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UCSB

Girls Aren’t Sluts

This morning we’re all waking up to the news about the shootings and rampage in Isla Vista. Parents sent their kids to college and seven won’t make it home. Currently the shooter’s YouTube page is active and it plays like a bad movie about a rich, disaffected youth who doesn’t make it through puberty with grace.

His videos are about how he’s been tortured with his virginity (not even a kiss) for the past eight years, his loneliness and how girls are sluts who “give it” to everyone but him. I’m quite certain he’s not the only 22 year old virgin who is frustrated but the venom is problematic.

Can we talk to our sons about the fact that girls don’t owe them sex? That there will many virgins both boys and girls, that some of them will be sexually frustrated and that’s normal. Can we normalize masturbation so that boys and girls can be a little less frustrated? I think we do a good job of telling our daughters they don’t owe anyone sex but we fail at telling them that they’re good people after they’ve had sex.

The notion of the mass shooting is not a common situation but the way we talk to boys about slutty girls who give it up to everyone but them is disturbingly normal. When we went to war against Vietnam we called them gooks. It’s easy to kill a gook but not so easy to kill a man, woman or child. Niggers were bought and sold, they were not people, using that term dehumanized them enough for America to treat them as chattel. Two generations before me my family died at the hands of Nazis. No Great Grandparents on that side, it’s easy to exterminate a kike but the notion of putting a human in an oven would be revolting.

So when our girls are sluts it’s easy to hurt them. Not everyone will run them over with cars or shoot them. People won’t necessarily kill them for being a slut but they do have permission to demean them, touch them, demote them, hit them, exploit them and abuse them. When we accept that women (and we do this to each other) can be called a slut we take away a piece of their humanity, we strip them of opportunities and we set them up as targets.

The shootings at UCSB will torture hundreds, maybe thousands of people for years to come. Elliot Rodger’s videos are disturbing to watch and his final video (which appears to be removed) talks about killing blonde sorority sluts. Again, they’re easier to kill than young women, because young women are human and deserving of proper treatment.

I don’t imagine that we will learn a lot from this shooting. There will be talk about mental illness and gun rights. There might be murmurings about watching for depression and isolation but the talk that I’d really like to have is this one. The one where we talk about keeping women human.