By Shaebaun “Suge” Benjamin
On Friday May 23, 2014 a 22 year old man named Elliot Rodger
murdered seven people and wounded thirteen others over the course of an
afternoon. During all of this I was the movies watching X-Men: Days of Future Past. When it was over I took the bus to meet
a friend. I perused twitter as most of us do as a combatant of boredom. I saw a
few things about a shooting at a school, which unfortunately did not shock me
as mass killings have become a norm within our society. The Aurora shootings,
the Newtown Killings, and the Boston Marathon bombings all happened within a
few months of each other and even more recently the incident at Fort Hood just
a month ago. The sad part about the last sentence is that I am omitting at
least two other incidents where several innocent people were harmed.
When things like these happen the first thing people tend to
do is become Nancy Grace or Bill O’Reilly and come up reasons for these things
whether they are sensible or not. We blame Muslims for terrorism. Video games,
music, and movies for school shootings or funniest of all a hooded sweater made
for rain and chilly weather for a person to murder an unarmed teen.
During my twitter reading on Friday, I at first didn’t
connect the tweets about the shooting to tweets about this Elliot Rodger
character. What I read about him were about him believing he was owed sex for
basically his very existence. This opened the floodgates for a bunch of “all of
a sudden” feminist critics to go on tirades against the rise of misogyny and
its correlation to the horrible thing this man did to these innocent people.
This is where this misplacement of blame comes in.
I am in no way excusing the actions of Rodger. It is my
belief that this young man was severely dissatisfied with himself and without
mental help through psychology or other means he took his displeasure out on
others. In effect he blamed his own perceived inequities with himself on others
because from his perspective he felt that they, men as well as women, found him
inadequate. In his manifesto he recalls certain incidents where he was
considered a loser and had difficulty obtaining not only women but male friends
as well.
Tony Montana said it
best “first, you get the money, then the power, then the respect, the women
come with that”. So rather than learning to stick his tongue out like a lizard
as Manny did in Scarface, Rodgers
thought he’d go the Tony route and spend oodles of money on his “friends” to
earn that power and respect and the women that came after.
In this world today where the perception that this guy‘s
whole ideology was misogynistic is understandable if you’re convincing me his
motivation was that a female lover or companion can be gained with money and
power.
What is misogyny?
It is the hatred of women.
Like most men, I have had my fair share of rejection from
women, but by no means do I hate women. That is life. I love all the women in
my family and have several female friends that I love and care for. Have I ever
felt that I’ve done things for women that I felt should entitle me to some sort
of physical reciprocation? Yes. Have I done things for women and thought “Hey
maybe a date would be nice?” Yes, but does that make me a misogynist? That is
left for you to decide.
In this society twerking and sultry Instagram posts are basically
normal behavior for most young ladies and the rise of self promotion through
self-taken pictures, what we now called selfies, and any male approval, to be
fair, unless it is a male whom the subject approves, is considered the act of
“thirst”. How do we decipher admiration from misogyny, or misogyny from
admiration?
You watch any hip-hop video you see beautiful women being
“objectified” yet there has been no sighting of the muscled-armed-gorilla pimps
who force these young ladies to these video sets and into sling bikinis for all
our viewing pleasure. That is because they don’t exist. Those women as well as
porn actresses, swimsuit models, and other women who are eye candies for
misogyny are there on their own volition. Feminists can counter that these
women have low self-esteem and hardly respect themselves as human beings.
That’s fine, but, if we can chalk these women’s reasons as
lack of self-esteem and self-respect can we spare the misogyny babble and see
the motives for these shootings for what they are. They were the maniac and
tragic act of person with a lack of self-respect and loathe himself to the
point he hated all others.
Another cause for his lack of appreciation for himself may
be because his mixed raced background. Rodger’s father was a Caucasian man of
British decent and his mother was Malaysian. He spoke of his distaste for
interracial relationships, particularly ones that involved white women and men
of other races. Growing up around affluent white children and being a shade
darker made Rodger an outsider. He wondered in his blog why white women would
date black men and Asian men but not him while also disparaging men of those
ethnicities. This also demonstrates how instead of finding the faults in
himself, he projected it on others.
The Revenge he spoke of was against others in his mind, but
in reality was a battle against himself. I do ask that anyone reading this that
is or knows someone with issues like these seek professional help to resolve
them.
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