On May 23, Elliot Rodger shot and killed six people and injured several more.
In most shootings, there is one lingering question, the one that people turn over and over in their minds like a hot coal, trying to light a fire of understanding.
“Why?”
This time, we know why. Rodger himself provided that information, in YouTube videos as well as in a 130 page manifesto, and filled with more venom than a nest of rattlesnakes.
On July 20, 2013, Rodger decided to grace the students of University of California Santa Barbra with his presence at a party.
Writing in his manifesto, he said, “I was giving the female gender one last chance to provide me with the pleasures I deserved from them.”
There is one word in that sentence that stands out like a red flag — deserved. Rodger grew up in a society which taught him that he was entitled to a woman’s affection.
The worst part is that he isn’t alone in this thought process.
Male entitlement is a pervasive idea, and it’s manifested in a myriad of different ways.
For one, there’s “the friendzone”, to which men exile themselves when a woman dares to believe their friendship is valid as opposed to a stopgap to sex.
There’s the idea that a woman’s choice of outfit is seen as a valid impetus for assault.
There’s the fact that, when I was moving into the dorms at USC, my mom’s boyfriend told me that he was going to buy me a can of pepper spray.
I laughed, nervously. I knew he was serious, but I didn’t like the idea that I needed it.
But I do.
Women live in a separate sphere from men. I don’t mean in a “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” type of way; I mean that we live in fear.
Pepper spray, the buddy system, the ingrained habit of carrying our keys between our fingers as a precaution: We are taught to defend ourselves, but men aren’t taught not to hurt us.
Blaming misogyny — the deep prejudice against women — for Rodger’s actions, and blaming the society in which misogyny is rampant, isn’t taking away from what he did. It isn’t making the tragedy a mere result of one’s environment.
It isn’t a denial of his mental illness.
It’s simply finding the root of the problem, which flowered into this 22-year-old man truly believing he had a right to a woman’s body; that, according to his document, women “should not have the right to choose who to mate and breed with.”
At the end of the day, it all comes down to one simple truth, and one simple question: Women are being murdered for saying no, for not giving a man exactly what he wants, when he wants it.
What are we going to do about it?