Angry White Men : American Masculinity at the End of an Era (9781568589640) by Kimmel Michael

Author:Kimmel, Michael [Kimmel, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781568589640
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

Targeting Women

On the evening of August 4, 2009, George Sodini, forty-eight, walked into the LA Fitness gym in Collier Township, Pennsylvania. No one paid much attention that he was dragging a large gym bag; after all, he worked out at the gym regularly and had just chatted with a number of regulars. At the door of the aerobics class, he put down his gym bag, took out an assault weapon, and opened fire. When he was done, five young women lay dead, another twelve injured. He then blew his brains out.

In his gym bag was a note, directing readers to a website where he had left an online diary for the months leading up to his carnage. The diary describes his failures with women, his constant rejections for dates (he claimed he had not had sex in twenty years), and his growing rage at women in general for such emasculation:

I dress good, am clean shaven, bathe, touch of cologne—yet 30 million women rejected me—over an 18 or 25 year period. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are. A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone special to spend the night with and who is also a friend. This type of life I see is a closed world with me specifically and totally excluded. Every other guy does this successfully to a degree. Flying solo for many years is a destroyer.

For nearly a year after he had made his fateful decision, Sodini documented his growing sense of isolation, his despair that he could not find a woman to date, and his frustration that others were having so much more sex than he was. He wanted women; they rejected him. He wanted sex; they weren’t attracted to him.

But more than that, he also felt entitled to them. It was his right, as a man, he felt, to have access to women. And when they turned him down, he didn’t just get mad. He got even.

George Sodini is not alone. Less than twenty years earlier, on October 16, 1991, thirty-five-year-old George Hennard drove his light-blue pickup truck through the front window of Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and methodically shot and killed twenty-four people, fourteen of them women, before he turned the gun on himself. While police investigators and journalists combed through his troubled childhood, his isolation (he was described as a “loner”), and evidence of any possible psychiatric issues or a history of drug or alcohol abuse, Hennard himself had made his intentions clear to two young women who lived nearby (but to whom he had never spoken). Infatuated and obsessed with the sisters, his rambling letter contrasted them to the other “evil” women of small-town Texas, the “vipers” who apparently had rejected his advances over the previous couple of years. “I will prevail in the end,” he wrote ominously. (The girls were so distressed by the letter that they actually brought it to the police, fearing that he was stalking them.

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