That is the description given by a neighbor of the man arrested for a horrifying number of killings of black prostitutes in the LA area. Lonnie Franklin Jr had a habit of taking hardcore photos of the prostitutes he had sex with in his van, and then showing the images to neighbors with a bit of ribald boy to boy 'I had her last night', as if the 'conquest' of a woman you have to pay to have sex with you is somehow an accomplishment.
If Lonnie Franklin Jr is an 'average guy' this could explain why the central tenets of feminist thought - which include that women are not sexual objects, that they are equal to men, that they have a right not to be sexually exploited - have not really taken hold in our society.
There was a time when I honestly believed that the emancipation of women from brutal sexualization was simply a matter of educating men, creating an equal playing field for girls and empowering them to say 'no'. Excuse me while I laugh.
Franklin has been arrested for 10 murders committed over a 22 year span by a killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper (how droll is that?). And after shooting or strangling his victims (who may well have been average women with young children needing new shoes and elderly parents needing care) this average guy discarded their bodies in trash bins or dumped them in alleys and covered them in debris. It is because we are so accepting of that kind of 'average guy' behaviour that a man like Franklin could go for over two decades without so much as a sideways glance from authorities. He was finally identified when DNA taken from a survivor of one of his assaults closely matched Franklin's son who had been in jail and had to provide DNA. When it was obvious that the son was not old enough to have committed the murders, the police were able to grab some DNA from a half eaten pizza pie left behind at a restaurant by his dad.
Franklin, 57, appeared in court and did not enter a plea.
I don't think the number of his victims will stop at ten. There are probably many more women, living as so many millions of women do, on the edge of our society making a paltry living as hookers in the seamier parts of our urban nightmares, who went missing and who were never sufficiently loved or missed. It would be tempting to say this human monster is hardly average, but regrettably he is more so than we like to admit. And the next Mr Average is already cruising the streets.
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