10 August, 2009 | Leave a Comment
The Reclusive Leftist wonders why George Sodini’s mass murder of women in an aerobics class in Pennsylvania last week is not receiving more news coverage. And also, why is the crime not being referred to as a hate crime?
If I want to read about the Pennsylvania shooting, I have to search for it. This evening I typed “George Sodini” (the murderer’s name) into the Google News search box. The stories that came up told me that Sodini was lonely; that he felt rejected by women; that he led a sad, bitter life; that he hadn’t had sex in years; that he longed for women to notice him. Well, isn’t that special.
I looked for the words “hate crime,” but only Ms. Magazine is referring to it that way. Good for them…But Ms. Magazine appears to be alone in its assessment. I can’t find any other media outlets calling the massacre a hate crime. If spraying bullets into a group of female strangers because you hate women isn’t a hate crime, what is?
Her conclusion, which I agree with, is that hatred of women is considered “natural and universal” and so we don’t even give it a thought.
In his NYT column, Bob Herbert nails it. He refers to another mass murder of females in Pennsylvania, when in the autumn of 2006 a man went into an Amish school, separated the girls from the boys, then shot all the girls. Herbert writes:
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar…We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected. We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment. The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.
Sadly, Bob Herbert is in the extreme minority with his coverage of the Sodini story. Instead, for most of the media, Sodini himself is the real victim – a victim of women. This Boston Globe editorial is a perfect example. According to the Globe, Sodini fits the “typical profile of an American psychopath: He was a loner who lamented his failure with women. His online diary was filled with fury over his sexual frustrations – claiming at one point to have been rejected by ‘30 million’ women. There are, of course, millions of frustrated men who don’t open fire on innocent civilians, so there’s a danger in making too much of his loser profile.”
Sodini is first described as a “psychopath” by the Globe but then by the end of the passage he’s just one of “millions of frustrated men” who are rejected by women. What is implied here is that while most rejected men don’t commit mass murder, it’s understandable why George Sodini – or any man – could snap. He was lonely! Them bitches rejected him! Sodini, a psychopathic multiple murderer, is merely a victim of selfish, shallow females.
Imagine that instead of hating women, George Sodini hated and murdered Jews. Imagine the Boston Globe writing this: “George Sodini tried to befriend many of the Jews in his town, but they rejected him. Last week, he went down to the local synagogue and sprayed bullets everywhere. There are, of course, millions of people around the world who are frustrated by Jews, but most of them don’t actually go out and kill, so there’s a danger of making too much of the fact that Jewish people had rejected Sodini in the past.”
This would be outrageous, of course. Any attempt to rationalize murderous behavior and hatred like this is indefensible. Yet female victims, when targeted because of their femaleness, aren’t accorded this kind of dignity and respect. Instead, women are blamed.
I should point out that the main focus of the Globe’s editorial on Sodini is his racist blog posts against Obama. A lot of other media have also made this the focus of the story, making racist blog posts against Obama equal in significance to mass murder of females. Because, you know, the Obama angle is more interesting and, let’s face it, more important.
The coverage of this case is, across the board, sickening. Here are a few headlines:
George Sodini, Health Club Gunman, Went On Rampage Over Sexual Rejection
George Sodini’s Blog Tells of Years of Rejection By Women Before Gym Shooting
Gunman at Pennsylvania Health Club Was Bitter Over Women
Sex-Starved Aeoribcs Killer George Sodini Was Upset By Women
Failures In Love Bred LA Fitness Center Killer’s Hate
And the list goes on. In each case, we see that Sodini is the victim. Nowhere do we see a headline like this: Misogynist Commits Mass Murder or Three Women Murdered in Hate Crime. The articles are clear that Sodini hated women, which of course he did, but for the media, if Sodini hated women, then there must be a reason for it. A good reason. If George Sodini, a proven racist, had murdered African-Americans simply because of their race, would we be asking why George Sodini hated African-Americans? No, because what possible legitimate reason could he have? There isn’t one. He’s a racist asshole and that’s the end of it. But apparently, there are legitimate reasons to hate all women. The articles try to explain, in rational terms, why Sodini hated women, thus making his rampage seem like the next logical step given his mental instability. If women hadn’t deprived him of sex, none of this would have happened.
Here’s the opening of the story from the last headline above, from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
“George Sodini couldn’t find love. He tanned, worked out at the gym, held a steady job and still went nearly two decades without the loving touch of a woman, according to his online blog begun in November. He wrote that he felt totally alone — isolated — and estimated that 30 million desirable women rejected him in the last 30 years. Enraged, he hatched a heinous plan to make some of those pretty young women pay for his misery. The price would be their lives.”
This is just sick. It’s beyond sick. It reaches new levels of vileness. You’ll notice that this, like a lot of the other coverage, is not written as a news report, but almost as entertainment. Whoever wrote this seems to be taking some vicarious pleasure in the actions of Sodini.
Sodini worked out “and still went nearly two decades without the loving touch of a woman” [italics mine]. Poor George. He did everything right, yet these cruel women rejected him. What’s wrong with women? When confronted with a vicious, hate-filled psychopath, they just ran in the other direction, without even considering his good qualities at all. Typical!
For a moment, just imagine if George Sodini had had a girlfriend. There can be virtually no doubt that she would have been physically and emotionally abused during the relationship, because George Sodini hated women. If the woman had tried to escape from him, she would have been stalked and likely murdered. And after he killed her, he would have probably committed a mass murder of women anyway. The headline: Heartbroken Man Goes on Rampage After Being Dumped.
The real story here is not lonely men (there are plenty of lonely women as well), but instead, the real story is male violence against women and girls, which occurs every second of every day in the form of domestic abuse, molestation, harassment, rape and murder. There is no rational, legitimate reason for this hatred of women, yet it is widespread in our culture and everyday, women die as a result. Writes Herbert:
Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female. A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem. We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.
This is the conversation we should be having. Instead, the media is legitimizing Sodini’s misogyny and giving him the exact platform he craved – he’s gone out in a blaze of glory, with everyone dissecting his blog posts and commenting on his mistreatment and loneliness. It’s too bad Sodini checked out before this new film was released. It looks right up his alley:
“Dead Girl: You’ll Never Have Anything Better,” a film about men gang raping dead women. Don’t forget the popcorn. (via)
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Ang04 Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 4:30 pmI can not believe this is a real movie. It’s sickening to think that real people will go see this.
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It’s hard to stomach the thought that this movie is out there. Of course, online I’m already reading comments that if you don’t like this movie, you’re “uptight” and “square” and that this movie is really a critique of masculinity, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, the title, the tagline and the poster of the “sexy” corpse just make entertainment out of the brutalization of women.
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Dorothy Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 6:32 pmThey’re also saying that The Duchess is a film about a strong woman, which it could undoubtedly and easily have been made into – but Keira Knightly messes it all up (otherwise she wouldn’t probably have become a Holywood star) – by trying to look like a sexy bitch in EVERY scene (which I find particularly embarassing and cynical given that it is the story of a tragic woman’s fate and all the inner tragedy of it). There’s also one rape scene in this film where they put her into a baby-pink little girl’s dress with a pink ribbon in her curly her – if I remember it well, she only wears this for the rape scene. I think many men do get a lot of pleasure out of this “strong-woman” sort of film, where, of course, everything’s portrayed in SUCH a critical way, blah blah…
Also, the duchess’s looks don’t seem to be getting older during the film and after 4 children…
in short: erotic entertainment out of the tragedy of a woman! -
I normally avoid anything with Keira Knightley, so I haven’t seen The Duchess. But that rape scene sounds disgusting. I really think Bob Herbert from the NYT is correct – all of this gratuitous violence against women in entertainment just normalizes it. The problem just keeps getting worse, with video games and pornography. It’s like there’s no way to stop this.
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Ken Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 8:27 pmI avoided reading most of the coverage of the murderous outburst of this depraved man. Anglofille is right when she observes that a note of something resembling sympathy creeps into the coverage of these disturbing men.
I did read one article that did offer a little insight. Sorry, didn’t think to keep it, so I can’t give a cite. Sodini was not without some self awareness. He knew there was something about him that repelled women.(well, duh?) When women told him he was “a nice guy” before brushing him off he knew they were handing him a line, not a compliment.
Rather than do what a rational man might do: take a long hard look at himself and the causes of the impressions he created, he chose to blame women for knowing the secret behind his failure and for not letting him in on it.
He was envious and angry when he saw men he regarded as inferiors enjoying relationships with women. Men he despised could get girls yet he, who held a good job, who kept himself in shape, who dressed nice couldn’t get out of the batter’s box, much less first base.
Like a lot of frustrated guys who feel they have an entitlement to get laid, he took a course with a self described “pick up artist” who assured him it was a trick. The trick to getting a girl is to treat her like dirt. Women may talk about wanting relationships with men based on love, respect and communication. But it’s all a crock. What they really want are bastards who treat them like garbage. Yes. He actually told Sodini, and the other losers who attended this class that women wanted “bad” guys and actually craved mistreatment, thus reinforcing Sodini in his growing resolve to end his troubles in a deadly rampage.
I read this and didn’t feel any sympathy toward Sodini. I felt revulsion toward him and the whole blase way this story was reported last week. The only use for a story like this is as an extreme example of what happens in this country (and the world for that matter) constantly. There is great resistance to acknowledging this.
I wish I knew what to do about it.
Anglofille, that movie poster really surprised me. At first I thought it was a spoof. Then I realized it’s a real promo for a real motion picture. Yuck!
Dorothy: My wife wanted to see “The Dutchess”, so off we went. It was expensively mounted, with outstanding production values. It was a superficial, at times dull treatment of an unusual woman and her problematic life. Hollywood whiffs again.
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I felt revulsion toward him and the whole blase way this story was reported last week. The only use for a story like this is as an extreme example of what happens in this country (and the world for that matter) constantly. There is great resistance to acknowledging this. I wish I knew what to do about it.
Me too. It makes me feel powerless. The issues at stake here go to the very heart of feminism, but people in our culture are very resistant to feminist ideas and so we can’t have these conversations. It seems like we’re going backwards, not forwards. This has become very clear to me lately and I’m very troubled by it, to say the least.
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Ken Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 12:54 amI can’t disagree with you there. I wish I could. If I had received a vision in 1979 (when I was in my mid-20s) of how dark America and the world would look in 2009 I wouldn’t have believed it. And I’m not gloomy or pessimistic, but I can’t fight the self evident facts.
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Dorothy Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 11:50 amIn ‘79, things must indeed have been a lot healthier than nowadays, from what I can gather. I haven’t lived then, but I recently saw a film of precisely that year (“Alien”), and was completely awed by how (relatively) cool this film is from a feminist point of view – at that early time, I was thinking! – with Segourney Weaver in the (unofficial) lead, who doesn’t look like a sex bomb in that film, but is looking stunningly(!) normal and cool! A female lead in a film wouldn’t possibly be looking like that today. Today they have to look like Lara Croft or something like that.
I’ve read an illuminating article some time ago about why they are portrayed that way nowadays:
http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-431 -
Ken Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 1:43 pm“Alien” was a pleasant surprise, as was Sigourney Weaver. That was her first big film role, and I was struck by her unconventional good looks.
I passed on the sequels. I particularly enjoyed two pictures she made in the early 80s: “Eyewitness”, a thriller co-starring William Hurt and “The Year of Living Dangerously”, a wonderfully atmospheric drama set in Indonesia in the weeks before the bloody coup of 1966. She was also quite effective in the 1992 political comedy “Dave”.
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Jan Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 8:45 pm -
Jan Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 8:51 pmThink that is a good coverage.
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Caroline Says:
August 12th, 2009 at 12:49 amOne thing the woman from Huffington Post does not mention is that Marc Lepine, mass killer of women, was an Algerian immigrant (real name Gamil Gharbi, name changed at 18) with a long history of Islamist-induced hatred toward women.
Something to keep in mind in light of the discussion of the burka and Islamic issues on Anglofille’s redoubtable blog.
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Redoubtable? Moi? Merci bien.
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[...] pleased to feature a post from Anglofille. Anglofille is the nom de blog of an American ex-pat living in London. She is finishing up a [...]
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Very good article; I read it at http://contexts.org/socimages/. Thank you so much.
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[...] An analysis of the media coverage in the aftermath of the murders in Pennsylvania, by Aglofille: The coverage of this case is, across the board, sickening. Here are a few headlines: George Sodini, Health Club Gunman, Went On Rampage Over Sexual Rejection George Sodini’s Blog Tells of Years of Rejection By Women Before Gym Shooting Gunman at Pennsylvania Health Club Was Bitter Over Women Sex-Starved Aeoribcs Killer George Sodini Was Upset By Women Failures In Love Bred LA Fitness Center Killer’s Hate [...]
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[...] reporting of the Sodini slaughter is, needless to say, quite [...]
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PGenes Says:
August 31st, 2009 at 9:22 pmYour comparison of Sodini’s actions with those of a racist is a false.
I’ve never, ever heard of a racist or anti-semite killing himself after killing his victims.
I’ve also never heard of a racist claiming he needs blacks or jews to make his life bearable and meaningful. The comparison is laughably off-base.
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I was making an analogy. An analogy is a comparison between two things that are alike, but not necessarily alike in every way. In my writing, I try to make sophisticated arguments. Sorry if you don’t understand them.
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Dorothy Says:
September 21st, 2009 at 10:35 pmI just accidentally found this cool coverage and thought I really have to show you:
http://aroomofourown.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/of-course-a-man-killed-three-women/
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Anti Vigilante Says:
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:55 amUntil there’s an invasion of misogynists debating the writings of a famous misogynist and they have meetings where they read verses out of a kind of misogynist’s Bible forming a misogynistic dysfunctional theory and pervasive and endemic cult and culture identifiable as the mall of misogyny, put away the hyperbolic pedantic ego stroking hate crime rhetoric before you ruin decades of progress feminism has achieved despite its divide and conquer origins in corporate and corrupt social engineering circles.
In other words, show me the lynch mob before you claim hate crime. The denotation is overshadowed by the connotations of the phrase and whether you like it or not that is its nature.
Sometimes people are just plain crazy.
Don’t be so careless as to make this guy an antihero, and do not get cocky and try to score drama points by attaching the all-purpose hate crime label.
Hate is a cultural phenomenon. Crazy is a psychological phenomenon.
But after all it’s your credibility. Do as you please. Pretty soon you’ll have women as chest thumping paranoid as certain right wingers are of Muslims.
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Targeting women is indeed a hate crime. I don’t think there needs to be a lynch mob involved for hate crimes to occur. Women are hated by many, many men – men commit rape, abuse and murder as a result of this hatred.
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Anti Vigilante Says:
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:53 pmViolence doesn’t imply hate. Violence can be the result of many impulses.
Hate is a much bigger topic than simply murder. But most importantly different kinds of hate have very different dynamics.
Different dynamics require different solutions.
There’s “hot” hate and “cold” hate as well as “accelerated” hate. The reasons and dynamics are so different that you have to treat them separately.
Hot hate is plain individual craziness. Example: 1 person might hate women because of rejection. This person isn’t a sexist who says women should be homemaker or a person who says women are weak and can be raped. This person simply hates women.
You can’t scare this person from murder. You have to discover him before he kills.
There is no deterrent, but you might delay him. Hate crime legislation does not work on this person.Cold hate is institutionalized hate. Example: It appears to the haters as a difference of opinion but their heads are full of propaganda from friends, parents, neighbors, school, work, etc. If they decide to kill women, you can deter them with hate crime legislation because the group wants to murder, not the individual. Hate crime legislation can break up the group by causing individuals to consider the consequences separately and make the group fall apart.
Accelerated hate gets worse with hate crime legislation. Example: A charismatic leader creates such group cohesion that any opposition solidifies and strengthens the group. Hate crime legislation can cause more violence in this case.
If you want to prevent violence like these different types you have to make it not about the women but about the perpetrator. You have to change the topic. As long as you make it personal, or about gender, or about social injustice, you will lose.
To fight violence you have to be focused not angry.
