Ann Hornaday Figured Out the Santa Barbara Shootings

I only need look at my Facebook status updates to know that pretty much everyone had an infallible diagnostic on the massacre in Santa Barbara within forty-eight hours of the murderous rampage of Elliot Rodger. Magazines and newspapers were quick to follow with 1,000 word essays on the precise cause gleaned from little more than scant available evidence and their own genius. But one of them, Ann Hornaday from the Washington Post, called first on blaming white guys making sexist white guy movies:

For generations, mass entertainment has been overwhelmingly controlled by white men, whose escapist fantasies so often revolve around vigilantism and sexual wish-fulfillment (often, if not always, featuring a steady through-line of casual misogyny). Rodger’s rampage may be a function of his own profound distress, but it also shows how a sexist movie monoculture can be toxic for women and men alike.

Yep, it was either summer movies or his decade long building dissociative psychosis. Hundreds of millions of people live in this sexist movie monoculture, a word I’m pretty sure you made up, and a couple or three whackjobs dress up like Joker or think they’re the dude from American Psycho so there’s your statistical correlation. Oh, to live before the dawn of the moving pictures when it was all ‘howdy’ and ‘ma’am’ and random acts of violence and male aggression were nowhere to be found.

Ann Hornaday’s simpleton breakdown of how white males caused the deadly massacre in Isle Vista normally would have been applauded by self-loathing white males in Hollywood. Except she actually blamed Hollywood. In fact, she specifically mentioned the recent movie Neighbors for setting up false expectations for young men about the ease of sexual conquest in college and Judd Apatow movies in general for making every guy think that hot women automatically come to even the biggest fattest loser of guys, i.e. Seth Rogen. Unfortunately for Ann, the only thing Hollywood holds in higher regard than speaking self-righteous truth to fake power is the sanctity of their filmed product:

Leslie Mann released Judd Apatow from his gimp closet to basically Tweet ‘Me too!’ with some accusation about how Ann Hornaday was using this tragedy to promote herself and her idiotic agenda. Though later Judd realized he was actually just repeating what people have been saying about him for many years now. Personally, I applaud Ann Hornaday for distinctly proposing the least thought out and most politically self-indulgent analysis of what drove Elliot Rodger to kill a half-dozen people and then blow his brains out. Though I’m sticking with the fact that his parents named him Elliot. You might as well just name your kid Virgin Serial Killer.