by James Bloodworth
In case you’ve been asleep for several days (understandable – it was a bank holiday) you would have heard about the Isla Vista killings. Elliot Rodgers, a 22-year-old man from Santa Barbara in California, stabbed to death three people, shot two women to death and murdered another man before killing himself near the campus of his university on Friday.
And why did he commit this heinous crime? Well, judging by his 140-page ‘manifesto’, he did it because women found him repulsive. As the deranged killer wrote:
“Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge . . . you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one, the true alpha male.”
The reaction of the feminist commentariat to the news of the violence was predictably swift. Writing in the New Statesman, Laurie Penny demanded that we “call the Isla Vista killings what they are: misogynist extremism”. Likewise in the Guardian, Jessica Valenti lamented the fact that misogyny “isn’t taken seriously as a cultural illness”.
And I quite agree; you’ll find no argument from me here. Elliot Rodgers appears to have been a pathological loser who harboured the delusion that women existed solely for his own pleasure. Like the ‘alpha males’ he aspired to be, Rodgers believed he had an innate right to dominate women and to have sex with them as a birthright – regardless of whether or not they were willing. He was a man and they were women, therefore they owed him.
When Rodgers’ sexual advances were predictably rebuffed, the young misogynist sought “vengeance against those who did enjoy that life” – the “love, sex, friends, fun, acceptance, a sense of belonging”. And so he pulled the temple down on his own head and, unfortunately, took several innocent people along with him.
So yes, let us call the Isla Vista killings by their appropriate name: an extreme manifestation of misogyny.
But if we are going to call a spade a spade from here on in, as I believe we should, can we be equally forthright in calling out misogynist extremism when it is politically inconvenient to do so?
What I mean to say is, the next time an Islamist fanatic attempts to blow up a nightclub full of “slags dancing around”, or throws acid into the face of an unveiled woman, can we have no more chin scratching editorials blaming it all on Western foreign policy, drone strikes or Tony Blair’s oil wars? May we, taking the lead of the feminists, have no more of this talk about ‘legitimate grievances’, ‘root causes’ and ‘blowback’? Can we, from the pages of the Guardian, be clear about what the violence is really about: misogynist extremism?
And if we can’t do that, could someone please explain to me what on earth the difference is.
