"Elliot Rodger, Gunman in California Mass Shooting, was influenced by the 'Men's Rights Movement.'"

Writes OllieGarkey in a post at Daily Kos (that is getting a lot of attention). The post actually begins with "Trigger Warning: Violence against Women." That's after the headline, quoted in my post title, so anyone already knows the subject. The "Trigger Warning" isn't so much a way of warning readers that there's something triggering in the post content as it is a way of asserting that the writer is part of a movement that purports to care about the sensitivities of women.

Myself, I'm the kind of writer who would like to assert that I'm against giving publicity to murderers. I'm afraid we're showing other angry losers the murder path to celebrity. But I'm going to write about this anyway, because I'm interested in the way other writers appropriate the latest violent incident to explain the ideology they already have. Why blog anything? It fits your template.

Rodger's pre-murder rant criticizes women for having sex with "obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentleman" and conceptualizes the murders as a demonstrating to women "that I am in truth the superior one. The true Alpha Male." OllieGarkey says:

The true Alpha Male. What those who call themselves the Mens [sic] Rights Movement aspire to be.

The Men's Rights Movement as they call themselves is a nebulous group of pickup artists and misogynists who've found each other on line, and are attempting to create a movement based around their hatred, disdain, and fear of women.

OllieGarkey bolsters his argument by listing (and linking) various YouTube channels that Rodger subscribed to, for example "'The Player Supreme Show' which rails against the feminization of men and talks about how to pick up women."

Rather than seeking mental help for some obvious issues, he sought out the Men's Rights Movement. He watched their propaganda. He internalized their hatred of women. (There's no shortage of anti-woman rhetoric and nonsense...)

He listened to these guys talk about being hard, and tough, and true alpha men. 

This is interesting evidence to analyze, but OllieGarkey handles it hackishly. Subscribing to channels makes it somewhat likely that Rodger "watched" and "listened," but we don't know that he did. To what extent did the language used on those channels correspond to the language in Rodger's rant? And is "Men's Rights Movement" the right umbrella term for the "pickup artist" genre? The goal of lots of sex is different from the goal of getting rights. These men want sex from women — I take it — not rights, which are something you get from the government.

A movement for "men's rights" has to do with men wanting the government to protect their interests that arise from their various interactions with women. That's quite a different enterprise from luring women into wanting to have sex with you, which I understand those websites attempt to help men do. That was the enterprise at which Rodger seems to have failed. Or are you going to tell me there are men who — as a group — want sex from women and have conceptualized this goal as a rights movement. How would it even work to form a movement seeking sex from women? The men are in competition with each other. What's the value of grouping together?

So this kid who needed some serious mental help sought out the destructive, BS views coming from the men's rights movement. He felt entitled to sex with women. 

OllieGarkey seems to be spouting off the top of his head. Could he provide me with specific material from the channels Rodger subscribed to that posit a right to have sex with women? I thought these "pickup artist" sites taunted males who have bad technique and offered to show them how to up their game so they can win. Games that require skill and have winners and losers are not about entitlement. They are exactly the opposite. Rodger seems to have come up on his own with the idea that he could move from his loser status to alpha status not by ever figuring out how to make a woman sexually desire him, but through the delusion that murder — which he did figure out — somehow equated with sex and that he could become "the true Alpha Male" through murder.

How does that delusion fit with what's on those "pickup artist" sites? Those "alpha males" — if that's what they call themselves — are claiming there is an elaborate manipulation of the female mind that can be accomplished by skillful, savvy males. They purport to be artists, and the art involves acquiring the willing participation of the woman. Using a gun is not using your mind, and killing a woman isn't drawing her into your game. What's the correspondence?

OllieGarkey tries to glue his theory together with the vague abstraction "misogyny." He ends by saying that Rodger "exposed himself to hateful rhetoric about women... [a]nd... he acted on that hatred": "when hateful rhetoric is trained on any group,  lone wolves like this guy get triggered."

So in OllieGarkey's fuzzy head, the pickup artists who want to bed scores of women using some fine "game" they've worked out are supposed to "hate" women, and a murderer who's been rejected by women hates women. And I guess men who've been stung by women and want some legal rights "hate" women.

It all fits together with a sloppy, gloppy mess of glue like that.