Elliot Rodger's 'War on Women' and Toxic Gender Warfare
The Santa Barbara killer wasn't just a misogynist; he was a malignant narcissist.
Cathy Young | May 29, 2014
Last weekend's horror in Santa Barbara, California, where 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded more than a dozen before shooting himself, unexpectedly sparked a feminist moment. With revelations that Rodger's killing spree was fueled by anger over rejection by women and that he had posted on what some described as a "men's rights" forum (actually, a forum for bitter "involuntarily celibate" men), many rushed to frame the shooting as a stark example of the violent misogyny said to be pervasive in our culture. The Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen sprung up as an expression of solidarity and a reminder of the ubiquity of male terrorism and abuse in women's lives. Most of the posters in the hashtag were certainly motivated by the best of intentions. But in the end, this response not only appropriated a human tragedy for an ideological agenda but turned it into toxic gender warfare.
For one thing, "misogyny" is a very incomplete explanation of Rodger's mindset, perhaps best described as malignant narcissism with a psychopathic dimension. His "manifesto" makes it clear that his hatred of women (the obverse side of his craving for validation by female attention, which he describes as so intense that a hug from a girl was infinitely more thrilling than an expression of friendship from a boy) was only a subset of a general hatred of humanity, and was matched by hatred of men who had better romantic and sexual success. At the end of the document, he chillingly envisions an ideal society in which women will be exterminated except for a small number of artificial-insemination breeders and sexuality will be abolished. But in an Internet posting a year ago, he also fantasized about inventing a virus that would wipe out all males except for himself: "You would be able to have your pick of any beautiful woman you want, as well as having dealt vengeance on the men who took them from you. Imagine how satisfying that would be." His original plans for his grand exit included not only a sorority massacre he explicitly called his "War on Women," but luring victims whom he repeatedly mentions in gender-neutral terms to his apartment for extended torture and murder (and killing his own younger brother, whom he hated for managing to lose his virginity).
Some have argued that hating other men because they get to have sex with women and you don't is still a form of misogyny; but that seems like a good example of stretching the concept into meaninglessness—or turning it into unfalsifiable quasi-religious dogma.
Of course, four of the six people Rodger actually killed were men: his three housemates, whom he stabbed to death in their beds before embarking on his fatal journey, and a randomly chosen young man in a deli. Assertions that all men share responsibility for the misogyny and male violence toward women that Rodger's actions are said to represent essentially place his male victims on the same moral level as the murderer—which, if you think about it, is rather obscene. And the deaths of all the victims, female and male, are trivialized when they are commemorated with a catalogue of often petty sexist or sexual slights, from the assertion that every single woman in the world has been sexually harassed to the complaint that a woman's "no" is often met with an attempt to negotiate a "yes."
A common theme of #YesAllWomen is that our culture promotes the notion that women owe men sex and encourages male violence in response to female rejection. (It does? One could much more plausibly argue that our culture promotes the notion that men must "earn" sex from women and treats the rejected male as a pathetic figure of fun.) Comic-book writer Gail Simone tweeted that she doesn't know "a single woman who has never encountered with that rejection rage the killer shows in the video," though of course to a lesser degree.
Actually, I do know women who have never encountered it. I also know men who have, and a couple of women who have encountered it from other women. I myself have experienced it twice: once from an ex-boyfriend, and once from a gay woman on an Internet forum who misinterpreted friendliness on my part as romantic interest. There was a common thread in both these cases: mental illness aggravated by substance abuse.
Yes, virtually all spree killers are male, though there are notable exceptions, such as Illinois mass shooter Laurie Dann and Alabama biology professor Amy Bishop; but the number of such killers is so vanishingly small that a man's chance of being one is only slightly higher than a woman's. As for the more frequent kind of homicide feminists often describe as expressions of murderous misogyny—such as killings of women by intimate partners or ex-partners—the gender dynamics of such violence are far more complex. If patriarchal rage and misogynist hatred are the underlying cause, how does one explain intimate homicide in same-sex relationships without resorting to tortuous, ideology-driven pseudo-logic? How does one explain the fact that some 30 percent of victims in such slayings are men (excluding cases in which a woman kills in clear self-defense)? What feminist paradigm explains the actions of Clara Harris, the Houston dentist who repeatedly ran over her unfaithful husband with a car (and got a good deal of public sympathy)? Or the actions of Susan Eubanks, the California woman who shot and killed her four sons to punish their fathers, apparently because she was angry about being "screwed by men" after her latest boyfriend walked out?
Defenders of #YesAllWomen say that the posts in the hashtag do not target all men. Maybe not; but they push the idea that all women—including women in advanced liberal democracies in the 21st century—are victims of pervasive and relentless male terrorism, and that any man who does not denounce it on feminist terms is complicit. They wrongly frame virtually all interpersonal violence (and lesser injuries) as male-on-female, ignoring both male victims and female perpetrators, and express sympathy for boys only insofar as boys are supposedly "raised around the drumbeat mantra that women are not human beings." And sometimes, they almost literally dehumanize men. A tweet observing that "the odds of being attacked by a shark are 1 in 3,748,067, while a woman's odds of being raped are 1 in 6...yet fear of sharks is seen as rational while being cautious of men is seen as misandry" was retweeted almost 1,000 times.
One can argue endlessly about the real lessons of the Elliot Rodger shooting, including the complex dilemma of responding to danger signs from mentally ill people without trampling on civil liberties. Perhaps, as Canadian columnist Matt Gurney writes, the most painful lesson is that no matter what we do, we cannot always prevent "a deranged individual … determined to do harm to others" from wreaking such harm—if not with guns, then with knives or with a car. But the worst possible answer is a toxic version of feminism that encourages women to see themselves as victims while imposing collective guilt on men.
Source
Roosh weighs in on this too.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Thursday, May 29, 2014
The manosphere on the factor
We got mentioned on the Factor. On the 5-28-14 O'Reilly Factor Bill mentioned the manosphere and actually said that we are not at fault in the Elliot Rodger case. He showed a clip of one of the Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) pit yorkies attacking the manosphere. O'Reilly shot this theory down. It seems that feminists are getting very nervous. Perhaps the misandry they spreaded throughout society is starting to backfire on them. What you sown you shall reap.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Feminism: the real terrorist group
Because of the Elliot Rodger tragedy feminists are trying to label the men's rights movement a terrorist group. Really. Let's take a look at who the real terrorists are:
If were going to equate terrorism with hatred then we can see that feminists are the true terrorists.
Let's see some more videos:
Violence by feminists is nothing new. In fact it started with suffragettes and is still used to this day. Let's not forget the Bobbitt case where NOW condoned what Lorena Bobbitt did to her husband. Fast forward a few years to the crimes of Katherine Kieu Becker and the jokes made about her husband whom she maliciously wounded. We can see whom the real terrorists are and they are feminists.
If were going to equate terrorism with hatred then we can see that feminists are the true terrorists.
Let's see some more videos:
Violence by feminists is nothing new. In fact it started with suffragettes and is still used to this day. Let's not forget the Bobbitt case where NOW condoned what Lorena Bobbitt did to her husband. Fast forward a few years to the crimes of Katherine Kieu Becker and the jokes made about her husband whom she maliciously wounded. We can see whom the real terrorists are and they are feminists.
Monday, May 26, 2014
Men:the forgotten rape victims
When Men Are Raped
A new study reveals that men are often the victims of sexual assault, and women are often the perpetrators.
By Hanna Rosin
men and sexual assault.
For some kinds of sexual victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences
Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.
Most Read
Hanna Rosin is the founder of DoubleX and a writer for the Atlantic. She is also the author of The End of Men. Follow her on Twitter.
Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.
Sexual assault is a term that gets refracted through the culture wars, as Slate’s own Emily Bazelon explained in a story about the terminology of rape. Feminists claimed the more legalistic term of sexual assault to put it squarely in the camp of violent crime. Bazelon argues in her story for reclaiming the term rape because of its harsh unflinching sound and its nonlegalistic shock value. But she also allows that rape does not help us grasp crimes outside our limited imagination, particularly crimes against men. She quotes a painful passage from screenwriter and novelist Rafael Yglesias, which is precisely the kind of crime Stemple worries is too foreign and uncomfortable to contemplate.
I used to say, when some part of me was still ashamed of what had been done to me, that I was “molested” because the man who played skillfully with my 8-year-old penis, who put it in his mouth, who put his lips on mine and tried to push his tongue in as deep as it would go, did not anally rape me. … Instead of delineating what he had done, I chose “molestation” hoping that would convey what had happened to me.
Of course it doesn’t. For listeners to appreciate and understand what I had endured, I needed to risk that they will gag or rush out of the room. I needed to be particular and clear as to the details so that when I say I was raped people will understand what I truly mean.
For years, the FBI defined forcible rape, for data collecting purposes, as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” Eventually localities began to rebel against that limited gender-bound definition; in 2010 Chicago reported 86,767 cases of rape but used its own broader definition, so the FBI left out the Chicago stats. Finally, in 2012, the FBI revised its definition and focused on penetration, with no mention of female (or force).
Data hasn’t been calculated under the new FBI definition yet, but Stemple parses several other national surveys in her new paper, “The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions,” co-written with Ilan Meyer and published in the April 17 edition of the American Journal of Public Health. One of those surveys is the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, for which the Centers for Disease Control invented a category of sexual violence called “being made to penetrate.” This definition includes victims who were forced to penetrate someone else with their own body parts, either by physical force or coercion, or when the victim was drunk or high or otherwise unable to consent. When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.
We might assume that if a man has an erection he must want sex. But imagine if the same were said about women.
“Made to penetrate” is an awkward phrase that hasn’t gotten any traction. It’s also something we instinctively don’t associate with sexual assault. But is it possible our instincts are all wrong here? We might assume, for example, that if a man has an erection he must want sex, especially because we assume men are sexually insatiable. But imagine if the same were said about women. The mere presence of physiological symptoms associated with arousal does not in fact indicate actual arousal, much less willing participation. And the high degree of depression and dysfunction among male victims of sexual abuse backs this up. At the very least, the phrase remedies an obvious injustice. Under the old FBI definition, what happened to Rafael Yglesias would only have counted as rape if he’d been an 8-year-old girl. Accepting the term “made to penetrate” helps us understand that trauma comes in all forms.
So why are men suddenly showing up as victims? Every comedian has a prison rape joke and prosecutions of sexual crimes against men are still rare. But gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves—if the survey is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator.
The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all. In the last few years, the BJS did two studies in adult prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. The surveys were excellent because they afforded lots of privacy and asked questions using very specific, informal, and graphic language. (“Did another inmate use physical force to make you give or receive a blow job?”) Those surveys turned up the opposite of what we generally think is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse.
Now the question is, in a climate when politicians and the media are finally paying attention to military and campus sexual assault, should these new findings alter our national conversation about rape? Stemple is a longtime feminist who fully understands that men have historically used sexual violence to subjugate women and that in most countries they still do. As she sees it, feminism has fought long and hard to fight rape myths—that if a woman gets raped it’s somehow her fault, that she welcomed it in some way. But the same conversation needs to happen for men. By portraying sexual violence against men as aberrant, we prevent justice and compound the shame. And the conversation about men doesn’t need to shut down the one about women. “Compassion,” she says, “is not a finite resource.”
Source
Indeed it is. Any compassion I had for women has been replaced by indifference and they have no one to blame but themselves.
A new study reveals that men are often the victims of sexual assault, and women are often the perpetrators.
By Hanna Rosin
men and sexual assault.
For some kinds of sexual victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences
Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.
Most Read
Hanna Rosin is the founder of DoubleX and a writer for the Atlantic. She is also the author of The End of Men. Follow her on Twitter.
Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.
Sexual assault is a term that gets refracted through the culture wars, as Slate’s own Emily Bazelon explained in a story about the terminology of rape. Feminists claimed the more legalistic term of sexual assault to put it squarely in the camp of violent crime. Bazelon argues in her story for reclaiming the term rape because of its harsh unflinching sound and its nonlegalistic shock value. But she also allows that rape does not help us grasp crimes outside our limited imagination, particularly crimes against men. She quotes a painful passage from screenwriter and novelist Rafael Yglesias, which is precisely the kind of crime Stemple worries is too foreign and uncomfortable to contemplate.
I used to say, when some part of me was still ashamed of what had been done to me, that I was “molested” because the man who played skillfully with my 8-year-old penis, who put it in his mouth, who put his lips on mine and tried to push his tongue in as deep as it would go, did not anally rape me. … Instead of delineating what he had done, I chose “molestation” hoping that would convey what had happened to me.
Of course it doesn’t. For listeners to appreciate and understand what I had endured, I needed to risk that they will gag or rush out of the room. I needed to be particular and clear as to the details so that when I say I was raped people will understand what I truly mean.
For years, the FBI defined forcible rape, for data collecting purposes, as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” Eventually localities began to rebel against that limited gender-bound definition; in 2010 Chicago reported 86,767 cases of rape but used its own broader definition, so the FBI left out the Chicago stats. Finally, in 2012, the FBI revised its definition and focused on penetration, with no mention of female (or force).
Data hasn’t been calculated under the new FBI definition yet, but Stemple parses several other national surveys in her new paper, “The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions,” co-written with Ilan Meyer and published in the April 17 edition of the American Journal of Public Health. One of those surveys is the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, for which the Centers for Disease Control invented a category of sexual violence called “being made to penetrate.” This definition includes victims who were forced to penetrate someone else with their own body parts, either by physical force or coercion, or when the victim was drunk or high or otherwise unable to consent. When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.
We might assume that if a man has an erection he must want sex. But imagine if the same were said about women.
“Made to penetrate” is an awkward phrase that hasn’t gotten any traction. It’s also something we instinctively don’t associate with sexual assault. But is it possible our instincts are all wrong here? We might assume, for example, that if a man has an erection he must want sex, especially because we assume men are sexually insatiable. But imagine if the same were said about women. The mere presence of physiological symptoms associated with arousal does not in fact indicate actual arousal, much less willing participation. And the high degree of depression and dysfunction among male victims of sexual abuse backs this up. At the very least, the phrase remedies an obvious injustice. Under the old FBI definition, what happened to Rafael Yglesias would only have counted as rape if he’d been an 8-year-old girl. Accepting the term “made to penetrate” helps us understand that trauma comes in all forms.
So why are men suddenly showing up as victims? Every comedian has a prison rape joke and prosecutions of sexual crimes against men are still rare. But gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves—if the survey is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator.
The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all. In the last few years, the BJS did two studies in adult prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. The surveys were excellent because they afforded lots of privacy and asked questions using very specific, informal, and graphic language. (“Did another inmate use physical force to make you give or receive a blow job?”) Those surveys turned up the opposite of what we generally think is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse.
Now the question is, in a climate when politicians and the media are finally paying attention to military and campus sexual assault, should these new findings alter our national conversation about rape? Stemple is a longtime feminist who fully understands that men have historically used sexual violence to subjugate women and that in most countries they still do. As she sees it, feminism has fought long and hard to fight rape myths—that if a woman gets raped it’s somehow her fault, that she welcomed it in some way. But the same conversation needs to happen for men. By portraying sexual violence against men as aberrant, we prevent justice and compound the shame. And the conversation about men doesn’t need to shut down the one about women. “Compassion,” she says, “is not a finite resource.”
Source
Indeed it is. Any compassion I had for women has been replaced by indifference and they have no one to blame but themselves.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
SB 967 is back
CURRENT BILL STATUS
MEASURE : S.B. No. 967
AUTHOR(S) : De León and Jackson (Principal coauthor: Assembly Member
Lowenthal) (Coauthors: Senators Beall, Cannella, Evans,
Galgiani, Monning, Pavley, Torres, Wolk, and Yee)
(Coauthors: Assembly Members Ammiano, Fong, Gonzalez,
Quirk-Silva, Skinner, Ting, and Williams).
TOPIC : Student safety: sexual assault.
HOUSE LOCATION : SEN
+LAST AMENDED DATE : 03/27/2014
TYPE OF BILL :
Active
Non-Urgency
Non-Appropriations
Majority Vote Required
State-Mandated Local Program
Fiscal
Non-Tax Levy
LAST HIST. ACT. DATE: 05/23/2014
LAST HIST. ACTION : From committee: Do pass as amended. (Ayes 5. Noes 2.)
(May 23).
FILE : SEN SECOND READING
FILE DATE : 05/27/2014
ITEM : 6
COMM. LOCATION : SEN APPROPRIATIONS
COMM. ACTION DATE : 05/23/2014
COMM. ACTION : Do pass as amended.
COMM. VOTE SUMMARY : Ayes: 05 Noes: 02 PASS
TITLE : An act to add Section 67386 to the Education Code,
relating to student safety.
It looks like new life has been breathed into this Frankenstein's monster of a bill. We've got to act fast. We need to contact the Assembly,the Senate and the Governor. I was wondering when they would try something and now here it is.
MEASURE : S.B. No. 967
AUTHOR(S) : De León and Jackson (Principal coauthor: Assembly Member
Lowenthal) (Coauthors: Senators Beall, Cannella, Evans,
Galgiani, Monning, Pavley, Torres, Wolk, and Yee)
(Coauthors: Assembly Members Ammiano, Fong, Gonzalez,
Quirk-Silva, Skinner, Ting, and Williams).
TOPIC : Student safety: sexual assault.
HOUSE LOCATION : SEN
+LAST AMENDED DATE : 03/27/2014
TYPE OF BILL :
Active
Non-Urgency
Non-Appropriations
Majority Vote Required
State-Mandated Local Program
Fiscal
Non-Tax Levy
LAST HIST. ACT. DATE: 05/23/2014
LAST HIST. ACTION : From committee: Do pass as amended. (Ayes 5. Noes 2.)
(May 23).
FILE : SEN SECOND READING
FILE DATE : 05/27/2014
ITEM : 6
COMM. LOCATION : SEN APPROPRIATIONS
COMM. ACTION DATE : 05/23/2014
COMM. ACTION : Do pass as amended.
COMM. VOTE SUMMARY : Ayes: 05 Noes: 02 PASS
TITLE : An act to add Section 67386 to the Education Code,
relating to student safety.
It looks like new life has been breathed into this Frankenstein's monster of a bill. We've got to act fast. We need to contact the Assembly,the Senate and the Governor. I was wondering when they would try something and now here it is.
Elliot Rodger and the misandric society
This is a young man who snapped. After being told feminist lies while growing up. I've touched upon this before and here. A young man who was put through a misandric school system by a misandric society that prized women no matter how evil they were while putting down men no matter how noble they were. Today we act surprised and horrified that young men are snapping. We act surprised that when boys are bullied by misandry they snap. Our society hasn't caught on to this "cause and effect" thing yet. Or so it seems. This is the same society that makes excuses for female killers such as Casey Anthony,Clara Harris,Jodi Arias,Susan Smith and Andrea Yates. This is the same society that put down what happened to John Bobbitt. America,you exalt feminists and feminism,in it's full misandric form. You exalt women above men then you act surprised when a young man who has been spit upon by society lashes out. You can only kick someone for awhile before they fight back. This young man was never given a choice. You,America,were given a choice and you chose to discount men. Well,America,I hope you can live with your choice. This is a country that says men should not have emotions,that men are unfeeling brutes. Well we can see that is not the case. One young man did care,in fact he described himself as the "supreme gentleman". We have a society that has women give lip service to chivalry yet when it is practiced they have disdain for it. Women say they want someone "sensitive" but in practice they despise such a man. So after being lied to and betrayed he snapped. This society demands that men be stoic and uncaring but that appears not to be the case.
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Reminder about the Maine Republican primary
The Maine Republican primary is coming up and pro-male candidate Erick Bennett needs your help. He is running against incumbent Senator Susan Collins. If he gets the votes he will be the first pro-MRA candidate in the race for Senate. I don't need to tell you this is big. But he won't go anywhere without your vote. If you are registered to vote in the State of Maine on June 10 and are able to vote for Bennett in the primary then by all means do so. The faster we get a pro-MRA into the Senate the faster we can turn the misandry around. For more information about Erick Bennett: click here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)