yet another horrific case of violence:
George Sodini seethed with anger and frustration toward women. He couldn't understand why they ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He hadn't had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn't slept with a woman in 19 years.
"Women just don't like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive," the 48-year-old computer programmer lamented in a chilling diary he posted on the Internet.
For months, he also wrote vaguely about using guns to carry out his "exit plan" at his health club, where lots of young women worked out. ...
He went to the sprawling L.A. Fitness Club in this Pittsburgh suburb, turned out the lights on a dance-aerobics class filled with women, and opened fire with three guns, letting loose with a fusillade of at least 36 bullets.
He killed three women and wounded nine others before committing suicide. ...
In his diary, he complained that women "don't even give me a second look ANYWHERE" even though he was tan and fit and claimed to dress well and smell nice.
this sounds so scarily like a case of "Nice Guy" syndrome taken to the extreme. there's that sense of entitlement, the notion that he deserves to have women because he thinks he's doing all the right things. that women are to blame for rejecting him, when he's apparently trying so hard.
what is also scary is that his blog is publicly available, he was explicit about his plans, but it would appear that no-one who read his blog alerted the authorities.
i don't really have much more to say about this, except to express my condolences to the families of his victims, and to hope that the injured recover fully.
11 comments:
No! hes not a "nice guy", far from it.
Any decent, good looking, "nice guy" would probably have had any number of female friends/lovers/partners over the time he was single. The fact that he was single and what he had written in his blog suggests he was probably some sort of looser. Maybe In his own mind he thought he was quite a catch (Clatyon Weatherston?), but the reality was quite the opposite.
Dave, it is people like you who bandy around terms like loser that are the causes of these tragedy's. Maybe if the people around that guy actually cared about him and didn't treat him like shit he wouldn't have felt any desire to do what he did.
Dave, I think you're not quite clear on the way 'nice guy' is used in this post.
i saw an interesting article that was posted aftere virginia tech shooting that has a lot of interesting analysis on gender in shootings
http://www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/?p=519
its depressing...
nice guy???????????
I DOUBT IT.
I suggest most nice guys have respect for woman and wouldnt shoot them.
hugh has it correctly dave, you've misunderstood what i mean by "Nice Guy" in this context. this post will give you some idea as to what i mean, but even better is this link left in the comments.
in thinking it over, where this shooter may have gone wrong in his many years of being single was a misdiagnosis of his problem. i strongly suspect that the problem was not that women hated him but that he hated women, and the women he met could sense that from the interaction.
Actually I think 'nice guy' is a misdiagnosis. From a quick perusal of his blog (which I'll grant you is hardly an authoritative source) it seems to me that Sodini felt women should be available to him not because he was 'nice' but because he was financially successful and I think physically fit. It's more of an 'alpha male' thing.
But tempting as it is to prescribe this to some pathology on the part of the individual men - and I certainly wouldn't argue this wasn't the case with Sodini - I think we need to not just consider the way society tells men that women should be available to them, but also the way it tells men that if they don't spend a lot of time in relationships with women, they're somehow failures.
I too don't see him as one of your "nice guys". He doesn't claim to be nice. He realizes he's flawed but feels helpless at changing himself ("What bothers me most is the inability to work towards whatever change I choose ... I wish I can go back to 1975 and fix things."). He is even amused that anyone would think he is nice ("Told by at least 100 girls/women over the years I was a 'nice guy'. Not kidding"). He seems to be jealous of everyone. Glosses over the few positive things that happen (gets a date; gets a promotion and a raise). Two good things though; he likes his new boss ("he tactfully says when you did something wrong or compliments on good things. Never confused with him") and he hopes that his various notes including the 'blog' would help others not go the same way as him ("maybe all this will shed insight on why some people just cannot make things happen in their life, which can potentially benefit others")
Martyr to the cause. There are some of us who women will simply never like as more than friends. From an evo-psychological standpoint, it is more insulting than someone flat out hating you. While I don't applaud his methods, and would never seek to emulate them, I certainly understand his sentiments, and I would be lying if I said I experienced no Catharsis in hearing his story.
Even though this guy took it to the extreme, I can relate to the feelings he stated. The way women ignore me, it makes me feel at times that my mother should've opened her mouth instead of opening her legs. I shouldn't have even been born.
That being said, this guy was looking for love in all the wrong places. Love of self and inner peace are way more important. We cannot place that much importance in other people's views.
Interesting to see the long life of this post, still attracting new comments.
(FYI, all comments on old posts go into moderation automatically and sometimes it takes us a while to get around to them)
While I don't subscribe to the "soulmate" approach to partnering up, I do tend to think there is at least one person out there for everyone. I think a lot of us look in the wrong places, or don't look at all really, and draw the conclusion that women (or men) don't like us/are stupid and hateful. Best to work things so you can be happy on your own, just in case, and then who knows what could happen?
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