On #YesAllWomen, and the Discomfort of ‘Good Men’ by @CratesNRibbons

cross-posted from Crates N Ribbons

orig. pub. on 3.6.14YesAllWomen

 

Following Elliot Rodger’s hate crime against women (yes, I know many news reports seem to have missed the misogynistic message he was sending, I know Wikipedia has decided to classify it as generic violence instead of violence against women, and I know The Good Men Project has decided it was really all about virginity, but make no mistake, it was a hate crime nonetheless), women all over the internet rose up with the hashtag #YesAllWomen, sharing stories of misogyny and sexual violence, pointing out how the little and not-so-little experiences that women are subjected to on a regular basis combine to create a society in which a killer like Rodger is made.

Somewhat predictably, there has been resistance from men reluctant to acknowledge the sexist culture that surrounds us; more specifically, they are uncomfortable with the idea that they, with their ‘harmless banter’ or only slightly sexist behaviour, could be complicit in a hate crime of such immense proportions.

One example of this is this piece by T.J Holmes, who believes that the hashtag is unfairly placing blame on men who consider themselves good men, who have never attacked women and probably never will, who are only guilty of what he sees as innocuous sexist behaviours, such as giving a woman their arm, or getting women to pass through doors before themselves. He states that “there is a huge gap between the man who catcalls a woman walking down the street and the man who opens fire on her”, and that #YesAllWomen has somehow led to a confused population of women who are unable to see the distinction between these two actions.

Yet, as someone who has followed the hashtag quite closely over the last week, I see no evidence of this “sense that all sexism is created equal”. There is nothing on the hashtag to suggest that shooting a woman is just the same as whistling at her on the street. What I have seen though, over and over again, is women asserting that we must connect the everyday sexism and harassment that women experience, with the underlying attitude of male entitlement to female bodies, thereby creating the conditions necessary for Rodger’s hatred of women to take root and flourish in that particular way. I have seen women point out how charged with fear many romantic / sexual interactions are for women, where it is often hard to tell if rejecting a man’s advances will lead to an uneventful evening, or an encounter with violence. I have seen women unite in their common experiences of being women in a man’s world, and call on men to take the responsibility of tackling the misogyny rampant in socialised masculinity. Nowhere have I witnessed the notion that a man who has regressive beliefs about being a “gentleman” is exactly the same as a mass murderer, which makes Holmes’ opening lines puzzling, to say the least.

And let’s not forget that we live in a world where women are brought up to expect and get over unwanted touching in bars and clubs, a world where a woman’s clothing and behaviour can be blamed for her rape, and where an unambiguously woman-hating killer is called a ‘madman’ rather than an extremist in a misogynistic society. Given this background, can you imagine that from now on, due to #YesAllWomen, any man who engages in sexist behaviour will be viewed and treated as no better than a mass murderer? Of course not. The idea that this is a serious concern for men is patently ludicrous.

I’m not surprised that many men are feeling uncomfortable after reading tweets on the #YesAllWomen hashtag. If one has lived one’s life completely oblivious to the systemic sexism that pervades everything we do, it can be a shock to suddenly realise that you, a well-meaning, kind-hearted man who would never hurt a fly, are complicit in a culture that has led to horrific instances of male violence against women. In fact, I’m glad of this discomfort. I would find it much more worrying if all men read about the harassment, fear and violence that women experience, and felt absolutely nothing. But don’t pretend that this discomfort is in anyway comparable to the actual lived reality of women’s oppression. Don’t ask women to censor their words and hide the truth because it makes some men feel unfairly blamed. Recognise how tiny sexist acts, while so seemingly harmless to you, can add up and add up and add up, to a culture where women are assigned inferior status, and hate crimes against women are a dime a dozen. Then take that discomfort and use it to drive change, rather than taking the easy path of denial.

 

Crates&Ribbons:  A feminist analysis of society [@CratesNRibbons]

Elliot Rodger: not all men hate women – but if one does, that’s enough by @jessiecath

(cross-posted with permission from Writing all Wrongs)

When I first started calling myself a feminist, I was tentative about it. Apologetic even. I wasn’t always sure how important it was – I mean, we’ve got the vote right? And Maggie Thatcher happened and everything? And aren’t feminists all hairy and angry (god, how terrible)?

But I read books and I watched films and I started to realise how the objectification of women had become so normalised we’d all stopped noticing. Things started to bother me, like why did I ask my mum if I could buy a thong when I was in year 6? Why when I was a 14-year-old virgin did girls at school who wanted to hurt me call me a slut? And why was I more likely to see a woman on TV giving a bloke a tit wank than I was to see her chairing a debate? Phrases became important: the beauty myth, the Bechdel test, everyday sexism.

But a while ago, that changed for me. It was no longer just about women being treated like sex objects in adverts or music videos, or that page 3 still exists, or that women are often meaningless plot devices. I began to understand that ritual misogyny is a pervasive, subtle and poisonous part of everyday life. Of course, the latter is only possible because of the unwavering persistence of the former – the continued portrayal of women as second-class citizens are symptoms. But I can no longer pretend that we don’t live in a society that is awash with the hatred of women.

We are repeatedly told that misogyny is just a case of mildly amusing anachronisms. The chief executive of the FA sent some sexist emails? Oopsy, wish the public hadn’t seen that – but he’s just being bawdy! Oh, another famous man off the telly has been arrested for sexually abusing women – but the culture was just totally different back then, you understand. Rape jokes? Jeez lighten up guys!

And then a 22-year-old man goes on a killing spree which he himself describes as “my war against women for rejecting me and depriving me of sex and love” – and it’s not a misogynistic attack. People are falling over themselves to say that Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and claimed “it was women’s fault for refusing to have sex with me”, did not hate women.

He did it because he was mentally ill, or because of the gun laws, or because his dad worked on the Hunger Games therefore = violence obvs. In fact we should totes just blame Jennifer Lawrence. Some have said Rodger is not a misogynist because he killed men too. But he didn’t kill those men because they refused to give him the sex that he felt unequivocally entitled to.

So I’ll just tell you right here and right now, Elliot Rodger was a misogynist killer. As far as I’m concerned, that is not up for debate: he murdered women for not giving him the sex he felt he was owed. He murdered men because they were getting the sex he felt entitled to.

Misogynist killings aren’t rare one-off events either: let’s not forget Jill MeagherJoanna Yeatesthe five women killed in Ipswich, or the 2012 Delhi gang-rape. Woman-hatred like this is not interesting or complex – it’s simply because some men believe that women don’t have the right to have control over their own bodies.

We can argue that misogynist murders take place until we are blue in the face, but we can’t escape this tuneless dull chorus: “but not all men are like that”.

Of course not all men are like that, but even if one is, it’s a massive fucking problem. All the time that men continue to use their energy to distance themselves from misogyny, rather than address the fact that it not only occurs but kills, they are simply perpetuating its existence.

I’m sick of trying to convince people that misogyny exists. I’m sick of trying to explain to people that rape jokes legitimise sexual assault. I’m sick of trying to tell people that a sensationalist video of a woman beating a man in public is distorting the debate, because I have never seen a woman be violent to a man in public but I’ve seen it the other way round more than enough times. I’m also bored stiff of the fact that even though I know ‘asking for it’ is the vile rhetoric of victim blamers, I still feel like it’s my fault if I walk home late at night and get attacked. And I’m also pretty bored of the fact that when I’ve called out commonplace wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing misogyny, I’ve been told ‘that can’t be right – he’s such a nice guy’.

What the ‘not all men’ argument does – whilst distracting from a proper debate about structual misogyny – is that it ignores the fact that actually, yes, all men are taught to feel entitled to sex and attention from women. And yes, yes, I know that when you were in your mother’s womb you had no concept of the patriarchy, but you were born into it just like we all were, and either you face up to that, or you try and pretend that you’ve lived your life in a vacuum and that you haven’t been trained all the way from Disney movies to porn films to see us as something you are owed. Fool yourself, but you won’t fool me.

Jessie Thompson a.k.a girl ignited tricks people into listening to her opinions at length by disguising them as attempts at humour.

She has also written for The Independent, The Telegraph, The Quietus, Red Pepper, Ideastap, Vagenda, Feminist Times, Huffington Post, A Younger Theatre and Libertine. Whilst at university, she worked as Arts Editor and Arts Editor-in-Chief of Sussex’s student newspaper, The Badger, which she found dehumanising because at house parties people only spoke to her so that they could find out how they could write for The Badger.

 

The Day Of Retribution. On Elliot Rodger, the Butcher of Santa Barbara. by @Echidne

(cross-posted with permission from ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES)

This post is about the slaughter carried out by Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara.  It is about violence, the hatred of women and the general hatred of humans.  Consider carefully whether you wish to read it.

1.  The Recent Events 

Elliot Rodger, 22,  spent last Saturday killing people in Santa Barbara, California.  He first brutally stabbed to death three men in his apartment:  Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, George Chen, 19 and Weihan Wang, 20, then got into his BMW with  his three semi-automatic legally acquired guns and headed to that UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara) sorority  he had rated as having the largest number of pretty tall blondes, the kind of womanflesh he wanted to have on his plate but was denied because the damn dinners had rights to refuse him!

He planned to kill all women inside the sorority, but was stopped by the fact that nobody opened the door however hard he banged on it.  Poor Elliot!  Things always worked out against him.  No wonder he was filled with such rage, as witnessed byhis manifesto for the butchering or “the day of retribution.”

Instead, he shot at the three young women standing outside the sorority building, killing Katherine Breann Cooper, 22, and Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, 19.  The third victim is still alive and I hope that she will recover.

What Rodger tells us in his manifesto is that this is the plan he had for killing people because he was owed that retribution for all the sex he deserved but wasn’t getting while other men were getting it:

First horribly carve up men in his apartment, then kill all the sorority residents, then just  drive around the place shooting and hitting people with his car.  With the exception of failing to wipe out the sorority, his plans were going pretty well.

He next killed Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, 20, at a local delicatessen.  He was probably chosen randomly, as “one of the animals,”  Rodger’s view of other humans.

No more immediate deaths on his rampage through the streets, though his car drove into two bicyclists (and two other individuals) and his bullets hit pedestrians walking by.  In all, six victims were killed,  seven other individuals were hurt on this “day of retribution.”  Two of the hurt remain in serious condition.  I hope all of them will be made as whole as possible.  I hope those who loved the dead (including those who loved Rodger) get some peace.

The day ended with Rodger’s suicide.

2.  What Happened Before?
In reverse time order:
Just a day before the slaughter, Rodger posted a YouTube video about his plans.  The video is now removed but I watched it, and wehuntedthemammoth.com has a transcript of it.   It is a monologue promising us the slaughter that followed.  Rodgerplaces the blame for his loneliness and suffering firmly on the shoulders of women, especially those of tall, white blond-haired women:

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.

Rodger’s parents tried to desperately find him when they saw the video.

In April, a family member asked the police to make a welfare check on Elliot Rodger.  He passed the check with flying colors.  The interviewer(s) found him perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human. 

Later another policeman described the results of the slaughter as “the work of a madman.”

At the time of the welfare check, Rodger was relieved that the police didn’t search his room where he had at least two semi-automatic guns in readiness.

Rodger clearly suffered from mental problems.  He had been receiving treatment, based on his manifesto, for several years.  What the treatment consisted of is unclear, but in this case the mental health system cannot be said to have  completely failed a sick person. Indeed, I’m not sure there is any effective current treatment for what Rodger’s manifesto reveals, except for involuntary confinement which could have protected his victims but would not have done much for him.  As far as I gather from the manifesto, Rodger received help in learning social skills, perhaps an attempt to relieve the loneliness he suffered.

His autobiographic manifesto suggests that he was bullied at school.

3. Reactions
These are of the expected type and often reflect the writer’sposition on the political map.  That Rodger had access to semi-automatic weapons made him a very efficient killing machine.  That he suffered from clear mental problems was also pointed out.  That he was a misogynist of rather extreme nature is given at least a nod in most places (though at least one writer disagrees on that as the cause for the massacre).  Whether he indeed was “a madman,” in the sense of an isolated, impossible-to-prevent-but-horrific event or whether something could have been done to prevent the massacre also seems to depend on one’s general slant about such things.
Comparisons to the 2009 killings by George Sodini, also  described as a loner who felt women need to be punished for spurning his advances might have been useful.  Both cases are about men who felt that they were entitled to have sex, that those who refused to hand it over on demand deserved punishment, and that punishment was not incommensurate if it meant death.  Both also felt great pain and perhaps self-pity because they were not receiving their fair number of voluntary f**ks.
In the primeval slime areas of the Internet, some comments argued that the killings were the fault of women who refused to give some pussy, even though by doing that they could have prevented murders.  From the comments attached to the now-removed YouTube video (the cleanest one of those which expressed the view):

He’s not a bad looking guy. Why wouldn’t chicks go out with him? If they had been nicer to him, this wouldn’t have happened. 

And the saddest reaction to the story is this one:

UCSB senior Kyley Scarlet, who lives next door and has served as president of her own sorority, said all three who were shot are sorority members, but neither of Alpha Phi nor her own.
Scarlet said she was very disturbed by the video describing his anger at sorority girls.
“It’s hard thinking my actions, being part of a sorority, led him to do this,” she said. “When I saw that video I was shaking and crying.”

4.  The Role of the PUAHate Site
Some have pointed out that Elliot Rodger participated at one Manosphere site, PUAHate.com (now inactive), where he wrote about his views on women to a membership which failed to disagree with him.  Indeed, he received support for those views, and nobody made a negative response to these comments he made there in April:

It must be accepted, but not embraced. Human society should never be allowed to degenerate to such brutality. The problem is women, they are primitive in nature and incapable thinking rationally. If they are allowed to choose who to breed with, humanity will never advance. Look at civilizations over 100 years ago. In a way they were much more civilized, simply because women were restricted and controlled. It was a much better world to live in.

And

Eventually these frustrated men won’t be able to take it anymore and will explode in rage and fury, and the female population will suffer the consequences, as they rightfully deserve. Once women are brought to their knees, things can be reformed. The sooner this happens, the better.

On the other hand, his participation at a bodybuilding forum did get some pushback.

The crucial question to answer here is a simple one:  Did Rodger’s participation at the PUAHate site affect his readiness to slaughter?  Did the support he received for his warped ideas strengthen them?

One might argue that his manifesto reveals the same strand of misogyny from the beginning to the end, whereas his visits to the wonderful world of extreme woman-hating sites were quite recent.  But when did he write his manifesto?  My impression is that he completed it right before the planned May 24, 2014 slaughter, which would have allowed his new “learning” about “alpha males,” “beta males” and “incels” (involuntarily celibate people but only men as women’s involuntary celibacy is a non-thing in that world) to have colored his views about his misfortunes and the causes of his suffering.*

Note, also, the language he uses in the YouTube threat:

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)

Bolds are mine.

The second question I cannot help having concerns the fact that Rodger is by no means the only person on the misogyny sites who expresses these kinds of opinions.  Are we to simply assume that all the other enraged (enraged!) men who blame everything bad that ever happened to them on women are simply using their freedom of expression without any further consequences coming out of it?  Chatting to each other about the perfidy of women, the necessity to restrain and cage them, just sharing their feelings about women in a supportive environment?   And this would never make anyone do what George Sodini and Elliot Rodger did?

What is the responsibility of such sites?  Why are extremely hostile comments not moderated?

Rodger wrote this about the PUAHate site in his manifesto:

The Spring of 2013 was also the time when I came across the website PUAHate.com.  It is a forum full of men who are starved for sex, just like me.    Many of them have their own theories of what women are attracted to, and many of them share my hatred of women, though unlike me they would be too cowardly to act on it,.
Reading the posts on that website only confirmed many of the theories I had about how wicked and degenerate women really are.  ….
The website PUAHate is very depressing.  It shows just how bleak and cruel the world is due of the evilness of women.

So there’s the sharing of misogyny, at least, something in which he didn’t have to feel all alone.

5.  The Manifesto
I read through the 140-page manifesto, trying to understand Elliot Rodger’s mind.
As the shortest possible summary:
He comes across as a severely troubled individual, narcissistic, megalomaniac, expecting to be adored and adulated and falling into rage when this does not happen.  The pattern is evident even in his descriptions of a happy childhood.  The happiness depended on him getting what he wanted, and what he wanted was to be the center of attention, a member of the “cool group,” never to be denied anything he desired.  He wanted to be rich, to live in luxury, to be looked up to, to have the hottest blonde by his side as he walked towards the sunset on the beach.These desires in a teenager are not unusual, perhaps.  But what certainly IS unusual are his reactions when the ideal world failed to materialize. Those were extreme rage and the assigning of blame to others, including vast groups of individuals in terms of “all women.”  He also expressed racist anger at men who were not white for having white and pretty girlfriends, because he ranked himself above them.

He bases his sufferings on comparisons to the richest, most handsome, most privileged of all people, and his failure to find himself among that group made him rage.   That  his life was financially comfortable, that he seemed to have a mother who did everything for him (“At mother’s house,  all of my needs were met with excellent precision, whereas at father’s house…”) and an acceptable albeit distant father  didn’t matter at all.
His suffering is real, his life probably was subjectively pure torture, his reactions out-of-proportion to what happened to him.  What would have been an ordinary (or better) life to many was full of painful failures to him, because he interpreted almosteverything except extreme adoration as rejection.
Because of the misogyny he so plentifully expressed, I read the manifesto looking for examples where he would have been rejected by women.  Oddly enough, there are none, unless we count a girl who pushed and yelled at him in childhood, because he first bumped into her.  Other examples are of the type where a woman he smiled at didn’t smile at him, where a woman he said “hi” to didn’t respond.  If female rejection was what he mostly blamed for his suffering, where is that rejection in his manifesto?  Or did he expect women to flock to him, without any necessity to make an effort to meet them or talk to them?
I cannot say for certain.  But the impression I got is that he never approached women at all, that he expected women to approach him, and when they did not, he felt enormous pains of rejection.
If anything, the actual named women in his life were all overly kind to him, with the possible exception of his stepmother who tried to set limits to his behavior and assigned him chores such as cleaning which he felt were beneath him and belonged to the hired help.
I am not a psychiatrist and cannot give psychological diagnoses on the basis of reading something of this sort. I cannot tell what the role of the bullying he faced at school might have been, and I cannot tell if anything could have been done to relieve his pain and suffering.  But the role of entitlement, the role of narcissism and the role of god-like thinking in the manifesto makes me fear that ordinary therapy would not have worked.  I may be wrong, and would be glad to be found wrong.  Still, I feel for his parents and for his family who clearly tried to help him over a period of many years.
The manifesto concludes with his plans to kill lots of people, especially women and men who have sex with women.  He writes:

Women should not have the right to choose who to mate and breed with.  That decision should be made for them by rational men of intelligence.,  If women continue to have rights, they will only hinder the advancement of the human race by breeding with degenerate men…

There is no creature more evil and depraved than the human female.

Women are like a plague.  They don’t deserve to have any rights.  Their wickedness must be contained in order to prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy.  Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals and they need to be treated as such.

He also suggests that most women should be put into concentration camps, to be starved to death, while he watches.  Some would be saved for breeding in laboratories where they would be inseminated with male sperm and where women’s animal natures would be bred out of them.

6.  Conclusions
This has been a difficult post to write, a difficult post to write in the correct tone, a difficult post even to think about.  And I have failed in finding the correct tone, failed in the distance I should have had, perhaps failed on the side of cold and hard anger myself.  The victims of the massacre deserve my focus, not its perpetrator, and even though I justify my writing about the perpetrator as a search for greater understanding I’m not sure that I achieved that.
Yes, Rodger was a troubled individual with severe problems.  Yes, he managed to slip through the police net, yes, he was able to buy three semi-automatic guns, apparently with no questions asked.
Perhaps all that is the framework, the flow-chart of what happened.  Still, the contents of his hatred were largely about women, not as individual women but as some thing he deserved to have, as some thing which deserved punishment when it refused to be available on command.  Yet reading his manifesto suggests to me that that no woman had actually rejected him in some particularly painful manner.  And of course the people he killed had nothing to do with Rodger’s life or with his problems. They were the sacrifice his anger deserved, in that last god-like state.
But Rodger learned his thinking about women (and about other races and the help in his home) somewhere.  It can be learned in many places, including some places on the Internet where the concept that women, as a class,  owe men sex is not unknown.  It is that belief which probably drives some men to the PUA and similar sites where the hurt they feel from real or imaginary rejection by individual women creates a toxic mix with the rage they feel at women who have not delivered the sex those men believe they are entitled to.
Rejection is something most human beings will experience.  It hurts.  It is part of life.  You will, however, get over the hurt.  That simple fact should be taught more widely, together with healthy coping mechanisms which can be used when the inevitable rejection happens, whether it is by a love interest, by a job or by a college.
Nobody is entitled to have sex on demand, just for existing.  That second simple fact should also be taught more widely, together with the interpersonal skills which help someone look at a possible love or sex object as a human being.  Flipping the mirror like that, astonishingly, raises one’s chances of getting laid, too, because people want to be loved for themselves, not as the menu selection for the night.
Certain Manosphere sites teach the exact opposite of these two simple facts, and that is where their potential harm lies.  What the role of the PUAHate.com site might have been in the butchery of Elliot Rodger is something we will never know.  But that site certainly didn’t change his mind or his misogyny, and it’s not unlikely that similar sites can turn more vulnerable minds onto the dark paths.
———–
*The theories of the world these sites propose are as follows:
In the past all (heterosexual) men had lots of sex because women needed to find a male provider, so they sold sex in exchange for bed and board.  Now, because of feminism, women no longer need to do this.  Therefore, they all flock (based on an evolutionary pseudotheory, combined with some stuff about alpha wolves in artificially created wolf-packs (the actual wolf packs in the wild are led by grandpa and grandma wolves)) to a small group of alpha males, men who are at the top of the society, but who are also rude, arrogant bastards who treat women like the scum women are.  The rest of the men are beta males, those who are always also-rans, those who now can’t get any sex at all, because the alphas are getting it all.  Indeed, beta males will never pass their genes on, which means the ultimately failure in the evolutionary race!
The solutions to this “dilemma of extreme harems of just a few alphas” vary, but usually the idea is to kill feminism.  If women had to sell sex for bread and board, then beta males would get more of it.  In general, this part of manosphere doesn’t believe in any women’s rights.The other ideas come from Pickup Artists (PUAs) who teach betas how to come across as alphas, how to hunt for pussy in the best possible manner.  The PUAHate site dislikes the PUAs because of their pyramid schemes and because the hunting instructions don’t  work.  But the PUAHate site also hates women for not spreading their legs enough or at least not to the correct men.

Now I wrote all that with sarcasm, but these are the actual beliefs of those sites.  That we don’t see a few “alphas” with giant harems matters not a whit, that the way these theories treat women (as prey, dinners, something that is a rack for vaginas) doesn’t matter,  that all those sites mean “alpha females” (the most gorgeous women only)  when they talk about “women” is irrelevant.  The idea is that all men are entitled to the small number of truly beautiful and desirable women.
Because the theory doesn’t regard women as individuals, it assumes that all women (whatever their looks, age and other characteristics) can get any amount of sex they wish to obtain, that the whole female gender must be somehow forced to give sex to all men who wish to have it.  Because the women “have” all the sex that these heterosexual men feel entitled to.

Everyday Violence: It’s Not Just Mass Shootings Women Fear by @VABVOX

Everyday Violence: It’s Not Just Mass Shootings Women Fear

by Victoria A. Brownworth

copyright c 2014 Victoria A. Brownworth

Women live in fear. It might not be obvious, palpable, heart-pounding, horror-movie-style fear, but it’s fear, nevertheless. We know what can happen to us. We know one in five of us will be a victim of rape. One in four of us was already a victim of child sex abuse by the time we turned 18. We know that one in three of us in the U.S. will be a victim of domestic violence, one in four in the U.K. We know that murder is the second-leading cause of death for women between the ages of 17 and 35 and that it is the leading cause of death among pregnant women.

We know that the night is not our friend. We are told that what we wear and where we go and how much we drink when we get there all makes us vulnerable to assault. We know that we will, most likely, be blamed for any violence that is perpetrated against us because we see how the media minimizes violence against women and maximizes the concept of the violent assaults on women as “isolated incidents.”

Elliot Rodger is the most recent example of that “isolated incident” meme, but he is also a clear example of exactly why women live in fear: because we never know who is the abuser, rapist or killer among us because so many men are abusive, so many are rapists and men who kill women almost always were people who said they loved them.

The mass-killing by Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista outside Santa Barbara, California on May 23 has raised the voices of myriad feminists and other women in a chorus of outrage. More than other killers in recent similar incidents in the U.S., Rodger stands out. Not because of his youth–he was 22 and the last ten mass shooters have been under 25. Not because of the number of weapons and ammunition he had–three semi-automatic pistols plus more than 400 rounds of bullets, according to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department. Not because he was male–the overwhelming majority of mass shooters in the U.S. have been male.

It was his plan. Elliot Rodger wanted to kill women–as many women as possible. He wrote about it, he vlogged about it on his YouTube channel, he talked about it to the few friends he had. The content was so disturbing, Rodger’s parents, British director Peter Rodger and his Malaysian mother, Chin Rodger, called police to report their son, fearful of what he might do. According to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department Rodger’s parents were on their way to Santa Barbara from Los Angeles–a 100 mile drive in the worst traffic in the country–when their son went on his murderous rampage. They’d been sent the text of his manifesto and an email outlining his plan to kill. They were frantic to stop him.

They were, as we know, too late.

This was not their first effort. They had already gone to police to report their fears after seeing his videos. Police did a “welfare check” on April 30 at the request of Rodger’s mother, to determine if Rodger was a threat to himself or others.

Police came away from that visit referencing Elliot as “polite, kind and wonderful.”

Elliot Rodger was near-gleeful at that response, writing in his manifesto that he had fooled them all and if they had asked to see his room–well within their purview–it would have been all over. Rodger wrote: “The police interrogated me outside for a few minutes, asking me if I hadsuicidal thoughts. I tactfully told them that it was all a misunderstanding, and they finally left. If they had demanded to search my room… That would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over. When they left, the biggest wave of relief swept over me.”

Did the police see the videos? Did Rodger’s mother explain the nature of her fear? (Rodger also writes about his desire to murder his family members.) Or did no one care especially about this son of a director who wasn’t Muslim, wasn’t black, wasn’t poor and presented like the “beautiful Eurasian” he described himself as in his videos?

Was Rodger not taken in for a temporary involuntary psychiatric hold because he was “polite” or because his proposed victims were “just” women?

Rodger’s videos are unnervingly violent, but it’s the text of his 141-page manifesto that is bone-chilling.

Rodger wanted to put women in concentration camps to be starved, tortured, flayed alive. He wanted to “punish all women.” He wanted to “kill as many blonde girls as I can” because he loved blonde “girls” and they didn’t love him back. (He did kill two young blonde women–Veronika Weiss, 19 and Katie Cooper, 22–who were standing outside the sorority he tried to enter to slaughter the women there. He shot at several others.)

The standard scenario is being promulgated in the media about him–he was mentally ill (he had been under the care of therapists and was being seen by a social worker hired by his parents at the time he set about the killings). He has Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He had been bullied. He never fit in among his peers. He was lonely–his writings and videos are an endless litany of misery inflicted, Rodger insists, by cruel women who chose “ugly guys” over the “beautiful Eurasian” and “perfect gentleman” he proclaimed himself to be.

The Elliot Rodger story unsettles me more than most. I’m used to mass shootings in America. I live in the city with the highest body count of the most populous cities in the U.S. Philadelphia is often referred to as “Killadelphia” because unlike New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago, the four cities larger than ours, this fifth-largest city in the U.S. has not lowered the body count. There are still a dozen shootings here a day, at least one resulting in death. In the past month a dozen children have been shot, several have died.

I’m not inured to gun violence, it just doesn’t surprise me in a country where over 100,000 people are shot each year, more than a third of whom die. Mass shootings–characterized by the FBI as the killing of four or more people at a time by one person–happen about every two weeks here. Yet they still only comprise one percent of the total number of shooting victims.

Those victims concern me, however. How long before we forget the names of Rodger’s victims, if we ever really know them? He killed two women and four men. Two of the 13 other wounded remain in critical condition. The violence he inflicted: six killed–his three roommates stabbed multiple times and three others shot, 13 wounded, himself a suicide–took a total of ten minutes.

America and possibly the world–at least the social media world–will be fascinated by Rodger for a news cycle. A week, likely two, until the next such event. One of his victims or possibly more will appear on the morning TV talk shows to discuss their experience.

And then it will be over. Rodger’s name will be consigned to the rolls of young, male killers and the victims themselves will be forgotten.

But the victims and their families won’t forget. For the victims, as one woman victim of a violent crime tweeted me when I was writing about this, the crime will be replayed again and again.

That victim is right, of course. For victims of violence, the news cycle never ends. That’s certainly been true for countless victims and their families I have interviewed over my years as a reporter.

It was also true for me.

I, too, am a victim of violence. I was raped and almost killed on a bright, sunny September afternoon less than 100 yards from my front door. A man walking down my street offered to help me with a chore. I told him cheerily, thanks but no, and seconds after I turned my back he grabbed me from behind. He dragged me into a neighbor’s yard where he beat, punched, slapped, bit, choked, raped and sodomized me. I was left bloodied and torn, with bruises black as night, the size of dinner plates on both thighs and my back. The mark of his fingers were on my throat and my arms for weeks. As were the marks of his teeth around my nipples.

I couldn’t undress or bathe without seeing his mark upon me for months. In addition, the outline of my body remained in the ivy in my neighbor’s yard for many weeks. I saw it every day when I left my house, like one of those chalk outlines in a TV crime drama.

Like the rampage of Elliot Rodger, it didn’t take long for my rapist to repeatedly threaten to kill me, repeatedly assault me, to change my life forever.

I wasn’t his first victim. As I discovered from the police detective who interviewed me, mine was a serial rapist who had been assaulting women in the middle of the day using exactly the same m.o. as was used on me. Five other women had reported similar rapes. There were five other victims like me, but likely far more, since according to the FBI, only 40% of women report when they are raped.

There were, though, at least five other women who had thought they would die, whose bodies were broken, whose psyches would never be the same again. Who were not only afraid of being out alone at night like all women, but now also had to fear the day–something none of us ever thought to fear.

Yet the police had said nothing, even though the rapist was operating only in my neighborhood, which meant he either lived or worked here.

Most rapists and killers commit their crimes close to home. Half of all mass shootings in the U.S. are actually domestic violence killings–the shooter kills family and self. Elliot Rodger committed his crimes within two miles of where he lived–first in his own apartment, then at the sorority house, then just randomly until it was over.

The mayhem Elliot Rodger wreaked in Isla Vista has turned the town itself into a victim, but most definitely the wounded and the families of those killed.

All their lives are changed forever.

We’re not supposed to say victim anymore. Especially not feminists. We’re supposed to say survivor. Many men and a plethora of anti-feminist handmaidens constantly claim feminists demand to be seen as victims, that victimology rules feminism, that all we do is talk about being victims night and day and night.

I’ve thought about that, of course. Women who have experienced violence can’t help but think about it. How do we situate ourselves in the chronology of our own lives when so often that timeline reads “before incest/abuse/rape” and “after incest/abuse/rape”?

I’m not opposed to the term survivor. That may be the path to healing for some. But I prefer victim because I want it made clear that I am not the same as I was before. What happened to me altered me forever. Just as I can never see my neighbor’s yard without thinking that’s where I almost died, I can never get back the parts of me that rapist took with him.

One of the things that is taken by violence is one’s sense of safety. One’s equilibrium is shattered. PTSD has become a meme on social media, but for actual victims, there are indeed triggers and they may diminish over time, but they never disappear.

Every day for the rest of their lives the parents of the six students Rodger killed will wake up to the memory that their child is dead.

Every day the others Rodger wounded will replay what happened to them, how lucky they are to be alive and wonder, why am I alive when others died and worse, what if it happens again?

The most insidious element of male violence is the sure knowledge that this is no one-off: What happened to you once could very easily happen again. Violence is not like lightning–it strikes in the same place time and again. Twenty percent of all rape victims are raped again. I had been raped years before this recent rape, back when I was a college student.

All those women at the University of California Santa Barbara will remember Elliot Rodger’s crime and who his intended victims were. Praise accounts for Rodger have already sprung up on Twitter and Facebook, protected by free speech, but unsettling women who are already victimized by abuse on social media on a daily basis.

We know about everyday sexism and everyday misogyny, but what we don’t talk about is everyday violence.

Elliot Rodger put a spotlight on what Germaine Greer said more than 40 years ago–that women have no idea how much men hate us. The Internet has made it much more clear.

As we wring our societal hands in the U.S. and beyond over Elliot Rodger and who is to blame for his crimes and who might have done more, we ignore the reality that he is not the only one. Rodger is extreme because of his manifesto, because of his videos, because he killed more than one woman.

But as was reported in the BBC, last month in the U.K., of the eight women killed by their partners/spouses or former partners/spouses, several of those men also murdered other members of the primary victim’s family.

Is that really so different from Elliot Rodger’s crime? Or is it just his weaponry that’s different?

And as we know, it is not one man raping all the girl children and adult women. It’s not one man beating all the girlfriends and wives.

Everyday violence against women is a thing, now. As it always was. We just know more about it. But when we focus on extremes like Elliot Rodger, we forget women’s reality: We’re being raped and killed every day by men who never posted a YouTube video about it and never wrote a manifesto.

What are we going to do about that?

Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA, the Keystone Award, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She won the 2013 Society of Professional Journalists Award for Enterprise/Investigative Reporting. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and a contributing editor for Curve magazine, Curve digital and Lambda Literary Review. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times. She is the author and editor of nearly 30 books including the award-winning Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic and Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability. Her collection, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for Cultural/Historical Fiction. Her Y/A novel, Cutting will be published in fall 2014. @VABVOX

 

Women’s responses to the mass murder at UCSB perpetrated by Elliot Rodger

We’re collating all the responses written by women to Elliott Rogder’s brutal murder of two women and four men in Ilsa Vista on Friday. The response from men and the media to Rodger’s clear hatred of women is state we are over-reacting and being ridiculous. This is gas lighting on a systemic level.

 

Elliot Rodger’s California shooting spree: further proof that misogyny kills by Jessica Valenti

Elliot Rodger And Men Who Hate Women at The Belle Jar

We need to talk about systemic male violence not the “work of a madman” at My Elegant Gathering of White Snows

What Elliot Rodger Said About Women Reveals Why We Need to Stamp Out Misogyny by Elizabeth Plank

Let’s call the Isla Vista killings what they were: misogynist extremism by Laurie Penney

Violent and wrong: Elliot Rodger’s crime should not taint my child at Grace Under Pressure

Misogyny Is Poison, And You’re Drinking It at Jess ZimmermanIronic points of light.

The Pick-Up Artist Community’s Predictable, Horrible Response to a Mass Murder by Amanda Hess

Joining the dots: From fairy tales to Elliot Rodger by Glosswitch

Elliot Rodger and illusions of nuance by Glosswitch

THE UNDERACHIEVING GRADUATE ON… THE WEEK’S EVENTS on The UGGO

Femicide, Misogyny and Elliot Rodger at End Online Misogyny

Femicide, Misogyny and Elliot Rodger Part 2 at End Online Misogyny

Please add links to any blogs you have written or read in the comments!