Laci Green: Hi, babes.
Announcer: We interrupt your regularly scheduled sex education for an urgent episode of Sex Plus. Warning: disturbing content ahead.
Laci Green: Here we are again. Before I begin, I want to send my love, my condolences, strength, and healing to the Isle of Vista community.
In college, I became friends with this guy who was kind of lonely, he was good-looking, a little bit socially awkward. He pursued me romantically very aggressively, and when I told him that I wasn't interested, he became violent. One morning, he spammed rape threats, my address, my phone number, all over my YouTube channel. He turned our mutual friends against me, he stalked me.
When I moved into my first apartment on my own, he used to leave me violent drawings, like a bloody knife through a heart. He would always draw them on green post-it notes and left them square in the middle of my drawer, as if to tell me that he was watching me. He terrorized me for years, all because I wouldn't date him. Sound familiar?
Elliot Rodgers: College is the time when everyone experiences those things, such as sex and fun and pleasure. In those years, I've had to rot in loneliness. It's not fair. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSD, and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blonde slut I see inside there. All those girls that I've desired so much, you will finally see that I am [inaudible 00:01:42] the superior one, the true alpha male.
Laci Green: The response to Elliot Rodgers massacre has widely focused on the fact that he's a psycho and a madman, glossing over the fact that he uploaded a string of 20 videos, where he repeatedly stated that the reason why he did this is because women wouldn't sleep with him. He said in plain language in his "War on Women Manifesto," that had a woman slept with him, he never would have done this, wouldn't even consider it. Yet all we hear is a sentence or two about how he was sexually frustrated and rejected by women.
You want madness? That is madness. There's a big conversation here that's being completely ignored. Whether or not he's mentally ill remains to be seen at this point, but that's not the end of discussion.
There have been 71 mass murders in the U.S. since 1982, and 70 of them were carried out by men. Most of those are white men. This is not a coincidence. It's telling us something about our culture. Elliot hated the fact that other men were having sex when he wasn't, and he ultimately killed to prove that he was the "true alpha male. But he also hung out on bodybuilding forums and pick-up artist forums.
Masculinity refers to the social expectation that anyone with a penis is raised with. Masculinity requires that men repress their emotions so they don't appear weak. They use women for sex. They appear physically intimidating. It also urges men to solve their problems and garner respect with aggression.
Now, before the massacre, both a social worker and his parents were like, "Something's wrong here." So, they called in law enforcement, and then the sheriff was like, "Well, he seems kinda timid and not very violent. Nothing to see here," despite the fact that he was posting his plans to slaughter his peers on YouTube. "Nothing to see here."
The fact that Elliot was dismissed is partially because of the fact that we've normalized this idea of violent masculinity. This stuff didn't raise enough red flags because the sheriff thought, "Hey, he's got a lot of aggressive feelings just like any other guy. It's nothing to be concerned about." Now, six innocent people are dead.
The emasculation Elliot Rodgers felt so deeply ultimately amounted in him following the manual written for boys, "Don't be a pussy. Do what it takes to take back control," and that's exactly what he did.
What happens when this toxic masculinity collides with entitlement? A large part of mainstream masculinity is learning to see women as objects to have sex with them, to make them food, to date them, to do their laundry, which of course is extremely misogynistic, but elements of that are all over our culture.
Just last month a girl in Connecticut turned down a guy for prom, so he decided to stab her repeatedly in the hallways of their high school. Three years ago, a man shot 13 women in a Pittsburgh gym after vowing vengeance against females for refusing to provide him with sex and pleasure. Here we see, in the extreme, examples of men who think that women owe them sex. You know, that it's their birthright or something. What happens when that angry, entitled man is armed with a gun, with a knife, with date rape drugs? Violence is one way that men attempt to maintain their power over women.
That is misogyny, but it's not always extreme like this, either. Think about things like street harassment, cat calling, the verbal abuse that so many women put up with online, stalking, threats, intimidation, assault, rape, physical violence. Men who act this way feel entitled to women's bodies and to their time. They're so entitled, in fact, that many of them believe that this is a sign that we put women on a pedestal. Ewwww. It's so wonderful not being seen as a full human being.
I know, it's not all men who act this way, but you know what, it's way too f****** many. Just look at all the terrible people posting their condolences and congratulations for a mass murderer on social media. Let that sink in for a second. Mainstream media jumps on the bandwagon and labels Elliot a "lonely virgin. [Inaudible 00:05:33] that sex is something women should provide, men can't live without it, that it's understandable that he might just lose it if he doesn't get his way.
He wasn't just a lonely virgin, he wasn't just a madman, he's an entitled misogynist with a gun, four guns, actually, and like eight bajillion rounds of ammo. Elliot is the monster that we as a culture, as a society have created. His terrifying acts are not random, isolated occurrences, they are part of a serious cultural illness that affects all of us, especially women every single day, and every person, every media outlet that gives him the madman stamp without any further discussion, is a part of that problem.
I think we need to be asking ourselves, "Why is it so hard to admit that misogyny actually kills people?" Misogyny actually kills people. Misogyny actually kills people, kills people, kills people.
There may be small errors in this transcript.
Curator:
Adam Mordecai