>The guy is an active stalker. Let's stop making excuses for horrible behavior. He's not "confused". He's malicious. He's threatening. He's trying to destroy her livelihood.

I did not read the root comment as an excuse, but rather an attempt at understanding what kind of twisted psychology would lead into this kind of horrible stalking behavior. Most often, people are not consciously driven by some kind of desire to be evil just for evilness' sake.

If the Hollywood romance concepts like "persistence will lead to romantic happiness" is a partial reason how people can rationalize this kind of behavior, that's an issue that hopefully can be tackled.

This.

"Danny" is obviously mentally disturbed and should not represent the rest of the male population.

Normal men do not act like Danny.

I'm really beginning to doubt the idea that people who act like this are mentally disturbed. I think they're just shitheads.

Mentally disturbed could mean sociopathic, which is likely the case here.

People who try to defend such harmful behavior may be trying to fight identity politics and radical feminism, but it's very counterproductive towards that. They're just confirming that what feminists say is true.

I don't think that I am trying to fight any politics, but rather just trying to understand the circumstances of the situation here.

I have had some experiences with women where things seemed to be going fine and then I was abruptly blocked or ignored, and it was very frustrating at the time because I had poor social skills and I didn't have a good understanding of what had happened or why. Now I understand that dating is often asymmetrical and one person just may have many more options than the other, or just decide they are not interested, and that's OK.

This seems like it could be a very extreme case which got way out of hand and the guy went off the deep end, but I think it is best to at least try to have some understanding of and maybe some empathy for both sides.

I think the same thing can happen to women who are pursuing men, and it can also become extreme, like the woman who broke into David Letterman's house. Should you just call her a creep and throw her in prison, or should you feel empathy for her mental illness and try to treat it? It seems to me like the best solution is to determine and treat the actual cause of the behavior.

Clearly at that point he had taken it way too far. I'm not making excuses for that and I think he is definitely in the wrong. I'm just commenting on what I believe causes these kind of situations in the first place.

I seriously doubt it. This person is mentally unstable, he has a chemical imbalance in the brain, that wasn't caused by a culture that encourages a notion of male romantic conquest. Social factors can contribute to mental illness, but it has to be a lot stronger of a social factor. Either a high stress environment or trauma.

On the contrary, the culture and the society very much influences how various mental issues develop and manifest and how they are interpreted.

You can't explain writing emails impersonating someone simply as result of "chemical imbalances in the brain" (except if you reduce every kind of human behavior to that, but then the phrase "chemical imbalance" does not explain anything). Brains and their chemical imbalances are much older than the technology of emails, or even writing.

I agree that culture can very much influence the presentation of mental illness. But the ability for a culture or society to cause a mental illness in the first place is much more limited. Mental illness can be caused or exacerbated by a high stress environment or trauma, but not much else.