I think any group description, whether chosen by the people in it or applied from the outside, should evoke something in us aside from ridicule and contempt. If plural numbers of people exhibit a certain pattern, however awful or regrettable, we should study it from the standpoint that some set of experiences and situations has the result of shaping a significant number of people into being that way. And if it constitutes a social problem, just hating on them as some flavor of Bad People isn’t going to fix it, whereas maybe, just maybe, gaining a better understanding of how it develops could lead to enlightening them or creating a different pathway for them to be.
And “Social Justice Warrior.” What’s wrong with fighting for social justice?
There’s plenty of good people who’d call themselves white, but not many who’d call themselves Aryan.
Yeah, “Incel” is a term that’s self-applied, not a blanket term applied by society. So it encompasses some sort of inability to get laid, as well as a certain set of attitudes about it/about women. In particular the idea that they’re “involuntarily” celibate- they want to get laid, but something (i.e. women) are preventing that.
Merely being celibate despite your best efforts isn’t the same thing. Most of us have been there at some point in our lives, but weren’t “incels”.
Right, it’s called “married.”
(just a little joke)
There’s a big difference there, however. “Virtue signalling,” in practice, is not used for anything bad. It’s an insult towards those who believe something you don’t and are willing to bring it up.
Someone asking “What’s wrong with virtue signalling” likely isn’t someone who misunderstands the term. They’re making a point about how the things that get labeled virtue signalling don’t tend to actually be bad things. They’re deconstructing the idea.
But “incel” is not like that. It’s not an insulting word created by others to attack people or invalidate their views. It is a self-identifying term. Deconstructing it in that way doesn’t make sense, since the term is not generally used except to refer to those who self-identify. It is not a generic term used for any person you dislike who is a virgin.
“Gooood incel.” (SNAP) “Ow!!!”
But there is always a negative connotation. It’s always an allegation of ostentation, whether or not you think it’s justified. (And clearly it’s not always an unjustified allegation, even if it is most often used by the right to attack progressives.)
The point relevant to this thread is that it is an established idiom that means more than just the meaning of its component words.
It certainly has been on this board, in a direct parallel to this thread.
No one that I’m aware of says or thinks that guys who are lonely and/or sexually frustrated are necessarily bad people. There is no debate here, @Velocity. The “incel” group and phenomenon is very bad and misogynistic; lonely and/or sexually frustrated men are not necessarily bad or misogynistic.
Do incels get good Hodgkins or bad Hodgkins?
Right- virtue signaling is basically someone pointing out that someone is essentially engaging in theater w.r.t. their beliefs/positions on some issue, for the purpose of showing how conservative, PC, whatever they are. It’s all about being seen espousing a particular viewpoint, which is odious to a lot of people, regardless of the viewpoint.
Being an incel is something you choose to be, because it’s a self-applied label.
Not sure if you frequent Reddit, but I’d say that 95% of the time, “incel” is used as an insult on Reddit to attack others. It’s very rarely used as self-identifying.
That may have been the origin, but it doesn’t prevent others from applying it themselves. The incels got together online and showcased these attitudes, other people look at that and hate it, they learn what the term means, oh look these other people have similar characteristics, I hate them for different reasons, incel as insult for a different reason.
The fact that it was originally self-applied doesn’t make that a constant state. In fact, the thread is applying incel to people who are not self-applying, so it seems the original usage is moot.
There are multiple incel subreddits for people who identify themselves as such. (And they usually get shutdown as they eventually become havens of hate). And when someone calls someone an incel, it’s not meant to mean “you don’t have sex.” It means “you’re a hateful little person.”
I suppose some might use it as an insult, but I think the point of the thread is that it’s NOT just a general-purpose term for people who aren’t getting laid, but who want to. The OP was mistaken.
Incel is both a self applied label and one applied by others as an insult. Nonetheless, it is not a phrase that consists of two innocent /accurate words in proximity. Oh, Bob? Yeah he’s not having sex, but not through choice, so he’s an incel. That’s not what it means in either sense, whether embraced as a label by the recipient or targeted at someone else.
The term incel means a toxic attitude toward the opposite sex, almost always by men toward women, and towards the same sex who is getting laid freely and with wild abandon -or, at least, has the opportunity to engage in sexual intercourse. Stacy, Chad, Tyrone- those people. Some incels may be women, hence the qualifier, but… Yeah. Generally men.
If people are getting “bogged down by semantics” it’s because the word is being used wrong at the onset of the thread. There are no good incels. Are there good people who don’t have sex through no choice of their own? Of course! But they aren’t incels.
Yes they are. They are incels.
This is the kind of Internet parsing that doesn’t fly in the real world. These sorts of boundaries aren’t enforceable in the real world. Incel, involuntarily celibate. Yeesh. Yes these other people are incels. It’s there in the root of the word. This idea that “look on Wikipedia, it’s only applicable to this particular subset, you can’t apply it to other people” it’s not holding, despite however much you’d like your Internet parsing to be the law of the land. It isn’t.
Then you’re fine with the white guy from South Africa who has moved to Boston calling himself an “African American?”
Is this the same real world where saying that things are a dime a dozen implies that you can buy a dozen of them for a dime?
The fact that you are not familiar with the usage of this word (or apparently even the concept of an idiom) does not mean that everyone else is equally unfamiliar and that we are deriving semantics from Wikipedia. If people are referencing dictionaries or Wikipedia these are descriptivist data points to demonstrate to people unfamiliar with the word that there is consensus on usage.
So we’re basically rehashing the “no, the Nazis weren’t actually socialists” thing again?
ETA: Ack, inadvertently Godwin’d the thread. Not too sorry about it, though.