Ten Years Later, What Have We Learned from the Violence in Isla Vista?

It is 10 years this month, since Elliot Rodger killed six students in my hometown of Santa Barbara, California, three of whom were students at UCSB where I am now a professor and chair of the Feminist Studies Department. Here on my campus, we held events to mourn, to remember these terror attacks, and to reflect on what progress has been made in the last decade to stem misogynistic violence.

Our conclusion, in fact anyone’s conclusion who is paying attention to the rise of patriarchal autocrats around the globe and the surge of right-wing attacks on the very concept of gender, is that things have only gotten worse.

Rodger made clear in his 137-page manifesto why he set out to kill women in 2014. He had declared a war “spoiled, heartless, wicked bitches,” seeking to punish them for withholding the sexual attention and submission to which he believed he was entitled. Though he had long struggled with mental illness, his violence was not an individual psychological problem but part of a broader cultural trend — a fact soon evidenced by his ascendence to the status of incel hero and saint of the manosphere. Rodger expressed what many other anti-feminist men felt, men such as Alex Minassian, who wrote on Facebook “all hail the Supreme Gentlemen Elliot Rodger” before murdering 11 people in Toronto in 2018.

It is a mindboggling exercise to teach gender studies in this era. On the one hand, the evidence of patriarchal crisis is everywhere. From the unapologetic misogyny of Donald Trump to that of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, China’s Xi Jinping, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the dehumanization of women has become a normalized feature of the political zeitgeist, and its consequences are global and deadly. On the other hand, the discipline of gender studies continues to be dismissed as frivolous, unmarketable, and inconsequential in the “real world.” Only patriarchy itself could take an injustice of this scope and reduce it to a niche interest, or have the audacity to question the real-world applicability of a movement aimed at elevating half the world’s population (not to mention being the movement that produced one of the top three largest mass political mobilizations in our nation’s history: the 2017 Women’s March).

One doesn’t need much ink to connect the dots between the rhetoric of misogynistic terrorists like Elliot Rodger and Alex Minassian and former President Donald Trump. Trump, also the leading candidate for the next POTUS if we are to believe the polls, is on record bragging about sexual assault and calling women fat pigs, dogs, and piece of ass. The stakes of Trump’s policies — his support for the most extreme abortion bans and his apathy about the possibility that states might decide to monitor pregnant women’s bodies as a way to enforce abortion laws — are nothing less than women’s basic safety and bodily autonomy.

Patriarchal authoritarians like Trump are prone to declaring themselves victims by coopting the language of actual victims of gendered violence. While Trump is on the campaign trail rattling on about the witch hunt against him, thousands of women accused of witchcraft in India, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Kenya have been tortured and murdered in recent years. For these women, the witch hunt is not a metaphor. For all women who have experienced sexual violence, there is no such thing as innocent “locker room talk” about sexual assault.

The gender studies classroom is the place where students learn to filter out fake news and patriarchal rhetoric such as Trump’s and replace it with the hard facts about gender-related violence and the dehumanization of women across the globe. It is the place where they develop the vital skills to track and document gender injustice, develop policy to undo it, and reimagine our political system as one that does not rely on the degradation of women to mobilize disgruntled male voters.

Yes, the pathway from majoring in gender studies to earning a six-figure salary is not as self-evident to parents as it is from an economics or engineering degree. To these parents, let me be clear: My former students are now physicians, professors, lawyers, consultants, community organizers, nonprofit directors, librarians, and teachers. I’m not worried about the futures of my students in gender studies; I’m worried about when and where the next Elliot Rodger will strike.

The people with the skills needed to confront misogyny and the violence it incites are the students of gender, women’s, and feminist studies. We would be wise to produce more of them.