(Not So) Breaking News: Some Dudez Really Do Hate Women!

Perhaps you've heard by now that last week a man, George Sodini, walked into a gym, opened fire on an aerobics class, murdered 3 women, and injured 9 before killing himself. Because of rants in his online diary and other evidence, police believe that he hated women and was targeting them specifically.

I read through his writings and they are indeed sad and disturbing on many levels. In his diary, Sodini presents himself as an isolated loner who hadn't had sex in almost 20 years, as someone whose brother made fun of him in front of his girlfriends when he was younger, and who now can't understand why he hasn't had a girlfriend since 1984. He writes that he dresses "good," is "clean-shaven," "bathes" and yet "30 million women" have rejected him over the years. Throughout the months preceding his Big Plan (of murdering women), he repeatedly refers to his unbearable loneliness and how Not Fun his life is because he has no friends and no girlfriend.

His writings evidence an anti-social sense of entitlement about his obsessive desire to have a woman of his very own. Indeed, it wasn't so much a real girlfriend with thoughts, feelings, and wants of her own that he wanted, for he never talked about personality traits he found interesting in potential girlfriends. But rather, he just wanted a woman. Of his own. At his side. To reassure himself and everyone else that he was a Real Man. He wanted a woman like, as blogger Jeff Fecke observes, "the way some people want a really sweet computer, the way others want a brand new car. His desire was not for a person, but for a thing, an object." As Dan Savage has documented, he was part of the "pick-up artist"/"seduction" community, a community revolving around a concept so creepy and disturbing I long for last week when I didn't even know such a thing existed. The title of a book found at his house? Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. Because every Alpha Male (or wannabe) deserves a Pretty Young Thang on his arm.

And thus, perhaps due to deep-seated hatred/fear of women, mental illness, and/or low self-esteem, he seems to have based almost his entire self-worth on the fact that he hadn't had sex in years and that he didn't have a woman. Yet, other than the fact that Sodini murdered 3 women, I don't think his thoughts regarding his sense of entitlement to a Woman-Thingy are horribly uncommon. And certainly, we all have our moments where we feel lonely, stupid, and alienated from other people. That's just part of the human condition. What I have more trouble understanding is why someone who feels those human emotions that all of us feel at times uses them to hatch and then carry out a murder spree.

And then I went ahead and read what people on the internets were saying.

See, as I was doing research to write this blog post I came across the even more disturbing phenomenon of men who lauded, justified, and/or condoned Sodini's violence. Because I don't want to link to certain sites and direct doodz who hate and possibly condone the murder of women directly to this Lady Blog of mine, I am going to link to a post by Ampersand, of Alas, A Blog, who has compiled some of the MRA and anti-feminist reactions to this murder.

One guy calls Sodini an "MRA hero" and gives his violence "kudos." Many blame this incident on feminism and the "fact" that men are treated much worse in society than are women. Many refer to this crime as the natural "consequences" of women rejecting men and denying them sex because, after all, "every man DOES deserve to get laid."

So ya'll, after throwing up a little in my mouth, I have to admit that reading these diatribes made me a little teensy bit more of a lesbian. I didn't think that was possible, but hey, you learn something new every day. Many feminists know that many men have a sense of entitlement when it comes to women's bodies and sexuality. When women reject men, the male sense of entitlement leads to unbelievable resentment and, in some cases, hatred of women. This is not news. Ampersand puts it quite well, actually:

"Mass violence is what’s unusual about Sodini, not his sense of entitlement to sex with attractive women, nor his resentful misogyny."

Visit any MRA or "anti-misandry" site and you will see the shockingly large numbers of heterosexual men raging within their homosocial forum about the overall cunti-ness of women.

So, am I surprised that a Nice Normal Poor Rejected Guy snapped and decided to commit an act of anti-woman terrorism? Nope. No way. The entitlement towards women's bodies waters the seeds of that violence every single day in a world in which "men's worst fear is that women will laugh at them [and] women's worst fear is that men will kill them."