Strange similarities between Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine

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For those of you who don't know, back on December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine killed 14 women and injured 14 others at Ecole Polytechnique in Montréal, claiming to be "fighting feminism". In addition to Lépine and Rodger having misogynistic motives, here are some other strange things they have in common:

1. Both had their parents separate when they were around 7 years old.
Elliot Rodger's parents separated soon after his 7th birthday, even though a few months before, his mother assured him such a thing wouldn't happen. His father was likely having an affair with his future stepmother, Soumaya.

Marc Lépine's father cheated on his wife and was physically abusive to her and the children. She left and took the kids one day after he had struck Marc, and the legal separation was finalized in the year of Marc's 7th birthday. However, unlike Elliot Rodger's father, Lépine's completely abandoned the family forever.

2. Both had a sister a few years younger who they didn't get along with.
Elliot Rodger's sister was born about 4 years after him. He doesn't really mention her at all in his manifesto, but says near the end of it that they never got along.

Marc Lépine's sister was 3 years younger than him, and he hated her. He even went as far as to make a mock grave for her.

3. Both travelled/moved a lot when they were very young.
Elliot travelled to a lot of different countries when he was too young to remember it very well, which he mentions in his manifesto. He moved to the United States when he was 5.

Marc's father worked for an international bank. He was born in Montreal, and as a child moved around a lot to places like Costa Rica and Puerto Rico. He permanently came back to Montreal when he was around 4 years old.

4. Both were biracial and seemed to have issues with it.
This is probably the strangest coincidence of all...

Elliot Rodger is half English and half Chinese. He calls full-blooded Asians "ugly" in his manifesto, and voices his disapproval of interracial relationships (very strange, since he's a product of one).

Marc Lépine was taunted in school for being half Arab. His original name was Gamil Gharbi, and he decided to legally change both names when he was 14.



I'm not sure what to make of this, but it's something to think about...

Lepine was only a misogynist.Elliot was a mixture
of misogynist,racism,hatred toward men.

Eh, seems mostly coincidental and not very relevant. I think the whole misogyny angle is getting played up too much by people with their own agendas. Rodger reminds me a lot of Cho Seung-Hui the Virginia Tech shooter, just the anger and the isolation and the delusions of grandeur.

How exactly does one 'play up' someone wanting to put all women in concentration camps so as to starve them to death? I'm pretty sure 'I want to kill all women because they're women' is the apex of misogyny. Is this another one of those meetings I missed?

Perhaps the fact that they both had issues with the women who were in their lives from an early age (mothers and sisters) may have had something to do with it...?

Though it's quite clear that Elliot Rodgers was a misanthrope more than anything...

The dude was a narcissistic sociopath nutjob and wrote a lot of messed up stuff, I think it's pretty sad that people out there are trying to push their agendas over this tragedy which is what people are doing by trying to tie this to some bigger issue of misogyny in our culture. Rodger killed indiscriminately, first his MALE roommates with a knife, hammer, and machete before going on a rampage out in public targeting whoever he could find. These killings didn't happen because Rodger was a misogynist, it happen because he had a diseased brain.

People I've seen expressing similar opinions to Jacoby have said that Rodger was a narcissist first and a misogynist second. As evidence, they cite his feelings of general superiority, and the male victims of his attacks.

I think there's an almost pitch-black irony that, just as he thought he should win the lottery, so it seems he thought his killing spree should - not just would, but should - go a lot 'better' than it did. He went knocking on the door of an all-female building. Thank goodness he wasn't let in.

I don't think he was only a misogynist, by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think that the only understanding of his self and crime that will be useful and illuminating is a feminist one. But I think it is important to understand certain currents of thinking that Rodger used to make sense of his life.

For me, the point about misogyny here is that it was a central part of how he understood his anger, and this misogyny - the things he had to say about women - are not uncommon, and he too easily found sympathy and support in his thinking. Either one supposes that he literally didn't know what he was saying, or one takes what he said, and the ease and regularity and encouragement with which this narrative is found, seriously.

How he expressed his anger isn't much importance to me, his delusions and his narcissism are what fueled it. His disturbed mind blamed society in order to rationalize his own shortcomings and illness. I take his rantings in the same vein as Cho Seung-Hui's, one has to realize that their 'manifestos' are pictures that they painted of themselves for others to see and probably do not accurately represent who they really were as people or why they did what they did.

both were virgins ? male insecurity issues of not fulfilling their "male role" ?

His manifesto very clearly, even explicitly, rationalizes his anger by specifically blaming women - he blames women for not being nice to him, and he blames other men for having perceived success with women. Reading between the lines, he seems to think he would be perfectly fine being a complete hermit with no friends, if he didn't have a sex drive.

Well, it's important to me, and a lot of other people, given he ended up killing six people, and wanting to kill an awful lot more. There's a point at which 'mental illness' becomes a handy way of dismissing something that really needs to be considered - it localises any problems in the individual's psychology, and walks away from any suggestion there may be deeper issues at play.

The woman makes me want to have sex with her. She won't let me have sex with her. Whore is misogyny 101. It's the foundation, one of the oldest stories there is. I want all women to suffer and die because they're women is, well, you've maxed out on misogyny if you get to that point. The only thing I can think could be beyond it is wanting to kill men who've had sex with women. Ah.

There's an awful lot of effort being put into trying to dismiss Rodger's misogyny. 'Virulent and violent misogyny to be treated as a mental illness' seems to me something one might expect from separatist feminists as a transitional demand, a kind of gesture towards table-turning for how 'hysterical' women were treated (not that there's any such equivalence, of course).

It's really, really weird - might misogyny get a bad name?

I just don't think it illuminates anything beyond Elliot Rodger, his sickness was his delusions and narcissism and because of that he turned his anger of his shortcomings outwardly towards women(and men and whoever else he felt were taking something he deserved) If it wasn't women, it could of been blacks or Republicans or police or Disney. He wasn't and couldn't take ownership of himself. I don't think it is appropriate to talk about broader subjects of misogyny in our culture in reference to Elliot Rodger.

I don't necessarily think this is the case. It's pretty clear from reading his manifesto that underneath all the hatred and misogyny was a guy with extremely severe self-esteem issues. He talks a lot about how he views himself as a short, weak guy who wasn't very outgoing and went through puberty rather late. He takes each rejection with women early in life very hard, and eventually develops the world view that women will never love him, and basically stops trying. Yet, he still somehow believes that despite his lack of effort, women should want to date him anyway. So it becomes this vicious cycle of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ultimately he decided to kill people out of his own self-loathing, but his misogyny is the engine that fueled his self-esteem issues.

I'm not sure how to explain that, correct me if I'm wrong. The two men had poisonous views of women, simply because they might have internalized the belief that being a man revolves around control and dominance, taking on the mentality that women are property to them and go out their way to treat them according to what society teaches them, on the basis of male privilege. Male privilege is some sort of social construction that being male will reward you with benefits, like how being light skinned rewards you with benefits. Therefore, we still live in an unequal society that favours the majority group and pushes the minority group away, so that is a challenge to fight for equality. Feminists think sexism is gone, but we still have a long way to go.

They didn't have parents who can teach them to treat everyone with respect. The only difference is that Rodger wasn't abused by his father, his father abandoned him, which I didn't know. They both had issues with women, which stem from their relationships with their mothers and sisters. Not only that, but of their inability to find a girlfriend. Some men get mad if they are rejected by women.

Which is why gender norms are recycled over again and people being desensitized from time to time because they are built upon the notion that this is how a man should behave and how a woman should behave. When some guy acts out aggressively, society, especially the media, is quick to label it masculine. If a woman does the same thing, they say she's out of control and being bitchy. We get conditioned very early on that this is how we "should" behave based on gender. This does a lot of damage on us; for men, they are denied the ability to express their feelings and for women, they are denied the ability to be self reliant. In the end we're all screwed up.

I'm not a feminist but I think it's time to challenge misogyny and all other forms of oppression. Things won't get better until we stand up and speak out.