From the moment I heard the news, the identity of the shooter and his purported reasons, I knew the victims of Isla Vista and Elliot Rodger were going to occupy this space. Initially, I felt compelled because of some superficial characteristics I shared with Mr. Rodger, also being a young multiracial cishet man who has struggled with sexlessness and internalized racism. But as the reaction proliferated, as I followed #YesAllWomen and all the opinion and advocacy pieces that resulted, I began to wonder if I should say anything at all. Indeed, much of the struggle feminism faces is in the routine privileging of cishet male voices over all others. I carry no illusions that the ideas I am about to express will be printed and treated as largely noncontroversial because it is a cishet man expressing them.

Nevertheless, deadlines loom. If this is ends up being mansplaining, I offer my apologies.

 In the wake of the Isla Vista shooting and the discussion that surrounds it, two concepts need to be accepted as truth without equivocation. 1) Inasmuch as we are willing to ascribe a political ideology toward the motivation of seemingly random acts of mass violence, we must extend the same courtesy to Elliot Rodger. Which is to say, that as we accept that global jihad was the motivation for the Boston bombings or the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, or we accept white supremacy as the motivation for the Oak Creek Sikh temple shooting, then we must accept misogyny as an ideology as the motivation for Isla Vista. To argue otherwise in any way is to be disingenuous at best, malicious at worst. 2) Despite its accommodation/co-optation by mainstream capitalist culture, feminism is neither a lifestyle nor a trend.

It is not an advice column, or a gentle exhortation on the correct way to live. It is a political movement.

 For the purpose of maintaining the status quo, we write off Elliot Rodger as a lunatic, as an extremist, but the reality is that he neither of those things; he is the naked embodiment of Western patriarchal male sexuality. This is not a new reality. By his own admission, out of his discontent, Elliot Rodger spent a great deal of time reading traditional understandings of history, and he found nothing to disprove the ideology he would come to form.

 But the discomfort, the #NotAllMen cries to the heavens, comes from a refusal to understand the violent tendencies of male sexuality. For thousands of years, we have been socialized into understanding this problem as inherent into the so-called project of civilization. There is a tendency to discount this reality because it was primarily expressed through Twitter and Facebook. I have always found it ironic that we deplore “hashtag activism” when it takes place in the US while also trumpeting the the liberatory potential of social media when it comes to [insert dark-skinned country run by autocrats here].

 We, the defenders of this violent patriarchal society, would like to call on our ideals, that all that is needed is for us ourselves to live up to the ideals, of equality and freedom, that all MEN are created equal. And yet, even in the most obvious of cases, of women soldiers facing pervasive sexual assault and a culture of silence while serving, our political body has been unable to alter the fundamentally oppressive nature of the institution. The Senate bill was rejected; the chain of command is preserved. I do not understand why anyone would expect anything else out of Congress.

 When trying to understand the source of Elliot Rodger's rage, we come back to this idea that sex was promised to Sir Elliot, but it was unfairly withheld. But we must ask, who made this promise? It could not have been actual women. As Elliot made abundantly clear, he was so afraid of women that he never even talked to them. No, it was our own culture. By his own admission, Elliot Rodger saw Alpha Dog, a movie that was Certified Rotten, but nevertheless made enough of an impression on him such that he believed by sheer virtue of moving to Santa Barbara as a young male, he would be awash in sexual offerings.

 Sexual and gendered violence is now a political issue, and men are the enemy. In politics, perception is reality, and the perception, the reality, is that men are no longer trustworthy. We are a hostile presence. So where do we go from here? As I see it, in a political movement of this scope and magnitude, there are three possible outcomes.

 1) Postmodern Chivalry. This has already begun with the hashtag #AllMenCan, and the idea that there is a “real men's activism” as opposed to the oft-ridiculed Men's Rights Movement. Certainly, this is the movement that neoliberal capitalism would prefer, the idea that misogyny is a corruption of masculinity, instead of being endemic to masculinity itself. A new code of masculinity will arise, same as the old code, with men being the primary enforcers.

 2) Full Decolonization. Truly, it is the only political project worth engaging in. Restrictive gender norms in the United States are a product of Western colonialism. Manifold forms of sexuality proliferated around the world before colonial rule. I try not to romanticize it, because I still have an infinite amount to learn, but I believe that full decolonization is the most exigent project of liberation, to be replaced with nothing but pure humanity. Unfortunately, the interests of capital are not too keen on such a project. The US provides the security to the neoliberal part-A after all. Which is not to say that we give up on this project, but until then...

 3) Armed Resistance. Perhaps the most instructive dynamic of any social dynamics, certainly in a political sense, is that of power. There is only the oppressor and the oppressed. In these situations there are theories of resistance, both nonviolent and otherwise. The efficacy of nonviolence, historically, is predicated on the humanity of one's enemy. One submits oneself to the violence of the oppressor, with complete documentation, upon hope that the oppressor will realize its own humanity and cease its oppression. And yet, even when appealing to our humanity, men still find a way to inflict violence on the very movement we're supposed to be in solidarity with. The reality shows numerous examples of men who have assumed unqualified places in the movement and used said places to inflict psychological trauma upon the selfsame women whom they are supposed to be liberating, see: Hugo Schwyzer and Charles Clymer.

 I will not elaborate further on the ways in which said resistance would take, both out of legal concerns, and also to avoid the aforementioned violent situations in which men have approached feminism in the past. All I will say is that these demands are real, they are deep, and they are ones from which, for the sake of our shared humanity, we cannot ever waver.

Address all hate mail to petermgunn@gmail.com. Follow on Twitter @petermgunn