Owning up to the lethal shame of Elliot Rodger
It’s nearly 10:30 p.m. and I have to work tomorrow, but I also have to get this done tonight after having elected to get this article in this addition so I could feel newsy. I’m on Zyban to quit smoking, and that taken with having just read Elliot Rogder’s manifesto, means I am not looking forward to my dreams tonight. Going into this, I thought I was going to make points about bullying and hyper-normativization of sexuality in youth and beyond. I also thought I was going to make a clever point about how he didn’t have the “consideration” of Rehtaeh Parsons and Amanda Todd by not simply offing himself and leaving everybody else alone because that’s how much of a sarcastic bastard I can be when I think an angle has been overlooked. Indeed, we would be thinking about those two young women in a different way if they had reacted to their very real trauma and isolation in the way Rodger addressed his imaginary persecution. The boy bullied himself, and has no defence in arguments of media messaging or rape culture—the latter of which I do not disavow; the existence of which I will not condescend to argue because the deniers are liars. Men know it’s real just as Neo-Nazis know the Holocaust happened and just as the oil companies know climate change is a thing.
I’ve never been one to lend my voice to a chorus of condemnation of acts the rest of us stop just short of. I’m also sceptical of the prevailing tendency to ascribe unimpeachable intelligence and reason to ourselves only to throw up our hands in futility and say we don’t understand other people’s behaviour when the truth is we don’t want to admit that we do. So in spite of myself, Rodger has found in me not a defender, but a compassionate witness to the darkness of the human soul.
I know where he’s coming from.
Reading that ponderous, and unbelievably entitled rant, I was reminded of a couple songs by an old band called The Hollies, “Carrie Anne,” and “King Midas In Reverse,” both of which succinctly describe my sex life from confused adolescent to my present barely improved condition. In my case, it had to do with prolonged and serious abuse, neglect, and bullying, and it’s only recently that I’ve recognised that sexual normalcy and precision timing of related milestones was a tad much to expect given the start I had in life. Of course not having sex didn’t make me heroic any more than not killing people, and my feelings were no less ugly and petty for the legitimacy of their cause. For that reason, men aren’t doing themselves any favours with the tired saw that this was the isolated act of a madman when there is nothing unprecedented in Rodger’s words and actions. His upbringing in relative opulence and security contrasts that of the abusive early life of Marc Lepine, yet the results were the same. The problem is when we deny the existence of misogyny solely because admitting to those attendant feelings means admitting to other things such as inexperience, or the fact that we came out of a relationship feeling like somebody got the best of us. Then we end up just like the Nazi apologist who denies the Holocaust while simultaneously justifying it.
Not to say mental illness was not a factor here. I’m also irritated by the old chestnut that the media or the broader culture is to blame for this violence. It implies a dangerous lack of respect for the ravages of these diseases. In the darkness of this ignorance, we seem willing to apply or withhold the incapacity defence injudiciously depending on whether it’s yours or my loved one that kills or dies.
In my own view, Rodger’s real mistake was wanting to be like everybody else. If, at the very worst of the abuse I suffered in my life, you had offered me the chance to escape the pain by making me into someone else, I would have LOLed in your face. From an early age, I did not envy the popular kids or want to be accepted into their ranks. While I did not measure up to any objective standard of what to be and how to go about it, I had a deep appreciation for my subjective worth in my own eyes. I have no time for motivational culture that exalts human potential in all areas of human endeavour except what I want to do. I don’t need to be motivated. I think of something, and I do it. I don’t wait for approval or permission. If I did, the world would never know what Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” sounds like on the harmonica. I kill it.