Why do so many straight men come to resent the women they find attractive?
It’s unclear if Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old white man who killed eight people on Tuesday – seven of them women, and six of them Asian women – in a mass shooting across three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area, even knew his victims’ names. After he was arrested and taken into police custody unharmed, Long promptly took responsibility for the shootings. He told officers that he had frequented the massage parlors, which appear to sell sexual services, and that he considers himself to be suffering from a “sex addiction”. He claims that he shot up the massage parlors in order to rid himself of “temptation”. By “temptation” he means, presumably, the temptation that was presented by the women’s existence, and which he thought could be eliminated once they were no longer alive.
Long’s attacks come after a long year of mounting hate crimes and street harassment against Asian people. Reports of anti-Asian hate crimes are up 150% over the past year, and many speculate that the rise in anti-Asian hatred has been provoked by the racist fearmongering of Donald Trump and other Republican politicians, who have blamed the Covid-19 pandemic on what they hatefully term the “China virus”.
Long’s acts have also illuminated the vulnerability of sex workers, whose industry is largely illegal and unregulated, and who have few protections as workers and few opportunities to advocate for better pay, safer working conditions, or greater control over their own bodies and images, and few avenues to avoid or de-escalate confrontations with the police – who frequently arrest, incarcerate or deport sex workers on the flimsy and paternalistic pretext of “rescue”. As sex workers’ rights advocates have long and eloquently argued, the answer to sex workers’ vulnerability is not more policing, as police have often been the source of sex workers’ suffering. Instead, decriminalization will keep sex workers out of jails and prisons – and robust immigration reform will allow those sex workers who come to the US from other countries to work and organize without the exacerbating pressures of possible deportation and debt. When people cannot work in the open, either due to the fear of arrest or deportation, they will not stop working. They will keep working, but under clandestine conditions that make them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. As a practical matter, these policy interventions are needed for sex workers to live with greater safety and dignity.
Long, if we are to take his own account seriously, seems to have killed the women because he, personally, found them attractive. His account of his own motive points to a broader problem not only with the status of sex work, but with the dynamics of heterosexuality in a culture that prizes male strength and female submission: Long seems to have experienced his own desire for the women who worked at the parlors as enraging, offensive and intolerable.
The conflation of sexual desire and hate for the object of that desire in male heterosexuality is a pattern that becomes obvious once you know how to look for it. Sexual culture abounds with the eroticized contempt of women, and with the understanding of straight sex, in particular, as implicitly adversarial – a needlessly reductive and limiting understanding of heterosexuality, yet nevertheless a popular one. There is some evidence that even the police officers who arrested Long feel some empathy with his experience of desire for women as an affliction or affront. At a press conference, Jay Baker, the Cherokee county captain, said of Long’s rampage: “He was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope. It was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.” The characterization of a man who killed seven women as the victim of a “really bad day” doesn’t make sense unless the person making that claim understands Long’s hatred of attractive women as at least a somewhat legitimate grievance.
Why do so many straight men come to resent and hate the women they find attractive? Maybe it’s a question of power. People often experience being sexually attracted to someone as if that person has a kind of power over them, and for a straight, white man like Long, positioned at the top of so many social hierarchies, this is likely one of his most acute experiences of another person’s power that he has ever faced. For men socialized in a sexist culture where rigid strictures of masculinity dictate that another person’s power over a man constitutes a failure of his masculinity, attraction to a woman can be interpreted as a threat posed by that woman – at least, it can for men of especially weak character. It is not hard to deduce how a racist and sexist man, reared in a culture of white supremacy and masculine entitlement, could experience his own powerlessness over his attraction to the women at the spas as a distressing humiliation. To be able to experience sexual attraction to another person without that feeling becoming a source of shame and rage requires a degree of self assurance and respect that Long, and men like him, evidently do not possess.
But if some men understand their attraction to women as a kind of power that those women hold over them, for women themselves, it often doesn’t feel that way. Unsolicited male sexual attention can often be experienced as threatening – in part, because it is often communicated as a threat. Few women do not have stories of being harassed in public with expressions of desire from male strangers that are explicitly framed as anger. Women receive unsolicited messages from men on social media who begin polite but revert to rageful invectives when rejected or not indulged. Most brutally, when women are murdered, it is usually by a current or former male sex partner – someone who found them attractive. One UK study found that 61% of women killed by men are murdered by a current or former romantic partner. In the US, 1,527women were killed by a romantic partner in 2017 – more than four women a day. These varying aggressions are not morally equal and do not impact women in the same way, but they do all contain the simultaneous expression of male desire and male rage. If men feel that when they are attracted to a woman, that woman necessarily has more power than they do in their interactions, they should perhaps consider how often men’s attraction to women is communicated with the threat of that desire being enforced, and of the woman being punished for it.
Punishment for his own desire seems to be something that Long wanted to inflict upon the women he killed. It is interesting that Long identifies himself has experiencing sex addiction, a phrase that casts his desire for the women he killed into the realm of the medical. Wanting these women, in his mind, is something that happened to him. But when he felt discomfort with his own sexual desires, Long did not address this discomfort with a therapist or a religious leader. He did not go into a 12-step program for sex addiction – several of which are available, free and active in the Atlanta area. He did not seek out a friend for advice. Instead, he killed seven women and one man. Because he understood his desire as their power – he also understood his desire as their responsibility.
Long says that he patronized the spas where he committed his murders, but it’s unclear if he was ever attended to by any of the women he killed. If he was, it’s not clear whether or not he knew their names. But we do know the names of some of these women. They were Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delania Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Julie Park and Heyeon Jeong Park. Each one of them deserved better.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist