Man who hasn't had sex in 19 years kills 3 and wounds 9 women

[Keanu]

I myself had issues early in my life - I had serious acne from age 16 on, wasn't athletic, big nose, little interest in normal social interaction. Ugly little weirdo. .

Great post. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Keanu]

I'm 28 never been in a relationship doubt I ever will be and maybe one day I lose it but you never go after innocent people over your shit.

I'm stunned to hear this. I was lurking this board 5 years ago and thought you were very funny and honest. I believe you were at York U at the time.
Shocked.

 

[alexmst]

Should women avoid men who follow pickup "scam" artists?


U.S. gunman devoted follower of 'pickup' artist

U.S. gunman devoted follower of 'pickup' artist

Updated: Fri Aug. 07 2009 5:29:42 PM

The Associated Press

BRIDGEVILLE, Pennsylvania — The lonelyhearted man who killed three women in a shooting rampage at a health club knew the book "How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35" chapter and verse, and was a devoted follower of its author.

In fact, in an online video that surfaced this week, George Sodini can be seen sitting in rapt attention at one of R. Don Steele's dating seminars as the white-haired pickup artist tells a group of men to get over their fears of approaching women and to stop being such nice guys all the time. Then, Sodini is shown shaking hands with one of Steele's beautiful blond assistants as part of an exercise in how to meet women.

The advice and the self-help book -- which promises to show "how to make your fantasies come true" -- evidently didn't do anything to improve Sodini's love life.

Embittered by his decades-long inability to attract the opposite sex, the 48-year-old computer analyst opened fire on a women's aerobics class in the Pittsburgh suburbs Tuesday night, killing three women and wounding nine. Four remained hospitalized Friday, one in serious condition.

In a chilling diary posted on the Internet, he complained that he hadn't had a girlfriend since 1984 and hadn't slept with a woman in 19 years. But before he gave up any hope of finding anyone, he turned to Steele, a 69-year-old dating guru from Whittier, California.

Steele, according to his online biography, grew up in rural Pennsylvania, obtained a master's degree in psychology, and became a marriage and family counsellor in 1976. He began writing books in 1984 and conducts "The Right Attitude Workshop" for men three times a year. He is the owner of Steel Balls Press and is married to a woman 34 years his junior.

In 2006, he told a Canadian newspaper that "women need men to take charge" and that women over 30 are "bitter."

Steele, whose real name is John J. White, did not respond to several email requests for comment. Calls to a phone number listed on his Web site went unanswered Friday.

The undated video of the seminar that Sodini attended, first broadcast Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America," shows Steele writing "NICE GUY MUST DIE" on a whiteboard. "I would say that's the problem with most of the guys in the room, that you're too nice," he says.

He also tells his audience, "It's normal to be scared when you have been hurt by women in the past," and adds: "The first woman that hurt you is your mother. And that lasts a lifetime."

That probably resonated with Sodini, who disparaged his own mother in his online diary as "The Central Boss" and "very dominant." She has not commented on her son's rampage.

In a video he also posted online, Sodini appeared to take encouragement from Steele's advice.

"RDS says that I have approximately, maybe 15 more years to be successful at this," Sodini said. "So my objective is to be real and to learn to be emotional and to be able to emotionally connect with people. Because when I'm 10 to 20 years older than she is, she has to feel good about this thing."

And in another video in which Sodini gave an online tour of his house, the camera panned over a coffee table with a copy of "How to Date Young Women." "There's some reading material that we're all familiar with," he said."

Evidently embracing Steele's philosophy that a man should act like an adult, Sodini showed off a matching sofa and chair in his living room and said, "Women will really be impressed."

In other developments Friday, police said Sodini called his mother about a half-hour before the shooting. But they denied a report in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that he told her he planned to "kill a bunch of people" and "didn't expect to survive."

While Sodini sounded distraught, he mentioned nothing to his mother about harming himself or others, Allegheny County Assistant Police Superintendent James Morton said.

The funerals for the victims will be held Saturday. Killed were Heidi Overmier, 46, of Carnegie; Jody Billingsley, 37, of Mount Lebanon; and Elizabeth Gannon, 49, of Pittsburgh.

http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/lo...gunman_AM_090807/20090807/?hub=TorontoNewHome

Steele's book is quite good - I recommended it on here like 2 years ago. Just because one guy flipped out doesn't mean the book's advice is flawed.

 

[alexmst]

I think I understand how a guy like this can end up where he did. Clearly he had issues with social interaction, probably the result of poor socialization in his early life. I wonder about his core relationship with his parents. But fundamentally I think he was responsible no matter how bad a hand he was delt.
I myself had issues early in my life - I had serious acne from age 16 on, wasn't athletic, big nose, little interest in normal social interaction. Ugly little weirdo. Pre puberty I was a loner because I just wasn't interested in what other people were doing or thinking, unless I met someone who was extraordinary - talented, charismatic, physically above average... I lived in my head, and was fascinated by what I could cook up there. My parents were good people but very english, and I think there was a kind of fear of sex outside of a very narrow understanding of its proper place. I remember not wanting them to know I was attracted to women, and I shared their confusion about sex, but in total isolation. There was a split in me between a sense that sex was sacred, and the drive that made me fantasize about acquiring the power to stop time for everyone but myself so I could go around looking up women's dresses and feeling their boobs. Basically, I intuited the value of real conection with deeper natural (pleasure, reproduction) and spiritual (vision of beauty, from the nipple to the galactic spiral) experience that sex can be, but I didn't have the social experience (or the interest in it) to bring these two drives together. (for style critics, please feel free to ignore bracketed text. I'm winging it here.)
My family moved from one end of the country to the other at precisely the point in time where I was getting interested in girls, and I had to build new relationships with bad acne, very high standards and a lack of social skills. This, from an objective point of view, is not a particularly promising starting point.
Late in highschool, my loner skills (I have to this day many personal interests and persuits that I find fascinating and rewarding, and these continue to grow in depth over time) paid off big when it turned out I could write poetry, and I ended up dating the most beautiful smart girl in the school. I still have dreams about her. That relationship was a rocket ride, and the peak occurred just before physical intimacy was about to erupt. I was just very unskilled and tentative, and much more comfortable in my own head. She got that, and even as an unusually perceptive person, didn't know what to do with it. Pretty understandable as she was in grade 10 at the time. So I went from loser to champ to 'the guy who threw it all away' in 6 months.
Here I get to my point: I went through hell for a year or two, taking lsd and attempting to have friends, skipping class at university, etc. while trying to figure out where to put the blame. I was the world's biggest loser, or she was evil incarnate. It had to be one of the two. This guy was playing that game. If I kept doing that, I would never have gotten to know how to deal with women, or people in general. I realized that even if I was the world's biggest loser, I was responsible for how I delt with it. Once I got that, I was no longer obsessed with a single unattainable vision of beauty. I had music, and literature and philsophy and movies....
And I gradually realized that I could assemble a life as close to ideal as is reasonable to expect. I am glad now I didn't get married. I don't have to have ONE PERSON whose life revolves around me. I think that is more likely to be grief for someone like me, in the long term. I am at the age now where I see my friends who were conventionally successful working through divorce number one, with pre- and teen kids that they have to take responsibility for. Those couples without kids are getting really old really fast. Some of them are happy, but I wouldn't be if I were in their position.

I now find it easy to enjoy people, and would probably marry someone like my highschool sweety if she came along and it all worked out. That hasn't happened yet. I work among young people and they enjoy me as much as I enjoy them. I have a nice job that helped a lot with my social skills, and now find myself attractive to others. My day consists of helping university students, so I personally meet probably 100 stunningly beautiful young women a year. Of these, I make serious friends with one or two a year. (Yes, a 50 year old can make friends with a 20 year old. It's all in the attitude.) Of the others, there will be maybe 10 who will beam a great warm smile at me when I run across them in the hallways. This is pure energy! I can get high enough off of one of these encounters to last at least two days. I have also been hit on by several over the years, but didn't take them up as I knew that I didn't want to be with them long term for various reasons... one was a dancer with 34ds and a 24' waist who unfotunately had some personal habits that turned me off, another a doctoral student who was beautiful but had a son, another was just too emotionally needy... I wasn't going to be there for these people long term, and since that was what they wanted I wasn't going to waste their time. I have had serious relationships where you go around hand in hand and tell each other about your day, and it was nice but not essential for my well being. I have cats, they are good for that just-want-to-feel-loved thing. gtttttttttttttttttttttth - that was one of them putting in his thoughts. At least a wife wouldn't walk across the laptop as I type. Maybe I should reconsider...
And I have the greatest physical love resource there is, a woman who is young, energetic, shifts personality from one day to the next, has perfect little body parts or big warm soft ones, blonde, brunette, redhead, whatever I want is there for me to find at my favorite agencies, as long as I have the $ to pay my way. They don't have to want me for my simple presence (cats). They don't have to value my friendship (university hotties). I have to put some resourses into getting laid, but not so much relative to my married friends - they have to have the house and support the offspring and maintain that 'happy married normal guy' image. I can forget shaving for a week. I get sex when I want it. I can have a nice warm loving presence sitting in my lap, and put it on the floor and have it go away whenever I want it to. I don't need to participate in the human game of family and tradition. I contribute to society through volunteering, and respecting the folks who cross my path from moment to moment.
I also value the depths available in a one hour session with a talented escort. I can imagine becoming friends with some of them, and would welcome it should it occur. I think they are all generous with their bodies, and thank them for that. Some are generous with their personalities, a few with their minds, and fewer yet with their souls. If one doesn't work out, they go away after the hour. I know where I can get recomendations for next time.
If I had decided that women owed me a life, I could have spent my time alienating people and working myself into a nurotic frenzy that might lead to fantasies of projected power involving guns. Instead, I decided I was responsible, no matter what disadvantages I had. I didn't have to focus on my problems and the cruelty of women (and no doubt there is such cruelty, humans can be cruel, get over it). I could realize that there was good shining through the cracks in the dark, and work to open up to the world. Why did I make that choice? It is a personal realization. If you get it, you do, and if you don't you are going to be unhappy no matter what happens in life.

Great post - thanks for sharing.

 

[gibsomstreet]

Hypocritical idiocy? I doubt he saw very much blowing his head off and ruining the lives of countless innocent others. He was whinning about not having sex (not love) in 19 years. Would blowing $200 would have killed him. He got a promotion during a brutal economy and many job cuts so the guy performed at work well. Of course he never saw much positivity in that. Hell, I would have taken him on a trip to south america and gotten him so much pussy (paid and otherwise) that he'd be begging me to take him back home.

You comment about him wasting his money. Is his money doing him much good now?

I reckon he was looking for a symbolism that was beyond mere sex--that is, a "civilian immediacy". Then again, it's the same kind of "civilian immediacy" that led him to kill, rather than to vent his frustration through, say, video game violence or whatever.

Regardless, within this here realm of hobbyists and the providers that serve them, there seems to be very little consideration of how sex and sexuality actually registers to those who haven't hobbied (yet?); or that there might be a daunting "it's just not the same" psychological barrier in the way of going from non-hobbyist to hobbyist.

And at the same time, from the hobbyist end, from those who did make that jump: I wonder for how many the choice to hobby was a means for preventing personal catastrophes like this to happen.

 

[wet_suit_one]

It definitely wasn't a means of preventing personal catastrophe for me. Personal responsibility (like staggerspool said) is what its all about. One day, I just decided, fuck the message of society, I'm getting me some pussy. It's be shits and giggles ever since!

O the women I have had sex with. I love it it! Thank god for sp's. They are truly god's gift to men. (who knows what god's gift to women is, but not being a woman, I'm not too concerned. I would like to know just for the record though...)

 

[staggerspool]

Then again, such self-aware postmortems can go too far the other direction, too--like, seeing your old friends, seeing your old friends' daughters, having American Beauty-type fantasies, and realizing that if you went the conventional married/kids route you might wind up a Woody Allenish creepo or worse. So, for mercy's sake, it'd be just as well that you "weren't lucky" (and that metaphor might have particular immediacy if you engage in "the hobby" through TERB with those of daughter age--not to be a scold or anything, just the nature of the beast)

I think this kind of development follows from NOT taking responsibility for yourself (if I understand your point, please clarify if neccessary), and instead covering up the hatred and trying to keep on being 'normal'. You marry the first one who will take you because you need to be seen to be a regular guy, then you go on developing your own personal fantasy life under that cover. Biological/psychological drives don't 'cover' well, they degrade over time.
For myself, I don't think I have molestation/assault/murderous rage in me. I'm much more the type you see portrayed hauntingly in the movie CRUMB, a documentary about the underground cartoonist R. Crumb which includes interviews with his two brothers. All three are seen to be persecuted by their father and schoolmates, and all have their sex drives warped by the experience. Charles ended up committing suicide after living his life in medicated seclusion with his mother, and Max lives in a skidrow hotel, meditating on a bed of nails, unable to have sex without suffering seizures. (Meditation is a good thing, but it doesn't work to fix neurotic problems, it just helps you drop them. Out of the meditative state, your mind will still circle around problems you don't actively deal with - see Ken Wilber's book INTEGRAL SPIRITUALITY). Although all three are/were very talented artists, only Robert was able to escape calamitous mental problems. He managed to maintain a rewarding llife by exploring his issues and making art from them. I don't think he really does deal with them either, ultimately, but as he says all his 'problems' with women disappeared when he became famous, and they started giving themselves to him. He seems to take every opportunity to exploit that. Luckily, he is satisfied with getting piggyback rides on the ample asses he fixates on, instead of doing a Woody on his stepdaughter... (It is a little creepy when he says that the only woman he has ever loved is his daughter, but it is also clear that he refers to real love, not lust or sexual attraction.)

If I had persued the poetry scam, I might have ended up as 4th rate Crumb, getting laid by making girls think I saw a goddess in them. (Which I do.) I understood that while I had a talent, I didn't have a real artistic drive, and was writing just to be admired for it. Pretty soon you are writing about writing about writing... got bored with that, and decided to just face the music.
You also make another interesting point - yes, I love the early 20s escorts. This is part of my current satisfaction with life. It may point to an immaturity on my part, and probably that of a few others who frequent the board. And/Or, it might point to a legitimate turning away from the normal social expectations around sex (get married, stay attracted to the same person for 40 years, never even look at the lovely young women prancing about - that fantasy bit the dust when I found my father's porno stash) toward an honest desire to spend time focussing on beauty pure and simple (and 22 years old). I sometimes see posts here by folks who seem to be happily married, and even hobby with the wife's blessing and/or participation. I think that is an interesting possibility, but it requires a lot of everyone involved. It does point toward what I think of as a more socially evolved vision, where sex is understood to work on multiple levels servicing multiple drives - procreation, bonding, adventure, persuit of beauty, spiritual growth...Unfortunately, the bulk of humanity is just not ready for that. (Or for real democracy for that matter.) For many people, I fear, romance is a variety of mental disorder, where love easily turns into cruelty whenever it is thwarted.

 

[sibannac]

Maybe he was just a f*cking mental case..period..no other issues except he was nuts!

Exactly, motivation here is most likely meaningless. He could just have had a hard on for 5' guys as easily as his stated motive here. We have to remember that this sick puppy was a homicidal lunatic and perhaps targeting woman was simply because he thought they would be easier targets. I've read a lot of stupid comments in this thread, especially from those who blamed this incident on woman being stuck up or something like that. That is BS plain and simple. This clown was a loser in life and decided blowing away some HUMAN BEINGS would make him a big man.

 

[wet_suit_one]

You also make another interesting point - yes, I love the early 20s escorts. This is part of my current satisfaction with life. It may point to an immaturity on my part, and probably that of a few others who frequent the board. And/Or, it might point to a legitimate turning away from the normal social expectations around sex (get married, stay attracted to the same person for 40 years, never even look at the lovely young women prancing about - that fantasy bit the dust when I found my father's porno stash) toward an honest desire to spend time focussing on beauty pure and simple (and 22 years old). I sometimes see posts here by folks who seem to be happily married, and even hobby with the wife's blessing and/or participation. I think that is an interesting possibility, but it requires a lot of everyone involved. It does point toward what I think of as a more socially evolved vision, where sex is understood to work on multiple levels servicing multiple drives - procreation, bonding, adventure, persuit of beauty, spiritual growth...Unfortunately, the bulk of humanity is just not ready for that. (Or for real democracy for that matter.) For many people, I fear, romance is a variety of mental disorder, where love easily turns into cruelty whenever it is thwarted.

I see that I was correct about you. Both learned and wise. It's good to know that there are a few such folks on the board. Mostly it's rude and self righteous and so on (quite a few funnies too!), but not too many Learned and Wise. BTW, I consider myself the rudest and most self righteous (hell, doesn't this post say it all? LOL!!!)

Sir, you honour us with your presence.