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" Thousands of men contribute to pickup artists (PUA) and men&amp;#039;s rights activists (MRA) websites. Thousands more adhere to similar ideology. Most don&amp;#039;t go on rampages, though Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old behind this weekend&amp;#039;s killings, was not the first. In 2011, Thomas Ball self-immolated outside a Keene, New Hampshire, courthouse to protest a custody proceeding. That same year, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway. Before that, in 1989, Marc L\u00E9pine shot and killed 14 women in Montreal.  In the aftermath of Rodger&amp;#039;s shooting spree in Santa Barbara, speculation abounds as to why Rodger murdered six people before killing himself. I&amp;#039;m of the view that we should take him at his word when he says that he killed because he hates women. That hatred may have been magnified by an untreated mental illness, but it also may have been validated by Rodger&amp;#039;s visits to PUA and MRA websites, many of which promote similar ideals to those in Rodger&amp;#039;s manifesto, though they stop short of the suggestions to murder women or put them in concentration camps.  Neither PUAs nor MRAs nor anti-PUAs made Rodger commit murder, and it&amp;#039;s impossible to know what Rodger was thinking when he visited their websites. But given that the content of their sites tracks with many of Rodger&amp;#039;s stated views, they may have helped to reinforce Rodger&amp;#039;s hatred of women and solidify his confidence in the idea that such hatred was normal and justifiable. Now that Rodger&amp;#039;s opinions have been connected to MRAs, PUAs, and anti-PUAs (those who tried PUA tactics without success), much of the reaction from those communities to his story is telling: They say no one but Rodger is to blame for his actions, and then they blame women for his actions.  MRAs and PUAs overlap only limitedly and show some animosity toward each other. PUAs tend to be socially awkward, young, single men convinced that they can attract women through an elaborate plan of trickery, manipulation, and ornamental headwear. They call this plan &amp;quot;Game.&amp;quot; They see women as interchangeable bodies, useful primarily for sex and boosting the PUA&amp;#039;s self-esteem. The PUA method tells men they deserve sex, women are the gatekeepers of sex, and women can be psychologically out-maneuvered. MRAs, on the other hand, are PUAs a few decades later \u2014 old and bitter, but still just as entitled and sexist. MRAs rage against child support, no-fault divorce, single mothers, and laws protecting women from domestic violence. They believe we live in a &amp;quot;gynocentric&amp;quot; society where women, as the holders of sex, have all the power and men are roundly victimized. They see PUAs as trying too hard to get women, when in the MRA opinion, women are mostly terrible.  Rodger seemed to exist at the intersection between PUA and MRA: wanting female attention, blaming women for his lack of it, and positioning himself as the ultimate victim. And the response from both of those communities in the aftermath of the tragedy is deeply disturbing. According to many PUAs, Game would have saved Rodger&amp;#039;s life, and the lives of his victims. For example, one of the most famous Internet PUAs, Roosh, whose supposed sexual exploits seem to be outnumbered only by the number of hours he spends on his computer documenting those exploits, situated PUAs as the answer \u2014 and women as the problem. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m trying to think of ways our enemies will come after us because of this, but if anything, we&amp;#039;re the solution to this sort of murder rampage,&amp;quot; Roosh wrote on one of his forums. &amp;quot;This is the society that progressives wanted, where women are fully able to choose the top 10% of alpha males while shaming masculinity, leaving beta males with modest resources in the dust ... Society gave beta males a bargain---they work hard with the expectation of a wife and family. That bargain no longer exists so we can&amp;#039;t be surprised when one loses his mind and starts shooting. At the very least, prostitution should be legalized as a release valve. If the killer had access to some high quality hookers for $150 a pop, it would have given him some meaning.&amp;quot; Roosh doubles down on this argument in a truly upsetting screed that essentially boils down to a veiled threat: &amp;quot;Until you give men like Rodger a way to have sex, either by encouraging them to learn game, seek out a Thai wife, or engage in legalized prostitution\u2014three things that the American media and cultural elite venomously attack, it&amp;#039;s inevitable for another massacre to occur,&amp;quot; he writes. &amp;quot;Even game itself, as useful as it is on an individual level, is a band-aid fix upon a culture which has stopped rewarding nice guys while encouraging female whoring to benefit only the top 10% of alpha males, all in the name of societal progress ... Game may not have led Rodger to find his dream girl and live happily ever after, but it would have given enough results to stop him from killing six innocent individuals and himself. Until you allow and encourage all men to get sex by some means, these massacres will be more commonplace as America&amp;#039;s cultural decline continues.&amp;quot; MRAs beat a similar drum in the wake of the tragedy: They claim feminists rule the world and cause divorce, and Rodger&amp;#039;s parents were divorced; ergo, blame for this killing lies with Rodger&amp;#039;s mother, who ended up as his primary caregiver (fathers, apparently, do not factor into divorce decisions). &amp;quot;He is a product of feminism, anytime an angry young man goes on a killing spree they are inevitably from a broken home and have been raised solely by their mother,&amp;quot; writes one commenter at A Voice for Men, one of the largest men&amp;#039;s rights sites. &amp;quot;It is women that are raising these killers.&amp;quot; MRAs also blame the women. One commenter at The Spearhead, another MRA site, notes that Rodger credited a childhood snub, among a litany of other perceived abuses, for his hatred of women. &amp;quot;I suspect that the encouraging of girls to think that they are Princesses and to act accordingly is a thoroughly undesirable feature of modern life brought about by the Universalists&amp;#039; equalist notion that there is no difference between the sexes and that any inequality of outcome is entirely due to male oppression thus justifying any female response,&amp;quot; that commenter writes. &amp;quot;Male instinct is to appease females and it takes some over-riding of natural inclinations not to put up with any BS from the fair sex.&amp;quot; Commenters at A Voice for Men concur, some noting that there are almost surely more men like Rodger out there, self-pitying and potentially violent. Yet the problem, they say, is still women, and not misogyny or male entitlement.  &amp;quot;He was deeply effected [sic] by the breakdown of his family and was bullied mercilessly in school, often by girls, until he developed a fear of women,&amp;quot; one commenter writes. &amp;quot;What he did was unforgivable but you would be a fool to think there are not many more like him out there and the way that feminism is taking society won&amp;#039;t make this sort of thing a more common occurrence.&amp;quot; That there are in fact many more men like Rodger should worry all of us. But even while some MRAs note that members of their own forums may someday commit a crime like this, their solution is to continue railing against feminism.  &amp;quot;The event is simply a reflection of the decadence of America, the arrogance of women, the gender warfare, the emasculation of men, the sex culture of shame and rejection, and the flippant lack of compassion for the criminal,&amp;quot; another commenter writes. &amp;quot;ONE of these days someone who cruises this site IS gonna do something like this (simple inevitability of rising popularity) and AVFM is not going to be able to handle it by saying &amp;#039;it&amp;#039;s not us, it&amp;#039;s not us!&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  MRAs should listen because, yes, it is them. It&amp;#039;s PUAs too. But neither group is going to change any time soon, and they&amp;#039;ll continue framing women as objects to either be had or destroyed. It&amp;#039;s up to the rest of us to label their rhetoric what it is: woman-hating and, yes, violence-abetting. RELATED: The 5 Most Terrifying Excerpts From the UCSB Shooter&amp;#039;s Manifesto Twitter Responds to UCSB Shooting With #YesAllWomen Follow Jill on Twitter.  Photo Credit: Getty Images.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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