Before gunman Elliot Rodger, a Santa Barbara student, went on his shooting spree killing he made a video in his car where he describes what he planned to do to blond females that left him sexually frustrated. After watching the tape and listening to his speech content and patterns it is clear that this is a spoiled, entitled young man with an over inflated opinion of himself who was not very bright or resourceful in how to get a woman in his life. When he didn;t get what he wanted handed to him in the form of – sex from the most beautiful and popular girls on campus like a spoiled brat, he lashed out and killed.
While his parents may have given him a luxurious home to live in, designer clothing, an expensive car, free tuition, and all the electronic gadgets he desired, they didn;t give him the ability to fend for himself and be resourceful in getting what he wanted. In this case it was a girlfriend. They also didn’t give him the social skills he needed to be more appealing to people, especially to people of the opposite sex.
I would not be surprised if he was a helicopter child who was doted over and who had things done for him which would account for him not being able to do things for himself in a resourceful manner.
If he wanted sex he could have done a number of things,
1. He could have gone online to one of the many sexual hookup sites and found a woman. One of his hookups may have even ended up as a girlfriend, especially of he showered her with gifts and took on some of her financial needs.
2. He could have hung out with his dad on the set of the Hunger games where some aspiring actress wannabe would hook up with him for sure , knowing who his father was and hoping he would put in a good word for her to get a better role. This goes on all the time in Hollywood where people hook up with people whom they think can get them to the right person to advance their career.
3. He could have taken an acting class and let out who his father was and young actresses would be all over him to get to meet his father or to hang out with him on the Hunger games set.
4 .He could have gone to Las Vegas where prostitution is legal. he could have hung out at the famous Bunny Ranch we have all heard about.
5. he could have gone online and joined all the realtionship sites from match.com to zoosk to jdate or christian singles and eventaully found a date and a reltionship.
6, He could have hired a high priced matchmaking service to find him a girlfriend as Hollywood is full of these services. they offer free membership to beautiful women and charge the men a lot of money to meet them. He no doubt could have afforded the fee.
7. he could have lowered his standards and not gone for the most beautiful and popular girls on campus who want the most beautiful and popular boys on campus. he could have hung out at the library and found an academic type who would have loved to have gone on a date with him.
But like a spoiled baby who didn’t get his way, he threw a tantrum and went to the extreme. He is also a sociopath for sure . his tone of voice gives it away. That soft spoken errily overly calm tone is a dead giveaway. If you hear anyone with that type of voice quality- run as fast as you can.
The next thing that is dangerous about him as we listen to him speak his speaking through a the clenched jaw which signifies anger and rage.
His is so out of touch when he says that ever since he has hit puberty he has been forced to endure a life of loneliness and rejection. WEll, welcome to real life. That is what life is all about for most young people trying to find their way in life. Most are met with loneliness and rejections. But they do something about it. They tell their parents or a teacher or a therapist how they feel . If he would have joined a sports team or got involved in some school activities he would not have felt as lonely and would have made some friends.As he says this we can clearly see how entitled he feels he is.
He says that girls have never been attracted to him and that they gave their love and sex to other men. Well, with an attitude like his of entitlement how could any girl be attracted to him. he then says he is 22 years old and still a virgin. Well if he did 1 through 7 as I suggested above he would not have still been a virgin. As he speaks of his virginity he squints his eyes in anger like he is entitled to not be a virgin without doing anything about it.
His tone of voice is very off putting and distant. It has a snobby “I’m better than you ” ring to the tone which would further alienate women. Then he plays the victim as he says he has had to rot in loneliness as it is not fair.
If he was that lonely he could have volunteered in a hospital or volunteered to feed the homeless, he could have joined organizations where there are a lot of women. he could have taken a cooking class or sewing class or just hing out at the library and acted friendly to women and perhaps he wouldn;t have been so tortured being lonely. Once again his rhetoric speaks to his entitlement and lack of making any effort .
He then plays the victim by saying how girls have never been attracted to him.It is clearly because of his creepy tone and lack of social skills as we hear in the tape.
As he points his finger in anger he is stunned that they women don’t see how great he is as he says “he’s the perfect guy.” This confirms what I said earlier about how he has an overinflated sense of self.
He then says how he will punish all of the women for not recognizing what a perfect gentleman he is he gives a sinister laugh which he does several times throughout this tape, showing his sadistic side. He wants so much to be accepted and says that on the day of retribution he is going to enter the “hottest” sorority house, where the girls rejected him. Onc e again his reference to the hottest sorority and the prettiest girls speak to his overinflated sense of self in thinking he could actually attain a relationship with one of these girls.
He then in a calm tone says how he will slaughter every “stuck up blond slut. ” Again, it is like a spoiled child who doesn;t get what they want so they lash out and have a tantrum. But in his case the tantrum was slaughtering what he couldn’t attain. What is very interesting is how he said that they would consider him an :inferior man: if he made a sexual advance towards them. In essence he is describing how he really feels about himself- that he is indeed seeing himself as an “inferior man. ”
His sadism comes about again as he says how he will take great pleasure in slaughtering these women. He says that he will be the “superior one the true alpha male. because in actuality he feels so inferior he believes that by slaughtering them he will then become superior to them.This speaks to his sick logic and extremely low sense of self.
His speech is very strange as it seems like he uses the vocabulary from a script as he says words like “slay” “slaughter, ” brute” “hedonistic pleasure”, “exacting my retribution, ” “you denied me” “depraved” ” mountains of skulls.” and “wretched.” It sounds like some of these words would be used in the films his father Peter Rodger was involved with in the Hunger Games.
He says how the guys whom he has tried to hang out with but who rejected him treated him like a “mouse” and on the next breath says he will be a God next to them. Once again he is trying to mask his is low self esteem with rhetoric and delusions of grandeur- being a God. He also says “if I had the power” indicating he has no power. But then he says he has the power to take away their life. So he feels he can only obtain a sense of power from within by killing.
His sinister and sadistic laughter is very disturbing in that he shows enjoyment at what he plans to do to his “enemies” who rejected him. We can see a clear manifestation of his sociopathic behavior. He is very detached vocally and emotionally as it seems as though he is reading a bad script or has watching some violent video games over long period of time..
The fact that he killed so many people as he carried out his rampage to prove his power and then finally turned the gun on himself showed that deep down he saw himself as a worthless coward who didn’t deserve to live.
Addendum:
Now we know according to a grandmother in the UK that he was very mentally disturbed, had a high functioning level of Ausberger’s Syndrome, and that he was living in an Independent Living Center with room mates . We also learned that police were aware of his intentions and interviewed him three times. They claimed he was “polite.”Obviously they dropped the ball. He needed to be under strict psychiatric supervision. With all of teh money his family had and all the luxuries they gave him, they needed to keep a closer eye on him. This new information with reference to his Ausberger’s Syndrome can account for his lack of social skills. If they or a therapist knew of his frustration with women, they could have employed more methods to have him develop better social skills with the opposite sex. His Ausberger’s Syndrome does not excuse his violence and mental disturbance.
His father is now blaming politicians for lack of stricter gun controls. He needs to blame himself for not paying stricter attention to his son whom he allegedly knew had mental issues.
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Dr. Lillian Glass Body Language Blog 
Hi Dr. Glass, I agree. The cops really dropped the ball on this one. They had every right to search Elliott’s apt after one of the very disturbing, threatning video he posted. It was reported that Elliott took down the video in question after the cops came because he did not want to draw attention to himself until after he finished his evil plan. By the way, that was not Elliott’s father that blamed the gun laws and politictians . That was one of the grieving fathers of a victim that made that statement to the media. His son was the one who was killed in the store getting a sandwich.
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Actually early on the father did mention the gun laws as he said he had no idea how his son got the gun in the first place
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I figure I’ll disagree on this. The killer was probably a deeply disturbed person, probably some kind of grave narcissist/borderline person with some kind of feelings of inferiority overlapped with a superior attitude making his advances on girls fail, failures that felt like catastrophic abuses. Which deepened the inferiority and imbalance between the superior outside. Narcissism doesn’t easily allow for feelings of shame and improvement of self.
Lowering the standards is not an option when maintaining a mask of superiority. Narcissism doesn’t easily allow for approaching women in a considerate altruistic manner necessary to make a balanced relation.
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He needed to be schooled in how to socialize, make more friends and how to approach women. He needed to learn communication skills with the opposite sex and body language nuances. This highly disturbed young man needed to be monitored a lot more closely than he was. It is said that he refused to take his medications as well. If he had the proper guidance and professional care he would be assisted in making more realistic choices with regard to women.
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Right.
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Had he had any interaction with any nice young lady- not just the sorority queens he may not have done this heinous act.
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It’s wrong to blame the parents for a mentally ill person’s lack of social skills (“They also didn’t give him the social skills he needed…”). Once someone develops severe mental illness, they can be incapable of normal social interactions that require some amount of emotional intelligence and sense — even when they DID in fact learn proper social behavior from the parents earlier.
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Amy I absolutely blame the parents who needed to keep a watchful eye over their son whom they knew had mental issues.They essentially ignored his mental and emotional needs while meeting his financial needs with a BMW and never wanting for anything. They definately needed to get him some help with his social skills that were not part of his mental illness like how to talk to women and how to deal with rejection and even how to have his sexual and social needs met as I discussed in this blog. He claimed he was going to kill girls because he was sexually frustrated and rejected by them. If he shared this with a therapist and if his parents had a handle on this issue it could have been addressed. So please don’t spew forth armchair psychology with emotional intelligence. His mental disturbance of narcissim and paranoia, delusions of grandeur,delusions of self,combined with an extremely low self esteem which we saw in the video and most and other disturbances diagnosed by Dr. Sophy could have accounted for his carrying out his murder spree. But had he had proper PARENTAL GUIDANCE and awareness of his current state of mind and had he learned proper social behavior like how to talk to women he wouldn’t have ruined so many lives including his own.
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There is so much wrong with Dr. Glass’ take on this sad situation that I don’t even know where to begin…….
Elliot Rodger’s problems were not caused by his parents failure to teach him social skills. His problems would not have been solved if he had managed to get layed.
My understanding is that his parents went to extraordinary lengths to alert authorities about the danger they believed their son posed.
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Thank you so much for writing this. I have met males with personalities like this more than once. I had once had a stalker and he as from a very, rich and sheltered family. I do not think he ever learned how to fend for himself or solve his own problems. You really shed light on this topic for me. Now I know it’s because of his helicopter parents that he developed into an emotionally stunted man with no social graces and an inability to develop a strategy for attracting a mate and winning.
The man who was stalking me was highly intelligent and getting a PhD in mathematics. I know that he has also been objectified by his parents and peers for being so smart and so good at a subject most people in our society are not good at. I got lucky that my stalker was not a sadistic sociopath and that he feared authority. He never bothered me again after I called the cops on him.
I think one of the worst things to do to children is to spoil them and coddle them and solve all of their problems for them.
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What I find interesting is yesterday, someome Rodger had referred to as a close friend in manifesto, denied they were close friends. He said they occasionally hung out but only because he felt sorry for Rodger. He also said he gave the murderer advice on girls/woken but Rodger refused to actually do it. He never actually approached women to speak to them, instead, he expected women to approach him. He makes that clear in his manifesto, as well.
Dr. Glass hit the nail on the head: Rodger was sadistic. According to his manifesto, his actual plan was three phases, although obviously, it didn’t work out. His sick plans were to kill his roomies, trick women and men (who supposedly stole women’s affections that he said should’ve been his), torture them alive (graphic detail given), then decapitate each one and put the heads in a trash bag. He was then going to a specific street, which I’ve forgotten the name of, and just before opening fire on the innocent people, he was going to dump the heads in the middle of the street, so the victims could see what he’d done to their friends. I’ve left a lot of his plans out that he planned to do, as it was 1 1/2 pages of his sadistic plans.
He wrote about his entire life and no matter what the bad experience was, someone else was always at fault. Also, no one would’ve known he was a virgin, had he not told about it at dinner parties, and such. But he’d discuss it as if he’d proudly won an oscar, saying he didn’t want to lie. I doubt even one person ever asked him at dinner or Christmas parties whether or not he was a virgin. These parties were family events, also. He was very arrogant, also. I’ve never heard someone speak so highly of themselves, even saying he’d be a god.
Excellent article, Dr. Glass, and spot on!
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Dr Glass please! It is not “Ausberger’s Syndrome”, “it’s Asperger’s Syndrome”…
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