Abstract
On May 23, 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger posted a video on YouTube and e-mailed out a 137-page autobiography; in each, Rodger expressed intense anger towards women for rejecting him his whole life and towards men for taking women away from him. On that same day, Rodger went on a killing spree, murdering six, injuring thirteen, and then committing suicide himself. Men have perpetrated 93.8% of all mass murders between 1976 and 2008, and the American construction of masculinity plays a prominent role in these murders. Sociologists Michael Kimmel, Rachel Kalish, and Eric Madfis studied mass murders and found that almost all perpetrators of these crimes experienced aggrieved entitlement, the belief that perceived emasculation justifies retributive violence. Building off of the work of Kimmel, Kalish, and Madfis, this essay will use a social constructionist and intersectional framework of gender and patriarchy to analyze the videos, forum posts, and autobiography that Rodger left behind in order to understand how Rodger's masculinity and aggrieved entitlement led him to commit these murders.
