Cultural/Political/Social Trends & Divergence Thread

[Sydney Fan]

On 01/09/2018 at 8:14 AM, Dazey said:

On her head or her pussy?  

Fuckin love those old british 70s comedys. Way to pc now though.

[soon]

Really great look at the sad and twisted world of incels.

The Rage of the Incels

Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy.

By Jia Tolentino

Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of the people I talked to were virgins by choice. Some were not, sometimes for complicated, overlapping reasons: disability, trauma, issues related to appearance, temperament, chance. “Embarrassed doesn’t even cover it,” a thirty-two-year-old woman who chose the pseudonym Bette told me. “Not having erotic capital, not being part of the sexual marketplace . . . that’s a serious thing in our world! I mean, practically everyone has sex, so what’s wrong with me?” A twenty-six-year-old man who was on the autism spectrum and had been molested as a child wondered, “If I get naked with someone, am I going to take to it like a duck to water, or am I going to start crying and lock myself in the bathroom?” He hoped to meet someone who saw life clearly, who was gentle and independent. “Sometimes I think, why would a woman like that ever want me?” he said. But he had worked hard, he told me, to start thinking of himself as a person who was capable of a relationship—a person who was worthy of, and could accept, love.

It is a horrible thing to feel unwanted—invisible, inadequate, ineligible for the things that any person might hope for. It is also entirely possible to process a difficult social position with generosity and grace. None of the people I interviewed believed that they were owed the sex that they wished to have. In America, to be poor, or black, or fat, or trans, or Native, or old, or disabled, or undocumented, among other things, is usually to have become acquainted with unwantedness. Structural power is the best protection against it: a rich straight white man, no matter how unpleasant, will always receive enthusiastic handshakes and good treatment at banking institutions; he will find ways to get laid.

These days, in this country, sex has become a hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, and, like any hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, it often makes people feel very bad. Our newest sex technologies, such as Tinder and Grindr, are built to carefully match people by looks above all else. Sexual value continues to accrue to abled over disabled, cis over trans, thin over fat, tall over short, white over nonwhite, rich over poor. There is an absurd mismatch in the way that straight men and women are taught to respond to these circumstances. Women are socialized from childhood to blame themselves if they feel undesirable, to believe that they will be unacceptable unless they spend time and money and mental effort being pretty and amenable and appealing to men. Conventional femininity teaches women to be good partners to men as a basic moral requirement: a woman should provide her man a support system, and be an ideal accessory for him, and it is her job to convince him, and the world, that she is good.

Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable. And, as women gain the economic and cultural power that allows them to be choosy about their partners, men have generated ideas about self-improvement that are sometimes inextricable from violent rage.

Several distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation. The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave women certainty and company in these convictions. And the Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with.

In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

The incel ideology has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own virginity.

The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.

If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”

On a recent ninety-degree day in New York City, I went for a walk and thought about how my life would look through incel eyes. I’m twenty-nine, so I’m a little old and used up: incels fetishize teen-agers and virgins (they use the abbreviation “JBs,” for jailbait), and they describe women who have sought pleasure in their sex lives as “whores” riding a “cock carousel.” I’m a feminist, which is disgusting to them. (“It is obvious that women are inferior, that is why men have always been in control of women.”) I was wearing a crop top and shorts, the sort of outfit that they believe causes men to rape women. (“Now watch as the level of rapes mysteriously rise up.”) In the elaborate incel taxonomy of participants in the sexual marketplace, I am a Becky, devoting my attentions to a Chad. I’m probably a “roastie,” too—another term they use for women with sexual experience, denoting labia that have turned into roast beef from overuse.

Earlier this month, Ross Douthat, in a column for the Times, wrote that society would soon enough “address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed or despairing.” The column was ostensibly about the idea of sexual redistribution: if power is distributed unequally in society, and sex tends to follow those lines of power, how and what could we change to create a more equal world? Douthat noted a recent blog post by the economist Robin Hanson, who suggested, after Minassian’s mass murder, that the incel plight was legitimate, and that redistributing sex could be as worthy a cause as redistributing wealth. (The quality of Hanson’s thought here may be suggested by his need to clarify, in an addendum, “Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!”) Douthat drew a straight line between Hanson’s piece and one by Amia Srinivasan, in the London Review of Books. Srinivasan began with Elliot Rodger, then explored the tension between a sexual ideology built on free choice and personal preference and the forms of oppression that manifest in these preferences. The question, she wrote, “is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question.”

Srinivasan’s rigorous essay and Hanson’s flippantly dehumanizing thought experiment had little in common. And incels, in any case, are not actually interested in sexual redistribution; they don’t want sex to be distributed to anyone other than themselves. They don’t care about the sexual marginalization of trans people, or women who fall outside the boundaries of conventional attractiveness. (“Nothing with a pussy can be incel, ever. Someone will be desperate enough to fuck it . . . Men are lining up to fuck pigs, hippos, and ogres.”) What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.

It is male power, not female power, that has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire. Women—and, specifically, feminists—are the architects of the body-positivity movement, the ones who have pushed for an expansive redefinition of what we consider attractive. “Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy,” Srinivasan wrote, “may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel—as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy—inadequate.” Women, and L.G.B.T.Q. people, are the activists trying to make sex work legal and safe, to establish alternative arrangements of power and exchange in the sexual market.

We can’t redistribute women’s bodies as if they are a natural resource; they are the bodies we live in. We can redistribute the value we apportion to one another—something that the incels demand from others but refuse to do themselves. I still think about Bette telling me, in 2013, how being lonely can make your brain feel like it’s under attack. Over the past week, I have read the incel boards looking for, and occasionally finding, proof of humanity, amid detailed fantasies of rape and murder and musings about what it would be like to assault one’s sister out of desperation. In spite of everything, women are still more willing to look for humanity in the incels than they are in us.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels

 

Edited December 20, 2018 by soon

[wasted]

13 hours ago, soon said:

Really great look at the sad and twisted world of incels.

The Rage of the Incels

Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy.

By Jia Tolentino

Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of the people I talked to were virgins by choice. Some were not, sometimes for complicated, overlapping reasons: disability, trauma, issues related to appearance, temperament, chance. “Embarrassed doesn’t even cover it,” a thirty-two-year-old woman who chose the pseudonym Bette told me. “Not having erotic capital, not being part of the sexual marketplace . . . that’s a serious thing in our world! I mean, practically everyone has sex, so what’s wrong with me?” A twenty-six-year-old man who was on the autism spectrum and had been molested as a child wondered, “If I get naked with someone, am I going to take to it like a duck to water, or am I going to start crying and lock myself in the bathroom?” He hoped to meet someone who saw life clearly, who was gentle and independent. “Sometimes I think, why would a woman like that ever want me?” he said. But he had worked hard, he told me, to start thinking of himself as a person who was capable of a relationship—a person who was worthy of, and could accept, love.

It is a horrible thing to feel unwanted—invisible, inadequate, ineligible for the things that any person might hope for. It is also entirely possible to process a difficult social position with generosity and grace. None of the people I interviewed believed that they were owed the sex that they wished to have. In America, to be poor, or black, or fat, or trans, or Native, or old, or disabled, or undocumented, among other things, is usually to have become acquainted with unwantedness. Structural power is the best protection against it: a rich straight white man, no matter how unpleasant, will always receive enthusiastic handshakes and good treatment at banking institutions; he will find ways to get laid.

These days, in this country, sex has become a hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, and, like any hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, it often makes people feel very bad. Our newest sex technologies, such as Tinder and Grindr, are built to carefully match people by looks above all else. Sexual value continues to accrue to abled over disabled, cis over trans, thin over fat, tall over short, white over nonwhite, rich over poor. There is an absurd mismatch in the way that straight men and women are taught to respond to these circumstances. Women are socialized from childhood to blame themselves if they feel undesirable, to believe that they will be unacceptable unless they spend time and money and mental effort being pretty and amenable and appealing to men. Conventional femininity teaches women to be good partners to men as a basic moral requirement: a woman should provide her man a support system, and be an ideal accessory for him, and it is her job to convince him, and the world, that she is good.

Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable. And, as women gain the economic and cultural power that allows them to be choosy about their partners, men have generated ideas about self-improvement that are sometimes inextricable from violent rage.

Several distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation. The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave women certainty and company in these convictions. And the Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with.

In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

The incel ideology has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own virginity.

The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.

If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”

On a recent ninety-degree day in New York City, I went for a walk and thought about how my life would look through incel eyes. I’m twenty-nine, so I’m a little old and used up: incels fetishize teen-agers and virgins (they use the abbreviation “JBs,” for jailbait), and they describe women who have sought pleasure in their sex lives as “whores” riding a “cock carousel.” I’m a feminist, which is disgusting to them. (“It is obvious that women are inferior, that is why men have always been in control of women.”) I was wearing a crop top and shorts, the sort of outfit that they believe causes men to rape women. (“Now watch as the level of rapes mysteriously rise up.”) In the elaborate incel taxonomy of participants in the sexual marketplace, I am a Becky, devoting my attentions to a Chad. I’m probably a “roastie,” too—another term they use for women with sexual experience, denoting labia that have turned into roast beef from overuse.

Earlier this month, Ross Douthat, in a column for the Times, wrote that society would soon enough “address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed or despairing.” The column was ostensibly about the idea of sexual redistribution: if power is distributed unequally in society, and sex tends to follow those lines of power, how and what could we change to create a more equal world? Douthat noted a recent blog post by the economist Robin Hanson, who suggested, after Minassian’s mass murder, that the incel plight was legitimate, and that redistributing sex could be as worthy a cause as redistributing wealth. (The quality of Hanson’s thought here may be suggested by his need to clarify, in an addendum, “Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!”) Douthat drew a straight line between Hanson’s piece and one by Amia Srinivasan, in the London Review of Books. Srinivasan began with Elliot Rodger, then explored the tension between a sexual ideology built on free choice and personal preference and the forms of oppression that manifest in these preferences. The question, she wrote, “is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question.”

Srinivasan’s rigorous essay and Hanson’s flippantly dehumanizing thought experiment had little in common. And incels, in any case, are not actually interested in sexual redistribution; they don’t want sex to be distributed to anyone other than themselves. They don’t care about the sexual marginalization of trans people, or women who fall outside the boundaries of conventional attractiveness. (“Nothing with a pussy can be incel, ever. Someone will be desperate enough to fuck it . . . Men are lining up to fuck pigs, hippos, and ogres.”) What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.

It is male power, not female power, that has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire. Women—and, specifically, feminists—are the architects of the body-positivity movement, the ones who have pushed for an expansive redefinition of what we consider attractive. “Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy,” Srinivasan wrote, “may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel—as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy—inadequate.” Women, and L.G.B.T.Q. people, are the activists trying to make sex work legal and safe, to establish alternative arrangements of power and exchange in the sexual market.

We can’t redistribute women’s bodies as if they are a natural resource; they are the bodies we live in. We can redistribute the value we apportion to one another—something that the incels demand from others but refuse to do themselves. I still think about Bette telling me, in 2013, how being lonely can make your brain feel like it’s under attack. Over the past week, I have read the incel boards looking for, and occasionally finding, proof of humanity, amid detailed fantasies of rape and murder and musings about what it would be like to assault one’s sister out of desperation. In spite of everything, women are still more willing to look for humanity in the incels than they are in us.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels

 

Incels seem like a product of cybernetic culture. In many ways they are doing similar things that a lot of youth sub cultures do. They sort build their own culture or club rules to deal with reality. It’s just the reality they see is videogames that make you all powerful and porn. Then it’s straight into this ideology. There’s no mention of tradition or roles in society. It’s like a mental game they are playing. 

It’s like that scene in Cheech and Chong where the father comes in while his son is making banana milkshskes. I can get you job working for United Fruit, build your muscles up picking fruit. 

Edited December 21, 2018 by wasted

[Graeme]

14 hours ago, soon said:

Really great look at the sad and twisted world of incels.

The Rage of the Incels

Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy.

By Jia Tolentino

Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of the people I talked to were virgins by choice. Some were not, sometimes for complicated, overlapping reasons: disability, trauma, issues related to appearance, temperament, chance. “Embarrassed doesn’t even cover it,” a thirty-two-year-old woman who chose the pseudonym Bette told me. “Not having erotic capital, not being part of the sexual marketplace . . . that’s a serious thing in our world! I mean, practically everyone has sex, so what’s wrong with me?” A twenty-six-year-old man who was on the autism spectrum and had been molested as a child wondered, “If I get naked with someone, am I going to take to it like a duck to water, or am I going to start crying and lock myself in the bathroom?” He hoped to meet someone who saw life clearly, who was gentle and independent. “Sometimes I think, why would a woman like that ever want me?” he said. But he had worked hard, he told me, to start thinking of himself as a person who was capable of a relationship—a person who was worthy of, and could accept, love.

It is a horrible thing to feel unwanted—invisible, inadequate, ineligible for the things that any person might hope for. It is also entirely possible to process a difficult social position with generosity and grace. None of the people I interviewed believed that they were owed the sex that they wished to have. In America, to be poor, or black, or fat, or trans, or Native, or old, or disabled, or undocumented, among other things, is usually to have become acquainted with unwantedness. Structural power is the best protection against it: a rich straight white man, no matter how unpleasant, will always receive enthusiastic handshakes and good treatment at banking institutions; he will find ways to get laid.

These days, in this country, sex has become a hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, and, like any hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, it often makes people feel very bad. Our newest sex technologies, such as Tinder and Grindr, are built to carefully match people by looks above all else. Sexual value continues to accrue to abled over disabled, cis over trans, thin over fat, tall over short, white over nonwhite, rich over poor. There is an absurd mismatch in the way that straight men and women are taught to respond to these circumstances. Women are socialized from childhood to blame themselves if they feel undesirable, to believe that they will be unacceptable unless they spend time and money and mental effort being pretty and amenable and appealing to men. Conventional femininity teaches women to be good partners to men as a basic moral requirement: a woman should provide her man a support system, and be an ideal accessory for him, and it is her job to convince him, and the world, that she is good.

Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable. And, as women gain the economic and cultural power that allows them to be choosy about their partners, men have generated ideas about self-improvement that are sometimes inextricable from violent rage.

Several distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation. The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave women certainty and company in these convictions. And the Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with.

In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

The incel ideology has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own virginity.

The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.

If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”

On a recent ninety-degree day in New York City, I went for a walk and thought about how my life would look through incel eyes. I’m twenty-nine, so I’m a little old and used up: incels fetishize teen-agers and virgins (they use the abbreviation “JBs,” for jailbait), and they describe women who have sought pleasure in their sex lives as “whores” riding a “cock carousel.” I’m a feminist, which is disgusting to them. (“It is obvious that women are inferior, that is why men have always been in control of women.”) I was wearing a crop top and shorts, the sort of outfit that they believe causes men to rape women. (“Now watch as the level of rapes mysteriously rise up.”) In the elaborate incel taxonomy of participants in the sexual marketplace, I am a Becky, devoting my attentions to a Chad. I’m probably a “roastie,” too—another term they use for women with sexual experience, denoting labia that have turned into roast beef from overuse.

Earlier this month, Ross Douthat, in a column for the Times, wrote that society would soon enough “address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed or despairing.” The column was ostensibly about the idea of sexual redistribution: if power is distributed unequally in society, and sex tends to follow those lines of power, how and what could we change to create a more equal world? Douthat noted a recent blog post by the economist Robin Hanson, who suggested, after Minassian’s mass murder, that the incel plight was legitimate, and that redistributing sex could be as worthy a cause as redistributing wealth. (The quality of Hanson’s thought here may be suggested by his need to clarify, in an addendum, “Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!”) Douthat drew a straight line between Hanson’s piece and one by Amia Srinivasan, in the London Review of Books. Srinivasan began with Elliot Rodger, then explored the tension between a sexual ideology built on free choice and personal preference and the forms of oppression that manifest in these preferences. The question, she wrote, “is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question.”

Srinivasan’s rigorous essay and Hanson’s flippantly dehumanizing thought experiment had little in common. And incels, in any case, are not actually interested in sexual redistribution; they don’t want sex to be distributed to anyone other than themselves. They don’t care about the sexual marginalization of trans people, or women who fall outside the boundaries of conventional attractiveness. (“Nothing with a pussy can be incel, ever. Someone will be desperate enough to fuck it . . . Men are lining up to fuck pigs, hippos, and ogres.”) What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.

It is male power, not female power, that has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire. Women—and, specifically, feminists—are the architects of the body-positivity movement, the ones who have pushed for an expansive redefinition of what we consider attractive. “Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy,” Srinivasan wrote, “may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel—as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy—inadequate.” Women, and L.G.B.T.Q. people, are the activists trying to make sex work legal and safe, to establish alternative arrangements of power and exchange in the sexual market.

We can’t redistribute women’s bodies as if they are a natural resource; they are the bodies we live in. We can redistribute the value we apportion to one another—something that the incels demand from others but refuse to do themselves. I still think about Bette telling me, in 2013, how being lonely can make your brain feel like it’s under attack. Over the past week, I have read the incel boards looking for, and occasionally finding, proof of humanity, amid detailed fantasies of rape and murder and musings about what it would be like to assault one’s sister out of desperation. In spite of everything, women are still more willing to look for humanity in the incels than they are in us.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels

 

It must take an incredible failing of empathy to become such an unpleasant human being. I mean, I get that on one level, the whole 'incel' community is founded around a certain kind of empathy in the sense that its members identify others with whom they have something they feel they're suffering in common, and they come together as a coping mechanism... But how do you become incapable of empathising with women to the extent that you're perfectly happy to describe people you've never met as "cum dumpsters"?

Not getting laid is no excuse at all. I am a white male. It was not until the ripe old age of 27 that I first encountered a woman who wanted to take her clothes off with me (who happened to be on the same continent at the same time). Aye, at times it was soul destroying, and I certainly asked the question "What is wrong with me?" more than once, but the idea of getting angry with all women about it never entered my head and I definitely never got angry with any individual women or wished them ill... I mean, most of the women I've ever been attracted to, it's because I've really liked who they are as people and cared about them. Why would I want to hurt them?

Also, I've realised that there doesn't have to be anything wrong with people who are not getting laid regularly (that's to say nothing of the emotional fulfilment of a relationship)... Sometimes it just doesn't happen. Sometimes you meet the right person at the wrong time, or in the wrong place, or the wrong phase of their life. 

I think this stuff can only really develop in a social environment where women are not allowed any part of the discourse whatsoever, then these guys can make up whatever bullshit they want to believe about them in their echo chamber and it will go unchallenged, therefore it gets accepted as the truth by truly delusional people (I don't mean that as a throwaway insult, I mean that their perception of reality is distinctly different from what can be empirically observed). 

Edited December 21, 2018 by Graeme

[Dazey]

On 05/09/2018 at 7:02 PM, soon said:

 

This reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode Meltdown. @Graeme

[Graeme]

7 minutes ago, Dazey said:

This reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode Meltdown. @Graeme

 

[soon]

10 hours ago, Graeme said:

It must take an incredible failing of empathy to become such an unpleasant human being. I mean, I get that on one level, the whole 'incel' community is founded around a certain kind of empathy in the sense that its members identify others with whom they have something they feel they're suffering in common, and they come together as a coping mechanism... But how do you become incapable of empathising with women to the extent that you're perfectly happy to describe people you've never met as "cum dumpsters"?

Not getting laid is no excuse at all. I am a white male. It was not until the ripe old age of 27 that I first encountered a woman who wanted to take her clothes off with me (who happened to be on the same continent at the same time). Aye, at times it was soul destroying, and I certainly asked the question "What is wrong with me?" more than once, but the idea of getting angry with all women about it never entered my head and I definitely never got angry with any individual women or wished them ill... I mean, most of the women I've ever been attracted to, it's because I've really liked who they are as people and cared about them. Why would I want to hurt them?

Also, I've realised that there doesn't have to be anything wrong with people who are not getting laid regularly (that's to say nothing of the emotional fulfilment of a relationship)... Sometimes it just doesn't happen. Sometimes you meet the right person at the wrong time, or in the wrong place, or the wrong phase of their life. 

I think this stuff can only really develop in a social environment where women are not allowed any part of the discourse whatsoever, then these guys can make up whatever bullshit they want to believe about them in their echo chamber and it will go unchallenged, therefore it gets accepted as the truth by truly delusional people (I don't mean that as a throwaway insult, I mean that their perception of reality is distinctly different from what can be empirically observed). 

Well said. 

Ive been trying to wrap my head around the incel culture for some time. Though I now know many facts, I still have to confess that I just dont get it. Its so new that a little think tank/project/ngo is being launched to explore it and intervene. 

There are other online communities such as Shy Guys, who are more about mutual support and arent into hate or violence. Its an entire world with various cultures. Involuntarily celebrate men have a few options for a healthy community of support, but seem to get funnelled into incel chat rooms for radicalization. 

I think you are right when you talk about the absence of a female voice in their narratives. The "Man-O-Sphere" kinda predates the the popularity of incel culture. There was already "gamer-gate" and stuff that set a tone in that online space. And within the Man-O-Sphere there are a subset of older and established organized misogynists who would easily be able to fuel and utilize the incel culture.

 

[soon]

12 hours ago, wasted said:

Incels seem like a product of cybernetic culture. In many ways they are doing similar things that a lot of youth sub cultures do. They sort build their own culture or club rules to deal with reality. It’s just the reality they see is videogames that make you all powerful and porn. Then it’s straight into this ideology. There’s no mention of tradition or roles in society. It’s like a mental game they are playing. 

I agree. Very succinct too.

One thing thats weird about the game they set up is that its rigged for failure. I mean if you look at the ideal women in the incel world, and if you tally up all the things they hate about women; there seems to be a lot of contradiction or crossover. Theres no real world women who fits the description. Theyd tell us that they hate women for not dating them. But they hate women too much to want to date any.

They don't want to leave the incel culture perhaps? Its an identity and a belonging. Almost as if they are intentionally planting life long roots with one another - close partners and extended family. These can be intimate relationships that include representations and explorations of ones sexuality in a twisted way. Kinda mirrors a traditional monogamous narrative a little bit. Fills a lot of the same needs at least in a cybernetic fashion.

[wasted]

8 hours ago, soon said:

I agree. Very succinct too.

One thing thats weird about the game they set up is that its rigged for failure. I mean if you look at the ideal women in the incel world, and if you tally up all the things they hate about women; there seems to be a lot of contradiction or crossover. Theres no real world women who fits the description. Theyd tell us that they hate women for not dating them. But they hate women too much to want to date any.

They don't want to leave the incel culture perhaps? Its an identity and a belonging. Almost as if they are intentionally planting life long roots with one another - close partners and extended family. These can be intimate relationships that include representations and explorations of ones sexuality in a twisted way. Kinda mirrors a traditional monogamous narrative a little bit. Fills a lot of the same needs at least in a cybernetic fashion.

I wonder how much is even an alt reality or trolling. As in it’s very present tense without context. It’s like they are just rationalizing something that won’t happen. But there’s no knowledge of a real world, do they think everyone is having sex like porn stars? If they put their ideas in context of an average family life do they dissolve. 

Another idea I had is that maybe these kind of personalties always existed but internet brought them together. Like what do serial killers think. There seems like a common brain malfunction. 

It does seem like an extreme ideology which is perpetuated by the internet. But is this is good thing or a bad thing. To know who and what they think means we can some how coax back into some sort normal level psychosis like most people. 

Edited December 21, 2018 by wasted

[soon]

18 hours ago, wasted said:

I wonder how much is even an alt reality or trolling. As in it’s very present tense without context. It’s like they are just rationalizing something that won’t happen. But there’s no knowledge of a real world, do they think everyone is having sex like porn stars? If they put their ideas in context of an average family life do they dissolve. 

Another idea I had is that maybe these kind of personalties always existed but internet brought them together. Like what do serial killers think. There seems like a common brain malfunction. 

It does seem like an extreme ideology which is perpetuated by the internet. But is this is good thing or a bad thing. To know who and what they think means we can some how coax back into some sort normal level psychosis like most people. 

Yeah, I dont know. Lots of good thoughts there.

I tend to think its a product of the internet and we dont yet understand how to to study it. And I think that there are those on the Right who troll themselves into true belief. And I think their are those on the Right, typically older, who troll virgins to coax them into incel culture to achieve discord or agendas in the MRA space.

The alt right and other new manifestations of the Right thrives in discord.

[alfierose]

I think a lot of young men that fall into this way of thinking don't have much opportunity to mix with women. Back in the 50's young people mixed in person at tea dances, later on that turned into pubs and nightclubs, now people gravitate to online spaces many of which skew heavily towards one sex.

A lot of them seem to be tech oriented which is an issue. My eldest son is studying IT at college, it's popular enough that they need to run two concurrent groups but last year there was only one girl on the whole course, this year none. Compared to when I was at college (doing A Levels with about a 50/50 split) the social mix is non existent and they only hang out with each other. He's into Thai boxing as a hobby and the club is all male so at almost 18 he has virtually no interaction with non family females, which worries me a bit.

There's a lot of debate about whether girls are interested in tech subjects and I find it believable that numbers naturally skew towards male students but when I took him to enrol on the course there was a young girl being interviewed with her Mum for a place and the guy running the course was doing everything he could to dissuade her from joining even going as far to suggest childcare or animal care would be a better option. He belittled her self professed interest in IT as not really evidence yet had no issue giving my son a place based on the same self professed qualifications. The difference in interview was stark - my son wasn't a great candidate as he did poorly at GCSE due to various factors.

I almost put a complaint in to the college about the blatant sexism, I wish I had really but my son didn't want me to make waves before he'd even started and technically I wasn't supposed to be eavesdropping. The whole experience was really depressing. I've no idea if she stuck to her guns and got on the course (maybe she was the lone girl last year) I can't imagine the course will have been much fun if that was the attitude of the staff.

[alfierose]

15 minutes ago, Oldest Goat said:

The staff member dissuaded her because she was a girl? Whaaaaat the fuck? That's so messed up. Like something from the 50's or some shit.

P.S. Your son is part of patriarchy. 

Even he agreed it was awful but was also aware he only scraped onto the course by the skin of his teeth and Mum going all feminazi on his new tutor probably wouldn't help. Seeing as he's my primary interest I'm also complicit in the patriarchy by letting it slide. 

[MillionsOfSpiders]

Hopefully the girls mother reported the guy running the course.

[wasted]

10 hours ago, soon said:

Yeah, I dont know. Lots of good thoughts there.

I tend to think its a product of the internet and we dont yet understand how to to study it. And I think that there are those on the Right who troll themselves into true belief. And I think their are those on the Right, typically older, who troll virgins to coax them into incel culture to achieve discord or agendas in the MRA space.

The alt right and other new manifestations of the Right thrives in discord.

By Alt right you mean 4 chan trolls or like Richard Spencer type Alt right? It does seem like they grew because of the the left bringing them up. Like the hype seems bigger than the numbers at the marches but if you add trolling then it seems like a fire. 

[soon]

17 hours ago, wasted said:

By Alt right you mean 4 chan trolls or like Richard Spencer type Alt right? It does seem like they grew because of the the left bringing them up. Like the hype seems bigger than the numbers at the marches but if you add trolling then it seems like a fire. 

Well what I said was:

On December 22, 2018 at 12:04 PM, soon said:

The alt right and other new manifestations of the Right thrives in discord.

 

By Alt Right I mean Alt Right and by other new manifestations of the Right, I mean all the other new manifestations of the right. That some in the media and public call all of the emergent right as "Alt Right" is unfortunate but does nothing to diminish the immediate threat to freedom and democracy that the spectrum of new right ideologies and tactics represent.

See how the discord caused by the medias blanket usage of "Alt Right" was used as an opportunity to attempt to downplay the new rights numbers? A very meta way of demonstrating my earlier point. 

Meanwhile the emergent Right informed Trumps road to becoming POTUS, Commander in Chief, Leader of the Free World. Hardly hype. 

Edited December 23, 2018 by soon

[wasted]

12 hours ago, soon said:

Well what I said was:

 

By Alt Right I mean Alt Right and by other new manifestations of the Right, I mean all the other new manifestations of the right. That some in the media and public call all of the emergent right as "Alt Right" is unfortunate but does nothing to diminish the immediate threat to freedom and democracy that the spectrum of new right ideologies and tactics represent.

See how the discord caused by the medias blanket usage of "Alt Right" was used as an opportunity to attempt to downplay the new rights numbers? A very meta way of demonstrating my earlier point. 

Meanwhile the emergent Right informed Trumps road to becoming POTUS, Commander in Chief, Leader of the Free World. Hardly hype. 

I think there’s a difference between a basic Trump voter and the Alt right though. Maybe it was bundling them all together that helped Hillary lose. Somebody who was voting for Trump in the hope of a job or is pro life probably was offended to be lumped in with the Alt Right. 

I don’t think voters have fully formed ideologocal reasons to vote. I think it’s more acceptable to say that Trump got these Alt right people on board to vote. Not that the Alt right got a huge demographic to vote Trump who wouldn’t have. Maybe he did mobilize a certain amount of people. That’s kind of his biggest flaw but it has advantages in an election. He says multiple things that appeal to different people. Trump lost most of the true Alt Right when he started missiling Syria. But now he’s talking about pulling out are they back on board? 

I doubt your basic Trump voter understands this distinction. They just put on a hat and pick a team. 

But true overall the right has always offered less freedom, they love to wield that state power. I guess the left’s freedom comes at a price. I think obviously they ignored the problems some groups and this became a probably. Like Hillary was saying recently need a address immigration or you will get a populist movement like Trump. 

The answer doesn’t seem to demonize groups of people. There’s too many to throw away. 63 million Americans voted for Trump. To say they are part of some sort of fascist movement is very limiting. 

[soon]

9 hours ago, wasted said:

I think there’s a difference between a basic Trump voter and the Alt right though. Maybe it was bundling them all together that helped Hillary lose. Somebody who was voting for Trump in the hope of a job or is pro life probably was offended to be lumped in with the Alt Right. 

I don’t think voters have fully formed ideologocal reasons to vote. I think it’s more acceptable to say that Trump got these Alt right people on board to vote. Not that the Alt right got a huge demographic to vote Trump who wouldn’t have. Maybe he did mobilize a certain amount of people. That’s kind of his biggest flaw but it has advantages in an election. He says multiple things that appeal to different people. Trump lost most of the true Alt Right when he started missiling Syria. But now he’s talking about pulling out are they back on board? 

I doubt your basic Trump voter understands this distinction. They just put on a hat and pick a team. 

But true overall the right has always offered less freedom, they love to wield that state power. I guess the left’s freedom comes at a price. I think obviously they ignored the problems some groups and this became a probably. Like Hillary was saying recently need a address immigration or you will get a populist movement like Trump. 

The answer doesn’t seem to demonize groups of people. There’s too many to throw away. 63 million Americans voted for Trump. To say they are part of some sort of fascist movement is very limiting. 

I dont think you are speaking to anything Ive said and seem set and rattling off very similar talking points on a regular basis.

Again, I am saying 'a spectrum of new and emergent right wing ideologies and tactics.' That would include the Tea Party. And I dont need an explanation that they are Alt Right because I am still not sayin that they are. You seem to believe the it suits your purpose to continue to repeat that "Alt right is small" "Not everyone is fascist" even when thats not a reasonable response to the content of my post.

[wasted]

9 minutes ago, soon said:

I dont think you are speaking to anything Ive said and seem set and rattling off very similar talking points on a regular basis.

Again, I am saying 'a spectrum of new and emergent right wing ideologies and tactics.' That would include the Tea Party. And I dont need an explanation that they are Alt Right because I am still not sayin that they are. You seem to believe the it suits your purpose to continue to repeat that "Alt right is small" "Not everyone is fascist" even when thats not a reasonable response to the content of my post.

You seemed to be saying Alt right and other manifestations of it. That seemed to broaden it. 

I agreed that they are a threat to freedom, so it’s a small misunderstanding.