Why do so many straight men come to resent and hate the women they find attractive? Maybe it’s a question of power. People often experience being sexually attracted to someone as if that person has a kind of power over them, and for a straight, white man like Long, positioned at the top of so many social hierarchies, this is likely one of his most acute experiences of another person’s power that he has ever faced. For men socialized in a sexist culture where rigid strictures of masculinity dictate that another person’s power over a man constitutes a failure of his masculinity, attraction to a woman can be interpreted as a threat posed by that woman – at least, it can for men of especially weak character. It is not hard to deduce how a racist and sexist man, reared in a culture of white supremacy and masculine entitlement, could experience his own powerlessness over his attraction to the women at the spas as a distressing humiliation. To be able to experience sexual attraction to another person without that feeling becoming a source of shame and rage requires a degree of self assurance and respect that Long, and men like him, evidently do not possess.
But if some men understand their attraction to women as a kind of power that those women hold over them, for women themselves, it often doesn’t feel that way. Unsolicited male sexual attention can often be experienced as threatening – in part, because it is often communicated as a threat. Few women do not have stories of being harassed in public with expressions of desire from male strangers that are explicitly framed as anger. Women receive unsolicited messages from men on social media who begin polite but revert to rageful invectives when rejected or not indulged. Most brutally, when women are murdered, it is usually by a current or former male sex partner – someone who found them attractive. One UK study found that 61% of women killed by men are murdered by a current or former romantic partner. In the US, 1,527 women were killed by a romantic partner in 2017 – more than four women a day. These varying aggressions are not morally equal and do not impact women in the same way, but they do all contain the simultaneous expression of male desire and male rage. If men feel that when they are attracted to a woman, that woman necessarily has more power than they do in their interactions, they should perhaps consider how often men’s attraction to women is communicated with the threat of that desire being enforced, and of the woman being punished for it.
Punishment for his own desire seems to be something that Long wanted to inflict upon the women he killed. It is interesting that Long identifies himself has experiencing sex addiction, a phrase that casts his desire for the women he killed into the realm of the medical. Wanting these women, in his mind, is something that happened to him. But when he felt discomfort with his own sexual desires, Long did not address this discomfort with a therapist or a religious leader. He did not go into a 12-step program for sex addiction – several of which are available, free and active in the Atlanta area. He did not seek out a friend for advice. Instead, he killed seven women and one man. Because he understood his desire as their power – he also understood his desire as their responsibility.
Long says that he patronized the spas where he committed his murders, but it’s unclear if he was ever attended to by any of the women he killed. If he was, it’s not clear whether or not he knew their names. But we do know the names of some of these women. They were Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delania Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Julie Park and Heyeon Jeong Park. Each one of them deserved better.