Except for the fact that you have to be low on hit points for it to work.
Sounds like part of the Deep (Sleep) State!
If you’re too scared of inflation to pront money in the midern world, the slogan could always be “Have gnu, will travel”.
Media skews a lot of things. One of them is sex and relationship patterns. If I were to believe TV and movies, after a break up a person is then subjected to the “brutal” singles scene of a string of bad dates and one night stands. “Loneliness” is more often than not expressed as a person complaining to their best friends about how annoying the past 5 people they had sex with were and how they can’t find “the one”.
I would imagine if you were the sort of person who literally had no one to socialize with and no where to socialize, you would see this on TV and might assume that is reality.
What is definitely fictional is that a total choad like George Costanza could date 47 mostly attractive women in Manhattan (including Marissa Tomei) over the course of Seinfeld’s nine year run.
There’s a heck of a lot of toxic culture associated with the incel movement, particularly in the US. And indeed, I would never use the word.
But there’s also an element here that it is the last group that you can beat up on. Our culture does still see being attractive to women as a desirable goal for men, as something other men should envy, and that the inverse therefore makes you a “loser”.
And it’s one of those “silent majority” situations IMO. For every noisy, misogynist, entitled prick, there are probably dozens of guys just quietly lonely.
Plus of course there are plenty of guys who are jerks but nonetheless attractive to women (don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe being a “bad guy” makes you more attractive. But oftentimes it is outweighed by other factors like physical attractiveness, confidence, social status etc etc)
Don’t get too carried away with the cultural relativism here. Being attractive to potential partners is not some arbitrary cultural invention.
And don’t conflate the bigotry of misogyny with just being mean to people. I’m not advocating being mean to people for not having desirable traits, that makes you a jerk. But it’s not in the same category as bigotry.
I can only speak for myself, but during my decade and a half or so of being one of those quietly lonely guys I never felt beat up on. My friends were largely sympathetic, and spent hours upon hours listening to me go “what’s wrong with me?” Dunno how much the Interwebz have changed things. I’ve been married since 1996, so I’ve had a different set of challenges (and dealt with them more successfully) since then.
Two points:
- I didn’t go into it for the sake of brevity, but I was trying to allude to the shift that has happened in Western culture, and how it is still ongoing.
For a long time it was acceptable to depict women in the media and fiction as trophies and totally objectify them. If you were a winner then you “won” women also.
Then, going into the 80s, that started to become unacceptable, thankfully, however it was still the case that in fiction the hero always got the girl. (This might be part of the “nice guy” resentment some guys had following this…they thought that all they needed to do to be attractive was not kick the dog and women would come to them.)
Thankfully society has largely moved on from all this, but I still think there is an undercurrent of men being judged on how successful they are with women. It’s not as overt, but it’s still there.
- I think you might have misread my post too. Being attractive is obviously not a cultural invention. How society views attraction and how much social status and other effects it might confer is the cultural factor.
Treating women as property - sure, but that’s a much more specific thing.
But my point is that general desirability to partners is an objectively positive attribute (and universally recognized as such). So judging people harshly on this criterion, while it might make you a jerk, is not bigotry. You cannot treat all value judgments as bigotry, or you dilute the meaning of the word. It might make me an elitist jerk if I prefer the company of intelligent, well educated people; but disliking stupid people does not make me a bigot.
Whereas misogyny or racism is bigotry because it treats “being a woman” or “being a POC” as an inherently negative characteristic (or inherently associated with negative traits), when it is not.
But I didn’t use the word “bigot”.
Put it like this: in our society it’s becoming less and less acceptable to “punch down” and make fun of people who are worse off than you. One of the exceptions to this is that it’s still largely OK to chuckle at men who can’t get dates. e.g. men in fiction who can’t get dates, unless they are the protagonist, are unlikely to be looked at in a sympathetic way.
Now, part of the rationalization of this has been that those guys are all entitled “nice guy” jerks. And of course some are. But many aren’t.
And I never claimed you did. I was pointing out that while it’s jerkish to be mean to people who fall short on desirable attributes, it’s a qualitatively different thing than bigotry.
People can stop being jerks about it, but it’s always going to be the case that desirable attributes are, well, desirable. “People who can’t get dates” is not a protected class, and never should be.
Nor did I say it should be. I don’t think your responses say anything counter to my points.
If people are promoting fat acceptance and trans acceptance, also perhaps implying that men in particular should be open to dating trans women and are bigots if they don’t (had a very thread on this here) I would think that yes, it’s going to be very difficult for those same people to turn around and care about men that can’t get dates.
“Sexy guys” is no more a built-in biological automatic than “sexy girls”.
In my particular experience (because I was slim and able-bodied and vain and stuff, admittedly, and privileged accordingly) it had little to do with my body not being sufficient. It was all about my behavioral patterns not being sufficient. You know the incels drill, so let’s charge me with the obvious, to get that out of the way:
a) No, I wasn’t only interested in the physically cutest female people. Honestly, I was affected by a lot of articles and essays about how the people you don’t tend to regard as sexy at first encounter might turn out to be the best partners, and I’d read that in 8th grade, and I was lonely and left out so I was very open to maybe the most wonderful girl was someone similarly left out because she didn’t look conventionally cute and stuff.
b) I never made friends with female people (and/or pretended to) in order to use friendship as a strategy to get into their pants. It was more that I liked them as people and also wanted to get into their pants and I kinda figured they knew male people were horny and hopeful, so if any of them were interested in me that way, they’d let me know.
c) I only gradually came to realize that for female people my age, to be overt about wanting sex to happen was at least as marked down socially as for male people to not embrace masculinity as socially defined. I still kinda thought 'Well, I’m a boy who’s always been like one of the girls, they’ll be looking for someone like me because we’re pariahs together". I mean, I really expected the girls who got cast and reviled as sluts and whores to come looking for guys like me.
e) Incels blame the girl folks, like the girls somehow magically (unlke the poor guys who didn’t embrace masculinity edicts) weren’t under any social pressures to behave and compete with established frameworks. I sympathize a little bit (but not much because feminist testimonials were available)… but for my own part I moved beyond that pretty quickly. I realized it was a communications issue. The girls who were reviled for not being like they were expected to be had no reason to believe the boys who were also reviled for not being like we were expected to be were fantasizing about them and wishing they’d come get us.
f) We (female and male alike) were so worried that how we were would make us nonsexy. Or at least nonsexy in any kind of hetero context. It was so hard to gain any confidence. And confidence is sexy. And without it it is hard to do things (or respond instead of freezing up when things get done, to be honest).
Not wanting to be judged or measured against their peers while at the same time wanting to reap the rewards of unearned success sounds like a very “Millennial” phenomenon to me. It’s like the same thing with their careers. No one wants to “pay their dues” or have to compete for coveted positions. They just want to show up and get handed the big responsibility, unproven.
Well they don’t give out vaginas as participation trophies.
The main theme of those 80 movies was usually one where the plucky underdog or outsider fought against the odds through grit and hard work (often presented in a “training montage”). The hero won the girl because he “won”. He earned her affections through demonstrating his character (which was often suspect in the beginning). Plus he probably worked out a bit too.
When I was single, getting laid took a lot of WORK. We didn’t have apps. We had to spend time going out to bars and clubs and parties and strike up conversations with strangers. We had to be confident.
We had to wear the right clothes and not wear the wrong ones. We had to have a cool haircut. We had to go to the gym and work out. We had to be charming and funny and clever. We had to pursue interesting (or at least lucrative) careers. There was even some networking. It was a lot of work!
I don’t know any INCELS personally, so I can’t be sure. But I suspect that most have a lot of issues going on where not getting laid is probably just one symptom.
Well I don’t see the need to make it a “battle of the generations” or anything.
And both the views “As long as I’m a nice guy, women will come to me” and “It takes hard work, determination and character to get the girl” are both wrong to about the same degree IMO.
If you’re someone, like me, that did not start out with natural social skills, then yes it may take self-discipline and bravery to acquire those skills. But there are also guys for whom it comes easy and are very successful with women (and/or general social interactions) even if they’re hopeless at just about every other aspect of their life.
And even for someone like me, it wasn’t like hard work was a good thing in itself – it’s only hard work if you start from a bad place, ultimately it shouldn’t feel like work.
Vaginas aren’t any kind of trophy, and they aren’t being “given out” to anyone.
This kind of attitude towards sex and women has much MORE to do with whether someone is an incel or not than whether that someone has sex or not.
It’s only a “generation thing” in that previous generations didn’t grow up with the internet being a big influence in their life or part of their dating activities. “INCEL” wasn’t a thing when I was growing up. It was just “loser who couldn’t get laid”.
Which to be honest, was probably most guys to one degree or another.
The concept of an INCEL online community means that instead of being out there trying to improve their game (such as it is), these guys can now commiserate online and feed off each other’s negativity. Reinforcing their identity and self-image as “loser who can’t get laid” in a bitter feedback loop.
At least the PUA community is trying to learn skills that might help them overcome their problem.
Yep, and I’m also too old to be part of that phenomenon. I only know “incel” from threads like this one and reading a few articles.
The info in the articles strongly suggests that these guys who label themselves “incel” are very toxic, entitled and bitter. I don’t know how well it actually represents all of the group, but if I were someone struggling to get a date today, I wouldn’t use that label for myself because of all this baggage.
This. An incel is not just someone who doesn’t have sex but wants to, any more than a Nazi is anyone who lives in a nation and is also a part of society. It’s an ideology.