George Sodini had a guru—not a murder-and-mayhem guru, but a love-and-romance guru.
The clues are in the videos Sodini posted to YouTube. In the first video Sodini is showing us—or whoever the video was made for—around his two-bedroom ranch-style home. If you look at the books on his coffee table, which Sodini takes a moment to point out, one is titled Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. Sodini says “we’re all familiar with” the books. Date Young Women: For Men Over 35—has there ever been a creepier title?—was written by R. Don Steele, a figure in the “seduction community,” and was published by “Steel Balls Press.” R. Don Steele also maintains a website, SteelBalls.com, where he sells his books. SteelBalls.com. A quick click through to SteelBalls.com makes it clear that Steele traffics in—and profits from—instilling false hopes in losers like George Sodini. (“Immediately improve your success with women! Everything is 100% guaranteed money back.”)
In the other video Sodini says, “RDS says I have 15 more years to be successful,” and then mentions “forgiveness exercises, per Hay.” That would nutty new age lifestyle guru Louise Hay, whose books are recommended at SteelBalls.com. So it seems pretty clear Sodini was following Steele’s advice. And these video were meant to be viewed by other guys who had a joined an online support group for guys following Steele’s advice on dating younger women. When Sodini goes into his extra bedroom he says that the tapes and CDs are things “I bought since joining the list.” He makes several references to how “she”—the woman he will presumably meet following Steele’s directions—is going to be impressed by things in his house.
“Somewhere there is a whole group of these guys doing exercises and getting ready for young women,” observes a Slog reader, a recovering journalist, who has been digging into this all morning.
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.
R. Don Steele offers one-on-one coaching sessions with “team members [who] demonstrate that they are following the Steel Balls Principles.” I wonder if Sodini ever had a private session with Steele.
More in NEWS
Local (and not-so-local) news from your favorite writers.
btw, Megan Fox is not as attractive, physically, as my ex wife at her age, my daughter, or several of my ex girlfriends. Pick a better example of “unattainability” next time.
I’d delete that last, hsd I the choice. The point is that the problem under discussion, in my view has nothign to do with the unattainability of any given ideal partner. It has to do with the response of some people to limits placed upon their social and sexual opportunities. Such limits always occur, for every one of us. Some of us descend into a cycle of resentment as a result. These cycles can lead to fantasies of revenge and to acts of violence – more apt to be physical and non-verbal by men; verbal and psychological by women.
My sense from reading Sodini is that his path to violence was from the limitatations of his shyness and (justified?) sense of persecution in his family, to resentment, to fantasy of dominance and vengefullness, to action on those fantasies – as I described earlier. So the existence of media representations of beauty and pseudo “unattainability” really has not much to do with it. It’s deeply personal, psychological, and potentially treatable if understood and addressed early in the cycle.
@10 Posted by because a woman would never do this on August 6, 2009 at 11:11 AM
No, women are never crazy:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article…
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/08/…
@99
I apologize for my inability to connect on your wavelength. Perhaps if I went to your website and purchased one of your lovely red heart candle-holders, or a dollhouse miniature Book of Shadows I might have more luck tuning into your frequency? Anyway, sorry I scared you off. Blessed be, little friend!
Goodness, what an incisive argument. How should I riposte? Should I defend my outside-Seattle credentials by talking about all the other places I’ve lived and worked? Wait, no, that won’t work — not only do I need experience outside Seattle, but that experience needs to be from someplace less “cosmopolitan.”
So basically, in order to really get my head around “masculine culture” I need to seek out insular backwaters that don’t actually take part in an exchange of ideas or values with the rest of the world. But if I, as a widely-traveled Seattleite, go to one of these cultural backwaters, don’t I by my mere presence impinge on their insularity and disqualify them as places sufficiently backwater and obscure to inform my perspective on “masculine culture”? Boy, that’s a poser. It’s like trying to study an electron without affecting its behavior. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
But I would like to point out that the murders we’re talking about here were perpetrated by a systems analyst for the seventh largest law firm in the United States, in a suburb of one of the largest cities in the United States, at a gym chain based out of another large city on the opposite coast. It all sounds terribly cosmopolitan, doesn’t it?
Yeah, okay. So I believe my initial riff here was that, if “masculine culture” exists, and if it advocates violence against women, its adherents are fringe whackjobs and that a lot of cultural introspection probably isn’t called for here. We, the people who live in the main stream of American culture, can just call the whackjobs whackjobs, keep an eye out for them, and shift our attention to threats we can actually do something about, like defective passenger-side airbags.
Your little screed above actually seems to basically support my premise. You’ve basically described the adherents of a culture of violence against women as people who skulk silently at the edges of society, secretly carrying out their agenda of rage, living in constant fear of exposure because the rest of us hate them and have passed laws and created a body of civil precedent to punish them. To which I guess I’d respond: “Alrighty then. We’ve got these creeps on the run. Mission accomplished.”
Except you’ve also got this weird kick where, “…you will find them nearly as numerous and vehement in their advocacy as the creationists – in fact they are the same people.”
So, first of all — bullshit. I’ve got two creationists from rural Virginia sleeping on my living room floor right now. I’m married to their daughter. My grandparents were all creationists. My aunts and uncles and many of my cousins are all creationists. And while I find their collective refusal to acknowledge the obvious veracity of the theory of evolution a little off-putting, I do know for a moral certainty that nothing in their world view or religious philosophy advocates for or approves of violence against women.
Leaving that aside, you state that the threat from this shadowy conspiracy of misogynist violence will manifest if the conspirators are set free of the constraints of… the criminal and civil laws that the majority has created to restrain them. Okay. When’s that going to happen, exactly? After World War III, when the rest of us have been killed off because we were living in easy-to-bomb “cosmopolitan” population centers? Somehow I think I’ll have other things to worry about at that point. Short of that, I don’t really see it coming up.
There’s a whole lot going on here and I’m feeling lazy, so I’m going to comment on those I can remember for right now, without direct references to previous comments.
~ The United States still remains a sexist culture. Female heroes are only recently being allowed to be sexually active outside of marriage. Male heroes are still required to be sexually active. Male protagonists are still paired with women much younger than they. Advertisers still target women with magic, and men with science.
~ Societal sex appeal is extremely subjective. US males are taught to expect women that look like Playboy Bunnies, but even Bunnies, and Mattel’s Barbie has changed proportions in different eras. The sexpots in ’50s ads are significantly different than those in contemporary ones, and the ’60s Ken looks like Gilligan, where the current Ken looks like the Terminator. As another example, fair gothy skin was all the rage in the 19th century until workers moved from the fields to the factories, then a groovy tan was in. That may change again now that tanning booths are a recognized danger.
~ As for real people, healthy sexuality comes in multitudes of shapes, sizes, builds and colors and it’s true for both sexes: the wider your range of acceptable partners, the more and better sex you’re likely to have.
~ I learned that Settling is bullshit when I realized I wasn’t going to turn down a great kisser for her inadequate bustline. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and one who chooses to hold out for one built like Carrie Prejean is going to miss out on a lot of great sex, and great relationships.
~ Spree killings do not happen on a weekly basis. Even if they did, fatal automobile accidents happen, in contrast, multiple times per hour. In fact, our schools, churches and gyms are statistically safer than ever.
Oh and…
Would you like to see Britannia rule again?
All you have to do is follow the worms…
His real name is John J. White and states the first women that hurt you is your mother. How sick! Mr. White come out from behind your Steel door and deal with your own pain, instead of pushing it on to innocent people. I have 2 sons who love me dearly. We recently had a wonderful w/e am. Followed by a lunch discussing are gratitude for life’s gifts and each other. Oh and by the why they are so not gay, like it would even matter to me. They each have lived with their respective female partners for the last 4 years and each is beautiful inside and out.
Praying for grieving families and lost souls in PA. Bernadette age 51 mother of 2 grown men.
His ideas regarding salvation are really interesting (and completely distorted from Christian doctrine). He really shaped his ideas to rationalize his plans, and to help him overcome his inhibitions. Yay, religion!
wow.
and i thought those sick pigs from alphadominance.com were creeps.
guess the amount of twisted people never ends!
by the way “candle opera” sounds like it could be the title of some Nightwish song.
@laurelgardner: it might be difficult, but i’d like to read your response. i read what you wrote @76, and it befuddles me. every once in a while i read something like this that seems to imply there are all these men out there — enough so that it is a part of our culture — that secretly want to beat or murder women. but i just don’t believe that’s true.
i think we still need to address some cultural issues relating to masculinity and femininity. in other words, culture isn’t perfect yet, and perhaps far from it. but i don’t see this killing as a direct product (ie, obviously avoidable) of the culture norms, especially as judah describes them.
so, it would be interesting to get a little more of your perspective, and to see where the disconnect in judah’s reply is.
@104 – So… I say we’re talking at cross-purposes and that I don’t care enough to bother with it, though I don’t think that makes you stupid, and you respond by mining my web page links and pulling a classic middle-school bully insult (“I’m going to point and laugh at something unique that I know about you as if there WAS a good reason to make fun of it, even though I can’t think of one!”).
Jesus Christ, but you’re an asshole.
@111… well, i did think that was juvenile of judah, but you did call him a moron @99.
much of what judah says makes sense. on the other hand, there still does seem to be a large portion of the male population that abuses women (spousal, date rape, etc…) that much of this can be attributed to circumstances other than solely the male/female dynamic, i’m not entirely convinced it is devoid of sexist strains that are accepted in much of our culture.
eh, maybe i should just research this for myself….
In response to
=======
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.
=======
BRAVO! Way to sell medicrioty! Personal improvement? Earn more? Contribute more to the world? Become a better person? NAH… just settle for everything in life.
In response to:
====
much of what judah says makes sense. on the other hand, there still does seem to be a large portion of the male population that abuses women (spousal, date rape, etc…)
====
Only if you’re a feminist or make your conclusion by following media stories. IF you do the actual research 97% of men NEVER EVER EVER does a single one of these things.
3% of men is not exactly “large portion of the male population”. Quiz blaming men for all the world’s problems.
112 – Um…no, I specifically said he was NOT a moron. Is it opposite day?
Not My sucker husband , felll into thiis Bullshit, leaving behind a family, a house thinking this made him a real man . And adamentallly under the misconception that this is Not cheating. This group and the guru is nothing more than paid for sex.
@ AlekNovy
Don’t bs.
It’s not 97% of men don’t ever ever ever do those crimes.
I’ve done research. Something you apparently haven’t but instead go with this myth that all/most men are good and only a rare few are bad.
You’re doing exactly what some radical feminists do maximize one behavior & minimize the other like it’s rarity. In the case of the radical feminists it’s maximize bad & minimize good you’re is maximize good & minimize bad.
Men do rape and commit those crimes and they are not some 3%. Rapists/abusers are fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandfathers, and grandmothers but mysteriously mentally ill people with no human relatives.
@ AlekNovy
Don’t bs.
It’s not 97% of men don’t ever ever ever do those crimes.
I’ve done research. Something you apparently haven’t but instead go with this myth that all/most men are good and only a rare few are bad.
You’re doing exactly what some radical feminists do maximize one behavior & minimize the other like it’s rarity. In the case of the radical feminists it’s maximize bad & minimize good you’re is maximize good & minimize bad.
Men do rape and commit those crimes and they are not some 3%. Rapists/abusers are fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandfathers, and grandmothers but mysteriously mentally ill people with no human relatives.