At no other point in human history has the amount of information accessible today via technology been available to the populace. On the very same computer or device a person uses to read this sentence, almost every painting, image, sculpture, book, film, TV show, porno, song, symphony, and bit of information which has ever existed might be just a click away. If someone wants to learn to speak Mandarin, how to change the oil in their car, or learn fundamental tenets of science, it's out there. So, in theory, the internet and media as a whole should be tools which clarify and educate, and allows people to find common ground in a rational thought.
It doesn’t always work that way.
As we’ve learned all too well over the past couple years, the internet and social media are just as good at obfuscating with a sea of lies and fake bullshit. And behind those lies is also a common ground found between mutual idiots, who find each other online and reinforce stupidity. One such group of idiots which have gained prominence are “Incels,” which consist of online communities of self-described “involuntarily celibate” men who wallow in self-pity about their bad looks and curse the “Chads” (attractive men) who take 80 percent of women.
Starting as an outgrowth of the pick-up artist movement, when some of the men who were unsuccessful in negging and other strategies of “game” figured out it wasn’t gonna work to get them laid, they became deeply bitter. Because they can’t get sex from the women they feel they are entitled to, these Incels preach a male supremacy manifesto which includes advocacy for rape, stripping women of human rights, and varying degrees of violence to achieve these aims. Before anyone laughs at this as just the ravings of sad and lonely losers on the internet, the Southern Poverty Law Center added male supremacy groups, including Incels, to their tracking of hate movements this year, and members of online Incel communities have been connected to multiple murders or mass murder incidents over the past four years. The most recent incident occurred three months ago when a man named Alek Minassian targeted pedestrians on a Toronto street killing 10 people. Prior to the attack, Minassian posted a message on Facebook pledging himself to an “Incel Rebellion.”
While the subject of Incels and male supremacy are ripe enough for discussion, I actually think how this fits into the overall picture of the greater culture is fascinating. For the past two years, critics and analysts have tied themselves in knots trying to explain how a significant number of people can live on lies and are willing to tolerate racist dog whistles. Sympathetic readings of the situation usually point to economic considerations, jobs, and “people who feel they had no other choice.” But academic studies state this kind of thinking is wrong. It is not economics which drives many white people to vote Republican or stand by Trump. It’s identity and status. More specifically, protecting the status which comes from being white.
The Incels and other male supremacy groups are another aspect of the same underlying dynamic of defending status and identity beyond rationality. Defending the status of what it means to be an “American” is perverted into kidnapping children and putting them in cages. The persecution complex of white conservatives reassigns them as the victims of liberal policies rationalizing horrible discrimination. The status of gender, like race and nationality, and what it means to be a “man” can be twisted into some very dark places.
From Jesselyn Cook at The Huffington Post:
The nearly 6,900 members of Incels.me have exchanged well over a million messages since the website’s creation in November. Many are strikingly similar to those written by [mass murderer Elliot] Rodger and other misogynists-turned-terrorists, and focus on one fantasy in particular: Vengeance.
Typical posts on the forum describe not only a desire to have sex with women but also to hurt, humiliate, control and punish them.
“I don’t see women as human. All they are, or should be, is slaves to men. Cook, clean, and spreading legs when they’re told to,” one member of Incels.me, who says he is 25 years old, wrote in April. “Let’s start beating women again.”
This man, whose username is “CopeWithTheRope,” frequently argues that violence against women is justified. He also writes about ending his life in a dramatic way to “put on a show,” because he’s convinced women reject him due to his baldness and smaller-than-average penis. Fellow incels have rallied around him and the many others who express suicidal and homicidal desires there, often encouraging them to “go ER” ― a reference to Rodger’s murderous rampage ― to seek revenge against women and their chosen sexual partners.
While much has been written on the effects of media influence and gender stereotypes on female body image, the issues surrounding male body image are similar.
Our entire lives we’re fed and taught different ideas of what it means to be a man, and more importantly a successful man. Or, moreover, sold products which are supposed to be part of the package of a successful man. Too often women in media are presented as a reward for masculinity. And for some men who buy in, but either can’t live up to it, can’t afford it, or finds the six-pack abs from the gym membership, nice car, fine clothes, and big wallet can’t compensate for a shitty personality, they get bitter and the blame game starts.
Because men tend to respond differently than women to rejection. For example, women who get depressed and feel they’re “unfuckable” don’t go on killing sprees. So this craziness isn’t just about a lack of sex.
But men and women respond very differently when discriminated against in a romantic or sexual context, experts say. While women often internalize or blame themselves when faced with rejection, men tend to lash out.
“Legit bro I haven’t left the house in 4 years,” wrote a member of Lookism.net — one of nearly 7,000 messages he has published since joining the forum in 2015. The man, whose username is Defeat, said he has been following a “looksmaxing regimen” closely to exact revenge against a woman who rejected him years ago. “I can’t wait to upload my new selfies to Facebook and make sure to rub it in her face … I’m nearly ready, so close, just need the final procedure,” he wrote. “She’s going to be begging for me. I can’t wait to reject her like she rejected me.”
“Males tend to take rejection as a challenge to their masculinity or an insult to their perceived place in the social hierarchy. Women are likely to feel emotionally hurt by the rejection and to assume that there is something lacking in them that warranted the rejection,” according to Suzanne Degges-White, the chair of Northern Illinois University’s department of counseling. “Women are encouraged to ‘get over it,’ but men often feel the need to ‘get even.’”
Unless you're the luckiest dude on the face of the Earth, at some point or another most men on this planet have faced rejection in love. Relationships require effort and work, and no one is entitled to love. Men can accept the rejection, be introspective, and move on. Or they stew, blame others, and wallow in pity. The latter choice leads to people saying "hey, I'm a nice guy, I'm being rejected because I'm too nice, and these bitches and sluts only like assholes!" The problem with that sort of thinking is it's predicated on a sexist notion women owe a man sex, companionship or a relationship for being "nice," buying a meal on a date, or any other stupid criteria.
Also, part of equality is women can be just as vain and shallow as men when it comes to picking a sex partner. And, beyond that, most guys who fall back into "I'm not getting a partner because I'm too nice" have issues they don't want to deal with, and blame rejection on women and being nice instead of making an honest assessment and realizing everyone has relationship problems at one time or another.
But that doesn’t matter. Because women are not equals or people to the Incel mindset. Women are objects who are their prizes for existing as a man.
From Lux Alptraum at Splinter News:
Women who try to challenge that line of thinking by pointing to their own dating woes are written off as delusional: “Stupid cunt thinks that not being able to get a 10/10 male model makes her incel,” declares one Reddit commenter in response to a woman who’d … posted asking if the community welcomed “female incels.” These women are told that they could never truly understand the social isolation of an ugly, unloved man.
This core belief that loneliness and sexual dissatisfaction are a uniquely male proposition helps to justify the vitriol and occasional violence that men in this community unleash in the direction of women. And yet it’s a belief that’s entirely baseless.
Women are deeply embedded in incel history, although the original concept is now unrecognizable. It was a woman named Alana ... who originally coined the term “involuntary celibacy,” hoping to create an inclusive, welcoming space where people of all different genders and orientations could find support and commiserate over their dating woes. “I was trying to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody,” she told a reporter at Elle. The now defunct site, Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project, was home to stories from a wide variety of lonely people, with no brand of loneliness deemed more authentic than any other.
Now if all of this weren’t disgusting enough, the conservative attempts to either explain or use this behavior to make their own political points get even more absurd. After the Minassian attack, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote a piece for The New York Times arguing the sexual revolution has upended ideas of monogamy and how people “pair off,” leading to sexual famine. As women approach economic and social parity with men, relationships and marriage become less about “man as provider,” and more about whether someone wants to spend their life and time with this person in partnership. The implication being that because women now have more agency over their own bodies, and less societal pressure dictating when, how, and who they can have sex with than say fifty-years-ago, the Incel phenomenon is a direct consequence. Douthat goes on to argue a likely solution to all of this might be “sex robots” (the New York Times actually paid for and published this, I shit you not).
George Mason University economist Robin Hanson tried to liken income inequality to “sexual inequality” in an attempt to contemplate redistribution of sex to men who can’t get laid. Hanson, who in the past has argued infidelity should be punished as severely as rape under the law, and suggested maybe women who cuckold their husbands should be tortured, argues that if poor people can congregate and organize to demand better wages and redistribution of wealth, why can’t sexless Incels organize and “implicitly threaten violence” to create a new system of having sex, or monetary compensation for going without? Hanson’s entire screed is a lame attempt to discount liberal economic ideas, but has the effect of coming off as Hanson advocating the creation of the Republic of Gilead.
However, The Federalist had a piece which argues a key problem is women will not fuck conservative assholes (my words not theirs, but an accurate explanation of their thesis). Now, it is true single women tend not to like #MAGA males either in dates or casual hookups, and The Federalist’s Jerrod Laber argues this “tribalism” and refusal to give Trump men a chance is part of the polarization of political culture. Because women should just give up their bodies to dudes who don’t believe they’re entitled to control of those bodies for … bipartisanship? I will say this kind of thinking is consistent with the batshit crazy I expect from The Federalist and conservatives in general.
From Harris O’Malley at Paging Dr. Nerdlove:
The entire argument is “well, you should fuck us because REASONS”. There is no exhortation to the Federalist audience to actually do things that might make them more appealing to women, liberal women in particular … One major reason why women don’t want to date Laber or his friends has everything to do with the fact that it’s rather clear that Laber doesn’t actually like women. He may think they’re desirable. He may believe that women make life worth living. But it’s impossible to escape the impression he neither likes nor respects them. Not when his argument ultimately boils down to the fact that men are evidently willing to vote for Trump because liberal women won’t fuck their pain away. If women were more willing to give it up, they might have moderated their views and voted for… I dunno, Ted Cruz or something.
At the end of the day, however, it’s still a case of “give us the pussy or else”. It’s a threat, one that’s ultimately not that far off from Elliot Roger or his ilk: “we aren’t getting what we want, therefore we’re justified in what we’ll do in revenge.”
And that, more than anything else, is an amazing indicator of why women don’t want to date him or his friends: because that’s a fucking horrifying attitude to have. Treating sex as something that you have to be given or who knows what may happen is the mark of someone who, frankly, is kind of awful. It’s the sort of argument that gets made by the incel community … It’s not terribly surprising ... why so many incels find themselves, well, celibate. Nobody is remotely interested in having sex with someone who thinks that they’re beyond contempt. And despite what many people will tell you: that attitude is incredibly difficult to hide or cover up.
I’m not going to claim I have everything about sex and relationships figured out, but from personal experience relationships are built on trust and intimacy. The very word “intimacy” connotes closeness of feelings, not as an exchange of fluids in assigned biological roles like dogs in heat, but as equals deciding to enjoy and share moments in time.
This very night at clubs, bars, and restaurants all over this planet there are millions of (subjectively) “ugly” men having dates with other men and women someone thinks they’re not attractive enough to be with. And if they should have sex later on, maybe it was because he was funny, maybe it was because he was interesting, or maybe he got a little help from shots of tequila. But they won’t be getting laid because they’re an angry asshole who feels he’s entitled.
And that entitlement, whether it be racial entitlement expressed as white resentment, sexual entitlement which comes out out in issues around sex and reproduction, or class entitlement where a “fuck you, I got mine” mentality permeates any discussion about economic policies, is the enemy we fight. And this is but one of the permutations it takes.