In Fear of Man: The disturbing implications of Isla Vista shooter

“Novelist Margaret Atwood writes that when she asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women, he answered, ‘They are afraid women will laugh at them.’ When she asked a group of women why they feel threatened by men, they said, ‘We're afraid of being killed.’” Mary Dickson, A Woman’s Worst Nightmare.

It’s not even surprising news anymore to hear the latest from the United States: a lone gunman on a shooting spree, killing random strangers at an ordinary venue. And true to the natural life cycle of the coverage of these horrifying events, it’s the killer who gets all the limelight, not his victims: Elliot Rodger, 22, went on a drive-by shooting spree last Friday, in Isla Vista, California, injuring 13 people and killing three. This was after stabbing three people to death and leaving their bodies in his apartment to be found by the police.

Rodger was found dead in his car after an exchange of gunfire with the police, who were giving chase. The aftermath, or what we get through the filter of the news, is fairly typical: he’d left a manifesto, a raving rationale for his planned rampage, in upwards of a hundred pages. He’d also left a series of videos on YouTube, one of which was posted only hours before the shooting and had explicitly stated his desire to attack. His targets of choice? Women.

“I don’t know what you don’t see in me,” Rodger told his audience on the Internet. “I’m the perfect guy, yet you throw yourself at all these obnoxious men instead of me, a supreme gentleman.”

For those of us not part of the community affected, and in fact not even part of the larger US community, Rodger’s violent shootout still presents a disturbing problem. High-profile mass shootings have always reached us through the news, and we have always watched grimly and prayed the likes of it never reached our shores. But this case has one significant aspect that had not yet been seen in previous mass shootings.

“Girls, all I ever wanted was to love you,” Rodger says, in his last video. It’s entitled “Elliot Rodger’s retribution.”  “To be loved by you. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted sex, love, affection, adoration.”

Rodger uploaded no less than 10 videos over several days, a lot of it simply showing the viewer the area where he lived, the places he liked to drive through in his black BMW, the car he later used in his rampage. But he also narrates how his picturesque surroundings are still a kind of hell, and how he planned to go open season on the “hottest sorority house of UCSB.”

“If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you,” Rodger stated. “You denied me a happy life, and in turn I will deny you a life.”

There’s practically a formula for the sculpting of a killer’s public image, mostly done by the American media: was he Muslim? Foreign? Radical? And the default “answer,” once there is absolutely no way to use any sort of code for “terrorist,” is mental illness. In particular, white shooters tend to be depicted has having had severe mental issues, especially when it’s the “only explanation” left. It’s not generally a nuance afforded to brown or foreign shooters. And Rodger was certainly white (half Asian, but white), privileged.

This time, however, we’re forced to consider gender, something that is not usually taken into account in mainstream discussions of mass shooters. It doesn’t matter that the majority of manifesto-touting mass shooters are overwhelmingly male; we’ve simply resorted to mental illness as a rationalisation, and left it at that. But Rodger’s case has, for better or for worse, made the conversation explicitly about gender.

“I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you,” Rodger says, easily, in his video. You will finally see that I am the superior one, the true alpha male.” He also stated his hatred of “sexually active” men, peers he felt were being handed the full college experience while he himself had been denied.

“All you girls who rejected me, looked down upon me, you know, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men,” he said. “I hate you. I hate all of you. I can't wait to give you exactly what you deserve — annihilation.”

Rodger was the son of a Hollywood assistant director who worked on The Hunger Games films; he led a life many would consider idyllic and privileged. So now we are at the point where the news is dissecting his home life and medical files and whatever else to find something that will point to the cause of the horrifying event. In fact, Rodger had been a cause for concern for authorities, as well as for his family; law enforcement deputies paid him a welfare visit sometime in April of this year, something he was able to check out of.

All of this offers us the painful question: At what point does misogyny become extreme enough for it to be a problem? Because if this fiasco with Rodger has proved anything, it is that misogyny can have its extremism the way racism can, and can play out with fatal consequences.

There is one last school of thought regarding mass shootings, and that is the idea that these shooters are agents of chaos that can never be made sense of. And to a certain extent, it’s true, but if there are elements that can be called by name, then they have to be called by name. Rodger hated women, the way many men hate women: by thinking of their bodies as accessible to him, his right as a man, and descending into rage when unable to access. What makes his ravings more disturbing, however, is not how deviant or against the grain his attitude towards the female sex is — it’s how common it is. So the demonization of Elliot Rodger won’t save us as much as it will harm us, because we’re in danger of thinking that he is isolated, and that other men are incapable of such violence.

Rodger’s decision to target women is simply in line with the gender violence common throughout the US, and the world. Seventy percent of female murder victims worldwide are killed by their male partners, according to the Michigan Women's Justice & Clemency Project. And in the US, a third of female murder victims are killed by their male partners. “By comparison,” says the project’s position statement, “less than 4 percent of male murder victims are killed by female partners, and most of those are women acting to defend themselves from men who have repeatedly beaten them.” Too many people fail to categorize the violence inflicted on women by men as a problem when the perpetrator is the husband or is in a relationship with the woman, which shows how women’s bodies are ultimately seen as possessions of men. These, along with many other studies on gender violence, are a chilling reminder of the fact that the leading cause of death for women is men.

So as shocking as the scale of Rodger’s attack was, he actually typifies the kind of gender violence that happens all too frequently in the US, and maybe even the rest of the world: a man killing women because he feels entitled to them. Rodger was being denied something he felt he was justified in having: “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.” Casting Rodger as a lone monster is only as true as the amount of media attention he is getting. What we’re actually dealing with is a wider epidemic of masculine issues that can harm anyone.

Of Rodger’s victims, two were women who fell to the shooting: UC Santa Barbara students and sorority sisters Veronika Weiss, 19, and Katherine Cooper, 22. Rodger meant to shoot every woman inside their sorority house, but resorted to shooting the three on the lawn when nobody answered the door. He then went on his rampage through Isla Vista, killing 20-year-old Christopher Michaels-Martinez, also a UCSB student, as he made a stop at a deli he knew was popular with students. Later, the three victims he had stabbed to death and left in his apartment were identified: Cheng Yuan Hong (20), George Chen (19), and Weihan Wang (20), all UCSB students as well.

And while we might take comfort in the fact that all this has happened in the US, and not here, we’d do good to remember how much of US media — and by extension, US culture — we tend to absorb over here. It’s never the consumption of entertainment that is the problem, but the consumption of ideas and values. And it’s important to consider that mass shootings have, in the case of US history, bred more mass shootings; we can isolate the incident all we want, but we truly cannot hope that containing the concept will actually keep it from ever happening again.

And honestly, one only has to glance at the comments on his videos (YouTube has since taken them down, but screenshots of the comments can still be found) to realize that Rodger really was not alone in this world with his views. Many of the comments express pity for him or egg him on, or both, which is problematic on its own as one of the viler aspects of this Internet age. Many more express blame for the girls who rejected him, and for women in general. “Any of you girls could have prevented this. I hope you women see this as a lesson,” and “see girls this is what you get for treating nice guys like sh**” are just a few of the mildly-worded ones, from accounts not solely from the US. 

The face of gender violence is ugly as it is without this extremist edge. And so while the particulars of the violence we encounter here would not be the same, we owe it to ourselves to think about what happens, why it happens, and what we can do to prevent a remake.