Making Sense of Rodger

~ Laura

Since I blogged briefly about Elliot Rodger last night, the whole “find meaning in something horrible” media saga has gone off in different directions.

Last night, the story was that misogyny was everywhere, violence against women is widespread, and this guy just took basic women hatred to a new level. (I’m not trying to downplay this message. It is an important message. I’m just say that’s where the conversation began.)

Now, we’ve gone off in two different directions.

Direction A is that the Hollywood culture brought us here. Check out Anne Hornaday in the Washington Post, Arthur Chu at the Daily Beast, and Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.

Direction B is a slight detour, but it’s worth mentioning. I’m starting to pick up people who are connecting misogyny with porn.

[This post is a work-in-progress.]

UPDATE1: Direction C is always guns.

Published by Laura

15 thoughts on “Making Sense of Rodger”

  2. on B: the rate of rape has been going down in recent years, pretty much in line with the availability of the most explicit stuff for free on the Internet. Any fifteen year old, with a few clicks, can find stuff zippier than anything I or my peers could find by sneaking into the adult section of the magazine rack at Palmer’s Drug Store. So it seems to me at least plausible that guys now sitting at home awash in onanism may be guys who would have been out raping thirty years ago.
    That doesn’t exclude objectification, of course. But, damn, if they’re not doing anything vile, who cares what they think?

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    1. Other possible factors for a decline in rape (if it’s happening): DNA testing (both public awareness of it and the ability to correctly identify a rapist), cell phones and potential serial rapists getting locked up mid-career. There are a lot of people in prison these days.

      Speaking of crime rates, as I recall, there’s been a decline in gun homicides in general

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/07/chart-of-the-day-gun-homicides-are-down-49-percent-since-1993/

      but, very interestingly, at the very same time, mass shootings are up

      http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21586585-mass-shootings-are-up-gun-murders-down

      It’s very peculiar.

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  3. What dave s. said. In my radical youth, I used to be a big devotee of Catharine MacKinnon, but the empirical evidence doesn’t support her contentions in any straightforward way.

    As to guns, that was certainly the angle the NYC tabloids ran with for the first couple days, but it isn’t clear to me how, when a mentally disturbed young man stabs his three roommates to death, it tells us something about guns.

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  4. Guns matter, because they let the madman kill more people and more people who are further away from you, in both space and society (obvious, yes, ’cause we arm our soldiers with guns and not knives).

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    1. That might be true as a general proposition, but it doesn’t seem very relevant here.

      Mostly, the actions of crazy people are meaningless, but people have trouble with that, so they import meaning into the events. The meanings they import are their own preconceived ideas: it can’t be anything else, since the events have no inherent meaning. So, for the NYC tabloid journalists, a mass killing means that we need gun control, without regard to the details of any particular mass killing.

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      1. It is relevant here. He killed people with guns, guns that he acquired legally. It’s harder to make it relevant in the school stabbing (which appears to have been similarly motivated). But, only one person died in that.

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      2. Except, as we’ve discovered, stopping homicidal crazy people is really hard. Making them less effective is one immediate solution to lower the body count. It won’t prevent every murder, but definitely decreases the scope of the damage. Without access to guns, it’s really hard to mass murder strangers. E.g. the American Sandy Hook vs. the Chinese “Sandy Hook.” Same day, same sort of troubled young man, same victim type and victim count (mid 20s). Except with a gun, all those people died. With a knife, they all survived

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenpeng_Village_Primary_School_stabbing

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      3. B.I. said:

        “Without access to guns, it’s really hard to mass murder strangers.”

        No, it’s not.

        But I’m a socially responsible person, so I’m not going to list all of the homicidal options that come to mind.

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      4. My suspicion is that the mass shooting has become a sort of American folk art form. Sure, there are other ways to kill people, but a mass shooting is the canonical form.

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      6. That’s as relevant as throwing in 3000 dead, no guns for the 9-11 terrorism attack: “It was the most sophisticated in a spate of recent terror attacks in China” An associated group also carried out a coordinated knife attack in which 8 terrorists killed 33 people. Clearly it’s possible to kill people with other materials — guns just make it easier, and, particularly easier for lone, mentally disturbed individuals.

        Australia is doing the experiment — of whether decreasing the availability of guns might reduce gun deaths:

        http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-australians-gave-back-their-guns/2013/08/23/108458dc-0c09-11e3-8974-f97ab3b3c677_story.html

        “In 1996, after a gunman killed 35 people and wounded 18 others in Port Arthur, a former penal colony turned tourist attraction, Australians collectively decided not to follow what then-Prime Minister John Howard called “the American way” on guns.

        Just 12 days after the massacre, Howard, a conservative, announced that he had convinced Australia’s states to ban automatic and semiautomatic weapons and instigated a gun buyback for high-powered and rapid-fire rifles. A uniform system for registering and licensing firearms was introduced.

        A third of the guns in Australia were handed in to the government. Polls found that as much as 90 percent of the public approved of the stricter gun laws.

        There had been 11 gun massacres in the decade preceding 1996, but there have been no mass shootings since. This is a source of national pride, though statisticians still argue about what caused the change.”

        It would require a whole scale change in our culture, but I’m pretty sure we could save lives through more effective gun regulations (and, yes, not just form mass murder, but also from accident & suicide, which are much higher causes of gun deaths). We’ve changed the culture of cigarettes. My kids still wonder what people are doing when cigarettes are broken out in old movies, and in the shows we watched from the 90’s, taking out a cigarette is used as a sign of regressing into bad behavior; powerful business interests opposed the change; the activity was pervasive and, people thought, personal.

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  5. I do wonder about the media angle, but I’m not convinced that we’re all watching too many movies and it’s making me crazy. It’s more the modern obsession with being famous. I wonder how many of these guys would still do this stuff if we had some sort of national policy against naming them in media coverage? (Kind of like how streakers are never shown on TV coverage of ball games.)

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