Elliot Rodger’s strange feelings.
„One time while I was alone at PlanetCyber, I saw an older teenager watching pornography. I saw in detail a video of a man having sex with a hot girl. The video showed him stick his penis inside a girl’s vagina. I didn’t know anything about sex at the time. I barely even knew what sex was. I was slowly starting to develop sexual feelings for hot girls, but I didn’t know what to do with them. To see this video really traumatized me. I had no idea what I was seeing… I couldn’t imagine human beings doing such things with each other. The sight was shocking, traumatizing, and arousing. All of these feelings mixed together took a great toll on me. I walked home and cried by myself for a bit. I felt too guilty about what I saw to talk to my parents about it. I was quite shaken for a few days.“
These are the words in which Elliot describes his first real encounter with sex. While it should not be surprising that a 13-year old boy would be somewhat shaken by his first glimpse of pornography, the reaction of Elliot seems pretty extreme. Most boys are shocked when they see porn for the first time, but hardly the majority of them would describe this moment as traumatizing and cry about it. It almost sounds like sexuality was something Elliot couldn’t handle at all, emotionally.
“At one time towards the end of the trip, when I had a sleepover with Ayman at Soumaya’s father’s house, he showed me some European porn videos in the middle of the night. I could observe the act of sex in much more detail than that one glimpse I had at Planet Cyber. I didn’t want to look, but my curiosity got the better of me. To see a video of human beings doing such weird and unspeakable things with each other revolted me. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. And yet, I noticed I was feeling aroused. I felt desire to do those things, to have sex with the naked women I saw in the video. It was a funny feeling that overwhelmed my whole body. I could feel my penis getting hard. This is when I noticed that I was finally going through puberty. Heavens save me. “
Again, Elliot shows a remarkable struggle with his sexual urges. It almost sounds as if he experienced the sexual reaction of his body as thorough confusing and dysphoric.
Interestingly, he later would state: “I began to have fantasies of becoming very powerful and stopping everyone from having sex. I wanted to take their sex away from them, just like they took it away from me. I saw sex as an evil and
barbaric act, all because I was unable to have it.”
Actually, he is contradicting himself, here. His earliest memories of watching pornography clearly show, that he saw Sex as barbaric and strange right from the beginning. It did upset him, in a way he couldn’t understand.
Even before he would ever see pornography, Elliot already exhibited signs that he had a strange vulnerability and paranoia concerning females. Even though this was not linked with anything specific sexual at this time (which probably was due his young age), it still shows a quite troubled young boy:
“At this camp, an incident happened that would scar me for life. The first time that I was treated badly by a girl occurred at this camp. I was innocently playing with the friends I made, and they were tickling me, something people always did because I was very ticklish. I accidently bumped into a pretty girl the same age as me, and she got very angry. She cursed at me and pushed me, embarrassing me in front of my friends. I didn’t know who this girl was… She was only at Pinecrest for summer camp… But she was very pretty, and she was taller than me. I immediately froze up and went into a state of shock. One of my friends asked me if I was ok, and I didn’t answer. I remained very quiet for the rest of the day. I couldn’t believe what had happened. Cruel treatment from women is ten times worse than from men. It made me feel like an insignificant, unworthy little mouse. I felt so small and vulnerable. I couldn’t believe that this girl was so horrible to me, and I thought that it was because she viewed me as a loser. That was the first experience of female cruelty I endured, and it traumatized me to no end. It made me even more nervous around girls, and I would be extremely weary and cautious of them from that point on.”
So, at the age of 11, an age where most boys start to exhibit some interest in girls (non-sexual/pre-sexual usually), Elliot got shoved and yelled at by a pretty girl that was taller than him. While there is no doubt that most boys would feel somewhat humiliated by such an experience, Elliot’s reaction is extreme. He does not only analyzes the girls motive in a kind of paranoid way, but he develops the belief that all girls will treat him that way in future (apparently, because he already starts to get the idea that all females secretly hate him) and starts to get cautious of them. Getting shoved by a girl seemed to have been a life defining event for him.
Given that this happened prior to his exposure to pornography, it might explain his later reaction to it. But as I feel it, it was not that one of the events created the other, but they are both first symptoms of one and the same disorder.
Although it’s not like you can pick up these two things and show “this is how his later ideology was born”, it is quite obvious, that we can already see some kind of basic elements. There is an extreme paranoia towards girls, which would later evolve into the belief that all females are secretly hating him. There is also a strange reaction to sex. At the same time, Elliot’s notices his first sexual interest in girls (without understanding what it is about), he gets a glimpse on pornography and is disturbed to his core. From his writing, it almost sounds like he is literally struggling with processing the experience of sexual arousal.
This contradicts with his later claim that he started to hate sex, because he couldn’t have it. I suspect, that his sexual urges, his distorted sexual feelings and his paranoia towards females did interfere in a way, where this idea of “I hate sex because I can’t have it and I hate females for rejecting me” was an attractive explanation with what he was struggling with- in his mind.
I know that many people are very wary against Post-Mortem diagnosis of any form, but I always have been interested in this. Of course you can’t do an actual diagnosis of these people, but that does not mean in any way that we are unable to relate their behaviour to general psychological traits or disorders. And in Elliot’s case, some of his mind patterns and behaviour fits the diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder in a way that I’d say it is noteworthy.
First: Schizotypals often have the belief that other people dislike or hate them and it is hard to convince them otherwise. This fits the basic picture of women that Elliot developed in his early years and then later mixed up with the arrogant and entitled part of himself.
As many people have pointed out, Elliot actually was never “rejected” by any girl in his life- he did not take any approaches on them. And in reading his Manifesto you can see this dynamic very good. As much Elliot writes about wanting a girl, every time he describes a scenery where he gets in the position of having contact with a female, he steps back and writes about how much that girl hates him and secretly sees him as inferior. Based on his paranoia, there was no sense in approaching girls, since he was already convinced that they were hating him anyway.
Second: According to Millon a “chaotic pattern of sexual interaction” is common among schizotypals. Also frequently listed as symptoms are body dysmorphic thoughts and struggles with processing emotions. What- if combinated- sounds like an accurate description of Elliot’s feelings towards his sexual awakening.
Finally, Elliots ideas of winning the lottery just by wishing it, is an example of “magical thinking” as its finest:
“My faith was soon broken, as I bought a few Megamillions Lottery tickets and visualized myself being the winner. I usually visualized it by meditating on the rooftop of my mother’s apartment right at the time of the drawing. A part of me knew it was impossible to will the universe to make me the winner just by wishing for it on a rooftop, but I was so desperate that I wanted to believe I could. I wanted to believe I had the POWER to do it.“
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