 |
i read savage love every week and nearly always agree with what danny-s
has to say. this week's article was particularly poignant. you all know
about the crazy dude who shot up a fitness center because he wasn't
getting any? well...
A couple months ago, I sent you an
e-mail thanking you for doing what you do. Today, the power of your
voice hit home. As you know, an angry, sexually frustrated gunman went
on a killing spree at a fitness center in Pittsburgh. Reading the
killer's blog, I was struck by the similarity of his situation to that
of the lonely, sexually frustrated men you counseled in your column the
week before the shooting. But George Sodini did not reach out; the men
who wrote you did.
The reason this strikes so close to home is
that my situation for years was very similar to Sodini's and to the
lonely men who you helped in that column. Although I wasn't a virgin, I
was "clogged up" and unable to get close to people physically and
emotionally. I overcame my fears and hang-ups, and life is good now.
But it wasn't easy. I was never as angry as Sodini, but I was
absolutely as lonely and isolated as he was and every bit as lonely as
the men whose letters you answered. Maybe if I'd been alone another 14
years—I found my life partner at 34—I might have become that angry.
Middle-Aged Family Guy
Thank
you for the note, MAFG, and thanks—I think—for pointing me to George
Sodini's blog. The blog has been pulled down, but it is extensively
quoted in news reports and it makes for depressing reading. It's never
pretty when chronic sexual deprivation and a lifetime of romantic
rejection slam into a narcissistic personality with sociopathic
tendencies who happens to live in a country awash in guns:
"I
actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of
cologne—yet 30 million women rejected me, over an 18- or 25-year
period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of
how many desirable single women there are."
So, hey, why not go shoot up an aerobics class full of women?
A
woman I knew at college—an antiviolence activist, righteous and
right-on—used to say, "Testosterone is gasoline, porn the match." I
disagree. Testosterone is gasoline—which isn't necessarily a bad thing
(gas makes things go)—but sexual frustration is the match.
I'm
not suggesting that this tragedy could've been averted if only some
selfless woman had "taken one for the team" and married Sodini, an
asshole and a sociopath. The women who rejected him obviously saw him
for what he was and were right to run in the other direction. But if
someone had told Sodini, who hadn't had sex since 1990, to see sex
workers—something I advised the guys in my column two weeks ago to
consider (among other things)—it might have taken the edge off his
anger and kept it from curdling into homicidal rage. Maybe if we, as a
society, valued sex workers and sex work, if we legalized and regulated
it, and if we viewed "paying for it" as a legitimate option for guys
who would otherwise go without for decades, perhaps this tragedy could
have been averted.
Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't wish a client
as sick as Sodini on any of my sex-worker pals. But if Sodini had
started seeing sex workers back in 1991 and not, say, two weeks ago
last Monday, perhaps he wouldn't have snapped.
But Sodini wasn't
taking advice from me. He was getting it from R. Don Steele, author of
How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. The book was sitting on
Sodini's coffee table in a video he posted to the web. Steele
apparently traffics in—and profits from—instilling false hopes in
losers like Sodini. ("Immediately improve your success with women!"
Steele says on his website www.steelballs.com. "Everything is 100%
guaranteed money back.")
Sodini felt that he was entitled not
just to sex and a romantic relationship, but to sex and a romantic
relationship with a much younger woman. And he was following the advice
of a love-and-romance guru who encouraged him to cling to that belief.
But Sodini wasn't just another socially maladapted schlub furious with
the world—and with women—for denying him the twentysomething ass he
felt he had coming. Sodini was a nut. And he couldn't understand why,
if he was doing everything right, he wasn't finding the success that
Steele guaranteed him.
Someone needed to sit Sodini down and
explain that settling down requires settling for and that young women
are usually interested in young men and that we can't always have what
we want and that there might be women out there who would date
him—perhaps women closer to his own age, women in his own league in the
looks and social-skills departments (and Sodini wasn't bad looking)—but
no woman was going to date him until after he got his shit together.
And someone needed to tell him that he wasn't going to impress the
ladies by leaving How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35 on his
coffee table.
And someone needed to tell him that some men—and
some women—are alone all their lives and, yeah, that sucks and it's not
fair and it hurts.
Instead, Sodini had R. Don "Steel Balls"
Steele telling him that if he just bought a matching sofa
set—really—and the right suit, that success was guaranteed.
10:10 PM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|