Why George Sodini’s actions disturb me so much
Posted By Kathleen David on August 7, 2009
George Sodini walked into an LA Fitness gym on August 4th, went into one of the classes, turned off the lights, and started shooting indiscriminately. He killed himself too so many of the questions that will never be answers went with him. He was a coward. He couldn’t face the women he was going to shoot but rather turned off the lights so he didn’t have to see what he was doing or who he was hurting.
Since his death, various pieces of his writing and a couple of videos have shown up or were found on the Internet. They paint a portrait of someone who didn’t understand why he couldn’t get a date. But even scarier is what he was looking for in a woman. He went to seminars on how to pick up women, bought books about how to date, and came to the conclusion that women were lying scum because they wouldn’t date him. The kind of woman he was looking for was younger (early 20s and he was in his mid to late 30s) and measured up to his impossible ideals for beauty.
But in reading his writings, I know I wouldn’t have dated him if I was single and he had tried to pick me up. He didn’t want to date, he wanted to have sex. He gives me a creepy vibe. He equates dating with sex and unless he got some, women were going to pay the price. Most of his bìŧçhìņg is about his lack of sex and he doesn’t understand why women are falling all over him. The sad thing is that I dated, for a short time, someone like this who equated dating with mattress mambo. And that was one of the reasons that I stopped dating him in rather short order.
In his mind, he did everything right and was rejected which was a shame because, according to him, he was a nice guy and proved that nice guys are looked at by pretty women. He was not a nice guy and those denizens of the internet who are saying that he might have had a point aren’t nice guys either. Nice guys don’t threaten to shoot people they don’t know and say that if they get some then they won’t shoot or won’t shoot for now but they are holding onto the option of going on a killing spree.
Another thing disturbs me is that police are saying that if anyone had read his writings and didn’t report them may have broken the law or at least could have save the lives of the women who died. But there are a lot of “ifs” they are putting in the mix. If he really did publish it over time or tossed it up at the last moment. If anyone looked at his website since it was his own domain name rather than a social network site. If anyone took it as real rather than someone writing fiction on the internet. There are a lot of ifs and some really strange finger pointing none of which is going to bring back the dead or help the injured.
George Sodini was not a nice guy no matter what he thought and that needs to be said out loud for all to hear.
I am grateful for the real nice guys out there. They do exist and don’t deserve to be thought of the way that some people are currently talk about them.
What I found most telling of all was when he ranted about how all 30 million attractive single women (his estimate) in America all rejected him. This guy didn’t see women as individuals; it didn’t occur to him that we all have minds of our own and lives that have nothing to do with him, or that when we have sex, it’s for pleasure and bonding and perhaps we might even want to enjoy it, and not just to give men what they think they’re entitled to.
He was not a nice guy and those denizens of the internet who are saying that he might have had a point aren’t nice guys either.
Word. Those denizens seem to be under the impression that Sodini was so sick in the head because he couldn’t get laid. I think they’ve got it totally backwards. He couldn’t get laid because he was sick in the head. His illness was probably most obvious to the attractive single women he tried chatting up, who undoubtedly got a very unpleasant vibe from him. If he had been sexually active during that time, then he probably would have focused his rage on something else, and likely would have treated his girlfriends very badly anyway.