What about teh menz???!?!?!!”
Will no one think of them and their needs?
Violent, bigoted dudes are just misunderstood and they neeeeeed stuff, y’all! Let’s not talk about how much it sucks that the manosphere actively promotes male entitlement and violence toward women. Let’s talk about being nicer to guys with sad boners.
*spit*
You know what they need? They need to stop murdering, abusing, raping and openly encouraging other men to do the same. That’s all the manosphere is. It’s where men go to find excuses for rape, harassment, abuse and murder. It exists to create group polarization among people who hate women. It exists to tell angry men that their failures aren’t their fault, but the fault of evil feminists.
…and people don’t understand that it does not require a mental illness for an already catered to man to become so entitled that he’s enraged enough to murder over not getting enough of his desires handed to him.
How could it be more obvious?
He murdered innocent people and we have assholes right here and all over the internet using this tragedy to talk about how we need to be more considerate of men, give them more, cater to their wants (which are magically “needs”, because dudes can die of minor inconveniences like not being as popular as they’d like, doncha know?) more.
A world of “NOPE”.
I’d also like to thank Louis, CripDyke and others who would not give ablism a pass.
@328
chimera (previously Bicarbonate)
Well…that sounds intuitively correct.
I suspect there is variation of sexual needs from person to person. Asexuals prove that, and beyond them lies a spectrum. A distinction between desire and need could be discussed, and between what a person thinks they desire and what they may desire after reasoning better. And also the whole “socialized that way” issue.
But I think all of that mess is a bit of a distraction, and whatever anteprepro is satisfied with is not entirely relevant.
Throw out all the social and you will still have biological organisms that desire to have sex with other people. What anteprepro was responding to was someone who was trying to articulate this. Though anteprepro’s response was somewhat appropriate because neuroguy might have been weighing the severity of the lack of sex without separating the cultural from it.
Not getting laid is nothing like having a painful injury to your fucking knee.
I know we aren’t supposed to other, but that shit is about as monstrous as you can get.
So not fucking a guy is just like breaking his knee or leaving him howling in pain without any assistance?
That makes it sound like he murdered out of self defense. After all, women were doing him grievous bodily harm akin to painfully destroying a part of his body that he needs to walk.
Seconding giliell: FUUUUUUCK you.
Where I come at that “Sexual needs” thing is from my experience with lack of friendship, and there were some times where I viewed this as persecutory or something. But I soon figured out that no matter how vital it is to human well being to have friendship and to be cared about, no individual person owes it to you, and no group does either.
*well, perhaps we all owe some kind of general “caring about” to fellow humans, in a moral sense, but that’s not what I meant. I meant the personal friendship way.
I hate stigmatization of the mental1y ill as much as anyone, AND facile moralizing when someone mentally ill has done something awful.
But mental illness isn’t automatically a moral get-out-of-jail free card. If this guy had any freedom to choose, because he chose hatred of women, unentitled entitlement, and then mass murder, we’re not stigmatizing the mentally ill by abhorring his choices. There’s no way to be certain, but his self-justifying videos suggest he wasn’t simply psychotic, but had some notion of the enormity of what he proposed to do.
I do pity him because of his obvious isolation, because I know that people do need human contact of some kind–but in the absence of a finding that he could not have done otherwise than he did, any pity for him has to be qualified. His victims are certainly more to be pitied.
Don’t worry, gang – this spree in no way reflects badly on the PUA crowd at all. You see, it turns out that he was doomed to fail due to being a ‘beta’ with, among other failings, a ‘gay midface’.
Chimera and Sally on the term “needs”
Thanks for those thoughtful posts. In general it seems to me that back in the 70’s the terms changed, what formerly would have been referred to as wants became needs. as in ‘I want to have friends’ became ‘I have a need for affiliation. My guess is that our old nemeses the marketers were a part of this translation; much easier to sell you something if you need it rather than just want it.
The motivation for men to call sex a need rather than a desire seems pretty transparent but it may also be that women find it easier to accommodate men’s desire if it is elevated to a need rather than merely a desire.
Whilst I’m on a roll…
Neuroguy, way back at #266,
How did I know that if I spooled out enough rope this would happen?
Ahhhh yes, women as willy warmers. A resource to be accessed for men who have this need. Just like food and healthcare. Gee, I wonder could there be a subtle difference here somewhere?
First things first: I am totally happy to acknowledge that sexual urges are good, normal, natural and should be permitted their fullest expression with capable, enthusiastically consenting adults who have unambiguously communicated their consent. Go to it my fellow humans! Hump away. I’ll even go further and say that we should combat social prejudices that obstruct this. I am painfully sex positive in that regard. So yes to more and better sex ed, yes to more widely available training in social skills. So please, no “Y U HATE MEN AND SEX, OPPRESSOR!” straw.
I work in the pharma industry. I make drugs. I’ve even been lucky enough to work on two that went to market. I’ve made drugs people use. I am happy for anyone who needs to to use those drugs. Go to it with my blessing. Even, and I want to make this clear, homoeopaths. I don’t like homoeopaths. But if they need the medicines I’ve helped to make, I am not going to deny them nor argue for such a denial. Even if those homoeopaths use the NHS, which is in a tiny part funded by my taxes, to get those drugs.
What I am not happy to do is encourage large, homosexual homoeopaths to fuck me in the arse. This is because I have yet to meet the large, homosexual homoeopath who I would consent to his fucking me in the arse. Who knows, maybe one day.
“BUT!” I hear you cry, “I wasn’t advocating non-consensual arse fucking by large homoeopaths!”, and indeed you weren’t. However, my arse isn’t just mine. It’s ME. It’s part of my anatomy, not my labour which I can withdraw if I feel like, it’s one of the many things that form the individual that is me. My labour to provide drugs for people’s healthcare is something I can withdraw. I can not do it. I cannot, without harming myself permanently, not have an arse.
The people who work to provide food and healthcare can, in principle, withdraw their labour. So can prostitutes. What is more difficult for prostitutes to do is separate their bodies, their selves, from their work. Of course other workers get sore backs/injuries.etc etc etc, as do prostitutes. The care here is over intimate use of another’s body. Healthcare and food are not like sex work in anything like the degree of access to a person’s body.
My views on sex work are….complicated. I see a lot of very rigorous, very feminist arguments over these issues. The simplest thing for me to say is that I default to this: whatever provides the safest working environment for sex workers of all kinds in all situations, I will support. I am on the side of the sex worker, end of story. I will listen to what they tell me. Either way, I digress…
Nobody “deserves” food or healthcare, they are not a matter of worth. Food, shelter, healthcare etc are basic human needs for survival of individual humans. They are the simplest expression of the responsibilities of a civilised state. Sex is not of a kind with these things. Access to the social phenomena that permit sex between consenting adults is. So yes, I agree that societies need to be ordered in such a way that consenting adults are free to meet, engage in sex and do so without penalty (and there is a LONG way to go here). I do NOT agree, however, that a civilised society has a duty to provide sex for citizens in the manner that it has a duty to provide for shelter, food healthcare etc. Providing access to suitable social situations/conditions is not the same as providing sex.
Think of it like this: Access to education is another fundamental right. Passing the exams for you isn’t. You and I agree that the social conditions around sex need massive improvement, and that very much includes the shaming and derogation of people not having sex but who want to being actively combated. It does not extend to anything like providing you with sex.
Louis
Unclefrogy, #293,
I’m going to take this piece by piece:
1)
Bolding mine.
Whether or not it is true that I have personally experienced prejudice on the basis of mental health issues or not it’s irrelevant to my arguments. Whether or not I have seen the effects of mental health stigma on others this is a classic ad hominem logical fallacy. The truth of the arguments doesn’t rest on any aspect of me or my experience.
As for your use of “extreme reaction:. Yes, those uppity n**gers are so terribly upset about their civil rights….oh sorry that’s far too offensive and discriminatory…I meant yes, those uppity wh*res and c*nts are so terribly upset about their equal rights…oh sorry, offensive and discriminatory again…of course what I meant was that yes, those uppity f**gots, d*kes and tr**nies are so terribly upset about their equal rights…
…I apologise my tone wasn’t suitably pleasant enough for you.
Do me a favour, could you please go up to your nearest black friend and tell him or her than the only reason they don’t like the word “n**ger”, and how racist white people use it, is because they’re black, and therefore insufficiently reasonable to deal with it. Please report back to me with the results.
2)
Not reasonable = “mad”. Good to know. No, no one is claiming he was acting (to use your ever shifting weasel word) reasonably. That doesn’t make him mad. It doesn’t mean he has a mental illness. It doesn’t mean he is “severely mentally deranged”. This is classic othering. It’s a blatant attempt to make him something “not like me”.
Whether or not he is mentally ill, whether or not that had an influence on his actions, you simply don’t have the qualifications, experience or position to comment meaningfully (see the large, self-blockquoting section of my #174, for why). Your comments also do more harm than good. You are not “innocently just saying”, you are playing into an already fraught area of social disadvantage and furthering the problem. Please stop.
Why is it that generally, although it is stopping here, the use of the word “prick” is less problematic than the use of the word “c*nt” as an insult? It’s because the latter is inseparable from a huge cultural misogyny. A profoundly well demonstrated network of individual disadvantages, ideas, hierarchies etc that systematically devalue and disadvantage women. This is not news, it’s not rocket science, for the average familiar Pharyngulean (like yourself) it’s the basics. 101 level. The weight of social context around the two words is not equal.
The same applies to how we discuss mental illness/health and especially as it relates to difference and violence.
Again, if you can, access the very few papers I linked in #174. They explain the consequences of your bigotry (and it is bigotry). They explain it in stark terms of how many bodies it produces. The Thornicroft book, by the way, is superb. I recommend it to everyone.
3)
Are Christians “reasonable”? Are they “delusional” to the point of “insanity” (a claim relevant to your comment, the next part I will quote)? Muslims? Jews? Jains? Sikhs? Hindus? Republicans?
The answers for the vast majority of these people is “yes they are reasonable” and “no they are not delusional to the point of insanity”. By definition following the whims, mores, social attitudes and religions of your environment is not “delusional to the point of insanity” regardless of how true, real, accurate or reasoned those whims, mores, social attitudes and religions might be. Make your mind up, either every person on the planet including you is so delusional in some manner as to be insane, and this discussion of this individual’s sanity in the manner you are doing it is as meaningless as discussing his hair colour, or you’re doing immense violence to the words “reasonable” “delusional” and “sane” that they themselves are rendered meaningless.
No one is claiming his acts are reasonable (Straw man. Another fallacy! You like those don’t you?). What I am saying is that HIS STATED MOTIVES are clear, his track record with misogynist
Being “reasonable” and being “insane” are not overlapping in the manner you are alluding to. You are simply perpetuating “bad”=”mad” and “different”=”mad”. Both of which are bullshit. See #174 and references therein for starters.
Again, where is the claim that this person acted REASONABLY? I’ll save you sometime: NOWHERE.
The opposite of “reasonable” is not “insane”.
4)
Define “delusion” for me. No, don’t go to the dictionary, YOU do it. Christians live in a “delusional” state. Their beliefs are demonstrably false. Demonstrably “delusions”. Some of them go to church every week. They must be insane. Remember: YOU BROUGHT SANITY INTO THIS. Or is it a bit more complicated than that?
Again, this weasel worded bullshit is just so you can maintain your bigotry. It does such violence to these terms, “delusion”, “insane” etc, that they are rendered meaningless. What makes you so sure you’re free from delusions my oh so reasonable Straw-Vulcan friend? Everything you think is 100% fact based, entirely based on evidence, reasoned perfectly? I doubt it. Maybe there’s even a few deluuuuusions in there….GASP! OH NOES! You may have even acted on imperfectly accurate or reasoned beliefs….ZOMG….YOU’RE INSANE! ARGHH!
Gosh I wonder if psychologists and psychiatrists and all the relevant experts in the various fields of study relevant to this have ever given this any thought? I wonder if there’s some way to search the internet and find out? Hmmmm. Nah. Can’t be.
If you’re trying to claim this person was PATHOLOGICALLY deluded, then you have to demonstrate that. Res by no means loquiturs ipsa in these cases. (and yes I know what violence I did the Latin there. It am an joke. Deal with it)
Again, I refer you back to my #174, to your own stark ignorance. You are not a psychologist or psychiatrist AFAIK, your experiences (if you have them) permit you to talk about your experiences in a valid manner, you’re not this person’s therapist/primary mental health physician. YOU DON’T FUCKING KNOW. Your speculation is ignorant, uninformed and borrow heavily form that redolent mixture of cultural ideas that are deeply damaging to people with mental illnesses. It’s not innocent speculation, it’s ignorant, likely untrue, and harmful. Yes that goes for PZ, yes that goes for the media, yes, that goes for everyone. Grow up and cope with the fact that your ignorance on this subject is not a licence for you to pontificate.
5)
Fuck me! A nugget of gold! Education IS a good thing, we SHOULD teach socialisation and various social skills as far as they can be taught. Ask the politicians why they don’t value it.
6)
Why does he have to be “mentally disturbed”? Why not “angry”? “Bitter”? “Emotionally disturbed”? Or one of a billion other things.
To reiterate: In the UK alone 2 women a week are killed by their “loved ones”. Because of domestic violence. The incidence of violence BY people with mental illnesses (diagnosed before, at the time of the events, or after) is much lower than the incidence of violence by people without mental illnesses. Even if you focus on those few specific diagnoses where there is an increase in violence by people with those diagnoses, controlling for social and other factors causes that correlation to almost vanish (certainly into the noise of such studies). It’s all linked above in #174, you can start there.
Your association of “violence” with “mental disturbance” is COUNTERFACTUAL. It is not supported by the data. Whether or not this incidence was in part due to this man’s mental health (which as I have said, you know too little about to speculate).
I’ve also mentioned the harm this counterfactual belief of yours entails. Wait a minute….counterfactual belief….one that causes demonstrable harm and results in bodies…THAT’S A HARMFUL DELUSION!!! LOCK HIM UP!!! LOCK HIM UP!!!!
LINKS SNIPPED!
Truncated links paragraph: Here’s some links on …
Perfectly “sane”, perfectly “normal” people kill all the time. One angry lashing out. One punch in self defence. One moment of inattention or negligence. One person pushed too far by a bully. One solider in a combat zone… the list is endless. None of them require “insanity”. This guy, from all we know of him, has been wound up. He’s been raised with the belief he is owed. He wanted what’s coming to him. He’s been bullied. He’s been told that he should play certain games to get what he wants and those games haven’t worked for him. He’s been reinforced in his bitterness. No “madness” is needed to make someone in that place kill.
7)
Oh well done! Classic victim blaming and even more bullshit. You’re a right fucking star aren’t you?
I am not denying he might be mentally ill. He might be. I won’t even deny that if he has a specific mental illness diagnosis (like clinically significant, pathological alcohol abuse) then he’s even more likely to have been violent because of that. That simply isn’t the point. Read my #174 again, if you ever read it, this time for comprehension.
What I am saying is that none of us have sufficient information to make any reasonable claim about his mental health. Making such claims in overtly (or even subtly) stigmatising language actually has measurable, real world consequences for people with mental health issues. Focussing on speculation about his mental health detracts from the very stark misogynist motivations for his murder.
Unless you can demonstrate his mental health has a causative effect on his actions, and let me be extremely fucking blunt, you can’t, then why speculate about it in a demonstrably damaging way?
Louis
*gives louis all the cookies and sex he needs to not be a mass murderer*
REMAINDER OF LINKS FROM TRUNCATED LINK PARAGRAPH
…the effects of stigma for you. An eclectic little mix (paywalled mostly, but probably possible to find for free). If that’s not fun enough for you, read the Thornicroft book I linked in #174.
Whole paragraph reads: “Here’s some links on the effects of stigma for you. An eclectic little mix (paywalled mostly, but probably possible to find for free). If that’s not fun enough for you, read the Thornicroft book I linked in #174.”
First 8 words are individual links.
Sorry for double post, but I hadn’t saved the comment and was worried about losing it from my Lazarus add on.
Louis
Tashliciously Shriked,
Luckily, I need precisely no cookies or sex to not be a mass murderer.
I am assuming this is very lucky for you, by the way. Dear FSM, sex and cookies with ME? The crumbs would get everywhere! The very idea! Horrendous…etc
Louis
sweet, more for me :D
@320:
Thank you for presuming to dictate what we should or shouldn’t talk about. Not really though. If you don’t like it, you can fuck right off.
Ahoy, captain obvious. Let me tell you something: I’m also not a job dispenser. Or a food dispenser. Or a healthcare dispenser. That doesn’t mean that lack of jobs, or food, or healthcare for some aren’t serious societal problems. Or that the lack of pussy and friendship for others also aren’t serious societal problems.
And this has NOTHING whatsoever to do with the way society is set up? Try this one on for size: The reality is that people are all having a hard time finding jobs and good healthcare. Because life is complicated; it’s not really anyone’s fault. So if you don’t have a good job with good health insurance, suck it up and stop whining. That’s what libertarians would say, ignoring the problems with the way society is set up which cause other problems down the line.
And I’ll type this for you alone again: yes they are. Because they’re human with human needs. Your vacuous, though predictable, reply will be “But that means I’m a mere sex object and pussy dispenser!!!” No, blockhead, any more than progressive economic and labor policies means that businesses are just “job dispensers”. Can you understand the difference between a general right to sex and relationships vs. a right to sex and a relationship with you specifically, if you can understand the difference between a general right to jobs and health care vs. a demand that any specific business hire you or any specific person pay your hospital bills.
@323:
You’re world class dense. Congratulations. You’re just as glib in your argument as libertarians. When we say that people have a right to food and health care, that doesn’t mean that people have the right to rob grocery stores and force a doctor of their choice to treat them at gunpoint, with the supplies obtained from raiding pharmacies and medical supply stores. When we say people have a right to decent employment, that doesn’t mean people have the right to force employers to hire them at gunpoint. So therefore, according to libertarians, there is no real right to food and health care and jobs at all, because to demand it would infringe on individual rights, with the government being the one “robbing” everyone at gunpoint. According to you, there is no real right to sex and intimacy, because to demand it would infringe on individual rights, with the government forcing it at gunpoint.
In the real world, unlike the make-believe one inhabited by libertarians and you, a balance is struck between individual and societal (programmatic) rights; without it, society falls into chaos. So, society doesn’t demand an employer hire any specific individual, but it does (or least it should, Republican rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding) demand that everyone chip in for public education so that individuals can learn what they need in order to be productive employees. Society doesn’t demand charity from any specific grocery store at gunpoint, but it does demand that everyone chip in so that the less well off can buy their own food at the store of their choice. So, society doesn’t demand sex and intimacy from any specific individual, but it should demand that everyone chip in so that those without can learn coping, social, and attraction skills.
In reality it’s not as simple as that, if they are poor and without health insurance. But yes, if you actually read upthread, this is exactly what I want to have available.
I made the argument in question. You’re the one not addressing it.
Well, for the record, the exact same arguments apply for women. But it shows your lack of empathy that lack of sex and intimacy would be characterized as a “whine”.
I think all of that mess is a bit of a distraction
Me too. The guy had money and could have used that, alone, to get laid if that was what was so important to him. He was good looking. Being a virgin at 22 is maybe not on the norm but there are plenty of 22 year old virgins; I nearly was. It’s as if nobody ever explained to him that relationships are something you have to work for, even if only a little bit. We can’t blame popular culture completely – though pop culture is full of badly-rendered relationships(*) that don’t make sense, it’s just as full of complex relationships that do, and representations of the more elaborate rituals that can go into mating in our society. It’s as if the guy completely missed all of those cues for a long time, then intensely latched on the PUA cues when nothing else was ‘working’ It shows a profoundly off-the-rails set of expectations and, yes, I agree there’s a huge assumption that things should go a certain way and they’re not: therefore anger. Yes, there’s a sense of entitlement there, but the breakage is deeper than that – he was able to generalize from not having any women throw themselves at him throughout his college career to wanting to destroy society. That’s a hell of a leap into extreme wrong. And it takes a huge amount of anger to just start shooting complete strangers on the street.
To me, that’s what’s scary about this guy. As a teen-ager I was awkward and talking to a girl would make my tongue flip backward and block my throat (not really, but you get the idea) and I was instantly a wreck. I cannot imagine a set of circumstances, though, that would have caused me to blame everyone else for what was, clearly (since most of my friends were dating..) my problem, not anyone else’s. It’s as if this guy was incapable of seeing the the common denominator of years of female rejection was him, and probably his behavior – and doubled down and doubled down on the behavior.
(* I just saw one last night. I watched The Wolverine on netflix and found it rather odd that Mariko falls in love with Logan after spending – what – 20 hours with him, being chased by ninjas and watching him kill her weirdly transformed beloved grandfather. Uh. She’s a cardboard cut-out.)
BZZZT
Try again, this time with respect for the bodily autonomy and freedom of association of individuals.
I read Neuroguy, way back at #266, differently.
I think he made a mistake, because in a broader sense the analogy is a failure in that no one “deserves” women, but he didn’t really think of the implication. He was reacting badly to the needs/wants debate, and trying to rail against the contempt the sexless get, and saw the perfect opportunity to equate both of those to libertarianism, which would help convince pharyngula’s godless commies.
That is, the libertarian mindset is that poor people don’t deserve shit, because by being poor they are failures and fuck them. Oh sure they’d like healthcare, but don’t give me any of that freeloading bullshit about healthcare “needs”, they’re still breathing, right? Similarly, we as a society have a tendency to view people, especially men, who aren’t good with the opposite sex as failures and there was a sense in which arguing about needs/wants comes across as uncaring.
So, I can see why it’s got the flak it has, but perhaps Neuroguy’s position is not as bad as the post makes it seem..
#334
I’m not sure how you know that, given it’s up to the individual to say how bad it is. A lot of anguish can be mental, and I think our poor gunman had it every bit as bad as someone with a broken knee.
Neuro’s statement that humans are entitled to sex and relationships is very much at odds with his proposition
which doesn’t get them the sex or relationships or sex they’re entitled to.
Essentially, I’ve gone from hoping he’s expressing himself poorly to hoping he’s expressing himself extremely poorly.
jesus fucking christ
no one is entitled to *anything* from any other person. Ever. You are not entitled to friendship, love, sex, hugs, pats on the head, cookies, social time, or even a friendly “Hello”.
The only, *only* thing that one could say every human being is entitled to is the care and upbringing from their parents. *everything else* is entirely up to the other person. Period. full stop.
@329:
OK, I made a long reply.
Right, well I think most people, myself included, would, in fact, categorize healing a broken knee as a human need, so I wanted to offer you the chance to clarify
The way you’ve defined human needs, yes. However most people, myself included, would define a human need as that which, if not present, causes at least a significant amount of harm, which can include suffering, physical injury/illness, psychological issues, or anything else.
Well here it is above. I don’t think most involuntary celibate people are just fine with it, and sex is not a mere “want” like a Gulfstream or expensive vacation.
All of a sudden everyone goes glibertarian here it seems. It violates nobody’s bodily autonomy to guarantee the entire population has access to services which will help them learn coping, social, and attraction skills. Also, guaranteeing the entire population’s access to food and health care could be done, as I pointed out to Jacob, in a manner which did in fact violate people’s autonomy; for instance, if people were given carte blanche to rob grocery stores.
Getting the knee fixed is a need under my definition of the term.
Well I guess you’re wrong.
Oh please. That’s the old “you’re just a loser who can’t get laid” meme. Which “unrelated personal grievances” did I bring into the conversation? Specifics, please.
If there was a choice between
1) Getting laid with (by?) different attractive women on a regular basis, but absolutely everyone thinking you are a luckless virgin
and
2) Being a luckless virgin but everyone thinking you were getting laid with different attractive women on a regular basis
which one would most PUA’s pick?
I wonder the same thing about wealth.
A quick note in translation of Louis’ fine post.
In the US the word “madness” is used to describe mental illness, but the word “mad” is almost always used to describe anger and some how drops the connotation of illness. Some US posters who aren’t up on vocabulary might find some of the top of your long post a bit confusing, since the shooter in Isla Vista was clearly angry.
@316
—But please reread what I wrote. Nowhere I suggested that it’s your or women’s fault.—
I did read what you wrote. You may not have said it is the fault of women, but you definitely stated it is our responsibility.
Because if one of us had just got down on our knees and sucked his cock, this wouldn’t have happened, right? Except it couldn’t just be any woman. It had to be a pretty sorority blonde, right? So, what, should we designate someone? Or should that just be part of the sorority pledge – ‘we will fall on our backs and spread our legs for the good of women everywhere?’
Jackie the wacky wrote:
Since we can’t do anything about the women who were murdered, since it’s not their fault, that only leaves the menz and their cultural problems.
It would be so easy to just blame this entirely on the manosphere and pretend that I have no stake in what happened. To wash my hands of this and blame it on that vile little group would be freeing. However, I’m increasingly of the opinion that this manosphere is a symptom of the bigger problem of toxic masculinity and misogyny. The toxic masculinity prevents people from getting help they actually need, and the misogyny justifies the atrocities they decide to commit in their minds.
I want fewer men deciding that the MRAs, PUAs, and MGOTWs are appealing rather than trying to fight those who have already committed to being horrible people.
I have not argued that “he just needed to get laid”, and would not ague that. I’d even argue that getting laid probably would’ve only made him nastier. What he actually needed was a group of peers to help him and maybe [figuratively] smack him around a bit when he was acting stupid. Instead, he found the manosphere, which validated his nastiest thoughts, and helped amplify them.
neuroguy wrote:
This person was not poor, and almost certainly had health insurance. In fact, these mass murderer problems tends to be from those within the middle or upper-middle classes. However, even if he was poor, it does not change the likelihood that he would’ve sought help. With the toxic masculinity narratives that all men are exposed to, admitting you need help is emasculating and marks you as weak.
@neuroguy, maybe you shouldn’t use the word “entitlement”. You describe correctly that it can be regarded as a need (I think). But to say that someone is “entitled to sex” kind of means that they should actually be given sex itself, not just help building social skills. It’s better to say that they are entitled to the social skill training and stuff because it is necessary for them to get.
Please let’s all agree on this use of the word, it’s really sad to see a disagreement that actually kind of looks like it’s just semantics from what I understand of your position.
—–How about therapy and therapists that realize this for the problem it is, for starters? Those that can teach social, attraction, and coping skills. Especially those that can teach that whether any woman finds you attractive or not has nothing whatsoever to do with your worth as a person.—-
These already exist.
These guys could easily go seek them out.
But they don’t.
There was this one lady, you might have heard of her. She tried to give a little friendly advice to a guy so that he could improve his ‘game’ and maybe have a better shot next time he tried to pick up on a woman in whom he was interested. So, she said ‘hey, guys, don’t do that’ about a particular behavior that women do tend to find creepy.
Do you, by any chance, recall what the fallout from her attempt was?
And here you are, doing it again. They DESERVE our compassion and support. We should help them. We could completely ignore that they won’t help themselves and that providing them with our compassion and support puts us in very real danger.
They fear women will laugh at them. Those women fear they will be raped and murdered. So try getting just a tiny bit of fucking perspective.
Beh, hit refresh and for some reason the draft of a post I did last night showed back up. I blame you.
@neuroguy in fact I was just thinking about basically all the stuff you said just the other day. I’m in the middle of a job search and I thought of the similarities you mention.
Slight difference though, I do think someone should give me a way to make a living, and that society is fundamentally broken if I’m left without that. But that’s mostly because bodily autonomy divides how the two problems have to be dealt with.
@neuroguy –
You do understand that there is a difference between a company and an individual, right?
Maybe I did express myself poorly (although I don’t think so, I think given the intelligence level here people are deliberately and dishonestly misstating my position) so I’ll try again. Anyway, the dialogue between myself and (most of) the commentators can be summed up thusly:
(You) The problem is misogyny and a feeling of entitlement to women’s bodies.
(Me) Maybe that’s not all there is to it. There is also the issue of being lonely and without sex and sexual relationships.
(You) Awww, poor thing, what about teh menz, just suck it up and deal with it.
(Me) Yeah, just like the proletariat should just suck it up when their needs go unfulfilled.
(You) What, are you telling me sex/relationships are a human right/need? That makes me a “pussy dispenser”, what about respect for bodily autonomy?
(Me) Your arguments are like libertarians. That society should try to make things as accessible for all as possible does not imply an “obligation” on any particular person towards any other one. Society should seek for as much employment as possible; that doesn’t mean I have a right to force someone to hire me at gunpoint or that businesses are “job dispensers”.
(You) Asshole, Bodily Autonomy, You Probably Just Have Issues with Women, etc. etc.
At this point I will continue the conversation with anyone willing to do so in a intellectually honest manner. My posts nowhere said that any particular woman “owed” any particular man sex or a relationship, and to portray them as such is deliberate intellectual dishonesty. To try to use the posts where I said sex/relationships were a human right or need as implying this, when I in fact said just the opposite elsewhere, is quote-mining on par with creationists. What I must conclude is that you don’t really have much sympathy for men who lose out on the sex/relationship department.
@neuroguy, maybe you shouldn’t use the word “entitlement”. You describe correctly that it can be regarded as a need (I think). But to say that someone is “entitled to sex” kind of means that they should actually be given sex itself, not just help building social skills.
Yeah, I think this is the source of some of the disagreement on the latter part of the thread.
I think neuroguy’s use of libertarian talking points (in a negative, but indirect way) may have prompted the believe that he was advocating grossly unsympathetic libertarian attitudes.
I think the use of yachts and broken needs was hyperbolic and kind of crappy given the context.
My understanding is that the Isla Vista shooter did have access to mental healthcare.
The attitude that het men need sex and are denied it has been used to justify much grotesque treatment of women. Anyone who chooses to go there is going to get blowback. And picking the day after, or the day after the day after of the mass shooting to “go there” is unwise and perhaps self-absorbed. (Maybe a little more compassion for people who get shot before an embrace of empathy for the shooter. Try on some “shoes” that aren’t the ones you wear all the time.)
#358
She didn’t care about his game and it wasn’t friendly advice. That’s a at least stretching the truth.
I think they do deserve our compassion. Even this guy, you can tell he had a lot of anguish.
I think if anyone is likely to get through to these men on an individual basis it’s other men, not women, and I don’t encourage anyone to put themselves in danger to provide compassion, but the author of comment 8 for example would not have put herself in any danger if her comment wasn’t exacerbating the problem and causing splash damage, which I think it is.
No, they are not.
All that is “general” is but a collection specifics. So if not “you” specifically, then SOMEONE specific. Who then do you suggest?
It is you who fails to understand the thing that is most important here.
Humans are entitled to bodily autonomy. They are NOT entitled to “sex and relationships”, because if they were then SOMEONE’s bodily autonomy is violated.
Humans are also NOT entitled to a job. They are entitled to freedom of association, and an entitlement to a job means that SOMEONE’s freedom of association is or can be violated.
What humans are entitled to an OPPORTUNITY for sex and relationships, and an OPPORTUNITY for a job with a living wage. Preferably an equal, or at least close to equal opportunity ith other humans.
And in the case of sex and relationships the opportunity is there and always has been.
@ Marc Abian
{raises gnarled paw}
The latter. Social currency trumps everything else.
JemoiJemoi:
The failure mode of clever is asshole. You fail.
There is no point in arguing with neuroguy since he seems utterly incapable of realizing he’s wrong. Just drop the ban hammer on this selfish piece of shit and let’s get on with our lives.
Comfort women. WWII. Asian theatre. Just one example of where that attitude leads to.
Ya, basically the shooter experienced a common real problem…but that’s really not sufficient to make the non-sequitur leap from there to his attitude or actions. The cause of that leap is probably the best place to focus attention on right now.
Shitcan your Vulcan approach to an emotional matter, and except people are going to get emotional. In other words, this isn’t an intellectual matter.
*hmmm, I said “the shooter experienced a common real problem” but I suspect things were less normal for him, in that he was probably the kind of person who actively made things worse for himself. It’s common for there to be lonely people etc. but I really doubt that’s the only reason he was lonely. More likely he was also unpleasant to be around to put it lightly.
Rodgers was a regular on the site PUAhate. I’ve stumbled across that site a few times on my Googling adventures–what a nasty little cesspool of misogyny it is. It seems to be guys that tried the PUA thing and then failed at it. Of course, the reason they failed is because all women everywhere are hypergamist gold-diggers.
There’s an interesting point here, about sex being an important element of many people’s well-being and happiness. Maybe, like food and water and shelter, there ought to be some basic right to it. Maybe there should be some sense of entitlement.
So, guys who think that’s true, let’s imagine some sad gay man comes up to you and says he’s desperately lonely and needs some human affection, and if you don’t give him oral sex right now, he’s not sure what he’ll do, but it will be horrible. Do you feel an obligation to give him what he needs, out of your sensee of common decency and sympathy for the poor fellow?
Or if you’re an exclusively gay man, and likewise a woman demands satisfaction from you. Do you give it up?
I hope you see the problem. It’s easy for a guy to say that women ought to be freer with their sexual favors, but only by ignoring the autonomy of the target of those demands.
I have a couple of suggestions for anyone who thinks women ought to be easier to get.
1. Masturbation. If it’s all about sex, really, jacking off solves all the biological problems. (If you want to argue it’s about intimacy with another human being, I agree, that’s important too — so get in the ‘friendzone’ with women, and have a fleshlight at home.)
2. Legalize and legitimize sex work. Some women will be willing to provide sex in exchange for fair remuneration.
But generically deploring men’s difficulty in getting laid, and the fact that women still have some choice in the matter? Stop that.
@ Marc Abian
Well fuck the adjective then. It was advice. Advice that, if taken, could have done a lot of good. But it didn’t.
Marc Abian:
Yep.
Nerd,
The “Vulcan” vibe is not what I’m getting from Neuroguy. Not unless this specific Vulcan has really failed Kolinahr.
Louis
Incidentally, my #378 is not a criticism. I think the “Vulcan approach” whilst occasionally worthwhile has sever shortcoming in matters social, moral, ethical etc.
Louis
Neuroguy,
(bolding mine)
I’ll take a go but can’t hang around much longer. I’ve got to go vote (European elections, yay!)
To begin with…. “the conversation”. What conversation? I thought this was a conversation about a guy going on a killing spree. If the conversation is about “sympathy for men who lose out on the sex/relationship department”, uh, mmm, I think I did post a question above about whether or not men’s sexual “needs” really exist. But to change this whole thread over to talking about sympathy for men’s needs is going a bit farther. In the context of the killing spree, it’s at very least not in the best of taste. I hope you can see that. Regardless of the legitimacy or not of your topic.
Secondly, I don’t think what you are objecting to in some of the reactions you got is dishonesty or honesty but rather vehemence, dismissal and caustic wit. It doesn’t feel good to be the brunt of that, true. But, … I won’t go into the but.
Let’s take a look at the language you are using instead: “sympathy for men who lose out on the sex/relationship department.” “Lose out” implies that there’s some sort of game going on in which there are winners and losers. You are doing it to yourself, self-inflicting a loser status. The winners and losers are, I guess, men, and what are the women in this scheme of things? Really, what is their role? I think this is more than semantics.
Hi,
I want to thank Louis, CK, CripDyke, Inaji, Pterixx and Carlie, among many others whose thoughtful entries on this long and tragic thread were insightful and constructive.
This was a tragic event, among many others in our society, over many years. Our history is filled with similar events involving hatred for poorly defined groups of people, by race or sexual orientation or politican or national origin, or something even hazier and more poorly defined. Any insight into the processes that lead to this kind of tragic attack is a good thing.
I personally have no ideas of any way to reduce these events quickly. Perhaps dedicated education over decades can help more people to understand how to relate to one another more comfortably? Should Social Science expand into years of training youngsters in how socialization takes place, how to develop friendships, practice sessions in meeting people, learning about each other, social skills of all sorts, etc?
Perhaps some people would be unable to learn social skills no matter what approach was taken in an attempt to help. We all know bright people who have trouble forming friendships and who react in an odd and unpredictable way to statements that seem quite ordinary to the majority of people. I have accidently offended people in the course of working with them, sometimes not even knowing until years later that something happened I couldn’t even perceive.
Email is bad for that, absolutely no non-textual cues to aid in understanding humour or sarcasm for example.
I was quite shy as a youth, and somewhat of an outsider through my teen years. Somehow I learned how to relate with others as a friend, which led to many close relationships over the past 45 or 50 years. I cannot describe how I gradually learned to reach out to people in friendship, but I am grateful to the people who were patient with me as I learned how to socialize with other humans.
I feel bad for everyone involved, the Deputies on duty, the ambulance medical staff, the people attacked and those nearby. But especially the victims, all unsuspecting – just living a day and running into a strange berserker attacking society…
And even the berserk guy, who fell into a pool of crazy without the ability to see what ws happening to him. I’m seeking words to describe how we got to where we were that night, and it’s hard. I can’t bring myself to thinking that those web sites I read about were intended to warp this guy into becoming a killer.
I know almost nothing about Men’s Rights and Pick Up Artists (what a strange way to use the word artist!!) and so won’t address that strangeness.
I have trouble remembering names and associating them with faces, so I can easily forget the names of people who commit memorable crimes. This (to me) seems to help short-circuit their desire for infamy, to be personally forgotten seems to me to be the best outcome for those people. Of course, almost no one can forget the crimes themselves, unfortunately.
Anyway, thanks everyone for your productive and educational thoughts on this event! Please forgive me for any awkwardness in language I may have committed.
JR in WVa
neuroguy
Wow, you crossed the line from “asshole” to “creepy and rapey” at light speed.
So, since it’s fortunately not me who has to put up with somebody I can’t stand and who gets raped, who is the unlucky person who gets forced into a relationship and who gets raped by somebody they can’t stand because of your “right” to those things?
Jobs and healthcare can be provided by institutions and financed via taxes. Interpersonal relationships are provided by people who have a right to be left alone and not to consent to sex. But you’re too much of an entitled idiot to even understand libertarianism.
People are not things.
I laughed. Look how much you veer back when you actually defend your assertion. You go from “right to sex and intimacy” to “chipping in so people can learn social skills.” It’s something I can get behind; it’s a good idea. But it is not a right to sex and intimacy.
With food and health care, socialist governments heavily subsidize those industries, and on top of that give funding to those who still can’t afford it. Note differences. With food and health care, they’re (ideally) made specifically and readily to anyone, regardless of anything. You’re not describing a parallel to that; you’re describing a (somewhat) parallel to funding for education so that people can get qualifications for jobs. You’re describing a program where the put upon and frustrated individual would need to put in effort and change themselves to reap any benefit. Again, a good idea, but not a right to sex and intimacy.
This: “So, society doesn’t demand an employer hire any specific individual, but it does (or least it should, Republican rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding) demand that everyone chip in for public education so that individuals can learn what they need in order to be productive employees.”
… is the best argument you’ve made so far. It requires effort and change to individual in question. That’s better described as “a right to earn capability”; “the right to decent employment” makes the eventual goal more clear, is rather ill fitting besides, but not altogether objectionable… unless one were to use that phrasing to compare that “right” to to one’s right to food and health care to defend the incredibly atrocious assertion that one is owed sex like own is owed food and healthcare.
:sigh:
The argument in question was HappiestSadist’s.
No. You’re post was described as a whine.
There’s lots’ of talking about helping people “get” sex, but I think more important in this case is teaching people how to properly deal with NOT getting sex. Just saying.
brianpansky:
While people tend to put a great weight on sex, the problem, as usual, lies deeper. Until we humans stop applying and adhering to all the labels we rely on, and believing those labels are somehow meaninful, we really aren’t going to get much further.
The fight against ongoing systemic sexism is an uphill one, and it’s not getting better thanks to the MRA/PUA crowd, who want to go backwards in regard to sexism and patriarchal values.
@382
Giliell, professional cynic
At first I thought you misread neauroguy, but you’re right. The way he wrote it says that SOMEONE on earth must give sex to someone who doesn’t have it. As if individuals can say no, but the collective humanity has to cough up SOMEONE to do it…
Hopefully that is one of the things neauroguy admits was badly worded.
I just
what
are… are people actually debating relationships being like health care!?
Marc Abian wrote:
I’ve got to wholeheartedly agree with this. Being able to develop health interpersonal relationships with those you have no expectation of fucking is a prerequisite for virtually any other complex relationship, including sexual relationships.
So how do we decide which individuals get to sacrifice their autonomy to make sure that guys like Rodger get the all-important pootang? Do we set up a lottery, similar to jury duty? Sex-starved folks appeal the government, which then randomly selects citizens to put out?
But unlike food and healthcare — where basic quality food and care is all that we require the government to provide (e.g. groceries vs. restaurant meals) — sex involves personal preferences. If the sex-starved folks don’t like the person selected for sex duty, do they get to demand other options? Do they get to provide a list of “options” (e.g. “Shall your partner be [circle all choices]: blonde, brunette, red-haired.), as if choosing accessories for a vehicle? And if the selected citizen refuses, do they go to jail, similar to how we punish tax evaders?
Just how far do we have to go to appease people who think they’re entitled sex?
The Guardian Link, Jessica Valenti is the journalist.
@385
Inaji
hmmm, which labels? I’m not sure what you mean…
@ brianpansky
Actually… I think a comment, by a certain contributor, at # 375 has covered this in great detail.
Great detail? Not a lot of detail, if that’s what you meant, just clinical detail.
Carbonfox, #389,
Ok you have just inspired this next joke, if it goes wrong, I’m blaming you.
Jury Booty.
That is all.
Louis
@392
Perhaps that was an exhaustive list of correct actions to take. I meant more about the internal thinking. The young need to be taught the logistics of consent and these sorts of things, then they can figure the actions out themselves. :)
Otherwise there is the risk that action advice will be rejected as authoritarian instruction, as if other available actions are ok. I’m pretty sure that is a problem that some parenting methods run into…
Or maybe neuroguy thinks the government should fund “sex insurance” and pay for men to access the services of sex workers. I just really can’t figure out how society could reasonably “provide sex” to anybody.
Bah.
First off, my local radio station is still playing the stigma game. As has been pointed out way too well up-post, a guy with a machete in Rwanda didn’t need to be “mentally ill.” Rodger had enough functioning brain cells to know that what he was doing was wrong, and he was free enough from severe mood swings to be able to plan his acts.
The side conversation on social ostracization is fascinating and needs to happen, but not in this thread. I think on the various intersecting continuum of social awkwardness, sexual longing, masculine competition, and feelings of entitlement, Roger was living in a corner of the Venn diagram that has very little in common with what is (stereotypically dismissed) as the “fat lonely guy.” And the social and psychological forces, the assumptions and the language, that allowed him to rationalize his particular path to violence are another discussion.
In short, arrogance and entitlement was his issue, not Aspergers, and he freely chose (aided by a friendly external narrative) to move towards violence.
People were killed and injured and the culture of violence is not helping and there’s that old sick-making undercurrent of “maybe it was the women’s fault” already sprouting out in the social media landscape. And its a pity this thread didn’t stay focused on those issues. Because the body count is still growing (even if most of the violence is less spectacular and a hell of a lot less reported).
But since the can got opened, a bit of perspective for the loner-blamers. ALL of us have at one point or another been the outsider. Because we didn’t speak the local language, because we were trying to get into a new hobby or new industry, because we were the new friend or spouse brought into a tight group with existing years of shared history.
For some of us, it is like this all the time. Every encounter, every day. At some point most of us manage to take a step back and self-evaluate and realize that the “problem” is us. This is a skill set, just like playing piano, but not only are we down twenty, thirty years of missed practice, we lack hand-eye coordination or any sense of pitch. So we’re never going to be very good at it. Not even with a lot of work.
And most of us find we can accept that. We do the work to at least move around normally in society, and enjoy those friendships we do find, and are basically happy. But the evaluation and perspective is necessary and constant. Because it is so easy to start constructing an other-blaming internal narrative instead.
And that’s the only place in which this might have even a smidgin of insight into the actions of what I prefer to think of as a neurotypical, more or less successfully socialized man who chose to construct a framework of rationalization around himself that led him into the only kind of violence that actually seems to appear on the mainstream news.
J. R. wrote:
Well, don’t think painting artist, or sculpture artist, but rather con artist. Their schick is conning people into having sex with them, so it’s kind of apt.
*eh, but PZ did at least provide some reasoning, a thought experiment, not just a list of correct actions.
@365
—She didn’t care about his game and it wasn’t friendly advice. That’s a at least stretching the truth.—
So I see you never actually watched the video.
Louis, even though I should know better, I’m laughing my ass off. It’s all just too absurd.
toddsweeney wrote:
I disagree. This is one of the only places it can happen, and saying that it should not be done now is like saying that we should not be talking about gun control at a time like this. Saying that it’s not the time for this discussion is a de facto defense of the status quo, and pretty much ensures that nothing will ever be done (the gun peddlers have been very successful with this kind of argument).
@231, WithinThisMind
Thank you. This comment cheered me up after seeing FO’s piece of nitwittery.
Oh, yeah… I totally know I and the rest of the sad lonely guys are playing on the easy setting.
I walk into a room, and it is “Who is that weirdo?!”
If I was a person of color, I’d get “Why is that ___ in here; is he looking to steal something?”
If I was a woman….well, we all know the internal dialog there!
None of that othering is fun, but neither is it all equal. I am rarely offered threat of violence. For a woman, the experience is almost inescapable.
neuroguy:
Sex and intimacy are not things you earn.
Sex and intimacy are not things you earn.
SEX AND INTIMACY ARE NOT THINGS YOU EARN.
People can be conventionally attractive and have social skills and still not get the sex and intimacy they desire. It happens. A huge societal push to teach people how to be “social” and “attractive” is not going to get everybody laid, because it still comes down to the mutual consent of all people involved. If someone cannot say no–if one suggests a world in which sex workers are actually obligated to take every potential client out of some weird sexual communism–then they can’t say yes. That is rape. So long as there is the option to say no–the only option that allows for meaningful consent!–there will be people saying no. And there will be people who get told no forever.
Your viewpoint assumes that people who are not getting sex are actually defective in some way, that there is something about them that could be fixed that would result in sex. That’s not true, because you cannot do anything that is going to guarantee the consent of others. That’s why it’s consent; everybody can always say no.
Here’s a science fiction novel in which exactly that happens, except it’s framed in terms of a military draft rather than jury duty.
Maybe I was also wrong in 361 about only considering unemployment to indicate a broken society. I can’t think of anything incoherent about the idea that a society with involuntarily celibate people is perhaps a slightly broken society. There may be some way to organize society so that everyone who wants sex can find consenting willing people to have as deep of relationships as they desire.
@406 oy, not like that! Probably an interesting read though.
How is “involuntary celibacy” broken?
Exactly. For every “lonely fat guy with poor social skills” you can point at who “can’t get a girlfriend”, I can point at one who can and did, or I can point at a guy who is conventionally attractive and has a good job and can’t find a date either. Should we have more explicit teaching of social skills in society? Of course. But that doesn’t mean people will end up with mates. What we have to change is the whole emphasis on being paired off as being a magical ultimate goal in life, not focusing on how to “get people there”.
Chiming in to add a couple tidbits.
1. Within This Mind’s #359 is pure gold. This thread, given the turns it has taken around “social education”, is absolutely the place for that reminder.
2. From JR at #381:
Oh, my, we’re going to get a lot of confused go oglers* reading this thread. With luck, a few of them might get some education, but if any significant portion of them actually comment we’re going to be overwhelmed with “WTF? Where is the funny?”
3. It seems to be the thread for my favorite social philosophy quotes by devoutly religious authors. In this case, Kahlil Gibran, noted christian poet and author:
Depending on your definition of “everyone” I think nearly everyone in this thread might agree: we each, as humans, innately *deserve* good lives – including sex and relationships with others. By virtue of our being, we each deserve love. We each deserve care.
However, as we grow and interact with others, those others are free to maximize their own experiences of love and care and health and sex and comfort and any number of other things. If my behavior is incompatible with those things for you, you are free to shun me, much less fail to have sex with me. It would be gross entitlement and dehumanization to think anything else. Thus none of us can be said to “deserve” a specific caring action from a specific other.
it’s a complicated point expressed well by Gibran. I think neuroguy that you are paying too much attention to “we each deserve care” and too little attention to the entitlement involved in framing a “right” to such care, which will inevitably have to be provided by individuals in an environment where
1. Sex work carries stigma, not prestige
2. Sex work requiring physical presence with a client/customer/john/etc carries horribly increased risks of violence that are, even scarier, difficult to precisely quantify because of the difficulty in acquiring a demographic baseline of sex workers necessary to generalize results from specific samples.
3. Exchanging sex for money is fucking illegal** in the vast majority of jurisdictions, making it impossible for the people ultimately forced to provide sexual contact to secure payment even when an otherwise valid contract would have been created.
4. Exchanging sex for money is fucking illegal** in the vast majority of jurisdictions, making it impossible for most governments to provide sexual services to residents.
5. This means that in the vast majority of jurisdictions, the natural outcome of a man’s right to sex is the sexual slavery of some number of women.
That’s repugnant.
1. When sex workers, including especially those who have physical contact with clients, are celebrated, even venerated, rather than denigrated;
2. When violence has been divorced from sex and is so unusual as to cause a media firestorm when a teenager 1000km away gets a bruised cheek from a punch
3. When accepting money for sex has the same security of contract as accepting money for groceries
4. When governments provide for a fund that pays workers well for sexual contact with clients, including generous benefits, such that there is no shortage of qualified applicants for the job to replace any who decide that they no longer wish to perform sex work
5. then and only then, in an environment where sexual slavery is an inconceivable result of a right to sexual contact, will I support your “medical services = sexual services, therefore you all are fucked up glibertarians to oppose a right to sexual contact” comparison as a serious argument.
*this was separated into 2 words by spell check, but I kind of like it. “go ogle” must be an inside joke at the search engine company, don’t you think?
**see what I did there?
@408
Tashiliciously Shriked
Well, it would be preferable if no such thing was necessary, and if this could be accomplished without violating other people’s rights either. If there was a win win situation.
If there were some way to organize society (or something) so that everyone who wants sex can find consenting willing people to have as deep of relationships as they desire, then would you agree that a society without it is less preferable?
I’m not saying I know such a thing is possible (I don’t have the data for any society that accomplished such a thing!!!), but it seemed very hasty/incorrect for me to declare that such a thing was not possible…and judgement of societies would follow from the best that could be strived towards.
Well, a start could be that sex ≠ relationship. A lot of people crave intimacy, yet think getting laid will fix that, and give them what they are looking for. Sex, as wonderful as it can be, is not a panacea, and it would be helpful if people understood that sex is not a quick fix to nth amount of problems.
@brian 411
You didn’t answer my question, though.
@413
Tashiliciously Shriked
hmm, I thought I did…
@Inaji 412 good point.
@Crip dyke some pretty good lists there.
This incident is a clusterfuck of misogyny, narcissism, and violence, and the comments have been many and varied, in terms of content and quality. I had a whole post *just about* ready when Crip Dyke @ 410 said about half of what I wanted to say.
While I figure out my next contribution, if I can make one at all, I am quoting below David Atkins, from his post at digbysblog, who makes a point which hasn’t been made enough yet in this. And no, I don’t think it is a derail, as only of the (many) ostensible points of debate in this thread is, “How can we make this not happen again?”
I had asked why people being “unwillingly celibate” means society is broken. You did not answer that even a little.
@416
Well there must be some misunderstanding, because I’m pretty sure I answered exactly that.
Doesn’t it make some sense to label something suboptimal in society to be “broken”, at least to a small degree? Or is the word too strong, and just something like “suboptimal” should be used instead? Maybe you think that aspect currently is optimal? I just don’t know where our disconnect is here…
Yes, it is optimal. Because it shows and proves that people still have agency and power over their *own lives*.
Unwilling celibacy is heads and shoulders and miles better than unwilling coupling. The end.
brianpansky @ 417
I lack a partner who will be satisfied in being emotionally involved with me without ever having the expectation or expressed desire for sex/prolonged physical contact. Is society broken or suboptimal because I can’t find that?
There are lonely people who want to have a meatspace friend who will engage in spirited debates with them about the merits of Power Girl’s boob window costume and lack that friend. Is society broken or suboptimal because they can’t find that?
There are lonely people who wish to have a marriage based on rigid gender roles with one partner in absolute control. Is society broken or suboptimal because they can’t find that?
Does society require absolute and perfect fulfillment for every single person’s every single desire in order to not be broken, or does that only apply to sex?
@418
Tashiliciously Shriked
Yes agreed totally, my hypothetical situation involved neither occurring, so there was no need to compare between them because both problems were gone.
And I only brought it up because I made a grand absolute statement that seemed wrong when I looked back at it, I definitely didn’t bring this up thinking it was highly important to the conversation. I actually considered letting my error slide, or correcting it in thunderdome…but I went ahead and recanted it here…
@419
The Mellow Monkey
Well ya that seems just as suboptimal as what I already mentioned.
Sure! :)
Hmmm, if such a thing were possible in some morally ok way…absolute control? Rigid Gender roles? oy…uh, this dives into unknown territory for me and someone would have to talk about BDSM and those 24/7 BDSM relationships…I mean I’m pretty sure that 24/7 consent is not possible…
Well if they can be fulfilled without, like, being immoral or something. Remember, I tried to posit a hypothetical society where desires are fulfilled in entirely consensual ways.
“Severely mentally I’ll.” He clearly was. You don’t need a diagnosis to be mentally ill. Also no need to quibble over mentally, psychologically,emotionally. Take for example the shooters words “It’s not fair. 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.
It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentlemen.
I will punish all of you for it. (laughs)”
This shows clearly disordered thinking- if you are not attracted to me you deserve to be punished- and the rage shows disordered emotional response, as of course does the shooting. Not to mention the statement “I’m the perfect guy.” Any psychologist, which I am, could see that this guy is psychologically disturbed, severely, you are right PZ, simply by his video. Need more to come up with a diagnosis but a pretty good understanding of him can be gotten from these few words. If I had the guy in my office talking like this I would be very alarmed. And in no doubt that he was ” severely mentally I’ll”.
@420
You *still* have no explained how some people not being able to find a partner means society is broken. I explained my position, but yours remains “wouldn’t it be so nice if we didn’t have forced partnerships OR single people?!”
carlie wrote:
That would probably help somewhat, but I still see a strong undercurrent of resentment towards everyone else around him who appeared to be enjoying life. He’s not the first person to go on a murderous rampage being angry at all the people who appeared to be enjoying life (I can help but remember the Columbine shooting here). Sex may be part of the problem this young man experienced, but I don’t believe it was even close to the most important problem he faced.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden wrote:
That’s a great quote, and I mostly just replied so I could have it appear again in the thread. No particular person owes any other particular individual anything, but everyone owes a debt of responsibility to everyone (including those who came before, and those who will come after) for everything.
It’s a pity more Christians don’t quote this guy.
brianpansky @ 420
Tashiliciously Shriked @ 422
Yeah, I’m with Tashiliciously here. I’m not seeing any actual argument about why this means society is broken. Why do our sexual or companionship whims need to be fulfilled in order for society to be good? Why do other people have to fulfill our social needs for society to be “optimal”? Do you believe that if anyone, anywhere, has an ever so small sad, society is suboptimal? Do you believe society must keep everyone in a state of perpetual bliss?
If people can’t say no, they can’t say yes. Unfulfillment is part of consent culture. Yes, people being friendly to one another and offering what social contact they want to offer is grand, but that some people are going to go without perfect fulfillment isn’t a bug to be hammered out. That’s just the natural consequence of respecting consent.
Correction “severely mentally disturbed ” Same thing. Also I imply no relationship between mental illness and violence generally ,though they’re. Clearly related in this case.
seeker #421
I expect Rodger got ‘help’ from ‘psychologists’ just like you.
seeker
you are two strikes out of three. Make your third a good one
Tashiliciously Shriked wrote:
Impressive self-discipline. I already want to rip those posts apart, but I’ll be good and wait for the third post, too.
Seeker: How do you consider that rant disordered? It seems that given a particular set of (particularly nasty) postulates, he’s actually being logical. I don’t like what he did, or what he said, but that doesn’t mean I think he’s “cray-cray”.
On the “food and health” vs. “sex and intimacy” rights:
Feeling less entitled to food won’t feed me.
Feeling less entitled to health care won’t help my broken knee.
Hell, I even conceded that this analogy was somewhat appropriate, but feeling less entitled to an education or a job won’t get me an education or a job.
Feeling less entitled to sex and intimacy may very well help feeling put upon and frustrated due to lack of sex and intimacy.
I don’t think this is a fair criticism. brianpansky posited a hypothetical scenario in which consent was always respected, and where finding intimate fulfilment via a consenting partner is easy.
Also, brianpansky described that hypothetical as “optimal,” not a “must.”
Oh, feel free to tear them appart if you wish. I’m leaving hir the third post until I just blanket mock.
To answer Seeker we just need to re-post Louis’s contributions that they apparently didn’t read. Maybe Seeker is trolling.
IF it was possible (without any nasty side-effects) to arrange society in such a fashion that everyone was happy all the time, then surely a society that wasn’t arranged like that (i.e. one wherein people were not as happy, without achieving any other benefits in return) would be suboptimal.
Seriously, if something isn’t as good as it could be, it’s suboptimal. That shouldn’t be a controversial point.
But that doesn’t mean that any particular instance of unfulfillment is inevitable or can’t be remedied without violating consent.
What brianpansky is talking about is to accurately pair people with other people who will consent. Something like a dating website. You’re not forcing people to do what you want, you’re finding the people who already want to do what you want.
It’s certainly legitimate to question how far such a system could realistically work (e.g. if you’ve got an unrequited crush on a specific person, you’re shit out of luck) and it may be somewhat of a detour from the central subject of the thread (would such a system really have prevented this guy becoming violent?), but I don’t see anything inherently objectionable in the idea itself, nor in the suggestion that it might just be possible to manage it better than we are doing right now.
Misogyny without loneliness or celibacy is extensively documented to result in violence against women. Loneliness and involuntary celibacy without misogyny is not. Focusing on the loneliness and involuntary celibacy is at best a red herring and at worst deliberate dishonesty.
Agreed on both points. So I’ve put my attempt to articulate myself over in Thunderdome.
LykeX @ 432
And if a world where no one would ever suffer death were possible, then any society with mortality would be suboptimal. Yes, it’d be lovely if we all lived in secular heaven.
Those of us who live in the real world are trying to discuss the real world, one where misogynistic entitlement and toxic masculinity and rape culture are all real, terrible things. So perhaps it’s not controversial to intellectually masturbate about “everybody gets cuddles!” utopia, but it’s hard not to see it being just another sort of entitlement when it pops up in this thread of all places.
And as long as we’re playing in hypothetical everyone-gets-a-happy-willing-socially-acceptable-partner land, let’s also pretend pregnancy incubators and medical teleportation exist, racism’s just a historical curiosity, and all handguns come with infallible justice-detectors such that when an entitled hater pulls a trigger, the shooter’s mind gets ported harmlessly into a Matrix-level revenge fantasy while the real-life targets get to go on being alive.
Remember, an awful lot of people out there like their partners nonconsenting. They prefer being predators. No way exists to give them what they want without sacrificing another unwilling person.
Azkyroth @ 433
Well said.
You people obviously understand nothing about psychopathology and I certainly don’t have the time or interest to educate you. If you don’t see what is disordered with “I’m the perfect guy” or that the girls should be killed because they have rejected him then there is no hope for your understanding. I am not trolling. Simply saying it as I see it. Good thing you people are restricted to blogs where you can say any nonsense you want. By restricted I mean no peer reviewed pub or magazine or newspaper would publish your opinions on this. Sorry to be so insulting but it’s hard to resist sinking to your level.
I would certainly not drink at a pub that did not have good reviews from the peers.
Mr seeker: you obviously know nothing about psychopathology, or you’d see what’s disordered about talking to invisible men in the sky or voting Republican.
I hate to admit this, but I trained in school until I was over 30 to get a job that offered only $40K salary. It makes no economic sense at all. I must have been crazy.
@Seeker,
Proof by direct assertion is the very best kind. You haven’t shown that believing oneself to be perfect and punishing those who you perceive as having harmed you is somehow incompatible, but since you’re a smart psychopathology person, I guess you have to be right.
Nope, we should just take your word as fact for some bullshit reason that you’re unwilling to state.
Oh, well then I guess we should all bow to your massive intellect. Wait… Are you the shrink that went on Fox news and proclaimed he did this because he was gay and also schizophrenic?
Having dysfunctional ideas does not imply dysfunction of the mental circuitry itself, at the level of abstraction we actually talk about “mental” anything at.
Do not conflate idea-pathy (ideopathy? memeopathy?) with psychopathology.
1) I can’t help but suspect that the problem is more that you can’t back up your assertions than a lack of interest in doing so.
2) It may very well fall under “disordered” (though given certain premises, the rant was cogent and coherent), but there’s nothing to indicate that the disorder in question was due to mental illness.
3) I don’t remember who, specifically, but I believe at least one commenter actually is a sociologist. I may be wrong.
4) Because insults are all you have left?
@ seeker
Of course you don’t. And of course your lack of time and inclination has nothing whatsoever to do with you talking out of your ass.
This is one of the most impressively feeble attempts at an insult that I’ve ever seen.
seeker:
The point is that if we automatically state that this man, or that other mass murderer, or the one before, is insane, then we do not have to take a look at what is wrong with US society that makes these things so much more common in the US than in other industrialized nations. Things like the worship of guns as a sign of power rather than as tool that can be useful in very narrow circumstances. Things like rape culture in which, if a woman is raped, unless it was a very specific type of rape, it is her fault. Things like men who think they have a right to sex and if she says no, he can take it anyway. Things like 30,000 or more gun deaths a year and the standard solution is — more guns! US society is sick. This man is a symptom of a sick society. Labeling him insane means that we, as a society, can ignore all the problems with our society because he was just another mentally ill man, it was just another isolated incident, it has nothing to do with our sick society.
I see we have a new professor of psychiatry. A psychic one too. Seems like our new chum knows an awful lot. Impressive diagnostic ability too. I mean one document, little to no history… What’s the diagnosis I wonder?
Louis
Louis
“What’s the diagnosis I wonder?”
of seeker?
Internet Narcissism.
@chigau, #447:
Factitious Disorder.
ba-dum, tish!
You gots to be a serious psych nerd to make that joke. It is a joke, right? It counts as a joke if I’m the only one who laughs?
No?
I’ll show myself out.
CD #448
You made me look. But
I’ll close the door behind us.
The Mellow Monkey:
Agreed, which is why I mentioned as much in my own comment. What I was objecting to was what I perceived to be you responding to something brianpansky didn’t say, which is why I offered a clarification.
Since he has now taken it to Thunderdome, we can leave it there.
I see we have a cupcake by the nym of neuroguy, who said this;
I am always saddened by fools who somehow think that lack of a sex life is a completely reasonable mitigating factor in murder sprees. The only issue involved in being “lonely and without sex and sexual relationships” is that it screams that neuroguy is under the impression that he “needs” sex and that he should not have to accept that nobody owes him sex because proletariat.
Poor baby is obviously being trampled under the hob-nailed stilettos of the evil Marxist feminist brigade, who do nothing but laugh at his entitlement.
Seriously dude, shut up. Lack of sex does not transform people into violent murderers. That you think it does is a sure sign of being an entitled douchebag.
A thought:
Some Men Who Bought Sex and Weren’t Angry Anymore:
Robert Pickton, Gary Ridgeway, Peter Sutcliffe, Robert Hansen, Joel Rifkin…
…OH WAIT!
(Credit to @LoriAdorable)
Louis
hahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahashahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahaha *breath* ahahah- oh shit I’m actually crying.
@451:
Fuck off, you deliberately dishonest asshole.
That you think I think it does is a sure sign of being an ignorant moron. Fuck off.
nice to see you’re only responding to the short posts now, neuro
@Louis,
Good (if depressing and distressing) point.
Yep. Do as many gay men who are lonely go on killing sprees directed at men as straight lonely men go on killing sprees against women? I can think of an awful lot of murders/suicides/attacks that have been reported as men being violent against women specifically because of that feeling of being the unpopular one who can’t get a girlfriend and how dare they ignore him and they will pay, but I can’t think of any instances where I’ve seen the same sort of dynamic surfacing with a gay man who feels that all the other gay guys owe him and the universe is not treating him the way he deserves and therefore he’s going to harm other gay men. It’s not the loneliness and celibacy, it’s the all-pervasive scapegoating of women that tips that blame and revenge at a particular target, and that target is women.
@410:
Thanks for one of the very few sensible and intellectually honest replies.
I would whole-heartedly support all of these things.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. At least it seems to me. How do we argue for points 1, 3, and 4 if not precisely through positing a right to sexual contact?
… really?
There’s a major difference between something being readily available and something being a right. I have a right to vote, to have clean air to breathe, to say whatever I like about politicians without the government punishing me. I do not have a right to an internet connection nor a right to have a Ferrari nor a right to have sex contact, even if I can pay for these things.
@neuroguy 458
I don’t know about giving you any more benefits of the doubt since you just literally outright said (not just strongly implied) that sex workers access to a safe, healthy and productive work environment is less important than your right to have access to their bodies.
do you not understand how unmitigatingly fucked up that is?
@neuroguy:
Perhaps by starting with this:
and arguing along the lines of Godbout’s use of Morgantaler [1988] 1 SCR 30:
At least for points 3 & 4.
I can argue pretty easily against the dehumanization of women who engage in sex – for money or for other reasons – as well. It’s not that hard. I think there’s even been an article or two written in a feminist academic journal that might touch on that.
Maybe.
Somewhere.
@457:
This is true only if misogyny and involuntary celibacy/loneliness are uncorrelated, and there isn’t an interaction causing a greater likelihood of violence against women when both are present. But why is it that all these shooters seem to be both misogynists and also involuntary celibate?
How common is involuntary celibacy among gay men? Just saying…
Well, the women are blamed precisely for the loneliness and celibacy, so yes they’re scapegoated, but it’s not precisely true to say “it’s not the loneliness and celibacy”.
So, here are the options for the involuntary celibate:
1) It’s women’s fault (the PUA/MRA message). They always go for the bad boys instead of the nice guys.
2) It’s his fault (the societal message mostly). If he had more money, were more successful, more courageous, had six-pack abs, etc., etc. ‘Cause no “real man” ever had a problem attracting women. Of course this message also percolates into those with money and success, so they therefore feel entitled because they have done what society says is necessary to “earn” a woman.
3) It’s just bad luck. Which is what most everyone on this thread would like to think, but this becomes less and less and less credible after rejection after rejection after rejection pile up. Lose one blackjack hand? Bad luck. Lose 100 in a row? The deck is stacked.
4) It’s society’s fault (my position). Society, dominated as it is by rich and powerful men, would like to have all the women to themselves. Therefore most men in my view are set up to fail with regard to women.
@461:
Quotation please or STFU.
neuroguy:
Can you explain how an individual can pursue their right to sexual contact/entitlement to sex without violating the bodily autonomy of others?
@neuroguy, 463:
Availability heuristic much?
Stereotyping without data much?
You might not be likely to be the one person who loses 100 hands in a row against an honest house, but with enough people playing enough hands, it’s inevitable that some person will.
Also: how the fuck do you know what we would like to think? Are you reading what others are posting? Most people here are arguing that there **is** a societal problem, there **is** an MRA problem and that, yes, Rodger had some rather unlikeable qualities as an individual. “it’s just bad luck” is something that
a) isn’t possible for us to know
b) isn’t what people here are advocating as the most reasonable hypothesis for the largest contributing cause to his loneliness/relationship difficulties.
And therefore the disagreement: not because we don’t see a social problem. But we don’t see the **same** social problem. You see rich & powerful men owning all the means of reproduction and go for the communist solution: from each according to his harem size, to each a reasonable number of faceable chicks. It’s natural, then, that you would see opponents of your solution as libertarian, empathy-deficient fuckwads.
But we see the problem not as **which men own how many chicks** but as **chick ownership itself**.
The problem isn’t that other men are greedy and have too much. It’s that those who fail are encouraged to covet thy neighbor’s harem the same way you would covet thy neighbor’s Lexus.
@460:
WTF?????? Seriously????? So you really think the government can say, naaah, we don’t really think you should have an internet connection ’cause it’s not a “right”??? You don’t have the right to spend your money on a Ferrari if that’s what you want to do. Seriously?????? I guess my concept of rights is much, much broader than yours.
@461:
You do realize, of course, that to even get started on points 3 and 4, everyone has to agree that sex work should be legal (you can’t enforce a contract for an illegal activity). And you do also realize that the legal justification for abortion is not only that doctors should be able to perform it as a capacity of their employment and way to make a living, but also because women have a right to reproductive freedom. Therefore the legal justification for sex work is not only that people have a right to that kind of employment if they so wish, but also that people have a right to sexual contact.
neuroguy @ 464
This is you wondering how it’s possible to even consider the well-being of sex workers unless you’re willing to concede that people have a right to sexual contact. Have you still not wrapped your brain around the idea that, if you have a right to sexual contact, SOMEONE has to have sexual contact with you?
We already tried living in a society that accepted that men (not women) had a legal right to sexual contact. Fortunately, the last US state that did not criminalize marital rape saw fit to outlaw it in 1993. Rape by a husband of his wife is still not a crime in many countries in the world.
Why do you want to take us backwards?
Most coherent thing you’ve said yet.
Seriously, your goalposts are slipping. “Not a right” is not synonymous with “the government will take action to prevent you from accessing it”.
Dunderheaded fool.
I’m not seeing mentioned, either, that the issue isn’t, strictly, that he can’t “get” sex*.
It’s that he can’t have sex with the particular tiny subset of women that he would accept it ‘from’.
If a woman is older or taller or fatter, or she is not ‘pretty’ or blonde or white enough, or she isn’t cis or doesn’t wear just the right amount of makeup or “give out” (like a vending machine) enough – but not too much – of the right kinds of sex, or does or doesn’t remove her body hair in the right places, or her breasts aren’t exactly the right size and shape, or if she’s a person with a disability – then the sex isn’t good enough, and is spurned even if it’s offered.
The entitlement isn’t just to “women”. It’s to a vanishingly small subset of women, and is thus probabilistically predetermined to fail: there are a great number of men who are taking an oar in this boat, and very few women to choose from. And given the whole slut/”if you give too much sex you’re undesirable” thing, they’re working against themselves even more.
And this, my friends, is a place where you, as men, can get involved in helping.
Start recognizing this reality, and stop making your friends feel like shit when their girlfriend isn’t a top model. There are very few models in the world, and all you’re doing is making yourselves feel like crap. Call out other guys when they do it. This is culture that men create. Women participate, absolutely. But this is something men need to take on, because women, by definition cannot do it for you. The kind of guys we’re talking about would never listen to us.
Please spare the “Not All Men” bits, if you’re tempted.
No guarantee I’ll be able to come back and read responses to this, fairly fragile just now to contention, so if I don’t respond, that’ll be why.
* I fucking HATE the “get” sex thing. You don’t get sex. Sex isn’t a thing. You don’t get it in a brown paper wrapper at the store like a wank-mag. It is an activity, and the kind of sex they’re talking about a specific sort of activity requiring at least two people to take part in the activity. You don’t get sex from people, you get it with people (or, y’know, by yourself). It’s an important difference, and one I’m really glad I taught my own kids. I didn’t get a lot right as a parent, but that one I did.
@466:
As do I. Get rid of “chick ownership” by the rich and powerful and the problem goes away.
@465:
In the same manner as I pursue my right to employment without violating the property rights of others, by voluntary association. BUT society can make it either quite easy or very difficult to obtain this right, depending on a number of factors.
@neuroguy, #458:
I’m not one of the good ones to be played off against the shrill ones. Feel free to like me or hate me just as much as any other commenter on this thread: no more, no less.
@Tashiliciously Shriked, #461 & neuroguy, #464:
I wouldn’t have said you “outright said” it. But your statement:
immediately after you called “sensible and intellectually honest” my argument that in the current environment a right to sexual contact leads to sexual slavery, which concluded:
If preventing sexual slavery that results from a right to sexual contact is the cart that must come after the horse of a right to sexual contact, that means that you, if your words are to make sense and be trusted as having that seemingly obvious meaning, are willing to risk the sexual slavery of some number of women in exchange for a right to sexual contact now, and partially justify that by saying that the right to sexual contact can be part of the argument for ending sexual slavery at some future moment, if that right is successfully established.
I really don’t see how your statement could possibly fail to entail you expressing a willingness to run this risk to others for some timeframe which you have not posited and are unlikely to be able to reliably estimate.
Therefore, the risk to others of sexual slavery for an indefinite time period is worth the benefit, in your eyes, of establishing a right to sexual contact long before we have any idea how societies will guarantee that right without sexual slavery.
This
strongly implies that chick ownership by the poor and powerless is fine with you.
And this
directly contradicts your statement that you truly believe that there is such a thing as a “right to sexual contact.” A right to various services that might improve your odds of finding someone who will consent to sex with you is not the same as a right to actually come into sexual contact with someone.
You’ve repeatedly contradicted yourself in this thread. That should be a big fucking red flag that your ideas aren’t as awesome as you think they are and the people criticizing you haven’t suddenly decided en masse to wilfully misread everything you’re saying.
Clearly neuroguy cannot grasp that even with full legality and ideal working conditions the individual sex worker would still have the right to say no to the individual john. Without that we have a slightly more comfortable form of sex slavery. Not good enough!
He still seems to want a world in which society gives him exactly what he wants at precisely the moment he wants it and he need take no account of the other person’s wishes. Now, who does that remind us of?
neuroguy:
In your #467, when you identify “#461” as the comment which you address, could you perhaps have meant to say you were addressing #462?
I lied when quoting you? Your entire premise was lack of sex is a factor in his murder spree.
No, his issue is that he and you seem to think that you are entitled to sex, and that women should chip in (its a different comment but again, your words betray your bias) to prevent men from going on murder sprees caused by lack of sex.
Women should ante up their bodies to prevent the tragedy of male gun fetish murder sprees.
Do it for your country ladies! The lives you save may be your own!
So neuroguy, you’re going to volunteer to go service the next dude that claims a right to sexual contact, right? Or do you think you might have some sort of right to refuse?
@468:
Read points 3 and 4, dumbass, and realize they are more than “even considering the well-being of sex workers”. They are legal rights, for which sex work therefore needs to be legal to grant.
You cannot have “security of contract” for an illegal transaction. You cannot have government-funded sex work (which means there must be a law providing the funding) if sex work is itself illegal.
So what is the justification for arguing sex work should be legal? Is it just that people should have the right to that kind of employment if that is what they wish to do? Or is it also that people should have the right to purchase it if that is what they wish to do. And if you say the former, but not the latter, what, may I ask, is your reasoning?
*sigh*
it’s pretty clear that even a 140 page published manifesto is not enough to get the self-entitled to self-examine.
You know, some of this might be more understandable if it turns out that neuroguy is simply ignorant of the distinction between rights and freedoms which, in philosophical discourse, is subdivided further…but is somewhat understandable as distinctions in 2.1.5 “opposites and correlatives”. See especially “claims” vs “immunities” where a “claim” would be relatively co-extensive with a “right” and an “immunity” relatively co-extensive with a “freedom”.
Spread your legs and think of not being the victim of a spree murder!
It’s totally different from rape!
The only possible way to reconcile this is to assert that individuals, given the availability of an informedly consenting partner, should have the right to engage in sex with that person without undue interference. Which isn’t all that radical.
Neuroguy is trying to have it both ways.
I think I’m just going to roundly mock neuroguy ’cause goddamn.
@478:
Yes you lied, asshole. “A factor” is not the same thing as a justification. You damn well know this and were twisting what I said to make it appear in the worst light as possible. And you still are:
You damn well know I didn’t say or imply that either. You’re a brazen liar. There’s a great career in politics ahead of you I’m sure.
@476:
Of course not. Imagine me being able to figure that out. I mean why give me any credit for rational thought and intelligence when you don’t have to. You can make me look stupid and not even have to use one iota of thought yourself. The audience cheers… Bravo.
@475:
Splitting hairs so fine… but if you’ll admit there is a “right to various services that might improve your odds of finding someone who will consent to sex” then OK I am fine with that even if you are technically correct that the odds might not be 100%.
@231 WithinThisMind
QFT and screencap’d for posterity (and twitter).
At least we agree on something.
neroguy
You don’t know many gay men, do you? Just asking.
Thanks to Ophelia for calling attention to Laurie Penny’s article in The New Statesman about the ideology behind these attacks:
(emphasis mine)
Her entire article is worth reading, but I wanted to draw attention to the bolded segment above, given the comments by neuroguy. When you [neuroguy] argue* that people have a right/are entitled to sex you’re doing so in a society that devalues and dehumanizes women, that treats them like objects, that “values” them for their bodies, that makes excuses for sexual violence against women. Your argument fails to account for the sexism and misogyny that pervades society and in fact, bolsters and reaffirms the misogynistic belief that women owe men sex.
*I’m not certain that ‘argue’ is the correct word here. I don’t think you’ve argued your position. You’ve asserted that people have a right to sex, but unless I’ve missed it, I haven’t seen your reasoning and justification for that belief.
Thinking about other rights-
You (general you) can choose to act on the right to free speech by openly criticizing the US government’s use of drones in the “war on terror”.
You can choose to associate with the people that you like, and refuse to associate with those you do not.
You have the freedom to choose which religion to follow, or choose to follow none.
To personalize it: I’m a gay man that hasn’t had sex in over a year and I would really like the opportunity to engage in consensual fun sexytimes with a guy. If I wanted to exercise this right, how would I go about it?
neuroguy @ 480
You didn’t say “sex work” fuckwit, you said “right to sexual contact.” You can’t even go from one sentence to the next without moving your fucking goalposts.
Had you been able to figure that out, you wouldn’t be talking about sex work and right to sexual contact as if they’re the same fucking thing, jackass.
@474:
Your logic is off. To clarify here, by “sexual slavery” we mean no legal rights for sex workers. Just because you need A to logically argue for B doesn’t mean you will necessarily get A by itself without B. So it is logically incorrect to argue that positing a right to sexual contact means no legal rights for sex workers. The logical chain is: a right to sexual contact; as a result of that, legalized sex work; and as a result of that, legal protections for sex workers. Yes it is true that the “cart” of legal protection is before the “horse” of a right to sexual contact. It does not mean that you necessarily get the horse without the cart. You can legislate for both legalized sex work and legal protections for sex workers. You cannot legislate for legal protections for sex workers without legalized sex work.
——This is true only if misogyny and involuntary celibacy/loneliness are uncorrelated, and there isn’t an interaction causing a greater likelihood of violence against women when both are present. But why is it that all these shooters seem to be both misogynists and also involuntary celibate?—-
Why would a woman want to fuck a misogynist?
That’s like asking ‘why is it all these bums are smell like shit and vomit and are also involuntarily celibate?
Um, they are involuntarily celibate because they smell like shit and vomit.
—-BUT society can make it either quite easy or very difficult to obtain this right, depending on a number of factors.—
And if a woman says ‘I don’t want to date you because you are black’ you are welcome to call her a racist. You are even welcome to tell other people about this so she can be properly shunned. You still don’t get to fuck her, sorry.
Do you still not get that there is a difference between an individual and a company? Hint – one is a person, one is a thing.
If you don’t get the difference between ‘person’ and ‘thing’, well, I suppose that’s your problem right there, and it’s the same problem this murderous asshole had.
Women are not things.
neuroguy:
How is that splitting hairs? It’s not the same thing! Having the right to use a service designed to increase your chances of finding a consenting partner is NOT the same thing as having a right to have sex with someone.
@Tony!
I’m trying to clarify something that may have escaped neuroguy: a right is not the same as a freedom.
To have a guaranteed freedom of the press, the government must merely not prevent people from printing up papers and handing them out (or charging money their for).
To have a guaranteed **right** of the press, the government must give you a job writing what you want to say and making sure the paper gets delivered in the morning.
A right always has a corresponding duty on the part of **someone** to **do some positive thing**. A freedom could be construed in such a way, but it would have to be twisted pretty far. It is better expressed as merely creating duty on the part of the **government** to **refrain from unreasonable interference**.
There is a freedom of sex in law in the US, Canada, South Africa and many other nations. There is no **right** to sex in any nation or jurisdiction of which I’m aware. Even certain cases in the Netherlands and the UK which involved persons with disabilities were (at least legally) about either accessing sex therapy which included sexual contact and orgasms or about the freedom of a person on a disability pension to spend that money as the person saw fit, even if that included a trip to a place with legal physical contact sex work and a visit to a sex worker while there. If I understand correctly (and I’m unlikely to, at least in any precise way), the netherlands case comes closest to establishing a right to sex, but still falls short.
So your comment comparing rights with freedoms (such as of speech) may not be as helpful as it could be. neuroguy would have to understand the distinctions first in order to get your point.
Does the sex worker have the right to say no?
If so, then what has happened to that right to sexual contact?
If not, then why doesn’t the sex worker have the right to bodily autonomy?
Neuroguy –
Do you understand the difference between this – http://www.pointsincase.com/images/blowup_doll.jpg
And this – http://i8.cdnds.net/13/19/450×450/smiling-woman.jpg ?
Because I’m really not at all convinced that you do.
neuroguy:
Why is the logical chain not: a right to bodily autonomy and freedom of association; as a result of that, legalized sex work (bc people have the right to decide what happens to and with their bodies AND they have the right to associate with whomever they choose); and as a result of that, legal protections for sex workers ?
You’re assuming that this “right to sexual contact” is an actual right and you’ve yet to justify that.
Crip Dyke:
I see that now. My apologies.
because otherwise how will he touch a lady?