The right to sexual fulfilment: a privileged gunman, misogyny and social comparisons

A young man in California, Elliot Rodger, is believed to have posted online a video threatening annihilation of women as retribution for a life of sexual rejection, followed by a shooting rampage, seven women dead and his own suicide.

While an investigation and the uncovering of facts about why this twenty-two year-old university student resorted to a murderous rampage will take some time, his uploaded YouTube video describing his sexual frustrations from perspectives of both misogyny and sexual inadequacy provides a few initial ways to make sense of this tragedy

"For the last eight years of my life, ever since I hit puberty, I've been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desire. All because girls have never been attracted to me."

Rodger complains of being "still a virgin" at 22 years of age, a couple of years into his college degree. "College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex, and fun, and pleasure. In those years, I've had to rot in loneliness."

Much of the initial media commentary has, so far, rightly focused on the intense misogyny that culminates in such heinous violence against women and the ways in which the über-misogynistic rhetoric of the Men's Movement is replicated in much of his video material and, ultimately, in his behaviour.

A substantial portion of the media response has, not unexpectedly, been framed by 'individualising' the act and the person - that his attitude to women, his motivation for the crime, his willingness to kill women, all emerge from a person internally troubled, who needed mental health support and who, broadly, was an anomaly in an otherwise well-adjusted contemporary first-world elite community.

Aside from the problematic tendency to individualise rather than looking to socio-cultural factors that make such attitudes, behaviours and acts thinkable, public commentary has been right to point to the ways in which misogynistic attitudes operate within a continuum from an anti-woman slogan such as "Ditch the Witch", or a wink about women sex workers, to the murder of Jill Meagher and the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Quebec in which an anti-feminist killed fourteen women, leading to the vital work of the White Ribbon Campaign which has been running since 1991.

At the same time, however, there are other elements that have not been discussed in detail so far, but which allow this terrible event to highlight some of the social attitudes which circulate in ways that make Rodger's demands seem credible to himself. The first is a culture in which sexual satisfaction is presented as a human right and that presents itself as a social pressure to seek sexual fulfilment, sometimes 'at all costs'. The second is a cultural framework of norms that encourages people to put painful pressure on themselves through social comparisons.

The Right to Sexual Fulfilment (Now)

Rodger claimed several times in his video that, without sex and as a virgin, he has had to "rot in loneliness". He probably was lonely - particularly if many of his university peers were having sex, had partners, had greater success in initiating a sexual encounter or maintaining a relationship.

It needs to be asked, however, what it is that positioned him to see himself as lonely - indeed, to articulate that loneliness in a YouTube video and to make the case for retribution on those he believed were the cause of his unfulfilled sexual desires.

Part of Rodger's motivation is based in the idea that he has been denied a "right" to sexual fulfilment. Girls who threw "themselves at obnoxious brutes," he felt, needed to punished, slaughtered and annihilated because others had access to "hedonistic pleasures" while he was excluded. The "popular kids" were "living a better life" than that he felt was available to himself.

Theorists, philosophers and advocates have, in recent years, argued over the notion that there may be conceived a "human right to have sex". The idea of a right to sexual expression is an important one in acknowledging the emotional, physical and affection needs of persons with intellectual and physical disabilities or the very elderly including those in nursing homes. A number of excellent organisations have been established to help, for example, persons with disabilities to access sexual experience by making connections with sex workers and educating sex workers in the sometimes complex situations that may arise with more unique clients.

But what of Rodger's claims to a right to sexual fulfilment?

What distinguishes Rodger from other persons who, for different circumstances, might find it difficult to achieve a sexual or emotional connection with another person is that it was almost certainly a matter of time. Not unattractive, not infirm - just awkward and lacking in confidence. Perhaps impatient and ignorant of the fact that sexual activity will be part of his life in due course.

At twenty-two, he is not the only young person in a first-world country who has not yet had a sexual experience. He rotted in loneliness not because he had not yet had sex, but because there are sometimes unrealistic and over-heightened expectations that one should have had sex by twenty-two.

In other words, he was unaware that there was nothing wrong with not being sexually fulfilled, and blamed his peers and the women around him for what he saw as an oppressive circumstance.

It might pay to turn attention to the cultural formations that present such urgency for a first sexual experience. This is not new - a vast proportion of 1980s teen comedy genre of films had narratives that centred explicitly on young men seeking a sexual experience with women "at all costs", among these films such as the Porky's trilogy (1982, 1983 and 1985).

More recently, Sex and the City (1998-2004), although a rich text with complex, multiple narratives, included an ostensible theme in which middle-class women viewed access to "good sex" as a right, one to be sought now, sometimes at the cost of other pursuits.

Even more recently, and although a very-nuanced and sometimes-philosophic text, The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) likewise depicts young men's obsession with getting a shag, getting a girlfriend, getting romantically noticed as the priority of social activity, one of the reasons for being alive, and the primary element in social achievement.

Pointing to the cultural formation of "sexual urgency" for young men (and the fact that this is sometimes explicitly regarded as improper for women) is not in any way to suggest that there is anything wrong with sex, in any formation, with any number of partners, hedonistic or vanilla, at any time - of course within the proviso that it is safe, consensual and without unwanted violence. Sex is good, and the fewer hang-ups about sex there are the better the social circumstances for many people.

Nor is this to put forward an argument that people should 'wait' - whether that is for a steady partner, for marriage, until of 'appropriate age', for a more loving sexual encounter, until one is in a relationship or any other reason.

Rather, the issue is whether or not the social pressure to have sex and feel that one is sexually satisfied can, as has perhaps been the case with Elliot Rodger, drive someone into a mad, murderous and self-hating rage. It is not the waiting, it is not the rejection, but the fact that Rodger felt less of a human being, that he was being excluded from something that he felt everyone else had accessed, that in relation to other people he was somehow less 'normal', and is therefore a monster (and thus do a monstrous thing).

Encouraging greater awareness of the problems of social pressure to be sexually fulfilled involves making people aware that they are not somehow inadequate or inferior if they are not (1) getting any, (2) wishing to get any, (3) getting some but not feeling it is as enjoyable as they feel it should be. Sex is great to be having; for some people not having sex is just as good. And not having it right now should not result in social inadequacy, self-hatred, feeling abnormal, hating the world (and hating the women who aren't giving it to him).

PRIVILEGE, SEX AND DEATH

When police arrived at his premises, Elliot Rodger was dead due to a presumed self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In some ways, Elliot Rodger's video follows a particular kind of suicide script and might be read as a suicide note. Indeed, many of the vlogs (video logs) he uploaded to his YouTube account are notes articulating his belief he has been unfairly treated by the world, his hatred of the world, his sense that he does not belong in the world.

If his YouTube videos are to be taken at face value, then his rampage murder-suicide can be read as being the result of his feelings of inadequacy in comparison with his peers - or, at least, his impression of how much his peers are having and enjoying sexual activity.

At first, thinking about Rodger as feeling inadequate and inferior is rather strange. He was an upper-middle-class young man, university-educated, a parent involved in a high-profile Hollywood production role, and driving around California in a BMW. He was attractive, had an interest in aesthetic beauty, introspective, personable if a little awkward, articulate if probably a little shy. In contrast to the majority of the population, nevertheless, he was very privileged.

Putting his case down to privilege-gone-wrong or grand self-entitlement of the well-to-do is, however, too simple. For himself, he was not privileged because the one area in which he compared himself with others was sexual achievement. His sense of a deep contrast between his own and his peers' sexual experience, regardless of all other aspects of privilege, was clearly damaging, leading ultimately to the deaths of his victims and his own self-afflicted death.

One way of understanding some suicides is through the notion of 'relative misery', whereby a subject feels that his or her life, happiness or resources have fallen short of those available to similar other people. This approach is used to explain why suicide rates sometimes continue to remain the same or increase even during periods of overall wealth, success or happiness across a nation or large population group. When those in one's socio-economic category, peer group or those who are socially comparable appear to be "doing better" than one is oneself, then one's sense of misery is heightened, aspirations are frustrated and suicide can be an available avenue for escaping the emotional pain that has become intolerable.

In Rodger's case, the intensity of his anger is perhaps the product of violent emotions caused by the 'relative misery' of perceiving his peers as sexually and romantically successful, while he lagged behind. He may have been very privileged relative to many other people in his country, but his relative comparison centred not on his wealthy background or elite lifestyle but on sexual fulfilment. The social pressure to feel "sexually normal" by losing his virginity and being noticed by the objects of his desire presents itself in him as intolerably painful inadequacy.

The anger produced by this painful social comparison found its outlet, of course, not merely in suicide but in adopting heightened misogynistic attitudes in order to find someone to blame for the pain.

In a culture that has moved towards re-framing sexual pleasure and experience through a right 'at all costs' to immediate sexual fulfilment, and in the context of contemporary society's intense social comparisons, this tragic outcome is not really a surprise. And one we will see again if we don't begin to address the social factors that create inadequacies where none should exist.

While Elliot Rodger is, of course, wholly accountable for his horrendous violence against women, the answer is not merely to condemn him, celebrate his own death and move on.

Rather, it points to the very urgent need to start investigating some of the social norms around sexual fulfilment, around misogyny, around social comparisons and the affliction of pressures to be 'normal'.