This summer, a man named George Sodini walked into a womenís exercise class. He set down his gym bag, pulled out a pair of handguns, and proceeded to shoot 11 women, and killing three of them, before finally turning one of the guns on himself.† During the investigation, it was discovered that Sodini had a blog.† The blog chronicled nine months of his failed attempts to get women to sleep with him.† Sodini claimed not to have had sex since 1990.
He wasnít crazy. He had a good job ñ he had friends who thought he was a pretty normal guy. He was mad at women for what he perceived as a slight against him.† And last August, he decided it wasnít worth living anymore, and if he was going to go he was going to take some of them with him.
What bothers me the most about Sodini is that, while we all want to believe he was just a crazy person, he really wasnít that different from most guys. A lot of people arenít aware of the extreme pressure society puts on men to be promiscuous.† Iím not trying to say that men have it worse than women. But the way the sexual double-standard hurt women has been discussed quite a bit and its effect on men often seems to get swept under the rug.
The essential fact, if we try and strip out all the gendered assumptions and value judgments, is that some people are more capable of casual sex than others. That is to say, some people are able to separate the physical pleasure of sex from emotional intimacy with another person, whereas others cannot have one without the other.† Iím not saying either of these is the ìright” way ó itís just two different lifestyle preferences, each with its own drawbacks and benefits.
The problem is that people do make value judgments based on these preferences, and which is judged as superior is entirely dependent on the gender of the person being judged.
Women are not supposed to enjoy recreational sex, so a woman who does is branded a slut. Men are supposed to want to engage in recreational sex, so a man who doesnít is ostracized and considered unmanly.
Now clearly, you might say, Sodini was trying to sleep with women. He wasnít the sort who would have been able to be happy alone if the media hadnít constantly been telling him he needed to get laid. But we have no way of knowing that. What we do know is that whatever else was going on his life, he considered it all useless if he couldnít get a woman. Sex wasnít just one element defining his self-worth ó it was the entirety of it.
I donít think this is rare. When you think about the sexual imagery that pervades our culture, itís not hard to see where this is coming from. Action heroes like James Bond have a lot of enviable qualities, but the be-all and end-all is their promiscuity ó lots of women want them and they donít have any qualms about bedding all of them.† If these are the guys who are supposed to be paragons of masculinity, itís small wonder that those of us who canít or donít want to fit into that mold can struggle with serious depression issues as a result.
ìSociety does this” is often a good way for individuals to get themselves off the hook. But movies and TV arenít the only problem here. The culture that promotes this double standard is very much propagated by individuals ó any time you call a girl a slut or make fun of a guy for not being able to get laid, youíre contributing to it. And there are very real and dangerous consequences that result from that culture, for both genders.