Chateau Heartiste

CH continues to explore the Elliot Rodger story because it reveals cracks in our culture that go beyond one man’s murderous rampage. In the days that have followed, the Hivemind has been busy concocting twisted narratives to see which one best tarnishes its free-thinking enemies. I examine their accuracies and fallacies below.

Sexual Entitlement

This theoretical gambit is a favorite of feminist fruitcakes, who blame the killings on Rodger’s thwarted “entitled” belief that he was “owed” sex with hard 10s, a feminist-friendly analysis that provides a handy springboard upon which they can launch into attacks on “pickup artists” who are learning how to become sexier men in order to date higher quality girls.

The fallacy in this feminist hypothesis was astutely noted by Liger (recently upgraded from Lamb) of the Blogosphere, who wrote that sexual and romantic entitlement is a natural condition of humanity, and that without it men would feel they had no right to approach women and initiate a courtship, and the human race would go extinct.

Here are some uncomfortable truths about “sexual entitlement” that feminists dare not contemplate:

– What Elliot Rodger had was sexual desire. Feminists often confuse sexual desire for sexual entitlement (because feminists loathe male desire), but they are two very different things. To conflate them, one would have to assert that Rodger was weird for feeling attracted to a hot young blonde. But men are attracted to beautiful women. That is their nature. Rodger was no different than the vast majority of men in this regard, alpha and beta alike. However, this is the part where Liger goes astray; Elliot didn’t need to be surrounded by pretty Hollywood actresses or steeped in a culture that reveres female beauty to feel urges to want to fuck cute girls based on their looks. The stripling CH did not grow up in Hollywood, and yet I, like almost every boy I knew, valued girls for their looks above all else. No “looks message” is necessary for a boy like Elliot to feel sexual urges for cute chicks, and to feel dejected if those urges aren’t fulfilled.

– Women feel more true entitlement to men’s commitment and money than men feel to women’s sex. Few men will rape in order to feed their sexual entitlement, but many women will hold out until they get promises of commitment from men, and many marriages end with women feeling entitled to half their husbands’ wealth. A more accurate description of the sexual market, then, is that women have commitment and provision entitlement.

– Finally, the scariest realization for feminists: Sexually entitled men are more attractive to women! If you don’t feel entitled to a woman’s love, she won’t think you’re worth her love.

Elliot Rodger’s problem was not sexual entitlement. His problem was sexual desire coupled with crippling introversion that left him no means to satisfy his desire. This created a cognitive disconnect that he filled with his own untested theories for why women weren’t with him when they were with (to him) obviously inferior specimens.

Father Emotional Abandonment

Elliot Rodger’s father, Peter Rodger, from all accounts sounds like he was uninterested in Elliot’s upbringing and preferred his time in the company of naked women taking pictures of their behinds, (which included Elliot’s mother). His father either never loved Elliot, or grew to despise him when he began to sense something was off with the boy. (If the former, it’s likely that Elliot’s biracial appearance contributed to his white father’s disenchantment with him.)

Bolstering the father abandonment theory, a reader sent some juicy insider information which I will post here, taking care to edit it in a circumspect manner so that no identities are accidentally revealed.

Elliot Rodger’s family has been part of a reality show the last seven years often recorded in his house. This is significant because his father on the show has always said he has “a” son, as in only one. In this video from the TV show it shows the father at the family table with the son from the second marriage, but not Elliot.

Elliot is shown in the show, for example when they met Sylvester Stallone (23:50), but Elliot is never acknowledged or speaks. Imagine a father that has a reality show in the house, keeps talking about “his son” and the “three of us” as in “Mother, Father, and son” as opposed to sons.

Elliot mentions the jealousy he has for the other brother. The fact his father says on TV, in the house Elliot lives in, that he has one son, might be enough to push someone over the edge.

In other words, complete family dysfunction.

Elliot doubtlessly sensed his father’s loathing and embarrassment of him, and this family dynamic may have set the ball rolling on Elliot’s eventual psychosocial schism.

Regardless where you fall on the “fathers are crucial/father’s genes are crucial” argument about children’s development, it’s a good bet Elliot lacked a positive parental influence and a loving father’s advice that would have helped him through his struggle into manhood. Nevertheless, the father emotional abandonment theory can’t fully explain Elliot’s eventual psychotic break; something awry already had to be present. Was Elliot’s blood tainted?

Psychopathy/Schizophrenia/Narcissism/Neuroticism/Asperger’s Syndrome

A common theme that often emerges from mass shootings is the revelation that the killer was on some kind of psychotropic or suffered from an anti-social disorder like autism. Then people say “Aha! He was a bad seed, not right in the head”, and feel satisfied that they can ignore any environmental insults that may have triggered the killer’s rage.

News stories present contradicting information on how much, or whether, Elliot was on any happy pills or had been formally diagnosed with any personality disorder. If he was on pills, the causal mechanism then becomes the issue; did Elliot’s psychological disease push him over the edge, or did the drugs he take to ameliorate his disease act as the trigger for violence? Evidence is slim that Elliot had a congenital mental disease, but this photo of him as a child is telling (via reader Tony Nick):

Dem eyes. We’ve seen them before, staring vacantly out of the faces of Dylan Kliebold and Seung-Hui Cho.

Right now it’s a guessing game, but the best guess is that Elliot Rodger had inherited a form of narcissistic and anti-social personality disorder. Some wags may ask your esteemed host, “If chicks dig dark triad narcissists, why didn’t they dig Elliot?” The problem here is that narcissism doesn’t attract girls if it’s hiding behind a shy, retiring, aggrieved personality. You’ve gotta bust a move, and Elliot Rodger clearly never saw a move he wished to bust, unless it involved spilling coffee on a girl who was dating a guy he didn’t like.

A severe organic personality disorder alone won’t typically create a killer, but combine it with some external variable — like incel — and all the bomb needs is something to light the fuse.

Male Feminism/White Knightism

A good argument can be made that Elliot Rodger was, in his writings and beliefs, a male feminist. And that the cancerous, deceitful message of male feminism warped his view of women and contributed to his ignorance about female nature and dating. Rodger believed “supreme gentlemen” should get the girls. He thought merely showing up and plopping down on a park bench would have the girls falling into his lap (and like a peculiar subspecies of MGTOW, his belief system similarly embraced the strange notion that making efforts to get girls was beneath him). His dad, probably equally deluded about women and dating in the year 2014, figured that buying his son a BMW in the last year of his life would help him get dates.

Did male feminism create a monster? It certainly didn’t help Elliot get laid; in fact, it helped repulse girls from him, the external factor which seems to have been the dark driving force throughout his post-pubertal life. Male feminism is not just castrating, it kills. Ask Hugo Schwyzer.

Status Envy

In the Hollywood culture Elliot knew, very high status men, beautiful women and botoxed women, and snotty children of high status men and beautiful and/or botoxed women surrounded him. Most of these people are entitled (far more entitled than Elliot) and bipolar. A fun bunch to throw a party, not so great for raising a biracial, effeminate (though not physically unattractive) male like Elliot who couldn’t look people in the eyes and barely spoke two words to family acquaintances. In this milieu, Elliot would have felt like a tragic outcast, and everyone who knew him would have thought that, too.

Absolute low status does not destroy souls, but relative low status can do the trick. Any other town, Elliot might’ve stood a chance of carving out a social niche for himself. A dad with some awareness and compassion would have taken him out of Hollywood, but then that would have meant no more naked photo shoots and handshakes with Sly Stallone.

The Anti-Boy Therapy Culture

Elliot’s family had him in therapy for years. The psychiatrist he saw was a quack who dated a skank blonde with gargantuan fake tits. Harken back to your childhood. How would you have felt if your family basically pulled a Pontius Pilate and washed their hands of you, sending you to a sleazeball who’s idea of therapy was promptly writing a script for Risperidone, an anti-schizophrenia drug?

This is a tragic example of the anti-boy therapy culture that pervades the US. And by “therapy”, I mean that feminized, womanish therapy that shoves pills down throats to solve the problem of boyness. Maybe Elliot was born sick and needed therapy. But what he didn’t need was a castrate asking him his feelings about his mother while he jerked off under the desk. Elliot needed the therapy of a clear and present father to inform him of the ways of the world. Maybe that wouldn’t have saved him, but it at least would’ve given him a fighting chance.

Pickup Artists and PUAHate

Elliot Rodger didn’t frequent the PUAHate forum to grouse about pickup techniques he tried that didn’t land him a bombshell hottie. He went there to bemoan women and the men those women loved with sympathetic company, and to complain about his looks. While there, (and elsewhere), he picked up (heh) a few bits and pieces of PUA jargon and proceeded to construct an inner fantasy world featuring himself as the put-upon alpha male. But, sadly, to the outside world he was still that shy kid who never talked and looked at his shoes. This was about the time when a complete dissociation between Elliot’s inner world and his outer reality was underway.

The Estrangement Of The Modern Sexual Market

If ever there was a subculture where the modern sexual market was most conspicuously operable, it was the la-la land Elliot grew up in. You can imagine what it was like for a shy kid who had to navigate a dating apocalypse where 90% of the girls were bangable and 99% of them were chasing after the top 1% sons of A-list insiders. This poor lesser beta didn’t stand a chance.

Elliot Rodger’s 132-page autobiography/manifesto (autofesto? manigraphy?) is filled with brutally confessional admissions of loserdom. If he carried even a fraction of that self-pity with him to real life interactions with girls, they would have immediately written him off as a romantic prospect. Girls can smell the stink of beta incel from twelve parsecs.

Failure with women compounds until the beta male succumbs to bitterness, at which point the process of sexual isolation accelerates and solidifies. If an intervention goes missing, the beta can drift into omegaland, and fall victim to his worst compulsions.

Reader Steve Johnson writes,

He was totally isolated because he made bad choices.

He chose world of warcraft over socializing because it’s an effective narcotic.

He chose puahate because it told him what he wanted to hear – that girls choose guys for mysterious reasons that no man can understand – or change about himself.

He specifically avoided socializing in any way that would threaten his narcissistic self-image and motivate him to change in any way – after all if he has to change, then he’s not perfect and we all know that can’t be true, right?

He was omega by choice because it was easier than doing any work.

Martyrdom complex, bad family, crippling shyness, pathological narcissism, biracial neuroticism, unfulfilled sexual desire, a sexual market rapidly separating introverted beta males from the sexual spoils… these things put together don’t guarantee a man will become a killer, but they sure don’t help.