“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 blond slut I see inside there. All those girls that I’ve desired so much. They would have 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.”
This is what we might call the take-away quote from a final video from Elliot Rodger, before he went on a mass shooting rampage leaving 7 people dead. (The video is below and here’s the transcript.) It’s hard to think of a more succinct distillation of young male anti-woman rage, punctuated infinitely by the fact Rodger made good on his threat. But the basic storyline is also a pretty common one, the mentality of innumerable PUAs and/or the more extreme self-styled Mens Rights Activists.
As is almost always the case, the guys who actually act out in such a cataclysmic fashion are borderline figures – emotionally isolated, often mentally ill. According to this article Rodger had a high-functioning form of Aspergers, which appears to have made it difficult for him to make friends and also exposed him to bullying, both of which undoubtedly fueled the build up of this unfettered rage.
But toxic ideas usually find their expression in people on the fringes. It’s most often the case when we see incidents of racially motivated hate crimes or anti-Semitic attacks. But for young men, hormones, stunted aggression, rejection and more also play a potent role even before misogynistic ideologies and ideas come into play. The combination is dangerous.
I suspect any guy reading this can identify at least the kernel of this kind of mentality and the rage associated with it in men he’s known. I have no doubt women can to – but the nature of the exposure is obviously very different. Usually it’s limited to private venting, sometimes it plays out in date rapes, and then there’s something like this.
A lot of the well-known young men/adolescent mass-killings have centered on alienated, emotionally isolated and ragefull young men. So I’m not sure we can say this is not related to those. But it’s much more direct and explicit. Not just directed at all the kids who weren’t nice to me or rejected me at my high school but against what Rodger saw as the universal “spoiled, stuck-up blond slut.”
