This is a good essay on incels, which makes kind of a universal point.
It is men, not women, who have shaped the contours of the incel predicament. 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.
It’s been that way for a long time. Hasn’t everyone been saying for decades that all of the men’s complaints about feminism are actually misplaced — that feminism is all about addressing concerns that affect men and women, that anti-feminism is a self-inflicted wound? That’s certainly been my perspective on it, and my own self-interest is in enabling feminism to reduce the insanity in the relationships between the sexes that is, in part, produced by the asymmetry between them.
And no, incels and MRAs, no one owes you sex. Quit trying to shoehorn human relationships into a pattern of capitalistic transactions. (We can also blame rampant capitalism for anyone believing this is a problem that can be solved with buying and selling commodities, or that “sexual market value” is even a real thing. Libertarians have fucked up everything.)
How much (if any) of incelism can we blame on the self-esteem movement promising every kid that they deserve the best just by existing?
Yeah, we need to go back to the good old days where every kid knew their place, because it was beaten into them from a young age onward. I mean, would you believe that these days, as a teacher, an adult in a position of power and a duty of care towards a child, you’re no longer allowed to tell that child that they are just shit and that you have to treat them like valuable human beings even if they still don’t know what the past participle of “make” is?
I tell you, it went all wrong when we stopped beating them.
*The above may contain trace amounts of sarcasm.
Red herring alert.
Incels do not have high self-esteem.
OT: “Terrorist protected by the US has died” https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2018/05/25/terrorist-protected-by-the-us-has-died/#more-47089
But he only killed darkie civilians, so who cares (sarcasm) ?
@1: Given that “incels”, by and large, have abysmally low self-esteem, none. None at all.
You treat sex as a commodity and ingrain hierarchies at every level of society and this is the end result. I’m rather curious about the rates of sexual assault in cultures that didn’t go down this path.
Only your Fleshlight owes you sex. If you hate women the way incels and MRAs do, you should try one of those. They’re much cheaper than women and they won’t hate you back when they discover how much of a shitty person you are.
Had there been social media 35 years ago I probably would have been one of their number. Apart from societal pressures and all that I was raised in a toxic environment which led to a lot of the misogynistic rage I felt. Has anyone studied these guys to see what their upbringing was like?
I really doubt there’s any particular upbringing aspect to it.
There have always been lonely young men. There have even always been lonely, sexist, entitled young men (perhaps even more in the past). What’s different is, as one Jeff Claywell rather memorably put it in the comments of Wonkette’s Jordan Peterson explainer:
In other words, to extent that there’s a newness to things like incels or gamergaters or JP fanboys, it’s simply the general internet-accelerated ability of even relatively small numbers of like-minded people to connect with each other. (And then, at least as appears to be the case with ‘incels’, to fuel each other in an ever accelerating collective flight from reality.)
Add in a general, society wide sexist/racist regressive backlash, bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes, or until firm to the touch. Serve warm.
Jack, true. 35 years ago there was no way to connect for people like me so I stewed in my own juices by myself until I eventually got over it. A younger person can find a whole welcoming to community to validate his feelings. But this doesn’t answer the question of why I was such an angry, unpleasant, person. I have no way proving it was my upbringing but it seems the best explanation.
Before the internet, men who were a bit socially inept may have focused on a skill or talent such as playing guitar. Now they focus on this device that just feeds and validates their disgruntledness and social ineptitude. Technology has also created more career opportunities for women, making them less dependent on men. The Unibomber was right!
Seems like this topic is a bit muddied. I kinda agree that
, but would say worth is not a good word. More like male status in the hierarchy of other men. These men have low self esteem but feel they have high worth. This seems like a better description.
One of the next places that needs cleared up, is that the body positive movement is in my opinion not able to do what this author thinks it is. Physical definitions of beauty are pretty much set in stone, or genes, or whatever. The movement mostly simply takes a woman (note the emphasis on women) who is not the complete epitome of beauty, and then typically frames her most attractive feature to appeal to an audience. This has little to do with
and more of learning to focus on only the attractive part. This simply tells people that you don’t have to be pretty if you are talented or have one attractive feature. This is actually a worse version of the social message we have been beating like a dead horse for the past 40 years, which was “beauty is on the inside” (has that changed society at all?). This body positive movement is essentially only geared toward self esteem. Lastly, and for this particular topic most important, is that this focus on womens attractiveness is essentially the opposite of the problem Incels complain about. The problem in their view isn’t that there aren’t enough pretty women for them to be with, the problem is what women focus on. They complain that women only go after attractive guys, or rich guys, or some other niche that they don’t fit into. This is the crux of the incel problem. These boys/men have grown up with “beauty is on the inside” and body-positive movement where every Hollywood nerd gets his girl, Seth Rogan is the leading man, and women end up with the winner regardless of looks. They believe this crap and are very upset when that is not how the real world works. I bet 90% of incels imagine they had a situation in their life exactly like a movie except they didn’t “get the girl” in the end.
There is a fundamental error in thinking that is very narcissistic and ingrained from essentially every source of media. Once they have this mentality, everything simply makes it worse, including feminism, and the body-positive movement. When they feel they have been “woke” to a larger definition of beauty and those girls also reject them, that reinforces their mental state. The incel mentality is perturbation that is largely unavoidable in western culture. The only real fixes I can see is completely changing media (not going to happen), reducing media exposure in children, and pushing equality and empathy in childhood social settings.
Pierce@1–
Incels have created a fascinating but horrifying hybrid of low self-esteem plus sense of entitlement. They see themselves as terrible no-good undesirable schmucks who are being unfairly denied sexual favours just because they are terrible no-good undesirable schmucks. The low self-esteem is part of the toxicity because it tells them that there is nothing they can possibly do to find willing sex partners.
Of course what really gives away their game is that they seem to think it’s someone else’s responsibility to provide them with unwilling sex partners. Neither the being provided nor the unwilling parts are morally justifiable…and the fact that they want this in societies where sex workers are available shows that they’re really motivated by power not lack of access. Like Cosby — he had no lack of access to consensual sex but he wanted non-consensual sex. Likewise, incels already have access to redistribution of sex, but what they really want is state-mediated non-consensual redistribution.
The story that they are unable to find attractive partners because alpha males have hoarded them all is a ridiculous and self-fulfilling myth they have created in order to justify a social welfare/rape program (only for their own benefit, note, never as donors). Cynic that I am, I even believe that many incels willingly suffocate their own self-esteem as a self-radicalising strategy.
paxoll@12:
Complete and utter tosh, empirically. Just look at Rubens, and then at photographs of today’s heroin-chic models.
Beauty standards have always varied with time and culture.
paxoll–
Standards of beauty vary enormously from culture to culture and over time. The idea that it is genetically coded is not supportable. See Chinese foot binding, Padung neck stretching, Ethiopian lip plates, and the current Japanese obsession with yaeba.
davsmith4156
I wouldn’t say “upbringing” as much as “culture”. Feminist parents like me can testify to the limited influence your upbringing has on your kids. We’re swimming in a culture where women are rewards, from Die Hard to Harry Potter.
paxoll
Thank goodness I have people like you who tell me that I am forever physically unattractive and absolutely undesirable. Maybe I should book an appointment for my husband who, for some reason, desires my body.
Alternatively I could open a history book or an anthropology book something and see that hey, you’re talking bullshit as usually.
I have no way proving it was my upbringing but it seems the best explanation.
I suppose it’s two halves of the same coin.
I was sort of asking the question of “why is this a phenomenon now“, and obviously that must have something to do with it simply being easier to build enduring movements out of otherwise isolated (and possibly ephemeral) dis-affectations.
But yeah, I suppose on an individual basis it probably does come down at least in part to ‘upbringing’ – i.e., bad (parental) role models passing these attitudes along, just as happens with behaviors like bullying, racism, etc. More generally, and perhaps tautologically, it’s the whole childhood experience, whatever that was.
I guess my point was that there’s no reason to believe those sort of individual individual factors have generally gotten worse, as Pierce suggested. It could easily be that modern parenting techniques, for their part, have improved matters over the last few decades. I.e., that the absolute number of “atavistic pissstains”, or the degree of pissiness*, is actually at an all time low – the worst ones are just more organized.
—
* I don’t necessarily want to suggest this is only a small number of people. I suspect I was at least a bit of an atavistic pissstain myself at one time, and I doubt that’s an uncommon way for (speaking for myself, at least) young privileged white men to be at one point or another. Most of us, thank Zeus, manage to keep our eyes and ears open to the world — and people — around us enough to eventually learn more and grow the fuck out of it.
I’m sure that dynamic is still playing out with subsequent generations, so even with all the of magical internet organizing powers, I suspect it’s still only a small portion of the proto-pissstain population that gets caught up in it.
@paxoll:
Yea, that’s not how “beauty is on the inside” works. That’s
But don’t let the facts stop you from your righteous rant.
paxoll, #12
That’s just obviously false.
That definitely isn’t the crux of the incel problem since most men have grown up with the same ideas yet incels make up a very very small percentage of men.
But hey, like in that other thread, anything you can do to shift the responsibility from these assholes…
I must say, teachers not treating pupils badly and destroying their self worth and people saying that your character is a valuable part of your person as reasons for men murdering women are new on the list.
I prefer to use enculturated instead of raised because it is a broader word and does not have the family alone as it’s emphasis. It is a compounding effect as the parents were also “taught” in a similar process. Of course there are effects derived in the family as well as those from the other places and groupings and social interactions that add much to the enculturation of every individual.
I completely agree that the problem under discussion is not the result of feminism though it becoming a movement as such may be a kind of reaction as well as an artifact of new interactive media proliferation.
The incels reaction is not about sex availability as much as the opinions of other men. It is about status in the eyes of other men, it is an attempt to declare their masculinity to other men regardless of how many women they can fuck at any given time, there is a strong element of the fear of homophobia in it, of declaring “I am not queer just because I don’t have a girl friend right now!”. So yes it is about how we are “brought up” but that is much bigger than the Mom & Dad and the family.
uncle frogy
paxoll:
Bullshit. No, Bonnaconshit. You should be utterly ashamed at spouting such easily disprovable garbage. Try using that lump of matter in your skull, and learn some history. Standards of beauty shift from age to age, and from culture to culture. Notions of what made up ‘beautiful’ were generally tied to class, and unfortunately, still are to a great extent.
You’re also falling into the big pit of thinking beautiful equals attractive. The attractiveness of a person has little to do with their looks or body shape. Very few people go into a committed relationship based on physical looks alone – there’s simply not enough there to feed a relationship. Eye candy is nice and all, but it’s all empty calories. Intelligence, imagination, humour, kindness, and on and on and on count for much more in both attractiveness and relationships.
I’m not beautiful by any means, but I’ve been with my partner for 41 years. Everyone ages too, we all get old. No one looks fanfuckingtastic their whole life long.
Giliell:
As someone who came up in an extremely abusive situation, I can say that to this day I am so grateful to those few teachers who reached out to me with the smallest of kindnesses. At one point, such acts literally saved my life.
I wonder if it’s not just that the internet turns it into a movement, but also that it self-reinforces. I mean, I imagine that a lot of teenagers go through a phase where they are lonely and it feels like other people can make this whole relationship/dating/sex thing work and they can’t. Being around friends who tell you that it is not your doing[1], and not bad luck, but that other people are doing it to you is a hell of a high. Especially as it pushes this angle that dehumanizes women. And teens/young adults who aren’t cis straight boys/men don’t get the messaging pushing them from ‘I am lonely and don’t know why this isn’t working for me’ to ‘I am owed sex for nebulous ‘payment'[1]”.
[1] Aside: that’s the weird thing about framing sex as a transaction: that incels frame it as ‘being owed’ rather than an actual transaction where you pay a sex worker for a sex act, the same way you pay for a haircut or doctor’s visit. Perhaps why they have shifted to co-opt more socialist language like ‘redistribution’ and such. Which still has the framing of ‘women who provide sex to incels’ not as the doctors but as the medicine if we are thinking using a metaphor of health care.
>> 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.
Sex work is to rape as company scrip is to serfdom. Different asshole, same shit.
> We can also blame rampant capitalism for anyone believing this is a problem that can be solved with buying and selling commodities, or that “sexual market value” is even a real thing.
As long as “sex work” is a thing, it is as real as it gets. Sex work is the pinnacle of capitalist exploitation, no wonder liberals hate the Swedish model.
Haha, Yikes
And of course it’s not just friends. As far as people like Milo Yiannopoulos or Jordan Peterson are concerned, it’s a lucrative commercial enterprise. (“You there, fellow who is convinced he is ugly and bullied and doomed to never have the
love and acceptancemale status tokens he deserves. Let me tell you about how this an obviously correct evaluation of your situation, and how the evil feminists and postmodernists have made it happen to you! (Also just as you were inclined to believe.) Now, for just 12 easy monthly payments of 29.95…”)I hate the Swedish model because I actually listened to Swedish sex workers who told me how it hurts and endangers them.
I’ll say it clear: I ain’t no fan of sex work due to the fact that it does indeed reinforce patriarchal notions about sex, but I also made the effort to listen to actual sex workers. For whatever reason they go into sex work, my priority is their safety and wellbeing.
And so far all the roads that “end demand” or make it harder for them to meet clients online etc. only ever punish the sex workers.
Incorrect. The problem, in their view, is that women get to have an opinion on the subject at all.
Ain’t that the truth…
…Ooops! Sorry. Didn’t mean to express an opinion!
Men were Going Their Own Way, taking their balls and pissing off home, swearing off sex-withholding women, screaming I-reject-you-before-you-reject-me long before plastic participation trophies became the American reactionaries’s second-favorite bogey. I don’t really see the point of pretending what Vasconcello was up to (hoping to nudge children into more substantive civil engagement) ever achieved any widespread traction in this country, and incels exist everywhere. Attributing misogynist violence and terrorism to “self-esteem” where everyone vies for the “best” kind of gives that game away, anyway; achieving some measure of parity, or even equality, eliminates “best” and “worst” as useful categories. That’s actually my beef with this [emboldened by me] bit in the OP:
This still privileges men over everyone else. I’m no longer as keen as I once was in assuring skeptics that full-blown applied feminism, especially the intersectional sort, eliminates the zero-sum nature of patriarchy. Maybe it doesn’t? I’m okay with disproportionate benefits applied first and most rigorously to people who aren’t cis men. They’re sturdy and hearty enough to survive that, particularly if and when we rid ourselves of this false binary of men and women and no one else outside and in between and overhead. Framing this as a Battle of the Sexes gets it wrong from the word go.
paxoll,
. They complain that women only go after attractive guys, or rich guys, or some other niche that they don’t fit into.
Are you an incel? You seem to have slipped from doing devil’s advocacy for them to actually stating their view as your own.
Messed up the blockquote there…
paxoll, #12
Are you an incel? You seem to have slipped from doing devil’s advocacy for them to actually stating their view as your own.
Lol, seriously guys? (non gender specific)
Yes throughout history there has been, idiosyncrasies that have been identified as important to be considered beautiful, but there is a fundamental building block to this. Big hair was hugely popular in the 80s, but you could take the same woman, put her in a pixie cut and sit her in the 20s and she would be considered the same level of beauty. This is true of women and men. The majority of the crap listed here, foot binding, neck lengthening had as much to do with announcing social status as in appearing beautiful. I highly doubt all the guys in ancient china were drooling over the mangled deformed feet of women that had them bound. This status demonstration could be considered “attractiveness” as it attracted a partner, but it had very little to do with how beauty is defined. Beauty had much less to do with “attractiveness” in the past as it does today.
@Saad
This is the problem as THEY see it.
Is how I see it.
You sound confused, paxoll. You’re acknowledging that conventions change with the wind and depend on the prevailing culture and its mutable ideals and whatever its upper and middling classes view as theirs, but still insist that there’s some universal standard of female beauty everyone agrees on because it’s written in the stars or the genes or whatever. It’s very convoluted, like a lot of ev psych-adjacent handwaving that confuses present-day WHITE HETERO boners and the things that might induce them with “instinct” rather than conditioning.
It’s not an ancient practice, so, score one for you, I guess.
Lardy lardy lard. Crack open a book, would you. What makes people think that these amateur hour fumblings, all pretty much identical, need saying out loud, over and over again. You’re out of your element.
Gilliell @ # 2, rietpluim @ # 3, mathman85 @ # 5, chrislawson @ # 13, snuffcurry @ # 31 – obviously, I didn’t make my point very well.
Sfaict, the massive school/etc program to tell kids they should feel good about themselves regardless of achievements, social standing, whatev, failed (near?-)totally at its stated goals – but it does seem to have contributed to an outlook of “the world owes me because I’m me!”, particularly among the dimmer bulbs flickering out there.
Or so it appears to one old enough to have missed that experience directly and who hasn’t raised kids exposed to it either, but puzzled by encountering attitudes of entitlement among younger cohorts (more so than remembered from being that age).
@36 Pierce R. Butler
“Or so it appears to one old enough to have missed that experience directly and who hasn’t raised kids exposed to it either, but puzzled by encountering attitudes of entitlement among younger cohorts (more so than remembered from being that age).”
I hear this attitude a lot and I usually translate it to: How dare kids today expect to be treated with respect and be given what they need to live and thrive?
As someone well past being young I am quite glad to see youth expecting and demanding better from life then being silent and taking all the garbage I had to go through.
I wouldn’t say #36 improved the situation.
In whatever sense there was such a “program,” what is your evidence of a failure?
And what do you mean by “the world owes me because I’m me!” and “attitudes of entitlement”? I assume “the world” is supposed to refer to people or society, not the planet or the whole universe. Do we not “owe” each other certain things, or are we not “entitled” to certain things, on the basis that we are people? Should people not feel good about themselves, regardless of achievements, social standing, and … “whatev”?
But maybe it’s not entitlement to any old thing whatsoever. If you have in mind some highly-specific thing that isn’t owed, like sex from unwilling partners for instance, it’s awfully weird that you would have anything like that in mind. What makes you associate that with some kind of messaging to kids that, among other things, “they should feel good about themselves”?
Should we be very sure that there is something to discuss here to begin with? Something that has significantly changed in the last few decades? (If not, all of these purported explanations of this non-thing are pointless.) I suppose, with the internet, there are more people who aware of a certain type of personality/attitude/outlook/disposition. There are more talking about it among themselves, inside and outside the “incel” group. There is a new word, which I just used (perhaps for the first and last time); I guess it was coined fairly recently. So there is that.
But it’s like people realized black holes exist, perhaps not so long ago; and now we’re acting as if they weren’t around (much or at all) until widespread discussion of them began. That is obviously not how it works, in the case of black holes. People should probably just laugh a little, when you present your pet theory about why there weren’t so many before we started discussing them and why there are more now. If we actually had information like that, then it might be time to come up with explanations for it. Until then, get some information like that.
You (Pierce) tell us it’s because these spoiled youngsters were systematically trained to be brats, not like you were back in the good old days. If only there had not been that massive program to tell kids to feel good about themselves…. Indeed, who could’ve guessed it would backfire in such surprising and horrible ways? But, here’s a thought: maybe it didn’t.
Fun fact: Trump is 71 years old. Was he in the pilot program or something? Or no, my bad. I’ve got it wrong … it’s okay for him to “feel good” because of his social standing. So he may have been taught right after all. However, the rest of us definitely have some kind of a problem.
Yeah. If I had to estimate, I’d say the younger generation is a lot less likely to take shit, from, oh, for example, the Harvey Weinsteins of the world. Pierce, you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that’s a negative.
And on the other hand, from my own observations, I’d say they’re more than willing to pay it forward as well. Like being earnestly aware of people’s pronouns, or microaggressions they might be inadvertently playing out, or the need for collective action in general. This generosity and fellow-feeling playing out even as the generation as a whole is facing a tougher world in most ways — ever worsening inequality, fewer job opportunities, more precarity, the general shittening of the entire planetary environment, etc.
I mean, I’m skeptical of the whole ‘entire generations of human beings have distinct and quantifiable personalities’ thing in the first place, but to the extent that there is anything to it: the kids today are definitely alright. The squeaky wheels on nasty 4-chan forums get a lot of attention, but they’re relatively few in number. Possibly fewer than ever. If that’s due to the great self-esteemening*, more of it please.
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* It’s not, of course, because the whole participation trophy thing is a total fucking myth.
anna @ # 37, consciousness razor @ # 38 – I did not say (pls notice how I used qualifiers in each comment) that the S-E movement was WrongEvilWorstThingEver in an otherwise Golden Age.
Consider my hypothesis that SE™ produced the proverbial Unintended Consequences, particularly in the subpopulation most agitated over privilege withdrawal – not denying that it may, even as actually practiced, also have had positive results elsewhere.
Last I heard, SE concerns have taken a place among myriad other concepts in education and child-raising, rather than their anomalous primacy (driven by generous grants from the California Dept of Ed & related foundations) in the heyday of John “Father of Self-Esteem Movement” Vasconcellos. I surmise the programs implemented did not generate the splendiferous outcomes promised.
Today’s kids, impoverished and otherwise, have needs and pressures both unknown and known but not talked about compared to those of, say, 30 years ago. Nonetheless, I don’t think the generation now coming of age (with the subset under discussion here bitterly resisting any tendencies toward maturity) owes its new dysfunctions (mostly amplifications of the existing heritage of old brutal traditional-value dysfunctions) entirely to social media. Apparently something happened to a swathe of young USAians (and, I’d expect, smaller, probably US-influenced groups of adolescents elsewhere) to create the present (generally) unprecedented pitiful spectacle at hand.
Much of the Trump Chump cadre gets its steam from anxiety and anger over loss of special privileges. But women, ethnic minorities, gender nonconformists, et al, have gained ground and undergone backlash in many (also social-mediafied) places around the world without (I hope…) much of anything like The Incel Nation rearing its whiny head. If (as seems likely) my suggestion fails, then what in particular did produce this peculiar problem?
Not actually apparent.
Pierce R. Butler: I’m amazed (probably shouldn’t be by now) that some people could read your very short comment #1 and translate it as “he’s saying self-esteem is bad!” or “he’s saying we should go back to beating kids!” or “he’s saying incels have high self-esteem!”, rather than “a specific movement aimed at increasing self-esteem could have failed, with possible negative consequences”.
The Guardian article on Vasconcellos was fascinating.
Huh? This says nothing in particular. Did you intend to make a claim here? What is compared with what?
What, precisely, are the new dysfunctions? Why is this being characterized as a generational difference?
Do you think that, one thousand years ago (or pick any time you like), there weren’t many men with similar views? If so, why?
Anger, frustration, resentment, jealousy, paranoia, and so forth, are not recent inventions. What’s also not new is the coupling of misogyny with a variety of such emotional states (or self-narratives or worldviews or however you want to conceptualize these things). That is, at least not according to the history books I’m familiar with. These have apparently been features of human society for a long time, whatever might have “produced” them. There is no one particular thing that produced all of it, presumably, and I’m fairly satisfied that that’s just how this tune goes. Sounds good?
I think we all read it exactly this latter way. I don’t see any reason to believe otherwise. The problem is it’s not any less ridiculous that way.
I mean, Vasconcellos’ ideas might have been a bit goofy, but what’s goofier is the credulous belief that a government task force with less than a million dollar budget somehow managed to reshape the psyches of several generations of American youth, for good or ill.
It’s…dubious.
The reality is that even the proponents couldn’t really identify any strong effect. The reality is that the public was at least as skeptical of the whole thing at the time as all the clever retrospective think pieces you could link to today. The reality is that it left little more mark on the world than a government report, yet another short-lived educational fad* and a collection of often overblown or even semi-mythical anecdotes about participation trophies and hippy-dippy corrections officers giving complements to violent inmates or whatever.
I mean, it’s possible — maybe — to make some kind of larger argument about America’s possibly unhealthy conceptions of personal self worth, but it would need to be over a much, much longer time scale. People were praising children, giving out participation medals at state fairs and bowling tournaments, and generally blowing smoke up each other’s asses since long, long before 1986.
Which again, leaves you out of luck for some overnight psychological shift. The more parsimonious explanation for the apparent outbreak of this particular disease is not that the underlying rate of disease has increased, but that the environment has changed to make the symptoms more visible even as the diagnostic criteria have become more finely attuned.
Just as the rest of us have been pointing out repeatedly above.
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* Of the sort of which I eyerolled my own way through at least a half a dozen times in my own school years, and possibly a few work-related ones. If you think any one of them had a dramatic effect, it would not only be welcome news to the instigators of the bloody things, but also a pretty impressive statistical achievement in sifting tiny effects from mountains of noise.
jack lecou @ # 41: Not actually apparent.
(Sorry for omitting you @ # 40) So the incel phenomenon does not exist/has no cause?
Rob Grigjanis @ # 42 – Thanks for slightly restoring my shreds of self-esteem.
consciousness razor @ # 43: What, precisely, are the new dysfunctions?
The massing together of previously solitary incels, and their mass shootings, etc. Perhaps you can find some historical precedents (if so, pls share), but I doubt with the same rationales or rhetoric.
jack lecou @ # 43: … yet another short-lived educational fad…
… with an international impact. (Pls read Rob G’s link @ # 42, and note that it comes from a book on the S-E movement.)
People were praising children, giving out participation medals at state fairs and bowling tournaments, and generally blowing smoke up each other’s asses since long, long before 1986.
Though not to such a degree that it added up to a qualitative shift. But your point does greatly weaken mine: born circa 1992, incel role model Elliott Rodger (and his emulators) went through school well after the SE trend had peaked and faded.
The more parsimonious explanation for the apparent outbreak of this particular disease is not that the underlying rate of disease has increased, but that the environment has changed to make the symptoms more visible even as the diagnostic criteria have become more finely attuned.
Mass shootings and myriad online fora in praise of same do not require fine-tuned diagnostic standards for the rest of us to discern a cause for alarm.
It’s a metaphor.
The basic point, which I shall belabor below, is that just because you suddenly notice a lot more people talking about, say, rickets, it doesn’t mean that there are actually suddenly more people with rickets. It could be simply that the couple of dozen people who do have rickets put a Google group invite out to each other, and then arranged to meetup at a conference in the Toledo Hilton to bring attention to the disease. Voila. Suddenly there are more people with rickets in one room together than there have been since enriched flour was invented.
But, in absolute terms, fewer people with rickets than ever.
One more time, slowly:
The recent prominence of groups like incels does not necessarily imply that there are actually more of them. There’s no reason to think that there are more people with the basic characteristics than there were in 1985, or 1955, or even 955.
So nothing needs to have happened to any swathe of young USAians, at least not in the sense of some change to their makeup or psychology.
All that happened was that advances in communications made it easy for them to find each other and gather in one place, complain about their ‘problems’ and one-up one another’s misogyny*. That, in turn, has made it easier for the rest of us to notice them, and trace violence** back to specific online forums.
This is the environment changing. It’s not new cases, it’s just existing cases and symptoms being thrown into starker relief*** because they’re all in the same virtual petri dish.
Simultaneously, there has been (some) progress in terms of the patience society has for young men’s entitlement to other people’s bodies. Not as much as we’d like, of course, so I’m skeptical this is a huge factor, but thanks in part to forums like this one, I think the bullshit ‘oh we’re just so lonely and forelorn’ claims of the incels might be getting a bit more skepticism in general than they might have in, say, 1986.
That’s the ‘diagnostic standards’ evolving.
—–
* Aside from the violent misogyny, this is not so different from a bunch of elderly people getting together and complaining about their creaky knees. It’s not that their knees weren’t creaky before they had someone to talk to about it, or that their knees actually got any worse when they got together and started one upping each other’s complaints.
** Because don’t think that angry entitled men committing acts of violence against women is a new thing. The specific form of attacks like Toronto or Isla Vista is possibly different – an escalation to generalized terrorism rather than personal violence – but even there, it’s possible such things have happened before with similar motivations and were written off as ‘lone wolves’ rather than be being readily traced back to an internet movement. Again, easier to trace and more aware of what to diagnose is not the same as new phenomenon.
*** Arguably the forums are a transmission vector, but I’d say that anyone who’s seeking out those forums has a prior infection, even if it’s not fully incubated.
jack lecou @46:
Except maybe an increase in narcissism and decrease in empathy over the last 30 years or so?
The author mentions the self-esteem movement as a possible contributing factor, although he favours other explanations. Yes, it’s all very speculative.
jack lecou @ # 46: It’s a metaphor.
That works about as well as It was a joke! worked for Roseanne Barr.
All that happened was that advances in communications made it easy for them to find each other …
And all that happened before the Johnstown Flood was that it rained. No big deal, rain.
The specific form of attacks like Toronto or Isla Vista is possibly different – an escalation to generalized terrorism rather than personal violence …
As you say: possibly different. Yup.
Rob Grigjanis @ # 47 – Another useful link – thanks again!
The author’s report that –
– gives me further impetus for cogitation and consternation.
Well, I’ll grant that that’s interesting, and much better evidence than vague handwaving about self esteem classes.
It still seems a bit difficult to square the circle. I mean, an uptick in narcissism or whatever, even a statistically significant uptick, doesn’t really explain things on its own. You’ve got the same gradualism problem: if we were, say, 20% narcissistic in 1980, and we’re 25% narcissistic today… Well, that’s definitely more narcissists today, but there were still an awful lot of narcissists in 1980. So why weren’t there incels?
The increase in narcissism might have mildly exacerbated things, I’m just not sure it really explains the rise of the phenomenon per se.
Maybe we could speculate that there’s some kind of critical mass or threshold of some kind, but that seems like a stretch. And on the other hand, I don’t see any reason to think that the incels function any differently than any other social movement, so the enhanced communication and concentration explanation must be part it. And it’s still the only thing that manages to explain the apparent sudden takeoff. They were around before, but they weren’t a movement. Then they got together and planted a seed and suddenly they were. Simple as that.
Could the ease of the modern internet in offering disaffected would-be incels a way to unite and radicalize within their little echo chambers not be a good explanation on its own?
An incel in bumfuck Iowa thirty years ago tangibly has less means to connect with the other incels in his state, much less nationwide. An incel in a secluded area twenty years ago still had to contend with expensive, slow, unreliable internet.
Now its as easy as getting a smartphone and going on social media sites and pretty much everyone has the means. Furthermore, you have the positive feedback loop of more people going out and telling others that being an incel is a thing as more and more people join up.
An odd thing to say for a guy who doesn’t like metaphors, but ok.
I mean, that’s a perfect example: the real problem wasn’t that it rained heavily. That wasn’t exactly the first time a big rainstorm hit Pennsylvania. No, the real problem was that there was poorly conceived and even more poorly maintained hydrological infrastructure lying about.
And if somebody was looking at the Johnstown flood and puzzling over the question of what had caused all that water to evaporate and drift toward Pennsylvania all of a sudden, instead of looking at the engineering question, well, that’d be silly, wouldn’t it?
Now its as easy as getting a smartphone and going on social media sites and pretty much everyone has the means. Furthermore, you have the positive feedback loop of more people going out and telling others that being an incel is a thing as more and more people join up.
Exactly.
But no, individuals coming together into a movement can’t possibly be the explanation. If there’s a bunch of incels in one place now, it must be that more incels than usual are being evaporated off of lakes in Minnesota somehow.
jack lecou @52: I’d be surprised if social media’s allowing like-minded folk to congregate online didn’t play a role in all this. Like most societal phenomena, it’s complicated. Note that Pierce started all this by asking “How much (if any) of incelism can we blame on X?”, not “I think incelism is caused by X and nothing else.”.
Fair enough.
But the answer’s still the same one people gave at the start of the thread: “not much”. And if the question is “how much can we blame on it based on solid evidence” the answer is, at present, zero.
And the same goes for the more general claim that something must have happened. Something might have, but it certainly needn’t have. A more or less unchanged latent level of entitlement, combined with the utterly normal phenomenon of a movement crystallizing around some random seed, accelerated a bit by social media — and perhaps a sprinkling of the general reactionary fervor we seem to be suffering through atm — is more than sufficient to explain it entirely.
All of those things are at the very least, part of it. Which is much more than can be said for the self esteem thing, or other pure conjectures.
Let me then posit another question: why, given all the above-recited factors, do we not hear of incel movements/attacks except in the US and Canada?
Personally, I think post-Diana touchy-feely culture’s to blame for Alek Minassian’s crimes. Prove me wrong!
Did you really want to ask why are we identifying them, discussing them, hearing about them, etc.? We have a term for them. Somebody in our culture bothered to come up with a name, and now you hear it occasionally. (At least you will in some circles, but I’m sure my grandmother would be utterly clueless.)
That need not be the case everywhere, obviously, and it’s not much of a mystery how it might play out differently in different places. In Turkey, let’s say, they may or may not have a word (or more than one) with approximately the same meaning. Presumably it’d be in Turkish, which I can’t read. I just don’t know.
I’ll admit I pay very little attention to how obscure things like this are discussed elsewhere. Are you ignorant about it as well, or do you have some genuine evidence? The US has a bigger problem with violence across the board, compared to a lot of places. I think that’s pretty clear. Aren’t younger men more likely to be violent, wherever they may be? I would think so; we’re not too unusual in that regard. Do people give them a special name in other places, when they’re primarily motivated by misogyny, sexual frustration, etc.? No clue.
Yes, I fail to see how a philosophy that regards chaos as bad and chaos as feminine and men as rational thinkers requiring order and clean bedrooms and deserving of their rightful place in a hierarchy that is identical to patriarchy is somehow connected with some non-existent California-based self-esteem movement that rocked (but, pace an editorial in the Grauniad, it didn’t) the US and Canada to its very core.
I do see echoes of feminist-like language and systems in anti-feminism, which is pretty predictable. “Women aren’t victims; I am!” “I have heard of the concept of privilege! Let me tell you why I lack it!” Sure, the train of thought is childish and obvious and not thoughtful or curious at all. But then, such are self-styled incels. I don’t understand the push to make this complex when it’s not. Reactionaries react by their very definition. Sometimes they pity themselves in the process. Marc Lépine told us who we was and what he was against. Ditto Breivik. If you explained to either what contemporary right-wing English speakers mean when they talk about “snowflakes,” both men would agree that such sensitive individualists are expendable and weak, pure Pajama Boy through and through, not like them at all.
Are you confusing bog-standard teenage-borne angst (“why o why do the cool buoys get the hawt gulls when I am more deserving of them???”) with too much “self-esteem,” Pierce R. Butler? That would be an interesting error!
consciousness razor @ # 57: Did you really want to ask why are we identifying them, discussing them, hearing about them, etc.?
Yeah, mass murders are, still, a powerfully effective publicity tactic. (Single murders used to be, but Leopold & Loeb would never get more than 15 minutes in today’s news cycle.)
I’ll admit I pay very little attention to how obscure things like this are discussed elsewhere.
Indeed, or you might have known that the woman who coined the word intended it as part of an effort to give emotional support to the sexually frustrated of all categories.
How many explicitly-motivated mass slaughters will you need to lift this issue from your personal obscurity?
Do people give them a special name in other places, when they’re primarily motivated by misogyny, sexual frustration, etc.? No clue.
I suspect most of us recognized your cluelessness when you lumped in Donald Trump, due to his narcissism, with those he would reflexively term “losers” (as they regularly call themselves).
Here we have groups taking up the name of sexual zeros for themselves – and acting on it, violently and terroristically, though with no coherent demands or goals. I’d still like to see you, or anyone, find parallels or precedents.
As for “genuine evidence” – does an online search for “Europe incels” which produces only items about Europe and items about incels, but nothing which includes both, count? What is the point of demanding evidence in reply to an open-ended question, anyhow?
This argument didn’t hold much water when the Vatican was telling the world that systematic sexual abuse by church employees combined with systematic coverups by Bishops and their immediate deputies and adjutants was something that only happened in the particularly immoral United States.
Incels may or may not be reported on elsewhere in the world, but everywhere men are killing women and other men because they believe that some woman or another has withheld (or given to another) the love (and/or sex) to which the killer felt himself entitled.
The phrase “illicit affair” may not be used in Nepal, but for damned sure they have some combination of phonemes to describe essentially the same behavior. And, yes, the exact boundaries of their concept might not be perfectly isomorphic with the boundaries for our concept, but that doesn’t mean that it’s entirely wrong to say that illicit affairs happen in Nepal.
In the same way and for the same reasons, there may not be a group named “incels” in Nepal, but by whatever name there’s a group of shitty, entitled men in Nepal who think they are owed love and sex. In some instances they kill. Research shows that killing is, for most people, a multi-stressor phenomenon. So murder will go down in Nepal as the economy in Nepal fairs better. It will go up as the economy does worse. The Nepalese economy isn’t the US economy, so trends in “incel” killings won’t map perfectly with trends in the US. Gun laws in Nepal are different, so the murders are likely to take different forms.
Investigating these differences can be useful. Using over broad language to insist that this is a uniquely North American problem is not. You first have to find the comparator group in another culture before you can start listing the differences and deciding how fair the comparison really is. Just convincing yourself that there is no comparator group because it hasn’t headlined your local newspaper is Papacy-level magical thinking.
snuffcurry @ # 58: I don’t understand the push to make this complex when it’s not.
I’ve been asking about (well, at first suggesting) single-factor explanations for a, to me and others, unprecedented phenomenon – so you may accuse me of many things, but unnecessary complication just won’t stick.
Are you confusing bog-standard teenage-borne angst (“… I am more deserving of them???”) with too much “self-esteem”?
You don’t see the overlap? What a boring error.
Crip Dyke… @ # 60: … Papacy-level magical thinking.
Youch, now that one stings!
… the exact boundaries of their concept might not be perfectly isomorphic with the boundaries for our concept
In fact, they only match up with a great deal of stretching. You’re talking about the age-old issue of sexual activity transgressing social boundaries; the incels are talking about no sexual activity. Whatever a Nepalese man might say in response to accusations of fornication, adultery, or rape, would surely not have much in the way of comparators with incel ideology (except that he might, in some cases, cite the alleged desires of the woman involved).
As I said in # 40, [“…new dysfunctions (mostly amplifications of the existing heritage of old brutal traditional-value dysfunctions)], this pathology does not innovate in its bloody consequences, only in its rationale and rhetoric. All along here, I’ve asked (and attempted, pretty unsuccessfully to answer) why we now have vocal and physical outbursts of feelings which were previously grounds for personal shame, kept concealed and repressed except perhaps during breakdowns. So far, I’ve found the answers given as unsatisfactory as my own initial hypothesis.
Well, obviously there’s no way he could be attacking people like him. He’s not a fucking idiot, and we have to take everything he says at face value and with absolute seriousness….. Oh wait. None of that’s true.
Anyway, there was no lumping. Hopefully, it was understood that Trump has plenty of what you called “achievements” and “social standing.” Given your criticism of a policy of telling kids they “should feel good about themselves regardless of achievements, social standing, whatev,” I can now ask how we should think about Trump from this perspective. You implied that shit matters. But is that right? Would it be more justified if he feels good about himself, since he does not lack the qualifications you proposed? That just sounds fucking absurd to me. How about you?
consciousness razor @ # 63: … how we should think about Trump from this perspective.
I see him as someone who boasts about his sexual experiences, not one who bewails their lack.
He hasn’t complained much about the inconveniences of poverty, either (even when his debts may have put him in a negative-net-wealth situation).
In short, other than as yet another (nominally if not chromatically) white American man who most other people would rather he shut up, and as a general disinhibitor of deplorables, Trump doesn’t fit in any discussion of incels at all.
But isn’t that exactly what happens when some man’s love is unrequited, yet he’s fixed on that one particular non-requiting person?
I haven’t studied this at all, I just was commenting on your particular argument that
and pointing out that we know that there are *some* parallels with *some* men. Given that, it seems like the mere absence of headlines isn’t really evidence of absence.
You may have looked into this a great deal more than I have, and maybe I should just defer to you on this, but I really don’t like the argument “if it exists, it would have been in the headlines”. As I said, the Vatican used that same argument to claim that there was no church-wide problem with sheltering sexual abusers, just a US-only problem that was a result of a unique moral deficit in the United States.
They were wrong then. Can you be sure that you’re not wrong now? Possibly, but mere lack of headlines isn’t a reliable way of proving it.
Again, I’m not expert on cross-cultural reactions to being denied sex or love or marriage. I just don’t like this argument.
Crip Dyke @ # 65: But isn’t that exactly what happens when some man’s love is unrequited, yet he’s fixed on that one particular non-requiting person?
Few incels seem fixated on individual women, but only on “Stacys” as a class.
Moreover, (so far) incelism doesn’t seem often, if ever, cited as a motive for rape. And the “forbidden love” scenario typically involves shared feeling by both (would-be) partners, whereas the typical incel fails to rouse such feelings.
I just don’t like this argument.
… the mere absence of headlines isn’t really evidence of absence.
The absence of massacres does indicate things haven’t gotten nearly so far elsewhere (Alek Minassian, the Toronto man who killed at least 10, made up for the absence of easily available guns with a van).
You may have looked into this a great deal more than I have…
Not a whole lot. My online searches due to this thread have shown me a few things I hadn’t known, and have perhaps doubled the hours I’ve spent reading about it. One of the new things I found this afternoon was a short thread on Quora.com which contradicts my “US-Canada only” claim:
The writer did not say whether these men identify as incels, only that they behave in sexually self-defeating ways; nor was there any mention of violence. Looks like a case of cross-cultural definition confusion from here.
For that matter, the incel-violence link doesn’t hold too well either. From the Vox article I cited in # 59 above:
The Quora.com piece also includes a statement from a woman “former incelsupport site admin” who approaches the movement entirely from a position of sympathy and emotional support (and who did not, in that statement at least, differentiate whatsoever between the men and women involved). You might find her idea that “… there is likely some biological cause. Therefore, I think we should be viewed as a type of gender.” interesting. At the very least, the headline-neglected set of unviolent, female, and LGBTQ&c incels deserves better than lumping-in with Elliot Rodger fanboys.
So I guess I need to narrow my question to self-identified violent male incels, rather than the whole set.
Nice reading skills. Not really. I’ll quote you again:
Do you think it’s not right that kids should feel good about themselves regardless of such things?
I want to know how that shit is supposed to make a difference, according to you. I’ll remind you that this was part of your attempt to clarify that you weren’t being a total shitheel, when several people responded negatively to your comment #1.
Let me put it in those terms: what exactly do you think kids don’t deserve “just by existing”? You evidently think it’s not “the best,” whatever the fuck that means. Something less than that, then. But what do you mean to suggest with this? That’s one thing I’d like to know, since you were in the mood for clarifying yourself. However, you didn’t do that.
And #36 raised more questions. Why do you suppose that achievements and social standing, which are of course something over and above mere existence, should have any bearing on what kids deserve or how they should feel about themselves? Doesn’t this still sound like an assholish thing to say? Would it be better somehow if I don’t take your comments in context?
consciousness razor @ # 67: Do you think it’s not right that kids should feel good about themselves regardless of such things?
I think self-esteem should bear some relationship to accomplishment, even if that’s only admiring your own crayon-scrawls. If you haven’t achieved anything at all, you should, at minimum, feel some frustration about that – and if you need help channeling that frustration into constructive ways of doing better, you should get such encouragement.
… your attempt to clarify that you weren’t being a total shitheel…
C’mon now, I never attempted anything that grandiose!
… what exactly do you think kids don’t deserve “just by existing”?
Prizes. Extravagant assertions of being “the best”, especially without expending real effort.
Why do you suppose that achievements and social standing, which are of course something over and above mere existence, should have any bearing on what kids deserve or how they should feel about themselves?
My parents spoiled me enormously when I was little, and I had a great deal of painful unlearning to do as a result of that. In retrospect, I wish they had given me kudos in areas where I had shown real potential, and helped me to be realistic about my actual lack of superiority in those things where I was average or below-.
Would it be better somehow if I don’t take your comments in context?
It might help if you could refrain from extrapolating “context” far beyond what the words in front of you say.
All you’re doing is fart noises and asking people to prove you wrong. Your thesis holds no water. The “I’m not like other girls/boys” trope pre-dates John Vasconcello’s birth by a century or two and is not uniquely North American in any sense, but in any case you are clearly unfamiliar, beyond a poorly sourced link, what Vasconcello did and didn’t do, much less what he set out to accomplish.
It kind of seems like your confusion comes from narrowing the definition rather too much.
If you really are literally defining incels as people who subscribe to a particular reddit forum and self-identify with that label, then, yeah, it’s going to look like they mysteriously pop up out of nowhere, with no precedent in history.
But that’s dumb. I mean, you could say the same thing about, say, fans of the K-pop group BTS. Before BTS there were no BTS fans. Then all of a sudden there were tens of thousands of them! Thousands of fans who like these specific songs. How does that happen? Totally mysterious, right?
Except, obviously, before BTS, it was some other group. With some other set of songs. Going all the way back to some homo floriensis heartthrob pounding out beats on a rock gong. It’s not exactly as if teenagers never liked catchy popular music before.
So if you actually want to understand the phenomenon, you need to take the blinders off. Part of that is not taking the assholes at their word about what they are: the fact is, despite the name, even the ‘celibate’ part isn’t really definitional. And there are absolutely ‘incel’ analogs in other contemporary society.
I’d maintain that even 2000 years ago you still had ‘incels’, in all but name — probably a lot more of them. Entitled, misogynistic assholes have been around a while. The fact that if they were, say, an ancient Roman of a certain class, that they could simply have their dad buy them a wife, or, worst case, rape a slave, and technically not be ‘cel’ is actually totally beside the point.
snuffcurry @ # 69 – Somehow I suspect your blandishments are directed at me; pls clarify if my vanity has led me into error again.
All you’re doing is fart noises and asking people to prove you wrong.
You would prefer that I demand acknowledgment of rightness instead of advancing a tentative hypothesis?
… you are clearly unfamiliar, beyond a poorly sourced link, what Vasconcello did and didn’t do…
At the risk of confirming your opening statement, then (poot!) why don’t you enlighten us all about it?
jack lecou @ # 70: …not taking the assholes at their word about what they are: the fact is, despite the name, even the ‘celibate’ part isn’t really definitional.
Social definitions always get fuzzy when you look at them hard. I’ve heard of incel fora going up in flames with accusations of “so-&-so isn’t really a virgin!!1!”, but I don’t take that to mean there isn’t a core to the movement.
… 2000 years ago you still had ‘incels’, in all but name…
No doubt. The (sfaik) unique aspect of the present movement* is its stridency (in which I include, for convenience in discussion, its violence as a logical-extreme). Previously, involuntarily celibate males had only the choices of “keep trying!” or accepting their lot, whether singly or in groups; in many cases (say, 18th-century Ireland, where iirc due to economic constraints men’s average age at marriage was about 30) they at least had a light at the end of their personal long tunnels. The difference here is that they band together militantly with an odd mixture of self-loathing, defiance, and free-floating rage.
*As I noted in # 66, I’ve just learned that we get misled by the media spotlight on the pro-violence component of the involuntarily celibate population, the apparent large majority of whom (even those gathered in online communities) do not share the ideology of those misogynists who applaud &/or enact mass killings. That majority certainly has the historic antecedents you mention; the raving misfit extremists we see, e.g., described in the Guardian –
– are the ones for whom I want a better explanation.
This is you getting confused by the celibate part. However difficult his life might have been, a well-adjusted 18th century Irish man who’s simply bound by his society to ‘earn his fortune’ or whatever before he can marry his best girl has literally nothing in common with the incels you’re talking about.
The defining factor simply isn’t the lack of sex, it’s misplaced rage and scapegoating along with misogyny and toxic masculinity*. There are plenty of precedents, contemporary and historical, for all of those things. Probably even some in that exact combination, maybe even with a side of murder.
Unless you mean this really specific combination under this really specific name, this stuff is just not that new. Or related to any mid 80’s self esteem movement.
——
* That’s why they also have literally nothing in common with the feminist movement that actually originated the term ‘involuntary celibate’ for subsequent cooption by the assholes. It’s not about lack of sex.
jack lecou @ # 72: This is you getting confused by the celibate part.
That’s me replying to you discussing celibacy.
… it’s misplaced rage and scapegoating along with misogyny and toxic masculinity*.
Yet they explicitly distinguish themselves from easily-found “alt-right” factions expressing all that by emphasizing their own social/sexual failure. Why?
Ftr: my online life takes me away from the keyboard for most of today, so I can’t continue this dialog as steadily as I have so far. Will attempt to respond in a batch this evening, I hope.
Correction to my # 73: … my offline life takes me away…
In my 2000 years ago comment I was specifically pointing out that the relevant analog at the time might not have even been celibate. Because, again, that’s not what it’s about.
Well, if they weren’t distinguishable in some way, we wouldn’t be talking about them (separately). That doesn’t mean the distinguishing feature isn’t fairly arbitrary.
As to “why women” (or women and sexually successful men) you might as well ask “why jews” for the Nazis. Or “why XX” for whatever random hate group. The answer is simply that they needed a target, and that happened to be the (usually handily pre-vilified one) they picked up.
Hitler didn’t invent anti-semitism out of whole cloth, he just picked up the torch. Similarly, these guys picked up on existing negative social stereotypes in our culture about sexually active women and ran with it. I’m sure you’re aware of some of the weird overlaps with other misogynist groups, like the PUA movement, for example, or “nice guys”. On the surface, incels and PUAs seem like opposites, but the underlying worldview has a lot of similarity. And of course the PUA ideas evolved directly from yet early misogynist ideas. Etc. Etc.
jack lecou @ # 75 – You seem determined to trivialize a weird and dangerous movement at the intersection of our most charged social and political turning points.
Please forget that I ever asked you “why?” about any of this, at least until you can think of an answer beyond, in effect, “So what?”
I’m not sure how you get from a comment where I literally just compared them to Hitler to “trivializing”.
You seem upset that I don’t share your apparent belief that the incels are fascinating, crucially important, mysterious little snowflakes “at the intersection of our most charged social and political turning point”.
Tough. The fact is, their motivations and psychology are pretty banal. So were the Nazi’s. There’s nothing “weird” about incels – not any weirder then all the past generations of unoriginally misogynist wife abusers, rapists and serial killers.
The fact that their existence isn’t especially unique or surprising doesn’t trivialize their danger though. Quite the opposite. Once you see where they’re coming from — the broader picture of lazy social scapegoating and misogyny — you can see that they are not only nasty little pieces of work themselves, but that there’s a lot more out there more or less like them.
They are a just one of many tiny, ugly little eddies in a bigger, even nastier current.
It is pretty mind-boggling.
Pierce: there never were any good old days. Seriously. Not during your generation or any other. Really try to let that sink in for a while.
It is not trivializing things in the least to point out that this kind of shit has been going on all over the place and for as long as anybody can tell. It’s just not a particularly new or isolated phenomenon. You, for no apparent reason, have been treating it like it’s just an issue with some random kids in this generation, in our sad little corner of the world. It wouldn’t be fair to call that “trivializing,” since you do seem to take it seriously enough, but it is vastly underestimating the scope of the problem.
Pierce R. Butler
Ableism is duly noted.
FFS, “the world owes me” is and has been the rally cry of straiught white men since time immortal.
1. Your complaint is about 2000 years old already
2. Define “entitlement”. Men feeling entitled to women’s bodies sure as hell isn’t a new phenomenon. Only that we’re finally at a point where women can say “no” and where there are occasional repercussions when men disregard that “no”.
3. You are aware of the difference between correlation and causation?
1. I suppose for you “achievement” means “straight As” or something like that, the idea that you can express somebody’s achievement in a neat, single, objective number. But as a teacher I can tell you that this doesn’t reflect reality. I’ve got kids who get weak Bs for whom that is a great achievement. They worked hard and tirelessly. I got others who get straight Bs for whom that means actually falling back behind their possibilities.
And did you actually write “social standing”?
Did you really?
Like in “being wealthy” or “being popular”?
If you’ve been trying to communicate that you don’t have very fucked up ideas about children and education, you’re failing miserably.
Maybe deal with your personal issues and don’t project them onto teachers. You obviously have no idea what the educational concepts you’re talking about mean. It does not mean teachers handing out praise without any relationship to effort or results. Kids are smart enough to figure that out and dismiss your praise as meaningless, which achieves the exact opposite of what you tried to do.
1. This is a very interesting question, since the idea of raising kids who are confident in themselves and who take their latest English grade as an indicator of how well they know the particular things taught in class and not as a general indicator of how much they’re worth as human beings has pretty much gained track in many western countries.
2. Just because a specific manifestation of male entitlement has only manifested in a particular cultural circle does not mean that similar ideas don’t float elsewhere.
jack lecou @ # 77: I’m not sure how you get from a comment where I literally just compared them to Hitler to “trivializing”..
Denying (any significance to) their unique self-identifying trait – one visibly generating massive rage – does not count as taking them (the extremist faction among them, that is) seriously.
… I don’t share your apparent belief that the incels are … “at the intersection of our most charged social and political turning point”.
The resurgence of full-blown fascism and the still highly precarious assertion of women’s bodily autonomy look, from here, like the most important developments in US society of this decade. Yet jack lecou, attention drawn to the literally bloody confrontation line between the two, says “nothing to see here, folks.”
There’s nothing “weird” about incels …
Did you go read https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/raw-hatred-why-incel-movement-targets-terrorises-women?
consciousness razor @ # 78: … there never were any good old days.
Pls show us where I said anything to that effect. While researching that, maybe you’ll read my closing line in # 68.
It’s just not a particularly new or isolated phenomenon.
From that Guardian article:
No one has yet answered my query as to precedents of anything like this as an organizing theme, let alone one sweeping a large nation in just a couple of years.
“… this kind of shit has been going on all over the place and for as long as anybody can tell“, says you – when and where?
Gilliel… @ # 79: Ableism is duly noted.
Have I unfairly insulted the violent incels’ intellects? What a nasty person I am!
… “the world owes me” is and has been the rally cry of straiught white men since time immortal.
When have they combined that with “We’re born losers!!1!”?
Men feeling entitled to women’s bodies sure as hell isn’t a new phenomenon.
Not among self-proclaimed “alphas”, true. But among self-proclaimed “omegas”?
I suppose for you “achievement” means “straight As” or something like that…
So you suppose. Pls re-read my “crayon” line in # 68.
… did you actually write “social standing”? … Like in “being wealthy” or “being popular”?
A low rank is a rank. Even those at the bottom of a tall pyramid have a position within that pyramid. “Standing” =/= prestige.
… you’re failing miserably.
At least one of us is doing so within this “communication”.
… teachers handing out praise without any relationship to effort or results.
Much of such was widely reported during the heyday of the self-esteem movement. As you note, the kids figured it out, and it didn’t work, and faded away.
… idea of raising kids who are confident in themselves…
Others have also accused me of opposing this. I do hope you and your colleagues do not explicitly or implicitly instill the “all or nothing!” mindset you seem to exhibit here.
Just because a specific manifestation of male entitlement has only manifested in a particular cultural circle does not mean that similar ideas don’t float elsewhere.
I have to wonder if you enjoy the movies shown at the consciousness razor Theater. Awesome projectors they have there, no?
That’s the thing though: angrily blaming one’s problems — real and imagined — on slutty women is not a unique trait.
And that aside, every group, like every snowflake, is in some sense, unique. But focusing on the particular random uniqueness of one single flake isn’t remotely helpful in understanding the general formation mechanism, let alone the origin of snowstorms. You’re literally failing to see the snow for the snowflake, as it were.
And other than apparently not liking my explanation for how all these hate groups — whether primarily misogynist or otherwise — crystallize in unique-but-broadly-similar shapes from the same basic antecedants , you haven’t actually shown how its wrong or insufficient.
Let alone how contextualizing hate groups into the broader movements of which they are a obviously a part is “trivializing” them, FFS.
…Yet Pierce R. Butler, attention distracted by the unique and colorful banner of one particular unit in this battle, can’t bring himself to understand where this unit came from or why they are fighting on the side they are. “They are just so unique and special! It says so right on their banner! I wonder where they came from… maybe it was something that happened to them in elementary school… Hey, what do you mean there’re hundreds more alongside them and waiting in the ranks behind them? How dare you trivialize their uniqueness!”
Yeesh.
Did you read the article?
Right there, she’s pointing out that people find the concept of online nerds complaining about not getting laid a bit titillating. And that focusing on this aspect — their, ahem, unique self-identifying trait — tends to lead people to not take them very seriously. Sound familiar?
To counter that, the very next thing she points out is how 1) they are part of the broader misogynist “manosphere”, and 2) that they also have a lot of ideological crossover with online white supremacist communities — i.e., they use the same terminology, but with different irrational hate targets.
Which is, you know, exactly what I’ve been saying. Basically, these are wannabe Nazis who have set their sights on women. Two great flavors, twisted together. That’s serious as death, yet not exactly surprising or unprecedented.
Unless you’re accusing her of doing exactly what she’s talking about here, it’s pretty clear that she’s not trying to say that contextualizing them in the larger movement and understanding where they come from, is “not taking them seriously”. The fact that the two halves of your quote are literally 13 paragraphs apart might have given you some clue.
(Also that part up above where she complains about how people focusing on the virginity aspect leads them to not take them seriously as part of the broader misogynist/racist terrorist movement of which they are a piece…)
Or to put it another way:
Williams is very plainly saying that the reason some people fail to take incels seriously is that surface level self-description (“dudes angry about not getting laid”) obviously isn’t kind of ideology.
If you only look at this surface — that “unique self identifying trait” you’ve been referring to — then there’s really no reason to take them seriously. If that’s all it is, then these are just some horny dudes who are kind of inexplicably really mad about the dry spell they’re having. They’re killing people, so that suggests we should take them seriously, but it doesn’t make any sense with their surface reasoning, so it’s hard to take seriously.
To understand why we should take them seriously — which is ultimately the same as actually taking them seriously — you need to look deeper, and fit them into this larger picture, where they are one of many proto-terrorist factions sitting at this nexus of racism, fascism, misogyny and online community.
THEN it does make sense. They’re not committing violence simply because they haven’t had sex. They’re committing violence because they’ve been sucked into this ideological movement which — like so many other similar ones — is amplifying their own sense of grievance, and redirecting the blame and rage onto an external target.
NOW we understand why they — and the ideologies backing them up — are a genuine threat, not just an isolated, laughable bunch of frustrated nerds.
Pierce R. Butler
You’re apparently unable to read what you yourself have written:
This makes no reference to incels whatsoever, but accuses all people you deem to be “dim” of demanding things you consider to be beyond whatever you think they deserve.
Seriously, do we need to rehash that argument? Just read up in the last Peterson thread with brainwarp.
I understood what you mean by social standing. You are makin g the argument that people who find themselves at the “bottom” of that pyramid don’t deserve to feel good about themselves. Who would that be? Oh, the poor kids, the gay kids, the kids of colour, the disabled kids,…
“Social standing” isn’t a fucking meritocracy, we don’t live in a fucking meritocracy and your social standing is mostly determined by factors beyond the control of the individual, especially the individual kid.
Well, you’re the one who wrote the following:
Oh, right, we’re in the “I’m perfectly clear in my arguments, it’s only all the people reading them who fail at understanding me” territory again.
jack lecou @ # 83: …You’re literally failing to see the snow for the snowflake, as it were.
Only in your imagination have I overlooked the neofascist resurgence happening today.
To take your metaphor back to its original form: we see a new growth in the forest, one spreading rapidly. It doesn’t even really qualify as a tree, more like a vine. Why should anyone trying to clear some land worry about a petty little kudzu?
… other than apparently not liking my explanation … you haven’t actually shown how its wrong or insufficient.
“It’s all the same, nothing to see here” does not qualify as an explanation.
Basically, these are wannabe Nazis who have set their sights on women.
Once they’ve gone deep enough into the mire, yeah. We have here a new gateway into grassroots stormtrooperism, with inherent self-contradictions that could lead to collapse or runaway growth. I personally, having confronted the larger movement on the streets multiple times, find it worth more attention than some apparently way up high in the ivory tower might.
jack lecou @ # 84: They’re committing violence because they’ve been sucked into this ideological movement …
I think you have cause & effect partially confused here. Elliot Rodger and his rage against everything started out from personal pain and frustration due to individual failure in a culture that condemns “losers” while demanding all compete in a game he couldn’t play well. That struck a resonant chord among a lot of others, and the black/brown-shirt recruiters moved in to cultivate the new field opening up before them (one progressives, unless they immediately abandoned anything like feminism and reason, could not cultivate).
The Guardian writer blames this on “breaking down” older cultural institutions and “failure to replace those institutions with anything new to hold society together”, which seems a bit like the “golden age” mythology some here accuse me of holding. That also strikes me as too vague to do any good, but – can you bear the irony of me using another metaphor? – I suggest we need to understand in detail what fuels this fire to have any chance of containing it.
Gilliel @ # 85: This makes no reference to incels whatsoever, but accuses all people you deem to be “dim” …
Somebody above mentioned the importance of “context” (but then invented their own); a lot of that going on here these days.
In the present discussion, I mentioned “an outlook of ‘the world owes me because I’m me!'” arguably exaggerated by the self-esteem movement – which, as you pointed out, many kids were smart enough to see through quickly. Do you find it impossible that some, burdened with personal problems &/or a bit short in what we call social/emotion intelligence, might have clutched onto that frail straw as if it were a life preserver?
I don’t ask for a “friendly reading” of my comments, but can’t help but think a hostile reading will surely get them wrong.
Just read up in the last Peterson thread with brainwarp.
I had skimmed that soon after posting, and on yr suggestion will now go back & read the comments. Hmmm … maybe you didn’t mean the “It’s A Cult!” post. A search for “Peterson, brainwarp” in that handy little box on the left comes up all 404.
You are makin g the argument that people who find themselves at the “bottom” of that pyramid don’t deserve to feel good about themselves.
Or so a hostile reading would have it. When I first wrote “… tell kids they should feel good about themselves regardless of achievements, social standing, whatev…”, could I possibly have meant that they might do better with encouragement and guidance on doing things, making friends, or anything else to merit a bit of self-congratulation? Well, of course not, because Pierce R. Butler is such a nasty person!
…we’re in the “I’m perfectly clear in my arguments, it’s only all the people reading them who fail at understanding me” territory again.
In the present case, at least the latter part of that seems viable. The former part, of course, I refuted (nastily!) yesterday at # 36.
If the vast majority of people who whine about self esteem mean exactly what you say you don’t mean, it’s not a hostile reading to read it that way again.
You may in fact be the first person I’ve encountered who has not meant it that way and thus any misinterpretations are ultimately upon your head for using unexpanded an argument used by a multitude of assholes.
Pierce R. Butler #87
This thread
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/05/20/why-is-jordan-peterson-so-unreasonably-popular/
Rowan vet-tech @ # 88 – I’d ask you to clarify, but by now I’d rather we all give this up: it’s neither informative nor fun.
chigau @ # 89 – Thanks!
I followed the link, read about 120 comments, and skimmed to see if our esteemed host showed up to swing his banhammer (not yet). Couldn’t find parallels to what Gilliel… implied in # 85 had been hashed over regarding a grab for status and power by self-labeled “omega” men – but then, Peterson’s schtick is so unclear, and his defenders’ positions so shifty, the concept of parallels would apply better to turbulent smoke puffs in a funhouse mirror. (Which is not to say the Rodgers/Minassian fan-clique does any better at clarity of thought or word.)
Except it can’t explain incels, with their oh-so-unique characteristics, amiright?
I love analogies. Ok, let’s start with all of the questions being begged here:
1. New growth, qualitatively different from all the other weeds and vines.
You’re asserting it’s “more like a vine than a tree” but this idea that it’s radically different from what came before is very much in your own head. The rest of us seem to be seeing various kinds of vines. Some have big thorns, some have smaller, more numerous thorns. Some have oval leaves, some spear-shaped. But all basically vine-y weeds. Vines which have been growing in these woods in various permutation since what looks like the dawn of time, or at least agriculture.
Maybe this ‘new’ vine is technically different, in a specific idiosyncratic sense, but you have to actually do the work to show the difference is important, and not merely cosmetic.
2. Extraordinary origin.
The implication of your whole self-esteem thing — or whatever else you’re throwing out here — is that this new vine is so different that we need a new explanation for its formation. You’re saying normal everyday biological explanations aren’t sufficient.
But you need to show that. Before you claim the explanation needs some extraordinary cause like EMF from the power lines or an alien invasive species, you need to demonstrate that it isn’t actually related closely to the local ones, and formed by the same mechanism. I.e.: maybe it’s the result of a cross-pollination, maybe a small point mutation that gave it colorful spotted leaves, maybe it was there all along and is only showing up because we recently hacked some of its bigger brothers out of the way…
3. Spreading rapidly
Again, this seems to just be your personal assertion. I grant that this particular, erm, vine is getting a lot of press coverage lately (I mean, as these things go — not in absolute terms), so it seems important, but let’s keep some perspective. Overnight notoriety is not actually the same thing as rapid growth — let alone rapid and indefinitely sustainable growth.
The only number I’ve seen in this thread is the “tens of thousands” number from the Guardian article. Now, I suppose that’s shocking compared to ZERO, which is obviously what it should be in any sane world, but it’s kinda tiny in almost any other respect. There are probably something like that many highly specific kitten memes posted to reddit in a given day.
More relevantly, I’d guess the broader mgtow/redpill/pua/misogyny-as-a-hobby community to be at least an order of magnitude bigger — hundreds of thousands. And the general ‘anti-SJW’ backlash movement very likely has at least a few millions who identify in some way with it. Let’s also not forget all the millions of men out in the real world, harrassing and abusing and raping and murdering for the last ten thousand years.
But prove me wrong. Let’s see some hard numbers showing that incels are taking over the world.
4. That “unusual” = “serious” and “same” = “not serious”.
This is the clear implication of the quote above: “Why should anyone trying to clear some land worry about a petty little kudzu?”. I.e., you’re implying that because we’re saying it looks familiar, we’re saying it doesn’t look worrisome.
But even in the analogy, that’s just terrible reasoning. Having lots of experience with kudzu — or other voracious, kudzu-like weeds — would make you more likely to worry about them, wouldn’t it? This logic just doesn’t work. We don’t need to exaggerate the novelty of something in order to take it seriously. Sometimes seeing it for what it is is even worse.
“It evolved as a slight variation/recombination of functionally similar antecedants” absolutely qualifies as an explanation. The crossed out part is just a particularly blatant strawman — see point 4 above.
You certainly haven’t offered a better explanation, by the way. Maybe you can get to that after you demonstrate that we need one.
I don’t think I’ve got anything confused. The fact that this is all chicken and egg is exactly what I’ve been saying. Shit resonates with Rodgers — he didn’t invent 1000 years of misogyny, racism, failure valence, and all the other stuff that was going on in there on his own — and then he adds his own ugly little runny fart of a note to that running chorus, and then that resonates with others and they do the same. That’s how this stuff works.
But what you are getting all screwed up is the personal pain –> object of hatred connection. Namely, there isn’t one.
One of the critical things with all of these groups is that those two things ain’t got much to do with each other. That’s the problem: they might have totally legitimate — and even otherwise sympathetic — pains and life difficulties in many cases. But then they fasten on to some extraordinary, external cause for their problem that not only make no rational sense, but also usually involves some kind of murderous final solution to actually solve. The initial problem is irrelevant, it’s the latter that really defines them.
If you don’t understand this, let’s invent a hate group.
Like maybe imagine there’s a guy whose socks keep disappearing. And then he listens to talk radio and “does some research” and ultimately decides that the reason for his socks’ disappearance is a concerted and targeted international conspiracy of jews and feminists. He posts about it, it resonates with people, he or someone else murders some people. It resonates some more.
Now as hate groups go, that disappearing socks thing would be pretty goddam idiosyncratic — I would certainly grant you that. It’s also definitely the most eyecatching thing about this group — mostly because antisemitism and antifeminism are, unfortunately, all too banal.
And socks disappearing is a legitimate problem. In fact, it’s not only a totally legit problem, it’s a normal, everyday problem that virtually everyone has. It’s a problem almost everyone else faces without resorting to antisemitic conspiracy theories.
And that’s why, when we’re looking at a group founded on that ideology from the outside and figuring out what makes them tick, the relevant, distinguishing characteristic for figuring them out would be the antisemitism and misogyny, not the socks. The socks are a red herring.
The relevant thing about this group isn’t that their socks disappear. Everyone’s socks disappear. It’s that they have prior underlying sympathies with antisemitism and antifeminist ideologies. That’s what makes those resonate when they’re trying to pin their problems — whatever the problems happen to be — on someone.
And that means they’re essentially the same as all the other groups that pin their own problems on jews and women. The problems differ, to be sure, but those problems have zero rational connection to the imputed villains causing those problems anyway. It’s the underlying antisemitism, anti-feminism, or anti-whateverism is the only thing that actually explains anything.
jack lecou @ # 91 – Maybe our statements are converging, or maybe I’m just getting tired, but I’d say most of yr latest comment makes sense.
Let me start with a point of disagreement, however:
… this idea that it’s radically different from what came before is very much in your own head.
I say that “it” (either the vine or the violent incel movement) has at least one significantly different characteristic from what we’ve seen before. I focus on that, while you emphasize the common features with more familiar flora/fauna. Which of us is “right”, in a consequential sense, depends entirely on how much of a difference that distinguishing characteristic makes. If the kudzu creates little difficulty in expanding your field, you’re right; if the pro-violence incels draw in a large part of their generation and form the core of a new Sturmabteilung, then (oh shit) I’m right.
The debate does have an answer, but we won’t reach that answer tonight – no matter how logically or eloquently either of us might expostulate. Perhaps these evil clowns will succumb to the derision they invite, and in the end make about as much history as, e.g., the Alaskan Independence Party, and we can all move on to more substantial issues.
But in the meantime they have succeeded, at least in gaining numbers and attention, far beyond what the rationally-minded would have expected; they will probably cause more deaths; and they present an interesting anomaly. Nobody has yet suggested any previous group (not even a slave rebellion or the keep-your-head-down meekness of the early Christian urban-underclass movement) to gain an energetic followership by braying about, not just oppression, but their own inferiority on every level.
Another analogy: doctors encountering a new disease, even while a much larger and more familiar epidemic threatens them (and which might not have emerged if not for the conditions of that epidemic), still have the right and obligation to learn everything they can about the puzzles it presents.
Incels aren’t an entirely novel disease though. At most they’re yet another strain of the flu. A new strain, maybe, but still the flu. They’re still most frequently extremely entitled and disgruntled men, one of the main sources of violence the world over.
Rowan vet-tech: … [not] an entirely novel disease…
Nope, but of an etiology that raises multiple questions.
If we ever discover a cure, or even a reliable preventive regimen, for fascism, it may well apply to violent incelism too. Alas, CDC is not not on the case.
That’s a relief. I might have been more explicit about some of the things I’d assumed were given.
I mean, the infection is sort of self-limiting, in at least a couple of ways, no? There’s the celibacy thing, and the violent misogyny thing*. You can only get incels at the intersection of that venn diagram.
Surveys show the younger generation is having less sex on average, but even so. That’s a finite field.
And then there’s the violent misogyny thing – this is what we’ve been trying to get at with the whole “these people already existed” thing. I just don’t see any evidence that incels are recruiting from the general population, as it were. The people falling down the rabbit hole that deep are the ones who were already preferentially tuned to the misogyny channel in one way or another. That’s how the resonance thing works.**
And given that, I don’t see why we should care which particular misogynist category they do end up falling into. They were, in a way, already lost. The best way to fight this is as it has always been – inoculate people intellectually before they’re rendered vulnerable.
I think you’re saying that incels would be deadlier. But that’s just unsupported assertion — what, #5 now.
Because there’s really no support for that. I mean, I don’t want to be keeping score or something, but look at the first Toronto attack, back in 1989. NOT an incel, but a slightly different species of misogynist, and just as deadly as the more recent ones. Same for, say, Anders Breivik. Incels are simply not the only racist, misogynist whatnots out there, even if you narrow your violence filter down to specifically just spree killers.
And that’s obviously not the only kind of misogynist violence we should be concerned about.
I don’t want to be flippant about it, but one way to paraphrase ‘incel’ — given the kind of people we’ve established they are — is ‘wannabe abuser’. That is, if you think about, actually somewhat better than the alternative, isn’t it?
—–
* Plus probably at least a couple others – Rodgers was racist as hell too.
** I was a lonely teenager myself – but you couldn’t have convinced me that it was all women’s fault, because — although I was possibly a jerk in other ways — I did at least recognize that women were individual people, with distinct thoughts and feelings. Not some kind of conspiracy front. I reckon this was true of most of my peers too.
But they don’t, do they? They’re actually superior. They’re “omegas”. (Plus, for example, white.*)
That is to say, they’re not actually braying about their inferiority at every level. They’re either talking about how actually important they are, even though society doesn’t recognize it properly. Or sometimes, they might be taking a perceived inferiority and turning it into greater status in their secret club. (“Oh yeah, well I’m way uglier than you. I’ve got it much harder.”) It’s twisted, I grant you, but it makes a sort of sense. I *very* much doubt they’re the first people to do that. Self flagellation isn’t new either.
In fact, I suspect you see that sort of thing going on in all sorts of insular “nerdy” cultures, who turn in toward each other because they feel cut off from the “normie world” or whatever. Their differences — or perceived differences — become a badge of honor.
And then, I don’t know why that should be so scary to you. Obviously, this particular culture is a lot less wholesome than the ones bonding over obscure anime cartoons or something, so it’s unsettling. But it’s still obviously a pretty niche sort of fetish. They’re really into it, but you haven’t actually shown why you think it’s appeal outside a pretty narrow pre-selected audience. I.e., that any given, otherwise well-adjusted, kid would be taken in.
———
* Rodgers wrote about how he couldn’t believe — and I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t want to go look this dreck up and re-read it — “a mere black boy could have already had sex when I hadn’t”. Actually, I think I’m paraphrasing badly. It was dripping with way more weird racism than that. The point is that’s not a story of weakness to him. That’s society’s values being so inverted that valuable people like him are taking second place to the inferior people.
To make the analogy complete, the second disease can only infect the ones who are already carriers of the first.
So study it if you like, but the practical upshot will still be the same. Neither is, at least in the general case, curable. The only way to fight them is to continue to try to immunize the population against the first disease. Then they won’t get the second one either.
First, apologies for unintended double negative in my # 94.
jack lecou @ # 95: You can only get incels …
Again, I think we should qualify when speaking of hardcore misogynist incels as compared to the politically inoffensive majority of the involuntarily celibate (who will, I hope, find a new label for themselves soon).
I just don’t see any evidence that incels are recruiting from the general population…
Their initial surge in numbers after the Isla Vista shooting had to come from somewhere. From that Guardian article and elsewhere, I have the impression that the fascists are recruiting from the “manosphere” misogynist population in general, with the obsessive sexual failures as just part of that trawl.
The best way to fight this is as it has always been – inoculate people intellectually before they’re rendered vulnerable.
I have some doubts that any intellectual conditioning can do much against lizard-brain emotional tendencies.
… one way to paraphrase ‘incel’ … is ‘wannabe abuser’. That is… somewhat better than the alternative, isn’t it?
With aforementioned qualification about labels in mind – you may be on to something, though not while flinging “unsupported assertion” accusations around. I guess you mean better than actual abuser, but we don’t know whether some fraction of them might be salvageable before abuse reflexes get burnt in.
They’re actually superior. They’re “omegas”.
Eh? The instances I’ve seen of them using that label are lingistically correct – end of the line, bottom of the ladder (though apparently within the bubble of taken-for-granted white male privilege).
… they’re not actually braying about their inferiority at every level.
After posting, I wished I could have edited that to read “at every level that matters to them” plus the WM bubble I just mentioned.
It’s twisted, I grant you, but it makes a sort of sense.
I’ve seen similar, but holding a big public self-pity party is new. Maybe the internet/social-media impact of a generation used to near-zero privacy does make a lot of difference here.
… you haven’t actually shown why you think it’s appeal outside a pretty narrow pre-selected audience.
I see that it does have an appeal, which has evidently brought in thousands of young men not pre-selected by anybody. The self-contradictory maelstrom of frustration and rage may be self-limiting, but possibly also has a potential to pull in many more who’d prefer to act out their anger than find ways to resolve it (see Nov 8, 2016).
… the second disease can only infect the ones who are already carriers of the first.
Again, an unsupported assertion, at least partially contradicted by earlier field reports. The two trends do support each other, but I suspect the neofascists recruit more from the violent incels than vice-versa.