Jessica

Vozel

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August 10, 2009

George Sodini and the Culture of Misogyny

Last week, a lonely man named George Sodini opened fire in a Pittsburgh-area gym, killing three women and injuring nine. The media’s excavation of his personal life has yielded chilling and easily viewable results. Sodini kept an Internet log of his progression from a man who thinks about going on a killing spree to a man that actually does so.   

From this journal we learn that, despite a career as a systems analyst and at least average looks, George Sodini had back luck with women. He wrote on Christmas Eve 2008: “Moving into Christmas again. No girlfriend since 1984, last Christmas with Pam was in 1983. Who knows why. I am not ugly or too weird. No sex since July 1990 either (I was 29).” Then, a few days later, “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.”

These writings, coupled with the murderous rampage that culminated from years of pain and rage, illuminate the culture of misogyny that leads men to view women as conquests, as property, as rewards for doing things “right.” For someone like Sodini, rejection is evidence that women (he calls them “hoes”) are selfish, manipulative, cold. There’s a reason he chose to go into a Latin dance class at the gym, where only women were working out, to open fire. His hatred was not generalized. It was directed specifically toward the sex that had rejected him. 

And this illustrates something else: A man like Sodini is conditioned to find himself worthy of women, while women are conditioned to believe it is their own flaws that lead to their loneliness. Sodini has a fairly high self-regard, given his appraisal of his own looks and success. Yet women who face the same long, lonely fate are told there is something wrong with them. Writes Barbara Ellen in The Guardian, “Something has to explain how female dating failure leads to Bridget Jones, while for men the same road can lead to George Sodini.” 

The fear of “spinsterhood” is fueled by advertisers who target a woman’s insecurities, particularly about physical appearance. Women who can’t get a man are portrayed as lonely, miserable spinsters too far gone to care about their looks, surrounded by cats and empty doughnut boxes. Men who can’t get a woman are told – particularly by “dating gurus” like R. Don Steele, whose book How to Date Younger Women was on Sodini’s coffee table and whose videotaped lectures Sodini was seen attending – that women are flawed, money-hungry, cold and deserving of manipulation. (Some dating tactics pedaled by these dating gurus include hypnosis).

Such a dichotomy seems to fairly easily arise from the pressing problem in gender relations (and the foundation for most of what feminism fights against): Women are objects, men are subjects. When the objects don’t behave, they are punished. 

I’ll admit, at certain points reading the chronicle of Sodini’s “plan” and the year preceding it, I felt a bit bad for him. Loneliness is a potent human emotion, and one can imagine the pain that builds up after 30 years of it. And surely, there were deep psychological problems that society’s misogyny only exacerbated, not caused.

“Looking back over everything,” Sodini writes, “what bothers me most is the inability to work toward whatever change I choose.” However, it seems the change Sodini wanted – and could not receive – was not a change within himself, but for everyone else, particularly women, to change their minds about him.    

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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