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Tortured by loneliness and his lack of success with women, George Sodini developed a plan to get even. On Tuesday night, he executed it, opening fire in a fitness center here and hitting 12 women, 3 fatally, before turning a gun on himself.
After reading the full article, you begin to understand how a man can become so anguished that he finds himself capable of fulfilling his plans of vengeance against the world he felt had shunned him and the society that had betrayed his trust and led him to believe he had no choices other than finding a beautiful, young woman for him to love or dieing in heartache.
Cenk Uygur, one of my favorite liberal talk show hosts, host of the Young Turks, suggests how we can see the Pennsylvania shooter and the tragedy from a different perspective. He suggests in the video below how we can see the result of this situation as a product of how society sees love and relationships.
(Link To Youtube Channel Updated Daily)
(Link To Youtube Channel Updated Daily)
“Society has become obsessed with dating and going out with…someone who is supper attractive…they have to be younger, they have to be thinner, they have to be attractive.”
The message Uygur presented, I find, needs to be taken to heart when considering what has happened and how this came to be. In our society we value and worship the beautiful a little too much. Like Uygur said, we ask too much of each other. Maybe Sodini was asking too much of others. Instead of looking past the women who may have rejected him, he focused on them even more. I’m not sure if he really understood that beauty does not equal personality. In his diaries and letters, he saw these women that he obsessed over as friends and sources of inspiration and empowerment. He believed that if he could find a young and attractive woman to be his girlfriend, she would be all of the above. If he wanted a friend, I do not doubt he could have made one. Unfortunately, his obsessions with the glorification of the young and the beautiful distorted his judgment. By bypassing what he truly wanted, companionship and love, I believe that he forgot what it meant to be with the person you love. Love isn’t about what is superficial; it’s about what’s genuine about a people you love.
The book that Uygur mentions in the video, How to Date Young Women: For Men over 35, is so unbelievable it has to be a joke. Product description from Amazon:
224 pages of realistic methods and sound advice from a man who has dated young women for the past 25 years. You're going to know what she has to offer and what you absolutely cannot expect from her. You will end up knowing what it really takes for a fortyish man to date a twentyish woman. Steele's experiences are here for you to learn from, good ones, funny ones and horror stories. When done reading you'll avoid many of the mistakes he made as you learn the complex, delicate rituals and courtship practices insisted upon by a young woman interested in an older man.
From what I have read on the Amazon reviews and an article about the author, I can infer that what the author promotes is nothing but misogyny and patriarchy. Only the truly depressed and desperate can possibly pick up this book and expect to be better at what ever dating “techniques” they are using to attract young women. I think this takes us back to the Young Turks video. We not only expect so much from other people but we depend on our partners to be young and attractive, ignoring who we are and what we need to focus on in our own lives. In the case of Sodini and the men who followed this book, they really needed to focus on what convinced them to attempt anything from this book. When it comes to misogyny and patriarchy, you can find a more in-depth blog here.
Craig Ferguson, host of CBS’s The Late Late Show, although he does stray off from my main point of this story, offers, what I believe to be, a deeper insight into society’s obsession with youth. I believe the video below can offer a sense of wonder about how we came to be who we are at this time when events like this happen. The video ends with a high note so I’ll leave this story with that.
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by Anatic09
Gunfire in distant gym echoes in a local workout