Last night, George Sodini entered his fitness club outside Pittsburgh with two guns in a gym bag and a mission to kill women. I would say “woman,” since his (currently unidentified) ex-girlfriend was among the wounded, but he didn’t go after her specifically. Instead, he entered an aerobics studio and opened fire on the several dozen women he found there. He killed three women and injured nine more before apparently shooting himself.
Good riddance to him.
Sodini had apparently been planning an attack at the gym for months, and had already attempted the crime back in January before he lost his nerve. In a blog found by police, the woman-murderer wrote:
Why do this? To young girls? Just read below.
Full details of the journal have not yet been released, but this story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette indicates that it contained hateful screeds against many people he knew, and contained no small amount of anti-women bile. THEY ARE SO PRETTY. HOW DARE THEY NOT FUCK HIM? And yet it also questions whether Sodini was specifically targeting women.
I’m tempted to call up Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler for a “REALLY?!?!” segment, but a) it’s not funny, not in the least; and b) you can decide for yourself, by reading little from his blog. “Hoes” and “bitches.” “30 million women” have rejected him. But Jesus will forgive him slaughtering women, and he has ample reasons–I mean, if unwanted celibacy isn’t justification for mass murder, what is?–so it’s all good.
Sodini (unfortunately) can’t be punished for his crime, but I’m hopeful that this latest tragedy will be added to all the other sex-biased crimes already documented by Casey Gwinn (read a little bit on those here), and might even help people recognize the pattern of violence against women and the patriarchal poison that drives “low-status” men to act out against them behind it. Well, I’m sorta hopeful.
I am, however, more fearful that we’ll hear that “More Guns!” is the answer to this sort of problem. (If only one-a them gals had been packing heat in CardioFunk II, this never woulda happened…) And then we’ll be reading some variation of this story in another couple of months.
If not a couple of weeks.
It’s been a bad couple of months here in the ‘Burgh for angry white men with guns, loathsome carrion of society that they are.
When the Harpies asked about future topics of discussion here, a couple of posters requested posts about how to rear feminist sons. I’d say this whole country needs lessons in that, and right now. Lesson # 1: you don’t own women. If you’re unhappy about being dumped, go shoot yourself if you have to shoot someone. Or better yet, be an adult and suck it up.
Good lord, the Post-Gazette is embarrassing us lately. Get it together, newspaper.
There are two things about his blog that really disturb me. One is this: “Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them”
The other is how much he sounds like the guys that were in that documentary about RealDoll owners. “I’m a malfunctioning human”, “I can never get a second look from women”, “there’s something fundamentally wrong with me” but “women are awful for treating me so badly”. As much as RealDolls squick me the fuck out (especially how the owners refer to their lives by saying, “This is better than if I didn’t have any female company” — you still don’t, dude, that’s a piece of plastic), they are WAY better than shit like this.
Yeah, it looks like the P-G just took the original story and added to it instead of re-editing it. How about doing your job, reporters?
I’m all for giving every single straight man a blow-up doll when he hits adolescence. He can practice his people skills on it, and a group of women can decide when, if ever, he’s ready to move on to real live humans.
I’m not Christian, but it sure looks to me like he was perverting the idea.
Naturally, news outlets and commenters alike are attributing the massacre to mental illness. To insanity. Anything to take the focus off the misogyny and the society that cultivated it.
I am in a bad mood and this isn’t helping. This is off topic and I’m sorry but I have to vent my rage, I was just in a work meeting that splintered off into 4 rich dudes railing about how having the government run health care was the WORST.THING.EVER!!!! When I was like, I want the government to run health care the guffawing was like comical it was so over the top. One guy was like, “how can you think so differently from me? I don’t want the gov’t running anything yet you think the government should be in charge of our health????” ARRRRGH, if I had a gun…
Blaming this on mental illness
(1) ups the stigma the mentally ill face
(2) ignores the fact that his thoughts about women’s role and his bitterness, hatred for, and anger towards women are totally normal in the world we live in. Because it’s too scary to think that the guy at the bar or your neighbor or even your relative could think these awful thoughts, you say “He was crazy.”
Both effects are dangerous and infuriating.
This murdering asshole reminds me of all of the “nice guys” who complain that women won’t fuck/date them. It’s a particular strain of misogyny taken to its logical extreme.
It makes me so angry. Women do not exist for the convenience/enjoyment of men! Christ!
All I could think of when I read this news story was: And which askmen.com message board poster was he? Some of those guys are effing scary, they hate women so much.
It’s like how people say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people!” Look girlies, relax! Misogyny doesn’t hurt women, mental illness hurts women!
Fuck it all, seriously.
Why do we have to choose between misogynist and mentally ill? He clearly was both.
His blog has been taken down and I can’t find a cached version of it, but here is a copy, via Elites TV.
Wait, my link got delinkified. Here is the URL, in case you need to copy+paste.
http://elitestv.com/pub/2009/08/george-sodini-journal-entries
question: why is the notion of a patriarchy so hard for some WOMEN to accept?
@bluebears: Maybe they’re just mentally ill.
Thanks, blue_streak. I should have known they’d block his page.
If he wasn’t an AskMen kinda guy, JetGirl, I’m thinkin’ he trolled over at antimisandry.com where men bravely speak out at the horrible abuses they suffer at the hands of women. I haven’t yet had the courage to peek over there and see what response–if any–there is from those dudes. If they’ve read his journal, I’ve got to think they see a lot of familiar sentiments.
And bluebears, patriarchy is hard for some (most?) women to swallow because it’s pretty shocking and disturbing to realize that the world, and not just a couple mean or crazy dudes, is set up to disenfranchise you. It also might require you to do something to end it, rather just brushing off bad experiences as unfortunate and coincidental.
@pedmi: I don’t understand why we have to chose either. The news outlets are blaming it on mental illness and feminists are blaming it on misogyny, as if the two cannot ever meet up at some point.
@beardown: ha!
@phDork: yeah, its just fucking depressing. I feel like, of all people why should I have to work so hard convincing other women? Can’t they see the evidence in front of their faces?
Kari said, “This murdering asshole reminds me of all of the ‘nice guys’ who complain that women won’t fuck/date them. It’s a particular strain of misogyny taken to its logical extreme.”
And I totally agree. I was over at my Dude’s house last night, talking to his roommate. We all work out with a running club. Anyway, Dude’s roommate was ranting about some girl at running club who had the audacity to try to outrun him on a workout run earlier this week and how he got supreme satisfaction at passing her later in the run. She was exhausted and out of breath, and he happily sped past her. I was trying to figure out why this made him so happy, and all I could get out of him was that (a) he doesn’t like ANYONE to pass him on a workout run and (b) this girl is not friendly (read: flirty) to him at running club. He was so vitriolic about the situation that it made me uncomfortable. He kept saying he doesn’t like anyone to pass him on a run, but it always came back to this girl and her “nasty attitude.”
I’m sure it doesn’t make him feel any better that my Dude and I met at this running club — I’m sure he is thinking, “Why not me?” Well, it’s because one of you is sort of misogynist and the other one loves how ambitious his girlfriend is. Just saying.
Anyway, Dude is always saying what a “nice guy” his roommate is, but this little tale doesn’t quite fit with that story. I’m sure Dude’s roommate won’t open fire on running club anytime soon, but it seems he has a mild form of what this Pittsburgh asshole had. I wish there were fewer such stories.
Perhaps a bit late, but Bob Herbert had a good column about this on Friday: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/opinion/08herbert.html?ref=opinion