I’ve been thinking, since reading Wesley Yang’s excellent essay on the Virginia Tech shooter, about the fact that for as long as I can remember, even when I was at my most lonely and romantically/sexually desperate, I never felt anything like how Yang describes Cho (and himself) as feeling– that women would never find me attractive, that mine was "a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country."
Some of it is temperamental: I’m an optimist, at least about the long term. Some of it is racial. I’m white, which is the best thing to be if you’re interested in being desired, in a generic way, by women in this country. I’m pretty good looking, and even in 5th grade, when I was horribly unstylish, had a bad haircut and wore aviator glasses with tinted lenses (long story), I knew that eventually I’d blossom into a fine looking young man. And, and this has been my ace in the hole, I’m smart, and in America, if you’re smart enough and psychologically functional enough and you have parents who have the money and savvy (which mine did) to get you into the right schools, then you can be pretty confident that someday, even if you’re really unappealing in all sorts of ways, you’ll make enough money that someone will convince themselves that they love you and find you attractive.
I mention all this not because I think I’m so fantastic (I’m a good guy, but not quite a fantastic one), but because I think I’m very lucky, and that because of my luck, I have sympathy, perhaps more than I should, for the unlucky men. It must be excruciating, I imagine, to be an unattractive, unappealing, not particularly bright man with too stunted a self to resist the culture’s message that a man’s ability to fuck hot women is the measure of his manhood.
The misery of that situation is less than no excuse for mistreating women, abusing them, assaulting them. But man, it must suck.
