A young man named Elliot Rodger apparently killed six people Saturday in Isla Vista California. I say “apparently” because the story is new enough that it keeps changing. When I first heard it, he had shot six people dead, but now it appears that three of them were stabbed, according to a recent version of the story. Apparently most of his targets were women, although not all of them. The story is likely to change again by the time you read this. For that reason, I wouldn’t normally write about a story like this, since almost anything I say would be speculation, and it could turn out to be very wrong when a clearer story emerges.
Still, a lot of people are talking about it anyway — it’s hard not to, when it’s something so shocking — and I’d like to talk a little bit about what some of them are saying.
The first thing to note is that this is a confusing situation. A lot of people are emotionally upset by what happened, yet the story isn’t really clear yet. That’s a combination that is guaranteed to produce angry misunderstandings. People might say strange things just because they’re working from a different version of the facts than we are, which isn’t their fault (especially if it turns out their facts are correct and ours are wrong). They might also be repeating something they heard without thinking it through or trying to verify the truth of it. So for the first couple of days, if somebody says something that really pisses us off, we might want to cut them some slack and hold off on our angry responses.
And even when we don’t want to cut them any slack, we may still want to hold off on angry responses anyway. Some people are just trolls, saying outrageous stuff just to be outrageous and get a reaction. It’s best not to feed the trolls. (Although in some cases, you will probably want to keep an eye on them in the future. Geez.)
With that in mind, I’d like to talk about some of the discussion of the “cause” of Elliot Rodger’s killing spree. Most of the emerging discussion of his motive centers around a video he posted and a “manifesto” he sent out. I haven’t seen either of them, and I don’t want to, but apparently they’re quite misogynistic, and he literally threatens to kill a bunch of women. This has naturally lead a number of people to make pronouncements about the how Rodger’s killings reflect the misogyny of our society.
One immediate complication to that view is that, as far as I can tell, Elliot Rodger started by killing his male roommates, and he ended up killing more men than women. (He also wounded a lot of people, and the news reports don’t talk much about them, so he may have shot more women than men.) I’m not saying that he wasn’t a misogynist, but it’s probably not a sufficient explanation for his behavior. I’m assuming he has some type of mental disorder.
For that reason alone, it would probably be a mistake to take much of what Rodger says at face value. Furthermore, murderers are often not really reliable sources of information about their motives. Almost none of them say, “I killed because I’m a violent asshole.” They cast blame elsewhere — the victim usually, but also society in general, racial minorities, women, video games, porn, music lyrics…anything other than themselves. Sometimes this is a clear case of a manipulative personality looking for a way out, and sometimes it’s just something they’ve come to believe. They feel lonely, cut off, and rejected by the world, and they blame the world for those feelings, and they seek their revenge.
I’ve heard that Elliot Rodger was associated with the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) community, and some people have tried to use his killing spree as proof of the misogyny in the PUA community. This is spurious reasoning. Spree killers, whatever their motives, are very rare. However they fit into society, whatever communities they are associated with, they are far out at the end of the curve, and they tell us very little about the bulk of the people clustered in the center.
If you want to make judgements about the values of a community, you should base it on the values displayed by the bulk of its members, not by the crazy people on the fringe. Elliot Rodger is not proof of the misogyny in the PUA community. The PUA community is proof of the misogyny in the PUA community.
I’ve also heard that Rodger was a Men’s Rights Activist (MRA), and some people are arguing that his killing spree is proof of the misogyny in that community as well. Again, you can’t judge a group’s values by the behavior of its most extreme members. Judge the misogyny of the MRA community by the misogyny of the MRA community.
There are those who would argue that by portraying Rodger as a lone madman rather than a representative of our misogynistic society, I am minimizing the problem of violence against women. I would argue that the people who are holding Elliot Rodger out as an example of societal misogyny are distracted from the larger social problem.
Spree killers are a small part of the problem of violence against women. The larger problem is less spectacular and more mundane, so it gets less news coverage. Usable statistics are surprisingly hard to find via Google, but according to a study by the Violence Policy Center (based on the FBI UCR Homicide Supplement), in 2009 there were 989 women killed by their husbands or boyfriends. An additional 590 women were killed by other men that they knew. That is far more than are killed by spree killers in any year. Using those numbers as a statistical average, it probably means that on the day Elliot Rodger killed two women in his spree, another 2 or 3 women were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and an additional 1 or 2 more were killed by some man in their life. And unlike Rodger’s shooting spree, that toll keeps repeating itself day after day after day. It may be a better place to focus our efforts.
(And if you think domestic violence gets little coverage or study, it gets even worse for violence against sex workers, but that’s another matter.)
At the end of the day, I’m pretty confident that Elliot Rodger was some kind of madman. He may have seen himself in a political context, as striking a blow for unloved men everywhere against women and other men, but that doesn’t mean he actually was, or that other men in similar situations are going to follow his example.
And for the record, whatever mental disorder he was suffering from, he’s out on the fringe there as well. People with mental health problems are generally no more violent than everyone else.
There’s no proof at all that Elliot Rodger was involved in the men’s rights movement.
The forums he’s been found to have posted to, a bodybuilder forum and “PUAhate”, are not connected to the MRM.
His youtube subscriptions, cited as proof of a connection, do not include a single men’s rights channel.
Furthermore, none of his beliefs have anything to do with men’s rights views.
There’s a reason why no source has been able to point to even one specific example of a connection to the men’s rights movement. There is no such connection.
All I can say is what I said in the post: I’ve heard that Rodger was a men’s rights activist. It’s possible that the people I heard it from were wrong. As for what his beliefs have to do with men’s rights, I don’t know enough about his beliefs or the body of beliefs typical of the contemporary men’s rights movement to make a judgement.
In any case, my general point was that spree shooters like him are so rare that they don’t tell us anything meaningful about the groups they belong to. Even if his beliefs were in complete lockstep with the men’s rights movement, then the men’s rights movement might help explain his actions, but his actions wouldn’t tell us anything meaningful about the men’s rights movement, any more than it would tell us anything meaningful about gun owners, the mentally ill, mixed race asian/white people, BMW owners, UC Santa Barbara students, or Game of Thrones fans.