[Content Note: shootings, murder, misogyny]
Andie and Donna have both posted links in the Open Thread to news items about the Isla Vista mass shootings, and rather than let this atrocity swamp the social thread I’ve decided to give this its own post.
Andie 2014/05/24 at 11:00 am:
Trigger warning, extreme violence, misogyny. It’s disgusting, especially when I know people are going to go on about gun control (which I am all for), scapegoat the mentally ill, but probably ignore the shitload of entitlement, the absolute fucktons of male entitlement to women’s bodies that it takes to feel justified in killing innocent people because you can’t get laid.
Holy shit. My thoughts go out to all of the friends and families of the victims.
Donna 2014/05/24 at 5:32 pm: This story:
And the transcript of the shooter’s youtube rant:
Make me want to vomit. Another mass murder that’s the product of misogyny, carried out by a self-proclaimed “nice guy.”
David Futrelle at We Hunted The Mammoth (the renamed ManBoobz) has a full transcript of the video allegedly posted by the suspected shooter.
As the person who sent this video to me this morning noted, it sounds almost like a parody of the misogynistic beliefs and rhetoric that I write about on this blog. His language and his melodramatic tone both echo the writings of many of those young men who consider themselves “incels.” His anger is the same anger we see from the rejected men who lash out with insults and threats on OkCupid when their often crude advances are turned down. He reminds me of every so-called “nice guy” who is inwardly seething with resentment born of sexual entitlement denied. He even, at one point, calls himself a “gentleman.” He also calls himself an “alpha.”
It is clear that his resentment at women was stoked by what I call the “new misogyny” and by steeping himself in at least one online community that reaffirmed his exaggerated, unwarranted sense of victimhood. So far we have evidence that he was a commenter at PUAhate, a site ostensibly designed to critique PUAs but which has degenerated into a haven for misogynistic “incels” and angry trolls. I suspect we will find that he was also a reader of, or a commenter at, some of the other sites I critique on this blog.
It’s obvious that an emotionally healthy individual could not have committed such acts of violence against strangers, but I ask commentors to avoid speculating about possible mental health diagnoses. What we know as facts is horrific enough.