A few days ago, an angry, bitter, deranged young man who had been shuttled back and forth between two broken homes for much of his formative years enacted the ultimate act of revenge upon the people he had come to blame for his misfortunes. He killed both men and women by stabbing, shooting, and using a motor vehicle, thus making the usual blame-guns narrative a little more difficult to sustain than usual.
Various people have blamed various things. One article blamed his parents for divorcing (while making it clear that he is ultimately at fault for his own actions). Another blamed the video games into which he sought solace. Yet others have claimed that the girls who shunned him were at fault for refusing to have sex with him. They depict these girls, as he did, as bullies who tease certain types of young men by dressing sexily and then having sex with different young men instead.
I'm not going to blame the girls. That's silly. I'm not really 'blaming' anybody but him, in the end. He had a problem and he went off. It happens occasionally, even in the best society. If it hadn't been the girls, he would have found something else. However, I do want to discuss something that this whole situation has uncovered, a profound change in society that I see as a larger problem that daily causes its own griefs and tragedies, never covered on the news. The crux of the statement just happens to be the very point of Elliot Rodger's manifesto: He felt that it was the women's job to seek him out for sex, the way they had been seeking out other men for sex, thus their refusal was a personal slight.
When did our society change so profoundly?
Before Modern Feminism, the man's job was to pursue the woman, and the woman's job was to not make his task easy. I am not talking about flirting with him, making promises only to withdraw them, teasing him for amusement. Her job was to rebuff him unless he met a set of standards that were hardly arbitrary: keep himself clean, show respect for her, and ensure that he had the ability to provide for her should she make herself vulnerable through pregnancy. Then as now, she decided whether he was worthy. Then, unlike now, she required him to commit to her exclusively, first.
"What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone." That quip, made by 1960's activist Stokely Carmichael, seems to describe the position of women in this new liberal feminist 'paradise'. Around the same time, liberal feminist groups worked out the slogan "Women Say Yes to Men Who Say No", which basically promised free sex to men who did not join the military to fight in the Vietnam War. More recently, "Rock the Vote" encouraged women to offer sex only to men who supported Obamacare. Imagine the irony of a bunch of "liberated" women trading sexual favors in return for having someone else buy their hormonally-based contraception.
Now as I said above, Elliot Rodger had problems, and he would have fixated on something. I do have to ask, however, if those women did not grow up in a society that expected them to seek out men and have sex with them while teasing the others with their partly-clothed bodies, would he have developed the belief that it was their job to have sex with him?
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