On Being (and Not Being) That Guy

No one will ever mistake me for a ladies' man, or some sort of Cassanova.  My track record with women has been, on the whole, not very successful.  I am 36 years old, and I am still single.  I would like to think that, in general, I am OK with this reality, but the truth is that I sometimes struggle coming to terms with this.  Despite the fact that I have wonderful friends and an amazing family, there are definitely times that I feel lonely.  There are also times when I look at being single as a failure, a black mark, a sign that I am somehow flawed and broken and defective.  That is not a pleasant feeling.

Before he ended the lives of six people on Friday, Elliott Rodger took to Youtube and posted a video manifesto.  I won't link to it, because I am uncomfortable with supporting in any way what he did.  But I read a transcript of what he said in the video.  He basically claims that he is going to shoot a bunch of people, especially women, because they would not date him.  He raged against these women, and the (in his mind) inferior men who get to have sex and be in relationships with them.  It was their fault he was lonely.  They deserved whatever they got.

I've had those same thoughts.


 For me, unlike Rodger, these thoughts have been transient, leaving as quickly as they come.  I've never dwelt on them, the way he clearly seemed to have done.  And it has never occurred to me to take out my frustrations about women on someone else, especially women themselves.  But I have seethed with resentment over women who chose someone else over me, and at the men who were selected.  I have felt the sense of entitlement expressed by Rodger--I, too, like to think of myself as a "nice guy," and I have felt that women as a Collective were being unjust in not "rewarding me" for that fact.  I've stamped my feet and shaken my fist at the sky at the unfairness of all of it.  The unfairness to me, of course.

It bothers me very much that I have had some of the same thoughts as Rodger.

 I know where these thoughts come from--a very deep and profound sense of insecurity and a lack of sense of self-worth.  The pursuit of a person of the opposite sex ceases to be about the other person at all, and becomes an exercise in warding off those feelings inside yourself.  The woman becomes a talisman, a prop--it doesn't matter who she is.  She becomes a thing, a thing that is used as a medicine for your own internal sickness.  It is a profoundly sick and self-involved place where those thoughts come from.  I know, because I have been to that place.

I am not Elliott Rodger.  Generally, when my thoughts turn black, I turn the lash on myself rather than on others.  But there is a part of me that is Elliott Rodger, because I know some small segment of the thoughts in his head.  And, until now, I have not fully grasped how dangerous these kinds of thoughts are.  And how dehumanizing they are to women.

Sometimes you need to hear your own thoughts repeated back to you to really hear them.  Sometimes you need something to happen to check yourself.  Reading that manifesto caused me to check myself.  No one, and certainly no woman, owes me anything.  I am not entitled to the affections of anyone.  And I need to be on guard against thinking that any person, especially a woman, exists for the purpose of fulfilling my needs.

Maybe I needed that reminder.  Too bad it had to come under these circumstances.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out of the church a
Read more

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Image
1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbation is going to result in those folks
Read more