[Content Note: Misogyny; objectification; rape culture.]
Another trend I'm seeing in the Roger Elliot think pieces by self-described nerdy or geeky guys is the use of the phrase "out of my league," or the associated concept.
This idea—that there are some women, generally by virtue of their proximity to kyriarchal beauty standards, are inaccessible to certain men, by virtue of their deviation from kyriarchal beauty and/or traditional masculinity standards—is absolutely toxic. It is also bullshit.
It feeds the narrative that women are a sex class, whose only value to (straight) men is their sexual desirability and availability. It feeds the belief that physical attraction is the only component of attraction—or, at least, the only relevant one. It feeds the idea that entitlement to women is only a problem when men feel entitled to women whom they don't "deserve."
That is not a comprehensive list. That is only the mere tip of a huge iceberg of fuckery that's embedded with "out of my league" rhetoric.
For a moment, let me speak to my own experience as a woman who deviates from kyriarchal beauty standards in multiple ways, not least of which is being fat. I've been fat for my entire dating life, and I have never thought that anyone was "out of my league."
Already I feel the fingers itching to send me missives that I'm a delusional narcissist. (Aren't I always?) But the reason I've never thought someone was "out of my league" is because it's dehumanizing junk to impose on another person. Putting someone on a pedestal is just the flipside of considering them less than.
And because, although I'm aware that there will always be people—irrespective of their own appearance—who won't be attracted to me for a variety of reasons, physical attraction among them, I have enough solid attributes as a complex person that I never thought, "He's too good for me."
Which is a very different thought indeed than, "He might not be into me for any number of fucking reasons."
And, the truth is, "he's out of my league" presumes that a man I don't even know is good enough for me. Like it doesn't matter if he's a piece of shit, as long as he's good-looking.
I look for a little more than that in a partner.
As it happens, I've been with attractive dudes with whom I've connected in important ways who would have been deemed "out of my league" on looks alone, but they weren't "out of my league" because I'm awesome.
That's a joke, of course—the point is that they thought I was awesome, because instead of holding them in rapt adoration from afar, I let myself be known. One human being to another.
And the men who haven't found me awesome? Well, that is their right. Which seems like a pretty silly thing to say, when a fat woman says it, because no one would ever think anything else than that an idealized man has the right to reject a fat woman.
Yet the "out of my league" stuff is embedded with the idea that idealized women don't really have the right to reject men on the basis of anything but their looks, and that idealized women couldn't possibly reject a man on the basis of his being a shitbird with a lousy personality.
Sure, maybe some dudes wouldn't be into me because I'm fat. But there are dudes who wouldn't be into me because of my personality or politics or something else that is about who I am.
And because I don't feel entitled to anyone's affections, no less everyone's, I'm good with that.
That's not about "leagues." That's about human compatibility. Of which physical attraction is only one part.
"Out of my league" is a very convenient trope to avoid having to examine why it is that someone might reject you for reasons other than your appearance, and avoid respecting that, if they do, that's okay, because no one is entitled to another person's attention, or desire, or love, or friendship, or any piece of their humanity.
There's really just no such thing as objectively out of someone else's league. That's a projection onto attractive (or rich, or white, or popular, or WHATEVER) people to mask one's own insecurity and tendency to idealize and dehumanize other people.
To lazily dodge making oneself lovable, if one wants to be loved.
The thing about guys who claim they've been rejected exclusively because of their looks is that it's pretty evident, just in the way they report this assertion, that there are reasons why a woman might reject them which has nothing to do with their looks.
Does anyone really imagine that Elliot Rodger wasn't attractive to women because of his appearance? Does anyone really imagine if only he'd "gone after" slightly or significantly less attractive women, he would have had women lining up to date him?
I mean.
Listen, of course there are people who reject other people exclusively because of looks, but maybe those people aren't "out of your league" so much as they are simply "not interested."
That's really not a cause for frustration and resentment, if you don't feel entitled to the reflexive affections of anyone in whom you convey interest.
On Geek Guys' Elliot Rodger Think Pieces, Part 2
On the Geek Guys' Elliot Rodger Think Pieces
[Content Note: Misogyny; objectification; rape culture.]
In the past few days, I've read a bunch of pieces by self-described nerdy or geeky guys, who identify with aspects of Elliot Rodger's resentful, entitled misogyny and/or identify with his expressed frustration at not being able to "get laid." None of the pieces I've read have justified Rodger's violent rage; all of them have, in fact, explicitly condemned it.
(That is not to suggest there are not plenty of pieces that do justify or even laud Rodger's violent rage. I just don't read them.)
And one of the things I'm seeing over and over in these pieces, despite their ostensibly being about how acknowledging women's humanity and agency is important, is a distinct failure to acknowledge women as anything but the sex class. That is, there is very little discussion about how straight men should and do have other reasons for interacting with women than trying to have sex with them.
I'm sure many of the men writing these pieces would argue that should be taken as read: Of course I believe that. As though it's self-evident. But it is not self-evident to the many men who treat women precisely like this every day, and to the many women who are treated every day like we have no value beyond our willingness to fuck men. Or their desire to fuck us.
To truly and meaningfully challenge the dynamic of entitled misogyny, the men who write these pieces need to make explicit that women do not exist to be sex toys for men.
In all of these pieces, where men talk about their days longing after women from afar, they are talking about objectifying women. And then they come to the denouement, where they finally figure out how to talk to women, huzzah, but individual men figuring out how to talk to women is not a solution to the systemic oppression and attendant objectification which produces men like Elliot Rodger.
They never get to the part where the cultural solution, beyond their individual success, is humanizing and visibilizing women in a nonsexual context. They never get to the part where the opportunity and obligation to interact with women in a way that isn't sexual is something that every man needs in order to undermine the narrative of women as a sex class.
They never address that that is both an opportunity and obligation that many men do not have, because our entire culture is set up so that most men don't have to interact in spaces that center female humanity if they don't want to.
Many of the men writing these pieces speak of being "lucky" that they didn't take a similar path to Elliot Rodger, or imagine some sliding-doors alternate reality in which maybe they could have gone down a similar road.
But it isn't luck, and it often isn't personal fortitude, that stops people primed with resentful, entitled privilege from enacting violence against the marginalized people they scapegoat for their frustrations.
It is usually the opportunity and obligation to interact with those people in a way that makes it impossible to maintain the illusion those people are responsible for your unhappiness.
Meaningful, humanizing interaction.
Passages in many of these pieces that essentially boil down to "once I realized I wasn't entitled to women, I got one, and that saved me" merely entrench the notion that women are prizes for straight men to be won, if only they figure out the magic combination to get in a lady's pants.
That's not a message which in any way supports women's humanity and agency. It still treats us like a sex class. Like prizes. Like property.
If you want to help bust the fuck out of the toxic culture that produces men like Elliot Rodger, you have to stop writing pieces that effectively explain how there's a "nice way" to be like Elliot Rodger.
Don't write a piece about how you learned how to get laid. Write a piece about how you learned that women are human beings.
If you have.
[My thanks to Shakesville Contributors Aphra_Behn, SKM, and Hallelujah_Hippo for the conversation we had which led to this piece.]
Police Knew About Rodger's "Disturbing" Videos; Didn't View Them
[Content Note: Violence; guns; self-harm; misogyny; racism; disablism.]
In the immediate aftermath of Elliot Rodger's violent spree, during which he killed six people and injured thirteen others before taking his own life, police spokesperson Kelly Hoover said that "the sheriff's office was not aware of any videos until after the shooting rampage occurred."
That was not true.
Law officers who visited Elliot Rodger three weeks before he killed six college students near a Santa Barbara university were aware that he had posted disturbing videos but didn't watch them, and they didn't know about his final video detailing his "Day of Retribution" until after the deadly rampage, officials said.But of course we already know why. The four deputies, police officer, and trainee dispatcher who spent 10 minutes at Rodger's residence interviewing him concluded he was a "perfectly polite, kind, and wonderful human."
...The guns he used in the killings last Friday were stashed inside his apartment at the time, but police never searched the residence or conducted a check to determine if he owned firearms because they didn't consider him a threat.
The statement [issued Thursday] does not explain why the videos were not viewed or whether the deputies knew anything about the contents beyond a description of them being "disturbing."
That seems to be an assessment which might have changed, had they viewed any of Rodger's videos, which his mother told them were "disturbing" in requesting the safety check.
Instead, they simply asked Rodger about the videos, and he told them the videos were "merely a way of expressing himself."
Rodger wrote in the manifesto about the April 30 visit by the deputies and said it prompted him to remove most of his videos from YouTube. He re-posted at least some of them in the week leading up to the killings. He wrote that the deputies asked him if he had suicidal thoughts, but "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."Over and over, we see that deference to armed authority by men who are not black is presumed to be indicative of decency, while even the most willfully misinterpreted "resistance" to armed authority by black men (Jonathan Ferrell, Oscar Grant, et. al.) is presumed to warrant deadly force. These are both deadly assumptions.
Rodger was a predator—and predators prey. They know how to evade detection by working the tropes of a patriarchal culture to their favor. They know that all it takes it looking like a nice guy in order for most people to assume that they are one.
This is a high-profile case, but lots of police routinely fail to bring charges against rapists or domestic abusers because they seem like nice guys.
A key part of the prevention of violence against women is police doing a thorough fucking job and not substituting for a real investigation their personal impressions of a dude who's been red-flagged.
In the earliest reports on Rodger's spree, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown called Rodger "severely mentally disturbed." The "crazy gunman" stuff is not only a red herring to avoid addressing violent misogyny; it's also to avoid addressing accountability for the sort of police failures that abet violent misogyny.
Like believing a killer is a "wonderful human," because of his privilege.
[Related Reading: Feminism 101: Your Underdog Lovelorn Romantic May Be My Rapist.]
* * *
UPDATE: For those who aren't on Twitter, some additional thoughts I shared on Twitter are Storified below the fold. Content Note for domestic violence, rape culture, rape apologia, murder, homophobia, police misconduct.
Welp
[Content Note: Disablism; guns; misogyny; racism.]
Here is just a whole article about how Congress is too fucking useless to do anything about gun reform, so they're once again fixing to pretend like they still have a purpose on the planet by talking about mental healthcare reform in the wake of another mass shooting.
I encourage you to read the entire article, because there's a lot to talk about but I'm only going to highlight one part:
"Our mental health system has failed and more families have been destroyed because Washington hasn't had the courage to fix it," Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said in a statement over the weekend after the shooting. "How many more people must lose their lives before we take action on addressing cases of serious mental illness?"It would also make it easier for family members to take action to commit people who need treatment. The idea here, of course, is that we're meant to imagine that Elliot Rodger could have been stopped if only his family had been empowered to commit him. We're meant to imagine that every man who picks up a gun and kills a lot of people could be stopped if only their families are empowered to commit them.
...Murphy says his bill would also expand access to psychiatric treatment and it would encourage states to set a new standard for committing people — the need for treatment, not that they present an imminent danger. It would also make it easier for family members to take action.
This is a dangerous, and disablist, fantasy.
It is also tasking individuals with finding solutions to systemic problems, which doesn't work. It never works.
Even if we imagine that committing Elliot Rodger would have stopped his crime; even if we imagine that traditional mental healthcare could have meaningfully addressed the violent misogyny and racism underwriting his killing spree; even if we imagine that some finite consignment to a mental healthcare facility would have "fixed" him; even if we imagine that there was a law that empowered his family and that his family made use of that legal power and that Rodger was compliant with therapy into which he was forced against his will; even if we imagine all of these things in this one specific instance, we are required to cast aside everything we know about how our culture works.
And one of the key cultural habits which we are obliged to ignore to imagine that this sort of legislation could work is that "mental illness" is often deployed as an excuse on behalf of murderous misogynists and racists, and routinely deployed to discredit women and/or people of color who are addressing misogynist and/or racist harm done to us.
It isn't MRAs and PUAs and other lifestyle misogynists and chronic harassers and vengeful abusers who are called "crazy" by society; it's the women who are their targets. It's the woman who raise our voices in opposition to misogyny and harassment.
We are the ones who are seen as "crazy." As "hysterical." As "narcissists." As "delusional." As "paranoid." We are the ones who are dismissed out of hand by law enforcement, by human resources departments, by friends and family. We are the ones accused of seeing things that aren't there.
This is the reality of the culture into which Congress wants to unleash legislation empowering families to forcibly commit people they believe are in need of treatment—a culture in which patriarchal and white supremacist beliefs and behaviors are the norm, and challenging them gets you called nuts.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today...
Today, President Obama will "outline his vision for a new chapter in American foreign policy...with a speech aimed at quelling growing criticism of US isolationism following troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan and recent decisions against military intervention elsewhere. In an address to graduating officers at West Point that White House officials say will map out America's new role in the world, the president is expected to argue there is a middle way between interventionism and isolationism that will not drag the US into unnecessary conflicts in future." A new policy that will last as long as until the next time we've got a Republican president.
[Content Note: Abduction; misogyny; terrorism; abuse] The Nigerian army announced that it now knows the location of (at least some of) the girls being held hostage by Boko Haram, but they "have ruled out the use of force to rescue them and turned down a deal to exchange prisoners who are members of Boko Haram for the girls' release, so it is unclear what their next step will be." This morning, it was reported that Nigeria's former president Olusegun Obasanjo is meeting with "people close to Boko Haram in an attempt to broker the release of more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by the militants." The meeting "was focused on how to free the girls through negotiation." Dear Maude I hope these negotiations are productive.
[CN: Food insecurity; death] The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) is warning that nearly "200,000 children under the age of five could die from severe malnutrition in Somalia by the end of the year, unless the United Nations receives emergency funds to stave off mass hunger. ...Only $15m has been received against the appeal by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) to donor states for $150m to provide vital health services to more than three million women and children in the Horn of Africa nation this year." If you would like to donate to UNICEF, go here.
The Illinois state senate has voted "to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). If it moves forward in the state House, Illinois will become the 36th state to ratify the ERA." Maybe we can get this done in the next 100 years!
[CN: Guns; violence; dehumanization] Joe the Plumber continues to be a despicable shitbird: In an open letter to the families of the victims shot by Elliot Rodger, he writes: "I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But: As harsh as this sounds—your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights." Fuck. You.
[CN: Homophobia; racism; misogyny] Speaking of shitbirds: "Phil Robertson, the controversial star of the hit TV show 'Duck Dynasty' will address the upcoming Republican Leadership Conference on Thursday." Ha ha "controversial." Which is a neat way of saying "a man who spews unrepentant homophobia, racism, and misogyny under the guise of being a Christian."
[CN: Privilege; class warfare] Emma Thompson is talking some real shit about working moms who don't have the same privilege that she does. Her comments stand in such stark opposition to what Angelina Jolie said just last week about how her wealth gives her so much parenting privilege.
And finally: Student-Run Business Bringing Joy of Puppies to Those Who Can't Own. And finding forever homes for a lot of puppies in the process. Yay!
On Elliot Rodger
[Content Note: Violence; misogyny; privilege; disablism; racism.]
Friday night, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old man went on a shooting spree, killing six people: Katie Cooper, 22; Veronika Weiss, 19; Weihan Wang, 20; George Chen, 19; Cheng Yuan Hong, 20; and Christopher Michael-Martinez, 20. Rodger was also killed, reportedly by his own hand. An additional 13 people were injured.
Despite the fact that Rodger left behind a manifesto detailing his hatred of and contempt for women, who he felt owed him sexual gratification, and a video expressing the same sentiments, immediately the narrative became that Rodger was "crazy," and/or that the Asperger's with which he'd been diagnosed as a child was responsible for his murder spree.
Over the last four days, I have pushed back on this idea. A Storify of my tweets is below the fold.
Or, you can just read my timeline here. I also strongly recommend reading the timelines of the following people: Amadi, Imani Gandy, Amanda Levitt, Jessica Luther, Sydette, Liza Sabater, Dr. Jane Chi, Lauren Chief Elk, Tina Vasquez, Angus Johnston, Elon James White, and Jordan Banks. Please feel welcome to leave links to other recommended commentators and/or articles in comments.
I don't have much more to say than I've already said on Twitter, but I do want to make the point (again) that mentally ill people are more likely themselves to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
Yes, we do need better mental healthcare access. But Rodger, a highly privileged man from a wealthy family, had access to great mental healthcare—his family could afford it, and he was getting treatment—but one of the things about which we have to be honest is that most mental health professionals are not equipped to address entitled misogyny as a psychological or behavioral concern.
And the reason for that is because we don't culturally regard entitled misogyny as a psychological or behavioral concern. Rodger was, after all, merely taking the basic precept of a patriarchal system—that men have ownership of and are entitled to women—to its extreme.
(Which is to say nothing of the fact that mental health professionals are not mind-readers. They can only address that of which they're aware.)
He holds the ultimate accountability for his actions, but we need to not pretend that these murders happened in a vacuum. It's no way to honor victims to refuse to acknowledge the cultural failures in the shadow of which their lives were taken.
My sincerest condolences to the survivors of Rodger's victims. My fervent hopes to the injured survivors that they have access to the care that they need to heal.
