WHEN REFUSING TO HEAR ‘NO’ TURNS LETHAL
Like other so-called incels, Scott Paul Beierle’s complaint about women who failed to see how wonderful he was might have been simply funny, were it not so pathetic and, in the end, tragic.
Authorities identified Beierle, 40, as the gunman who posed as a customer to go on a killing spree Friday in a Tallahassee, Florida, yoga studio. He shot two women to death and injured five other people before turning the gun fatally on himself.
From what’s been pieced together by police and journalists, Beierle sounds like a man whose mind was a stew of hatreds.
He left a history of misogynistic and racist rants in videos, first reported by BuzzFeed, that he posted over at least the past four years. He bemoaned his inability to connect with other people — as varied as his Army comrades who didn’t want to travel around with him and women who refused to go out with him.
He identified with the tragically bizarre “involuntary celibates” movement, which is believed to have inspired other homicidal misogynists such as Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, California, in May 2014. Rodger also expressed his disgust with women in videos online and urged other incels to fight back.
The yoga studio massacre occurred almost a week after another mass shooting in which a man killed 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue while mouthing anti-Semitic slurs, according to witnesses.
Just over a week before that, another gunman killed two African-American grandparents in a Kentucky grocery store, muttering as he left another white man unharmed that “whites don’t kill whites.”
Both of those tragedies came at a time when a Florida man was arrested on charges he sent pipe bombs to a dozen prominent Democratic figures, including former President Barack Obama.
Even before the Tallahassee shooting, many asked whether the highly polarized and emotionally charged atmosphere leading up to the midterm elections had anything to do with the hate crimes.
But White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sharply rebuked reporters who attempted to blame President Donald Trump’s tone.
“The only person responsible for carrying out these heinous acts were the individuals who carried them out,” she said.
It also was hard not to notice that, among other past offenses, Beierle had been arrested for committing a rude act similar to the sort that President Trump was recorded on the famous “Access Hollywood” tapes as saying was OK for celebrity men to do: grabbing women by their private parts.
In December 2012, Beierle was charged with battery after a woman accused him of grabbing her buttocks at a dining hall on Florida State University’s campus in Tallahassee, according to news reports.
He also was charged with battery again in June 2016 for groping a woman at a swimming pool without her permission. In both cases the charges were later dismissed, according to police.
There has been considerable academic debate about what appears to be a spreading social pathology. Sex adviser Dan Savage, among others, has proposed without tongue in cheek that the incel phenomenon offers an argument for loosening our laws toward professional sex workers — or speeding up the development of sex robots. I am sure that more science fiction movies already are in production around that theme.
But in the real world now, we need to think seriously about the lessons we are teaching young men. What makes some of them feel so entitled to women’s company that they dehumanize the women who, in their minds, refuse to let them have it?
That’s a task for us older and presumably wiser men to pursue. Even President Trump should support that.