Women are supposed to be sexually available to men, that’s our assigned role; if we are hot, we are supposed to put out since we are signaling we want sex, and if we are not hot, we are supposed to be so grateful for male attention we do anything the attending dood wants. Otherwise, death to us…

Some links and post excerpts about the Sodini murders:

Anna N. at Jezebel:

Sodini was clearly disturbed, but his bilious diary displays an extreme version of a type of grievance misogyny that is all too common. His conviction that all the “desirable single women” in the country are collectively rejecting him, even though he is not “too weird” seems at first like the antithesis of the bluster of pickup artists and “game” aficionados, but a glance at repugnablog Roissy in DC reveals a connection. In a post about the shooting, Roissy writes,

“When men kill women, the underlying reason is almost always an unfulfilled psychosexual need. This goes for spree shooters, rapists, and serial killers. I’m not surprised Sodini hasn’t had sex in nearly 20 years. As I’ve written before, to men celibacy is walking death, and anything is justified in avoiding that miserable fate.”

Roissy’s contention that “anything is justified” to help men avoid celibacy is terrifying, but more subtly disturbing is his assumption that Sodini’s rampage was directly caused by women refusing to sleep with him. Like Sodini himself, Roissy assumes that Sodini shot up a gym because women rejected him, not that women rejected him because he was the kind of guy who would one day shoot up a gym.

From Amanda Marcotte we learn that Sodini was taking a seminar from R. Don Steele, who writes Pick Up Artist-style books like Date Young Women: For Men Over 35 and Body Language Secrets.

NYT columnist Bob Herbert wrote:

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

From law prof Mike Madison:

As I wrote on my local blog this morning, the truth here is that this was an act of violence against women everywhere.

The Women and Girls Foundation, local elected officials, the National Organization of Women, National Council of Jewish Women, and Pittsburghers Against Domestic Violence didn’t need me to say that. They know. They have already mobilized in support of a candlelight vigil for the victims and their families that will take place tonight (Thursday, August 6) in Downtown Pittsburgh.

It is doubtful, unfortunately, that the vigil and its message will attract the coverage that followed the shooting itself, or that the violence-against-women narrative will displace the isolated-loner-gunman-and-the-innocent-victims narrative.

Supposedly liberal doods like   Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Greg Mitchell at the HuffPo and an editorial page editor at The Boston Globe don’t see the mass murder as directed at women though. They just want to frame Sodini as a right wing Republican because that is what best serves their personal and professional interests, unlike calling out misogyny.

–Ann Bartow