yeah thanks for that my mum has worked in mental health for over 10 years my twin has bi-polar and my partner has clinical depression. Sorry for using ableist language. But sure lets keep diverting from the topic of misogyny.

I have met “victims” claiming “female privilege”, as they claimed they suffered, at times irrationally.

So perhaps this is not just a “male” problem?

Chloe, labeling a mentally ill as “nuts” is not helping mentally ill to find understanding and treatment, it is “labeling” and stigmatising, I am afraid.

What about he was out of mental order and behaved “nuts”, instead of writing a person off as “nuts”?

I have learned a lot about mental health and disability, and I am always furious, when people that do not suffer such challenges simply use language, that stereotype, label or basically write people off.

Even the worst cases deserve some fair treatment, as when or if they act “insane”, there is usually a good enough cause for it.

Well, you have had your bad experiences and deserve respect for raising concerns, I must say.

But is this shooting incidence not a case, not one where the young shooter went around harassing and raping, but simply felt he was not liked by the other gender?

I think you are turning this into something that is a bit too far from what you wish to stereotype, which sadly does not serve the cause of raising concerns about rape, abuse and so.

This guy had serious mental issues, and that is more of the cause of what happened, combined with the too easy access to guns in the US! He appears to simply have tried to “connect” and flirt and whatever with the opposite sex, just as most young males and females do. He did for some reason not succeed much, which appears to have devastated him.

That is a far stretch from being a sex maniac and rapist, I must say.

Of course it does not justify anything the young guy did, and it is shocking what happened. In the end he sacrificed his own life anyway, seeing little sense in life.

Taking abuse and gender issues to such levels, to exploit this sad event for political or other motives, that is not what I can support.

Sorry, perhaps take another event to write a story like this next time.

Mainstream media in the US was no better it’s where the NZ media were getting their sound bites from even RT were doing it. Alternative media like this blog on the other hand are paying more attention to the wider context.

many men display this entitled attitude, and when they don’t get what they want they sometimes use violence against women.

True enough, but Rodger’s case isn’t really like those cases in anything but a superficial way. Those people are just assholes; Rodger was mentally ill and had been in therapy for years.

There are plenty of hate crimes where the perpetrators were not mentally ill. The rape and murder of Brandon Teena is the most obvious one I can think of. I get that lots of people want Elliot Rodger’s case to be just like that one because it suits their political purposes, but it’s not, and facts matter.

Read his manifesto. He wanted to be the divine dictator of humanity and abolish all sexuality outside of reproduction. Sound sane to you?

why can you not see the problem with your line of “but he’s clearly a nutter, and so this has exactly nothing to do with negative attitudes to women and everything to do with his craziness”? If we take that line then we ignore the reasons for his killing he clearly wrote for us, and then we miss a chance to DO something about violence against women

So religious lunatics who go on a rampage should force us to suppress religion then?

Rodger’s embracing negative attitudes towards women were caused by his mental illness. Seung-hui Cho’s negative attitudes towards everyone were the same. Jared Lee Loughner hated the government, but it was a stretch to blame his shooting of Gabby Giffords on the Tea Party. He shot Giffords, because he was mentally ill. Wackos tend to grasp worldviews that make sense of their own feelings of exclusion – that’s not new.

No matter how you swing it, this crime just isn’t what you want it to be. There are plenty of other crimes that fit the bill. People who shoot at abortion doctors are one, the murderers of Brandon Teena another, and any number of lynch mobs as well. All such crimes are motivated by bigoted ideology and are usually committed by sane people who do so purely for ideological reasons. In that respect, they’re no different from the Baader Meinhof Gang shooting at bank managers.

That’s a whole lot different than a paranoid lunatic shooting up his town because he’s externalised his paranoid, narcissistic delusions onto the world’s women, or Muslims, or blacks, etc.

and finally, this may make you uncomfortable, but I suggest your argument hurts the movement from women to confront and change violence against us,

No, what hurts it is feminism being treated as if it were a form of religious belief, in which every single event has to be interpreted so as to fit in with a pre-existing ideology (which is a tedious, warmed over version of 1970s sociology).

If you want to turn people off of feminism, the best way to do it is to make outrageous claims with little regard for the actual facts of the case.

err never said you are the problem yo, but if you don’t take responsibility then nothing changes. Women have been taking responsibility for the violence of men for decades ya know what with allllll those anti-violence organisations they started.

That’s irrelevant, since it wasn’t the point of comparison.

thanks for writing this Chloe

I know how hard it is to publicly say things about violence towards women, it often ends up with the writer being derided by a bunch of dudebros.

misogyny kills women in NZ every year, and most women in NZ have been on the receiving end of at least some small kind of violence towards us. from the smallest incident of being shouted at in the street (which can be very frightening, especially if you are alone and the shouters are a group of men) to the biggest incidents of rape, murder and abuse.

if we don’t keep on about the causes of this violence then it will never end.

and we need all the good men, who are the majority of men, to stand up with us and not accept women being treated as sexual playthings to be shouted at, groped, and abused.

I will not hold my breath waiting for MSM to see violence towards women as a cultural issue. they treat each incident as isolated.

Actually meant to hit the thumbs up button and hit the thumbs down instead. Whoops. :/