@FOUND SOUL,
Quote:Being a Virgin for a male over 16, 18, 21 is like being dead. Being Autistic is embarrassing. Being a Virgin for a male at 21 is embarrassing, (if not by choice). Yet people learn to live with being a Virgin and work around it, work with it and work towards changing it (if the can) .
The average age at which U.S. teens, both male and female, lose their virginity is 17, and that's an average, meaning some are obviously losing it later.
One of Elliot's two childhood friends, I think it was James, was also a virgin, so among the two friends he did have, one of them had never experienced intercourse either, but that didn't help Elliot see the issue with less melodrama and more perspective. Everyone else in the world, including one of his two friends, was not living the life of sex and pleasure he imagined, nor were they apparently as unhinged by their virginity as he was.
You're right, everyone generally lives with being a virgin, and finding sexual release in other ways, like masturbation, until they have an opportunity to have intercourse, or until they want to have intercourse. His father sensibly tried encouraging him to be patient, beside offering him the option of a prostitute. But, with Elliot, the entire issue didn't seem as much about frustrated sexual impulses, as it did about his status compared to other men. Elliot was very status conscious. To have a beautiful girl in the passenger seat of his car would be a status symbol for him--particularly in the eyes of other men.
I'm not sure he wanted a real sexual relationship, or any kind of a relationship, with an actual woman. I'm not sure he wanted any kind of actual physical sexual contact with another person, it might have revolted or terrified him, because nothing in his manifesto suggested anything sensual about him, or any desire to touch/hold/kiss or make love to a woman.
Being a virgin at 21 wasn't embarrassing for Elliot Rodger--embarrassing things are generally difficult to talk about, or they aren't talked about, because they involve shame--but Elliot couldn't stop talking about it. He couldn't stop telling people he was a virgin, he drove his family and childhood friends nuts with the topic, it was almost the only thing he wanted to talk about, constantly, and he did the same when other students living in his housing complex asked him to join them for some conversation. He was
obsessed with it--he made YouTube videos about it. He wasn't embarrassed, he was pissed off about being a virgin, because it was an "injustice" and an "insult" to him that stupid women weren't providing him with his sexual entitlements, given his obvious superiority compared to the men they did choose.
All of us can empathize with someone feeling lonely or alienated, or rejected, or despondent, and longing for a close relationship with someone that will make them feel loved and wanted--most of us have been in that situation at some time in our lives, so we know what it feels like. That wasn't Elliot Rodger, he had never been rejected by any females, he had never even approached or tried to initiate conversation with any females, he didn't want to even try giving an off-hand compliment to a female he passed on the street. He wanted strange women to intuitively and suddenly respond to his alleged "superiority" at a mere glance, throw themselves at him, and give him a life of pleasure and sex--a nice fantasy, but Elliot's craziness was that he fully expected this to be reality, and he hated women because they weren't conforming to his expectations/fantasies and providing him with what he wanted and felt he deserved.
And his thinking on this issue got increasingly paranoid and delusional, which is why he fixated on seeking revenge for the "horrible injustice" and personal "insult" done to him, by women not fulfilling his fantasies, and providing him with, what he saw, as his entitlements. His revenge was a demonstration of his grandiosity and narcissism.
And that is why he wasn't gathering much sympathy from the people in his life, except for the fellow woman-haters he met on the internet, or among most of those who read his manifesto after his death, who tended to see him as whining like a spoiled brat, and more misogynistic than someone longing for a woman to love who would love him, and that fairly unsympathetic reaction came from both males and females.
I don't know that being Autistic is embarrassing, although it can certainly hamper one's social functioning, and that can contribute to envy and jealousy, and it can create social frustrations that can lead to anger. But, like everything else, Autism affects different individuals differently, and Elliot did not give a clear indication of how it affected him, and he generally lacked objectivity or insight about his social problems--he pretty much blamed others.
I just think we can't disregard the fact that he likely suffered from a form of Autism, that this was part of his make-up, although that certainly doesn't explain everything about his personality, or his values, or his mental health problems, or why he turned into a cold-blooded mass murderer, it's just a piece of the puzzle we are trying to understand. But I think we're going to need to hear from some of the mental health professionals who worked with him, or one of his childhood friends, or more members of his family, to understand more about how Autism might have affected him, and how it affected him over the span of his life, and I doubt those people really want to speak out, nor do they have to.
She laughed out loud.
