There’s been another shooting by an incel, and when you read about the hateful stuff he actually believed, you will be surprised that anyone made it through life with that degree of bullshit festering in his head.
But then, read this account by a medievalist of the warped notion of “courtly love”, and you’ll notice this is an ancient and familiar trope. You’ll never be able to watch “Camelot” again.
What a supreme gentleman. /gag
I’m pretty sure there will soon be people who tell us how he really was the victim here.
So that was the motive for the shooting at the yoga studio?
Seriously? Are incels actually something to be taken into account otside a psychiatric lab?
For me I’d make prostitution legal, safe, controlled and out of the hands of criminal organizations (*). Then if you want to have sex and are not able to get it for free because you’re such a fucking asshole that every girl runs away you can easily get professional services.
(*) it is not, where I live.
I actually liked ContraPoints video on incels from a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0
She brings up a lot of interesting points that I had not thought about it. We know any misogyny, racism but it was interesting to know that the incels are also very much interested in trashing each other, telling each other that there is no hope, encouraging despair and in fact anyone with even a slightly positive message would be treated with hostility.
Oh FFS.
So there is a potentially dangerous repulsive man who actually hates woman and your solution is to send him to sex workers? Because they have to fuck him and keep nice respectable women safe because who cares about hookers and their safety, right?
@6 Giliell, QFT and there is still coercion and trafficking of women even in the countries where prostitution is legal and “controlled”.
As a young man, I was often sexually and romantically frustrated, but it didn’t occur to me that I had a right to sexual satisfaction or romantic fulfilment, nor that I had the right to coerce anybody into meeting my needs.
Yeah, except the incels are pretty much obsessed with teenage sex and having sex with virgins. These attitudes don’t lend themselves to visiting prostitutes.
angela78 @4
Even setting aside Giliell’s very valid point @6, incels don’t want to pay for sex. They’re well aware of the existence of sex workers and have an extremely low opinion of them. They feel entitled to free sex and paying for them isn’t going to take away their anger and resentment.
@6 Gillell
Prostitution is a job, and just like in any other job those who do it know that some part of it will be tiring, repetitive, boring, or simply something they won’t like and rather would avoid. Then it’s upt to each worker to chose what to do, and I can assure you that sex workers are very good in understanding if a man is “potentially dangerous” (most men are) or dangerous, and don’t accept the exchange.
Which, by the way, is what happens right now anyway, only without protections for women.
@9 Tabby
Giliell’s point is palin wrong. On the opposite if what you say is true then incels are worse off than I thoungh. They scare me.
Hmm, I have issues with this notion that the ideals of “courtly love” (not really what Medieval writers themselves would have called it, but useful enough a term I suppose) are basically just incel ideas from a thousand years ago. Indeed, in many ways the ideals of courtly love run directly counter to what these modern incels believe.
Far from being about entitlement to women, the kind of love poetry popularised by the troubadours in the Twelfth Century tended to be about holding noble women as idols, and improving as a person through the experience of a chaste, ultimately unconsummated love. Love is held to be ennobling, because it focuses one’s sense of self outside one’s own needs and promotes service, devotion and dedication to others (in much the same way as Plato describes paiderastic love in his Symposion). A very common trope of courtly love is to cast the relationship between lover and beloved as a feudal, vassal-liege, type of relationship. The lover (a man) devotes and dedicates himself to his beloved as a vassal would to his liege, who is unreachable and unattainable because she is married to someone else. The whole tension and struggle of the courtly tryst is precisely the balance between burning desire and the certain knowledge that one will never be requited in one’s passions. The lover’s devotions are not made in order to win the beloved’s heart but in spite of the fact he never will.
As such they represent an ethic of selflessness and denial entirely at odds with the incel world-view, where one is entitled to sex for doing women favours or for simply being really attractive. The whole dynamic of courtly love is precisely the opposite – no number of favours will suffice to get what you want sexually, but you do them anyway because in doing them you improve yourself and do service to your fellow man. Incels are directly opposed to self-improvement, because their world view is calibrated entirely to create a sense of aggrieved entitlement and forestall having to do any work to improve themselves.
I have to admit, I have something of a stake in this comparison myself. I have, for the last seventeen years, devoted myself to a very courtly form of love for my best friend, who has been in a relationship with someone else for all that time. The noblest ideals of courtly love very much resonate with me, because I recognise in it the same passion and pain, self-abnegation and selflessness, hurt and denial and anguish that I myself have felt my entire adult life when it comes to love. I know full well the pain of not being able to have the attentions of my beloved, not being able to stop loving him, and having to cope by taking joy in the service I can perform for him and others, the discipline that can be developed in bearing the torment, the purity of the dreams of love unsullied by realisation and the grubby compromise of their practical fulfillment.
Which is not to say that there weren’t deep currents of misogyny in Medieval thought. A lot of it derived from ancient thought (Andreas Capellanus’s de amore was pretty much lifted directly from Ovid’s ars amatoria). But courtly love literature as a genre isn’t where one finds most of it. There’s an awful lot more in medical and theological literature. Indeed, the whole culture of courtly love, spread from the Pays d’Oc and derived ultimately from Islamic models of courtly behaviour, was a powerful civilising influence on Medieval noble culture. In the centuries before the flowering of the courtly love tradition the competitions between nobles were about fighting, conquering, killing and murdering. The rough and ready warrior aristocrats of the early middle ages cared little to nothing for love – indeed, the closest early medieval literature comes to vaunting love as a force is lingering on the love that Roland felt for his magic sword Durandal, so great a weapon it was.
1) awful situation. Once again. I was just reading about this over at WHTM.
2) I am going to lose hours reading Going Medieval.
3) Can we please stop recommending sex work to “solve” incels? Sex workers, or anyone, don’t deserve this this crap. I don’t know how to solve incels but protecting women comes first and keeping incels away from women is a damn could start on that front..
4) no sex, or anything, is free as a general point.
@13 Mike Smith, #3
What do you think incels do right now?They go and pay for sex, even if they claim the opposite.
Legalizing prostitution doesn’t put women at risk, it helps them to be protected.
angela78
So, that still doesn’t or wouldn’t solve the “incel” problem, since sex workers still don’t want to fuck them.
Besides the fact that those men see “paying for sex” as the ultimate insult to their masculinity anyway.
Besides, you’re beating up a straw commenter, because in general people here are pro sex workers and decriminalisation. Which also means that many of us actually listen to sex workers and what they actually want and I can assure you “fucking incels so they don’t shoot up bunches of women” is not very high on their list. Here’s a nice article in which many sex workers themselves say as much.
angela78
You clearly haven’t read the linked articles, or come to that much else about Incels. Incels don’t want to pay for sex, they expect the objects of their desire to give them sex on demand regardless of the objects feelings. And I use ‘object’ purposefully as for them women are not really people.
@ angela78, #4
Considering they keep going on killing sprees, I’d say yes. Also, “murderous misogynist scum” isn’t a mental illness.
Why is it that, every time one of these fuckwits murders a bunch of women, someone has to pop up and say “why don’t they just have sex with sex workers?” It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to suspect it should be read as “if they just stuck to raping and murdering [slur against sex workers or sexually active women in general] it wouldn’t be a problem.”
Your follow-up comments haven’t done much to persuade me that my translation is wrong. Maybe don’t suggest that violent misogynists should be the problem of sex workers, or of women in general.
What’s the difference between an “Incel” and “financially-insecure, fat, ugly, freak with a history of mental health issues who is still cursed with sexual desires despite the impossiblity of fulfilling them?”
@ Akira #18
Well, I’m a financially insecure, high functioning autistic permavirgin with a history of depression who’s not grossly obese but certainly not lithe or at all attractive. I still feel attraction to good looking young guys, even though it will never happen, and it’s never occurred to me to resent them or anyone else for it. But maybe incels cannot be gay.
@angela78
I am in favor of legalizing prostitution on liberty grounds and that on the grounds that being a pornographic model is already legal.
It is still a red herring to mention sex work as a solution to incel violence. Decriminalization might make sex workers safer, which is a good thing, but I have my doubts that it will help with incels being violent and in anycase sex workers should not provide services to unsafe people. incels are unsafe.
@Akira
Most incels are conventionally attractive. Elliot Rodgers was not ugly physically.
Male entitlement is a hella unattractive and unsafe through!
Incels: Learn how to jerk off properly. You foolz are not a ‘thing’.
And at #20: If these creeps were, indeed, conventionally (don’t know what that means really) attractive, they wouldn’t be incels, now would they?
About entitlement: Bullshit. No one is entitled. You have to earn it. And that is all. As FST said: Eat or Be Eaten.
angela78 @11
Now there’s an insult to ponder and consider what it says about the deliverer.
On reading the post at Going Medieval”, my first thought was, “I wonder what Cartomancer would make of this”, then reading the comments, I’m gratified, as a total non specialist, to have my first reaction confirmed. It had always been my belief that “courtly love” was an unrequited longing, transferred to devoted service of the lady. Not always perhaps, as in the case of Lancelot and Guivere, who according to Mallory, “were found togedders abed”, though Mallory is not Medieval, of course, and misogyny is a whole lot older than the “Middle Ages”.
I wonder if the Incel phenomenon is mainly a US or North American affair. We have plenty of violence against women, but not really in this particular form. Could it be connected with the toxic history of US slavery?
On top of the fact that we shouldn’t be recommending sex workers as fodder for society’s abusers, the biggest problem with angela78’s proposal is that incels are very clear about the fact that they will not pay for sex and consider it an affront to their very existence that they can’t demand sex from any given woman. Furthermore, we have multiple examples now of incels being so enraged by this perceived iniquity that they have gone and fired on groups of women.
This will not be solved by sex workers and we know this because incels already have access. Part of their psychopathology is their refusal to engage in any meaningful change in their own behaviour. Instead incels foster their own low self-esteem as a tool for magnifying their misogyny, sometimes to homicidal levels. They don’t want to improve their situation. They’d much rather shoot women.
@21 Sparks
Conventional* physical attractiveness isn’t the only determinant of how and why people pair bond. Most of the incels I have seen pictures of are not, despite their protests otherwise, physically ugly or unfuckable trolls. The comment I was responding too seemed to think there was something to their constant whining about being too ugly/fat to have sex with. That isn’t the actual problem for the vast majority of the incels I have encountered and in any case it is punching down on people who do struggle pair bonding because of appearance to just grant that they can’t pair bond because of looks. An extraordinary amount of people pair bond even with less than conventionally ideal looks. Incels’ problem is they are extraordinary awful in personality in large part because they don’t consider women people and they tend to be filled with self loathing about among other things their alleged physical ugliness.
I don’t know if you have seen a picture of Elliot Roger but he was physically quite cute and attractive. He was not remotely “ugly.” And to think his looks are why he didn’t pair bond, as opposed to him being a hateful little prick is to miss the point. Most selfie of incels I have seen also fit this pattern. They are just hateful little shits with too much self-loathing, patriarchy and misogyny messing up their lives.
Keep in mind what women tend to actually find attractive and what men tend to think women find attractive are two very different things.
*what post people consider attractive. Brad Pitt.
From Dr Janega’s post
Anyone else seeing parallels to nerfing rage in online multiplayer games? I suspect there’s a large overlap with the incel population…
OP:
I did. I think that should have been ‘this account of a medievalist’s warped notion of “courtly love”’.
(cf. cartomancer above)
sparks
The fact that you think women will fuck any guy who is sufficiently attractive says more about you than the matter at hand.
Indeed it is that whole damn incel “philosophy” by which women are shallow yet manipulative beings who only fuck all the Chads.
You all (angela, or anyone recommending sex, masturbation, porn etc. to incels) need to learn more about incels and go beyond the typical and shallow response that “their medicine is sex”. It is more complicated and much more deeper than that. Every idiot thinks of the “LUL, they just need sex”, or “just pay someone, bro LOL”, “dood, just whack it!” solutions. They are boring and stupid and shows you know nothing about them other than what the word “incel” stands for. They don’t want sex really. A lot of them are not even “celibate”. They are a self-radicalizing death cult built around a very dark and grim view of the world where they are constantly being oppressed by women, and society and they idolize anyone who goes out to “avenge” for the crimes committed against them.
Giliell:
The originator of the term deplores that it’s become a referent to this male subculture. Good luck trying to reclaim it.
—
PS lotharloo @5, yes, good video. Informative.
Recommending that prostitutes take care of incels is like suggesting that toxic waste isn’t a problem, because we can just pay someone to shovel it up. It’s a rather deeply capitalist way of thinking.
And of course, the someone is always someone else.
Perhaps the people who make this kind of suggestion should be the ones to offer their services?
If I had to prescribe a cure for this toxic phenomenon, I’d probably focus on the sense of societal alienation that it feeds on. As an historian, I tend to look to the past for analogues of modern social problems to help understand what might remedy them. But try as I might I can’t really think of any good historical parallels. The particular combination of fetishising sex, constructing imagined social hierarchies and promoting a communal sense of worthlessness, aggrievment and helplessness is pretty unique. The closest parallel I can think of is Christian thought, which has the imagined hierarchies and deals in communal unhealthy ideas about sex and personal value, but tends to demonise sex and use a warped sense of worthlessness to create an image of mock-humble smug superiority. Also daemons, magic and elaborate hats.
But there does seem to be a particular aspect of modern culture and society that underlies the incel phenomenon. That being a sense of alienation from society endemic to developed Capitalism. Marx was quite perceptive in describing the psychological effects of divorcing humans from the products of their labour, and structuring a society such that it provides reward and validation only for the rapacious few. He was thinking of the industrial towns of 19th Century England of course, with all their attendant social horrors, but the principle applies to modern society too. Particularly given the sharp decline in American society of organised groups that give people a sense of belonging – trades unions, local bowling leagues, book clubs, political clubs – the sorts of things that keep societies together and make people feel invested in their fellow human beings. Instead the cultural landscape is increasingly atomised, corporatised and impersonal. Media conglomerates provide news and entertainment for individuals, and discourage communal identity to better sway with advertising and propaganda. Working hours have gone up quite worryingly, so people have less time to connect outside work (when they have jobs at all – unemployment fuels even greater alienation, and late-stage Capitalism is very good at creating that), and even at work increasing numbers of people are doing impersonal, isolated, somewhat meaningless jobs, with little stability or sense of investment. The “gig economy” is not a healthy one for social wellbeing when administered by rapacious profiteers looking to cut costs.
All this seems to be the background music to the incel cult. Because, let’s face it, it’s an ideology that could only appeal to people deeply unhappy with the world and their own self-image, and looking for scapegoats to blame.
@angela78
You seem to be conflating support for decriminalising sex work with a willingness to have sex workers be the ones who have to deal with incels, and vice versa… why is that?
I do agree that decriminalising sex work would probably make sex workers safer, but sending virulent misogynists their way to “be fixed” certainly won’t.
I am celibate, out of what I hope is love or one expression of it, I have remained so over fifty years. Thank you, cartomancer, for your thoughts at #12.
;-)
antaresrichard, no; involuntary is the keyword, not celibacy.
(Also, Catholic priests are supposedly voluntarily celibate, out of dedication)
@Angela78: I’d like for you to go and actually read the first linked article in the OP, particularly the part with the shooter’s own quoted words regarding “American whores” and the way in which he believed they deserve to die, and why. Once you have done so, consider the implications of expecting sex workers to fuck away the homicidal urges of society’s violent misogynistic men.
Addendum– Then, I’d like Angela78 to ask themselves why they are willing to trust a group of violent, murderer worshipping misogynists to have correctly identified both the problem* they have (virginity) and the solution (sex)?
Plenty of men who do have sex with women still/also hate us, see. Maybe the problem isn’t in fact a lack of sex but misogyny and misogynistic hate feeding “support” groups.
*That goes for everyone tempted to take incels at their word and treat their complaints as though they are happening in good faith. These are guys who stalk and grope women and call that “courting,” they think that their lives are forever ruined if they don’t have the experience of teen love– by which they mean sex with a teenaged virgin before they’re 20– because only that act can bestow upon them their full manhood, who worship a murderer as their hero. Why is anyone taking them at their word regarding their physical attributes or lack thereof, or sexual experience or lack thereof, or any of it? They are not reliable narrators. I will repeat for those in the back:
Murderer worshipping misogynistic hate groups are not reliable narrators regarding their own supposed victimhood or causes thereof.
Yes, I have experienced this as guy. Once someone I knew was picking me and another friend of his (so 3 guys in a car) and this friend was talking about a one-night stand he just had with a woman. I honestly could not believe the hate coming out of his mouth. He called her the b-word, s-word, w-word, and so on just because she had sex with him. I don’t know what to think of it, as this is completely incomprehensible to me.
cartomancer @ 12 about fin’amor expressed it well. I can only add that there is double as to how far, if at all, it existed outside poetry.
Ah! Kalenda maia
Ni fueills de faia
Ni chans d’auzell ni flors de glaia
Non es qe.m plaia,
Pros dona gaia…
“double”????
‘doubt’ without a doubt.
ionopachys @ 19 and Mike Smith @20
I know, it’s just that when these murders occur, I start to worry whether or not I should try to empathize with these Incels on any level. I understand who it feels to be alone and insecure about their looks or station. I can relate to the anger and frustration that comes with living in a culture that equates the ability to acquire sexual intercourse as some sort indicator of social worth, psychical prowess, or mental stability. While I understand that no-one owes me sex, I still liked to have it and not being able to attract a partner since 1997 has resulted in more than a few nights crying into my pillow… literally. I wonder if their is anything that can be done to help me.
Then shit like this happens. Then I read all of the misogynistic “Red Pill” conspiracy theory bullshit. Then I hear assholes like Peterson and Douthat suggest rationing out women to single men. Occasionally, one of my jerk relatives or some acquaintance who knows my hopelessly single status will factiously ask when I’m going to go on my shooting spree, and I find myself wondering if I’m a bad day from snapping and causing my own Incel-related crime.
Retaining the services of a sex worker is not going to work for these guys as another article on WHTM explains:
Emphasis mine. Retrocuckoldry FTW!
It so happens that the intersection of sets on the Venn diagram of “alt-right” and “incel” is swollen pretty much to fucking bursting as their obsession with cuckoldry demonstrates. Also, the alt-right has recently taken to dubbing their ideological enemies NPCs— “non-player characters”, a term originally borrowed from tabletop role-playing games– in an attempt to dehumanise them. But I believe that most incels would be dissatisfied with a partner who was anything other than an NPC, because what they want in a relationship is fucking unattainable from an actual human being: a virginal hottie created ex nihilo with no personal history– no friends, no hobbies, no inner life that might get in the way of servicing your desires– who is desirable by other men as a trophy but has no desires of her own, who is there to please you when you want it and, I dunno, disappears under the sink to recharge when you don’t. They don’t want a lover. They don’t want a partner. They want a Roomba they can fuck and show off to other men.
Always remember that 100% of wife beating husbands are married to women.
Giliell @44:
I think I read it over on WHTM at some point but apparently some significant percentage of these “involuntary celibates” are, in fact, sexually active! Except they don’t get laid enough (for whatever value of “enough” is), or they’re not getting the right kind of sex (“Goddamnit if porno has taught me nothing it’s ladies like it in the pooper and no lady I’ve ever slept with has ever let me put it in her pooper and it’s the SJWs’ fault!”) or the quality of sex is somehow wanting (“it’s my right as a rich white guy to score with at least an 8 on the Soopah-Objective Scale of Sexual Hotness and I’ve never done better than a 5! Woe is me! Also, I saw a slightly overweight woman today who wasn’t ashamed and now my boner is sad the West is doomed!”). But, you know, it’s us progressive SJW types who are the delusional ones because we all identify as attack helicopters[1] or something 🙄
[1] Obligatory link
@Giliell: And that many, many rapists have access to willing partners. It’s not lack of sex that’s the problem, it’s misogyny, aggrieved entitlement, and a culture which promotes, supports, and provides cover for both. Women can’t fuck that away for you, dudes, sorry not sorry, you’re going to have to do your own internal and social homework.
@Akira MacKenzie: Any and everyone experiences loneliness, anxiety, self doubt, feelings of unworthiness, and self hate. Everyone. None of those things are unique to incels, they just treat it that way, so there’s no need for you or any other person to try and identify with them just because they’re attempting to claim universal human experiences for themselves and themselves alone as a cover for their vicious, violent hatred of women. Additionally, your jerk relatives and acquaintances suck for saying those hurtful things to you.
Akira MacKenzie @ 42:
J.F.C. There are no words. I am so sorry that you have to put up with this kind of shit.
@Cat Mara: What I gleaned from the last* article I read on them, one of their tenets is that if a cis male doesn’t have sex with a virgin teen girl before he turns 20** then he’s irretrievably broken for the rest of his life because he can never be a full man. That’s why no amount of sex as an adult will suffice, because they believe any sex other than the aforementioned won’t fix what they have misidentified as their problem.
*hopefully the actual last, JHFC if I never hear about these assholes starting now it will not be soon enough
**superficially they refer to this as “teen love,” but further digging reveals it’s not about the emotional connections of love and intimacy at all
lotharloo @39
Yup. We can’t win. If we don’t have sex, we’re frigid btches. If we do have sex, we’re slts and wh*res (just in case certain words are automatically moderated).
Another thing that “incels” obsess over are “looksmatches” which is essentially the 1-10 scale and all 1s should be with 1s, etc, and it fills them with rage that women they consider 5s and 6s are with men they consider Alpha Chads. It’s also bullshit because as much as they say they should get their “looksmatch”, they already refuse to even consider a woman who is remotely physically flawed in their eyes.
I remember years ago talking to a guy who was complaining that women refuse to see past his looks and take into consideration how nice he was (yes, this was before I was aware of incels or even Nice Guys™). I asked him why he couldn’t do the same. “I have to be turned on.” I don’t remember many conversations years later, but that one stuck with me.
Onamission 5 @ 46
True, but a huge chunk of my loneliness, anxiety, self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness and self-hate is due to not being able to attract a girlfriend for the last 21 years.
An analogy that occurs to me is that saying that sex workers — or even volunteer sex donators — could “solve” the problem of violently misogynistic incels is like saying that anti-semitism could be “solved” by Jews getting out of banking, big business, philanthropy, politics, Hollywood, social work, &c.
The problem is that they’ve fixated on their respective victims because they want someone to blame for their problems, and as deserving targets for their cruelty. As lotharloo@#39 describes, giving them what they say they want doesn’t make them hate, blame, or target less.
There’s probably more to it than that. I suspect that there may be real stress, anxiety, and depression, and maybe narcissism and paranoia mixed in, all working together in toxic, self-reinforcing feedback loops.
Come to think of it, there is probably a large overlap between misogynistic incels and anti-semites. Just as there’s the phenomenon of crank magnetism, there’s probably a similar but non-identical phenomenon of bigotry magnetism.
Misogyny is on the rise, world-wide. The cult around Jordan Peterson, The Proud Boys, MRA (Men`s Rights Activists), Incels etc. are only a tiny fragment of it. This is the other side of the “cult of male supremacy” that is gaining more and more support. Anti-feminists are against the equality of men and women.
This needs more awareness. Instead, the mainstream media fawns over Jordan Peterson who “helps” young men by telling them that they are superior to women, who are by “nature” made to be mothers an nothing but. The mainstream media still sees misogyny as permissible. And there lies the problem!
Btw, Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil`s fascist President-elect) is also a “macho” who believes in “male superiority”. So is Duterte, most religious fundamentalists of all faiths (not only ISIS), the new far-right movements in Europe etc.
@Owlmirror
The shooter demonstrated himself as racist as well as misogynist, huge surprise I’m sure. No doubt homophobia and anti-Semitism were also lurking close by.
@43, Cat Mara, you said: “…what they want in a relationship is fucking unattainable from an actual human being: a virginal hottie created ex nihilo with no personal history– no friends, no hobbies, no inner life that might get in the way of servicing your desires– who is desirable by other men as a trophy but has no desires of her own, who is there to please you when you want it…”
You are onto something. I believe that is what they want. Well, throughout history and even now in too many places, men come close to this “ideal” (be prepared to be shocked): Child brides. It is still a sad but real-existing phenomenon around the world. In some places in Latin America, like Brazil, the numbers are actually even going up, not down. Look at the NGO “Girls bot brides” https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/where-does-it-happen/
What I say next is pure speculation: Maybe “Incels” are the Western version of men who marry underaged virgins who come straight from their “father`s house” into their bed. Preferably without education (I am not joking!). They demand a girl who is in their absolute power, who has no say in anything. Sick? You bet. But obviously a male fantasy all over the world.
Because of “bad feminism”, women are not commodities anymore, given away in young age by their fathers. They have education, a mind of their own, careers. Demands (like: being treated like a real human being). Sometimes, they are actually “better” than men (e.g. in their job) – a fact that does not compute with the “cult of male superiority/supremacy” that the Incels firmly believe in.
What Incels would really appreciate is to turn back time on women`s rights and on the equality of the sexes. Than, they can feel like “real men” again, towering over their dependent “little wive”. Only complete domination over a woman (who they married as a young virgin) can satisfy this urge of being “like a God” to “their” woman.
“Macho culture” was with us since time immemorial. In many cultures, it is still dominant. And problematic, as not only the existence of child brides but also of “femicides” (murders of women) document.
Demcracy Now on the recent shooting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuygPvu0WNQ&t=136s
A long time ago, I read the novel “Beautiful Antonio” (Bell` Antonio) by Vitaliano Brancati which (if I remember right) gave a glimpse of the “good old” Italian macho-culture. There were no Incels in the story, but I think it is still an interesting read.
Also, I recommend to watch a few videos on youtube about child marriages (e.g. in Bangladesh). Eye-opening.
alixmo @ 54:
To be honest, I’m not sure I could. Way too upsetting for me.
I think you’re right, that most of it is tied up in a culture of authoritarianism and dominance, a “macho” culture that simultaneously attracts these guys and makes them feel wretched about themselves because they don’t meet the macho ideal. Macho culture values extroverted personalities where they are mostly introverted; it favours physical pursuits over intellectual ones; etc. They are in the lowest position of the macho pecking order but no matter how low they were, they were told, at least as white men they were automatically better than any woman or [insert favourite slurs for people of colour and LGBT people here]. That is why they hate the social justice movement so much, because it threatens to take away that particular refuge from them. Of course, if they stepped away from this repellent mode of thinking altogether they’d probably be much happier people, but they’re too much invested in the idea of one day getting to wear the jackboot they’ve licked for so long to even think of doing that.
Akira MacKenzie @ 50:
For what it’s worth, Akira, you’re not alone. I’m a 45-year-old guy and I’ve never been in a romantic relationship. It’s… hard to talk about it feeling like I’m veering into self-pity or making light of your own experiences so feel free to tell me to fuck off or whatever. It started for me when I was a kid about 8 or 9, I got into reading, computers and stuff, started being a whole lot more sedentary, so I started putting on weight. Not much (I mean, I look back on the photographs now and wonder what the fuss was) but I started getting shit from family and teachers about it. I went through the whole thing in school of being picked last for sports week after week after week. It seems kind of trivial but I think it kind of breaks you as a person after a while, not least because the people doing it to you are trying in their own ham-fisted way to help, you know? I mean, if they’d been more obviously malevolent, I could’ve told them to fuck themselves and taken some pleasure in it. I had one therapist a few years back when I told them all this tell me I was overreacting, after all, I wasn’t “American fat”. Can you believe that?
I have women friends but because I’m so self-conscious about my weight, I’m always worried about “looming” or giving off creepy vibes around them.
As to the “get a hooker lol” suggestions, I mean, yeah, sure, if it was just a physical thing. Sex work is illegal in Ireland (though they changed the law here recently to the “Nordic Model” where it’s the john not the worker that gets busted) but it’s easy enough to get a plane to Amsterdam for a naughty weekend if I felt like it. I don’t feel like it because the thought of being physically intimate with another human being makes me nauseous. That’s how fucked up I’ve been left.
Did you know that the term “incel” was originally coined by a woman who wanted to use it as a kind of safe space for anyone who felt their relationships were a bit too few and far between to maybe be healthy? Until, of course, some dickheads decided to hijack it to hate on women. 😡