Feminist agenda pounces on the Elliot Rodger tragedy

Well that did not take long. The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti went on the offensive in a piece titled Elliot Rodger’s California shooting spree: further proof that misogyny kills, to make the case that misogyny, not mental illness, was the main driver for Elliot Rodger’s murder spree in Santa Barbara.

As Ms. Valenti explains:

According to his family, Rodger was seeking psychiatric treatment. But to dismiss this as a case of a lone “madman” would be a mistake.

It not only stigmatizes the mentally ill – who are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it – but glosses over the role that misogyny and gun culture play (and just how foreseeable violence like this is) in a sexist society. After all, while it is unclear what role Rodger’s reportedly poor mental health played in the alleged crime, the role of misogyny is obvious.

According to Ms. Valenti, misogyny is worse and more destructive than mental illness. Actually you are insulting men who suffer from mental illness if you call them out as misogynists. This is standard feminist dribble. The author is working towards framing misogyny as an evil so vile that it should be considered more destructive than mental illness. Mental illness is a complex and serious matter, she makes it seem like a simple headache (take two aspirin and call me in the morning).

If she had bothered reading his 141 page manifesto she would have realised (like any logical thinking person) that this young man was a socially broken, mentally ill person, who absolutely needed help.  Misogyny was one part of a much deeper problem that only a professional is qualified to diagnose.

She continues…

Rodger, like most young American men, was taught that he was entitled to sex and female attention. (Only last month, a young woman was allegedly stabbed to death for rejecting a different young man’s prom invitation.) He believed this so fully that he described women’s apathy toward him as an “injustice” and a “crime”.

In his manifesto Elliot Rodger also goes over his hateful feelings towards family members, classmates (boy and girls) and a host of other complex emotions. Of course this fact needs to be  simplified into a digestible snack for mass media to distribute as hating women leads to murder, so best find the men (cough, cough), I mean misogynists and lock them up.

This is after all where Ms. Valenti is leading the reader, towards the outright imprisonment of more men in a pre-emptive effort to get them before they get us. She is fear mongering, plain and simple, avoiding the complex questions around this event with simplistic, media friendly explanations.

And of course no feminist argument would be complete without the twitter reference:

Yet, as the artist Molly Crabapple pointed out on Twitter: “White terrorism is always blamed on guns, mental health – never poisonous ideology.”

Eventually, after the muck of her case if doled out, the conclusion she was driving at comes out:

The truth is that there is no such thing as a lone misogynist – they are created by our culture, and by communities that tells them that their hatred is both commonplace and justified.

So when we say that these things are unstoppable, what we are really saying is that we’re unwilling to do the work to stop them. Violence against women does not have to be inevitable, but it is almost always foreseeable: what matters is what we do about it.

Her agenda revealed, to stop men from inflicting more harm to society. ‘Men are evil’ alarms are sounding and for Valenti it is time for our society to formulate more laws to imprison men in order to protect our women.

Shame on Ms. Valenti to write such crap during Memorial Day weekend. This author needs to crack open a history book and read about the sacrifices that men made protecting their country, family and women they loved.  It is this very weekend that all of America should honor the amazing compassion that men have shown throughout history to lay down their life for their brothers in the trenches.

Perhaps what is needed is for society to examine a history of mass misandry that has sacrificed the lives of millions of men as if they are a disposable gender, while people like Jessica Valenti sit in a building built by men, on furniture put together by men, eating food harvested by men, and enjoying all her little trinkets shipped and transported by men.

References:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/elliot-rodgers-california-shooting-mental-health-misogyny