Sunday, August 09, 2009

Sodini - the consummate creepy middle-aged man

It turns out that mass-murderer George Sodini is one of these guys who was into the "How to Get a Women" lifestyle - but specifically, how to date younger women. Apparently quite a few unattractive middle-aged men think that they are too good for women their own age and so try all kinds of wacky techniques to get younger women. Since, although proponents of evolutionary psychology would try to have you believe otherwise, women are not "naturally" interested in older men, they develop special pick up techniques, body language analysis, hypnosis - they'll try anything it seems, except trying to meet someone they share common interests with, and actually getting to know a woman as a person. But let's face it - they don't want a woman as a person - they want a female body to evacuate in. But it has to be a high-status body. I guess that's why they aren't satisfied with lap dances and other forms of prostitution - it's a status thing.

But the primary belief of these men is that the reason that they can't get any hot young thing in the world is NOT because they are old and unattractive and have a lousy personality, it's because they are TOO NICE. The Village Voice has a video clip of Sodini at one of these classes in which the dating guru R. Don Steele tells them "nice guy must die."

More Sodini videos at the blog Jezebel.

Men believing that they are entitled to much younger hotter women is nothing new - I gave up on online dating sites because the number of 40-something men who wouldn't consider dating a woman older than five years younger than himself just made me start to despise 40-something men.

Dan Savage however, probably says it best:

Sodini clearly felt that he was entitled not just to sex and a romantic relationship, but to sex and a romantic relationship with a much younger woman. And he was following the advice of a love-and-romance guru who encouraged him to hold on to that belief and filled him with false hopes. Not normally a problem, I supposed. But Sodini wasn't just another socially maladapted schlub furious with the world - and with women - for denying him all the 22-year-old ass he felt he deserved. He was a nut. And he couldn't understand why, if he was doing everything right, he wasn't finding the success that was Steele guaranteed him. He was employed, dressed nicely, in good shape - he even bought a matching sofa set. ("Couch and chair - they match, the woman will really be impressed.") But none of it worked - and his failure couldn't have been his own fault, since he was doing everything right, doing it all by the book. Unfortunately the book was Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. Someone needed to get Sodini a book that explained that settling down requires settling for and that young women are usually interested in young men and that we can't always have what we want and that there were probably women out there who would date him - maybe women closer to his own age - but only if he got his shit together and stopped obsessing about college-age women.

I am, of course, not suggesting that R. Don Steele's book made Sodini go shoot up that aerobics class. But it's clear that Steele was not the guru Sodini needed.

One particularly chilling detail from Sodini's online diary was his seething resentment for a neighbor. He had seen an attractive young woman leaving his neighbor's house and was absolutely furious that his neighbor was sleeping with the kind of hot young girl that Sodini himself wanted but could never get. The girl was his neighbor's daughter.