I spent much of the long weekend absorbing the response to the Santa Barbara rampage. I first learned of it on the following morning, by which point there was plenty of background on the perp.
I watched the first thirty or so seconds of the "retribution" video, but the creeping sickness I feel when observing something newly monstrous compelled me to read the transcript instead. Early reporting led back to his other internet haunts, many of whom were in the process of scrubbing evidence of his participation.
I had never heard of "PUA hate" before. It required some research to learn what the hell PUA even meant. I'd heard the full phrase before and know of women who have had would-be PUAs try to game them, but it's a world so divorced from mine -- the object assigned to that label for me is the 80s film -- that I was surprised to see just how common a reference point the "game," "PUA," "MRA," stuff is for people who are not me. PUA "hate"communities are not what one expects from the name; members do not hate the concept. They hate that it doesn't work for them.
That in turn fuels other hate. Of successful guys who can seduce women; of the women who allow themselves to be seduced by other men, and, naturally, hate of themselves.
When I was a teenager, I knew of guys who were on this trajectory. Like the 20something guys who hang around the Gas-n-Sip on a weekend, they sat in chatrooms and endlessly bemoaned the foregone conclusion of their lifelong failure to attract women. I don't mean the occasional bad-date, got-dumped kind of complaining. This was their normal day.
At that time these were general-purpose chat, so their self-pity would stand out in sharp relief to whatever topic the majority discussed. Sometimes folks would good-naturedly engage with the pitiers, giving them encouragement or advice about meeting and talking to women. In every instance I recall observing, the pitier would hem and haw but ultimately reject the possibility that any change to their approach would work. At the time it was unclear whether the behavior indicated an according-to-Hoyle psychological issue or simply a means of gaining attention, any attention.
These guys were a small handful, three or four at the most; maybe 1-2% of the regular participants. I have no certain proof of it, but as far as I have heard none of them have been charged with crimes. If they haven't -- which yes, is uncertain -- what contributed? I'll return to that in a moment.
Every American killing spree is covered endlessly by the media. Even when there is little background to report, two easy-to-disseminate causes usually dominate the coverage: gun availability and mental health. They are generally self-evident in most of these cases which in recent years have frequently involved both. Either factor can be picked as the sine qua non: with better mental health care or with better restriction of guns, the event would never have happened.
This case is a little different. Here there's a identifiable, definite third factor.
As I read more and more of the PUA/MRA chatter -- some of it now reacting to the shootings and the ideology of the gunman -- along with his autobiography, I was reminded a great deal of theories from a book I read for school, Marc Sageman's excellent Leaderless Jihad. Sageman looked at the recruiting and network-building that recruit new members into terrorist groups. The parallels between the terror feeder communities and those attended by the shooter are quite strong: privileged men airing their frustrations about their lot in life. A significant amount of the chatter I've read exists along the lines of those teenagers I remember: self-pity, deprecation, resignation to failure. But then there's stuff like this. Lots of it. Men who feel entitled to women, entitled to sex. Thwarted desire that has metastasized into untrammeled hate. I rigorously caution against the easy conflation of anecdotes with data. The sample size here is large enough to corroborate what I've seen on my own: it's normal discourse for these groups.
And that is where the Sageman parallels started rising off the chart for me. Not all of those disaffected, frustrated men in the communities he studied joined up with a cell. Not many at all, really. But the insular nature of their communities, the shared grievances, the specialized, insider jargon, ; that absolutely radicalizes a small percentage. Egging each other on to greater and greater rhetorical grandiosity, whether sincerely meant or tongue-in-cheek, will move their discussions further down the road to extremism. Following a highly publicized incident such as this, the extremism going to enable more violence, just as some of it seeped into the shooter's worldview.
One good thing that has resulted from this incident is the publicity given the fringe of these groups. In the short term, at least, there will be some greater empathy toward the amount of smaller, but still horrible behavior women are subjected to on a daily basis. But grasping the full size of the problem is going take much longer. I am relatively knowledgable about internet subcultures and yet I've been taken aback many, many times in the last week. So I can understand that at this point in the story the greater population is still reeling from the discovery. Men, especially, seem to have a knee-jerk defense mechanism to proclaim that they're not the problem; that this guy was simply crazy. Nothing more to see here, let's stop talking about it.
I have yet to see a single woman argue that case.
Maybe there really is a problem here, guys.
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