Yeah, it’s not like women have never spoken out or written about what their side of it is like!
Wow, the more I hear about the PUA crowd the worse it sounds. And it sounded pretty bad to begin with. I’m not exaggerating when I say that if I had fallen in with that crowd when I was already depressed about not dating I would have probably ended up in the psych ward. Not that I would have ever gotten involved in the first place; the philosophy runs too counter to who I am.
The original incel community I could have possibly gotten involved with. I think it started in the late nineties? I met Ms. P in 1995 and we got married in 1996, so I don’t think I missed it by much. While I mostly blamed myself, I could have gotten to the point of complaining about how the game was set up. I whined plenty. The other things I was bad at (higher math, mechanical stuff) I could pretty easily avoid. It reached the point where I said (not just to myself, but a therapist and the therapy group I was part of) that it just wasn’t going to happen for me and I needed to learn to live with that. Would I have learned to live with it? I never got to find out, because within a week or two of saying it out loud I was approached by my future wife. There was some dumb luck involved, being in the right place at the right time. I don’t think I did anything different; even after we’d gotten together and agreed to go out again when she got back from a trip she was taking it was very difficult for me to make the phone call. It wasn’t as if I’d had success getting second dates, or hadn’t seen women show what I thought was reciprocated interest when it wasn’t there. I was honest about who I was, and she was patient. She had tons of dating/relationship experience, while I had less than a lot of high schoolers.
Did I learn anything? I suspect the answer is no. When I dream that I’m single it’s always a nightmare. It’s worse than the “in school again” dream. After I had it enough times, though, I would think to myself “hey, I haven’t been single for decades” and wake up. The point is, I don’t believe I would be any more able to “play the game” now if I suddenly found myself single. That isn’t even taking into account the trauma of losing my spouse.
Is it fair to call extreme anxiety/awkwardness/cluelessness a disability? I hesitate to use the word for my situation. Certainly it isn’t something for which accommodation is possible.
I think that’s a pretty toxic way to look at relationships. The courting-dating-flirting thing is at its core about expressing to someone else that you’re interested in connecting with them, spending some time to see if you’re compatible and actually getting to know them, and finally building beyond that to a deeper romantic relationship (or, at any stage in the process, discovering an incompatibility and breaking it off).
Maybe you could say this about a particular dating arena, like Tinder or trying to pick up hookups at bars. But the idea that the whole concept of meeting someone, and interacting with them casually at first and more seriously later in order to determine whether you are both interested in a romantic relationship and are actually compatible with each other? I don’t think most of “we” see “the whole context as toxic for pretty much everyone”, no.
I agree that this view, that the entire romance-seeking interaction is inherently toxic, is part of the package of ideas that make up the Incel ideology. I would argue that it is neither widely held outside Incel circles, nor healthy.
Babale, your mileage may certainly vary.
In my life I discovered that the way to meet potential partners was to explicitly search outside the normative people-meeting modalities, in places where people could express that conventional hetero gender roles were absolutely not compatible with who they were. At times that has meant radical feminists, at other times nonbinary or genderqueer people, and sometimes has meant countercultural norm-noncompliant folks, but has always meant a starting point of discussing such things as expectations, roles, etc, and a laundry list of the unhappy experiences we’ve each had with the courting-flirting-dating theatricals.
It’s not toxic to recognize that the dating roleplay in our society is riddled with toxicity. But what is toxic to one person may be less poisonous to someone else.
I would say that your experience is pretty outside the norm for how many people meet.
Well it sounds like the whole thing got perverted (in both senses of the word) then.
Just as a FTR, both “negging” and “kino” were concepts in PUA when I was learning it. But they didn’t mean the same thing as your descriptions. At least not then.
<long aside about PUA concepts…>
The point with “negging” was that physically attractive people may be used to having strangers give them compliments or praise immediately. So you could distinguish yourself by not being so immediately complimentary – not insulting them, certainly not making them feel bad, just a kind of playful tease. If it sounds like an insult then you’re doing it wrong.
With “kino” the point was, in movies or whatever, people have zero physical contact then at some point, usually at the end, they kiss. That can happen IRL…but can also mean a bit of a sterile date followed by rejection when you go in for the kiss.
So the idea is that instead of that, you throw in incidental touches, but just the kind of touch you would be comfortable with a friend, or your mom, or whatever touching you in conversation e.g. a tap of your elbow.
And you notice the feedback – did (s)he touch you back? Is (s)he starting to stand closer to you? If so, you can move from a 1 microsecond touch to a 2 microsecond touch. And so you very gradually go from taps to more intimate touches based on his/her reciprocation.
I would be horrified to think this concept had evolved to just become “see how much sexual assault you can get away with”
Addressing @Babale vs @Ahunter a couple posts ago …
I might argue that rather than using the binary label “toxic” we make an analogy to fresh- and salt-water fishes. Saltwater fish do well in the ocean and will die in a lake. Freshwater fish will do the opposite. And there are some species confined to “brackish” waters which are semi-salty.
Different species have greater or less tolerance for less-than-ideal salinity. But for darn sure, if forced to live in a salinity far from their norm, they won’t be thriving at their best.
The conventional meeting / greeting / dating / mating game for people is a particular metaphorical salinity. If your individual personality, looks, anxiety levels, or gender style are by luck a good fit for your local culture’s “salinity”, you’ll thrive and it’ll feel pretty effortless. If not, you’ll not. Perhaps you’ll be a little less successful. Perhaps you’ll be an abject failure, despite monster levels of effort.
Humans being a lot smarter and more vocal than fish, someone embedded in a “salinity” that is ill-suited to themselves is far more likely to blame the game than blame themselves. More goal-directed effective personalities will try to learn the rules better, do self-improvement, develop self-discipline in teh face of repeated rejection, etc. As @mijin explained about his encounters w early forms of PUA. Less effective personalities may give up in quiet desperation as @P-man has shared he was on the verge of doing when his deus ex machina showed up to save his day.
Others, like @AHunter3, call the local salinity for what it is: unsuited to him and in fact harmful to him. And humans being creative, some of those folks go on to join the other misfits who’ve carved out small pockets of other-salinities more hospitable to their other-selves. But that also takes admitting to yourself “I am a misfit at least partially”. Which can be a bridge to far for many folks.
Which leaves us with another group. The archetypal INCEL we’re all bashing with varying degrees of vigor. Those folks may choose to lash out at the unfavorable salinity and at everyone else who’s seemingly doing just fine where they can’t. It’s a self-centered, if not selfish POV, and ignorant, often deliberately so. But that too is normal human behavior at least statistically speaking. Regrettable, but normal.
I mean, that’s exactly my point. Like I said, if you want to say that Tinder is toxic, or that the bar hookup scene is toxic, that’s probably valid. But the vast majority of dating occurs outside these environments. Most people meet their partners through work, mutual friends, school, or other communities they are a part of such as church. While online dating is more common nowadays, even young people are still much more likely to meet their partner offline.
Even if you’re one of the people who DID meet their partner online or at a bar, once you’re past the hookup/first IRL date phase, you still need to transition from this initial meetup to a long term relationship, which likely means texting, hanging out, going to restaurants, etc - in other words, the exact same sort of dating those of us who met our partner through a mutual friend or at work had to do.
Not exactly, no, but I concede your point anyhow. LSLGuy expressed the situation better than either of us have, I think.
I’m definitely atypical. I grew up identifying with the girls and I’m sure that shaped my priorities and whatnot, as far as what I wanted to get out of the dating situation, in addition to which girls were the people (generally speaking) that I wanted as friends so I was quite nervous about offending any of the people I wanted as friends, and overall didn’t feel comfortable being the one to first indicate sexual interest.
Someone who simply happens to resemble the cultural expectations associated with their sex is probably going to find the environment less intolerant of who they are, even if they too sometimes find aspects of it reductionistic or confining in some fashion.
I found getting past first dates very challenging. I’m sure part of it was the same thing that kept me from getting dates in the first place, and another part was that first dates were rare; I didn’t have much practice. There was also an instance where I had a long term friendship with a woman where we hung out as often as we would have if we had been dating. I would have been interested in moving beyond that, but I enjoyed hanging out as friends and didn’t think she had any interest in going beyond being friends. I only found out after Ms. P and I started dating that she had been interested in dating me. The funny thing is that I met my future wife at this friend’s birthday party. Said friend attended our wedding, and we’re friends (all three of us) to this day.
I was definitely a saltwater fish in fresh water, and had decided I should probably get out before it killed me (not literally, but I was in bad shape).
I was in HS/College in the 90s, and I felt like “dating” was entirely a Hollywood thing. People hung out in groups. Sometimes two people would start making out, and after a while, having sex. Then there would be some weird period where it wasn’t clear what the relationship was, and often some drama about whether they were a couple. After a while, you maybe moved in together, then after a while, you got married.
I don’t think I lived in a world where people would ask someone out on a date until my mid-20s at least. But even then, it seemed like it was mostly hang out with friends/hang out alone/have sex/announce relationships. On-line dating has changed that, I think, because there is a need for semi-formal meetings in the process. But anyone in my generation who was asking out random girls was doing it wrong. If they thought the “Chads” were getting laid that way they didn’t understand at all.
If you want to call out the bar-hop-hookup-culture for being… if not toxic, than “the wrong salinity for most people” - great, I agree.
If you want to call out our culture generally, or shows like How I Met Your Mother or Friends specifically, for presenting this culture as How Things Are And How They Ought To Be in a way that’s toxic to those who don’t fit that mold, then great, I agree with that too.
What I disagree with is the idea that this represents how dating actually works in the real world. It isn’t made up from whole cloth and certainly people do act that way, but I would argue that it’s actually pretty rare, and the vasy majority of people in relationships DID meet their partner through places that are “outside the normative people-meeting modalities”.
To use your analogy, @AHunter3 is pointing at an incredibly salty puddle (maybe one of those undersea lakes that don’t mix with the rest of the ocean because of how salty they are), and claiming that it shows how inherently broken dating is; but in reality, despite a number of admittedly popular movies and shows that portray the whole ocean in this way, most dating doesn’t take place anywhere near that puddle at all.
I like the salinity analogy, but I also think there are pockets of actual toxic waste runoff that we all would do well to avoid. For example, the idea that women lose value by having sex while men gain it is not something that just works better for some people than for others; it’s toxic. It’s actually toxic to both men and women; it hurts men by depriving them of an opportunity for real intimacy by viewing the interaction as an adversarial conquest rather than a chance to connect for mutual benefit. But let’s not be too relativist here: like most of the toxicity around dating, it hurts women more.
Online dating was an interesting experience for me. In some ways, it reinforced certain gender roles. In the beginning, I tried to look through men’s profiles and reach out to the ones that interested me, but I soon became overwhelmed with all the messages I was receiving and defaulted to the passive role of accepting or rejecting advances. In other ways, it made me feel less “chased” and more in control, because I could take my time looking over a guy’s profile before deciding whether to respond, and I could more easily filter out the guys with sexist ideas about dating. To bring it back around to the analogy, online dating may have been a bit saltier than I’m wired for, but it made it easier to see where the storm drains were.
I admit to thinking this some when I was younger. But I found that my wife is surprised that I couldn’t have any woman when I was younger. Plus, back during traditional dating times, she thought that I had it good in that I could pick up the phone and ask for a date, while I thought she had it good since she didn’t have to pick up the phone and get rejected.
But I don’t think that attitude makes people incels. Back when I lived in that hotbed of celibacy, MIT, we were frustrated but we never once thought that women owed us anything, or that we deserved women falling into bed with us. If the tag existed back then all of use would have rejected it.The sense of entitlement they seem to have is the distinguishing feature as far as I can tell.
I don’t know. Even if you didn’t think women owed you anything, if you thought they never felt loneliness or unrequited love or sexual frustration, that they never got “friendzoned” or had trouble finding romantic partners that they were interested in, I think that’s the beginning of being an incel. It’s so othering: no woman could ever understand my pain, because this experience of wanting someone and not being able to have them only happens to men. It’s easy to see how that would lead to bitterness and resentment, and also make it difficult to find a relationship, if you think of girls as that different.
There’s a really interesting take on this from a trans guy on how socially isolating being seen as male can be:
None of us ever went that far. In college we were friends with women who lived in the dorm next door. We thought they might be frustrated but not miserable, just like us. We never poured out our feelings to them, and they didn’t pour out their feelings to us. But we were probably all on the scale. This was MIT, after all.
And back then, believe it or not, everyone was looking for relationships not one night stands. Everyone did eventually find a partner. We could have done better, for sure, but I really don’t think we were on the first step to inceldom.
I’ve learned an awful lot by being married and having two daughters.
“[M]ost cis men probably experience chronic emotional malnutrition.” This is brilliant.
Great insight. I do remember feeling incredibly lonely, at times, when I was single. And I remember seeking out team sports at least partially for the camaraderie. Some of my best non-romantic and non-familial memories come from team sports (and a few from the Navy).
My wife has said the same thing. She believes there have been tons of women who would have wanted to date me. My feeling has been that there have been very few (to the point that actually encountering one is extremely unlikely). The truth is probably somewhere in between. I will say that, in two years living in a city of around 200,000, while in a graduate program that was majority female, I didn’t go on a single date. Of course our spouses would probably say, “if you were really such a loser do you think I would have married you?” 