Laurie and Debbie say:

Anna North at Jezebel weighs in on the devastating story of George Sodini, the man who killed three women and injured ten others at a gym in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,

Her incisive point is that “his bilious diary displays an extreme version of a type of grievance misogyny that is all too common.” She quotes “Roissy in D.C.” whose blog she cleverly and accurately calls a “repugnablog,” who post, entitled “Game Can Save Lives” says:

When men kill women, the underlying reason is almost always an unfulfilled psychosexual need. This goes for spree shooters, rapists, and serial killers. I’m not surprised [he] hasn’t had sex in nearly 20 years. As I’ve written before, to men celibacy is walking death, and anything is justified in avoiding that miserable fate.

Anna says;

Roissy’s contention that “anything is justified” to help men avoid celibacy is terrifying, but more subtly disturbing is his assumption that Sodini’s rampage was directly caused by women refusing to sleep with him. Like Sodini himself, Roissy assumes that Sodini shot up a gym because women rejected him, not that women rejected him because he was the kind of guy who would one day shoot up a gym.

Aside from agreeing with Anna, this made us think of a post Debbie wrote almost two years ago about men who have decided that the reason they “have to” pay for sex is that women have the nerve to have preferences and make choices that don’t seem to include these particular men.

So many things are going on here: these men don’t understand that affection, attention, attraction, sex, and love are all different things. They don’t understand that economic freedom for women means at its most basic level that women are under much less pressure to settle for the best of a lot of bad choices. They don’t understand that human interactions are complicated and rich and nuanced, that women who don’t run up to [a man] and hug him at work might very well go home and hug their sweetheart(s) with great delight, that women who don’t fall at [another man]’s feet might simply be looking for a different kind of man (possibly one who thinks women are human?).

It all comes down to two truths: 1) if you want something badly enough and you have money, you can almost always pay for an imitation and pretend that it’s the real thing; and 2) to get real loving attention from someone, you have to offer exactly that to people until you find someone who wants it from you. That’s how you get it back. As long as (some) men continue treating women like a commodity, they’ll be paying for those imitations … and blaming women because it’s so much easier to blame women than to take responsibility for how people respond to you.

But Debbie didn’t approach the deeper truth in that post: commodifying women falls just an inch short of permission to kill us. If you’re a man and you don’t have money, or don’t want to pay for sex, and you believe women are commodities, you’ll get a lot of social support for your poor unhappy condition. If you believe that sex is something women have that men need, then you’re on a very popular bandwagon. By this twisted reasoning, men’s pain is women’s fault. And the poor dear men who buy into this theory don’t have to take responsibility for much of anything.

It’s a big jump from “Thanks for nada, bitches!” as Sodini wrote in his diary in June to pulling out a gun, but it’s a comprehensible big jump.

And then people look horrified and grossed out and go to great lengths to explain/justify why men’s generalized hatred of women is okay, but actually taking that hatred physical is not. Verbal abuse of women is rampant, and society turns a blind eye to it; physical abuse of women (when it’s reported) might be grounds for therapy, or anger management classes. And these things happen all the time. They’re business as usual. The only time they stop being part of normal life is when someone is murdered. And then, people look up and says, “Oh, my! What could have gone wrong with that man? He seemed so normal.”

Women are people, not things. Men are people, not essentially walking psychosexual time bombs. Everyone makes choices, and everyone is responsible for their actions. Which means that if you are silent about (or participate in) the degradation of women, you’re contributing to the environment in which women get murdered in gyms.

We got this from Supergee, who got it from Susie Bright on Facebook.