I don’t doubt they are very toxic. “Involuntary” and “celibate” tends to lead to a lot of anger and frustration. It’s the only equivalent to a pickup bar or frat party near closing. You’re mostly left with a bunch of frustrated drunk dudes who aren’t going home with girls at that point. That’s why there are always fights and broken furniture.
So…do you have more respect for PUAs than incels? Because to me, the toxic part is seeing women as a reward, not the part where you don’t think you have to work for it.
I’d say the incel part is also saying you shouldn’t have to work for the “reward.”
Well, yes. But only because I don’t really see anything worthwhile about the incel community.
The toxic part is seeing women as objects to be manipulated and used in order to satisfy your own needs. IMHO that leads to the sort of anger and resentment you see with incels, rapey guys and psychopaths.
Just wanting to have sex with lots of women isn’t inherently toxic. I’m sure there are plenty of women who are just interested in going out to the club to find some dude to have sex with for the night.
I’d like to ask you to step back from your assumptions and ask whether or not a male person and a female person are each being prompted to work the same way for what they want, and also whether it is structurally assumed that they want different things.
Bitterness and blaming another sex is infantile and unproductive, but we can learn useful stuff from asking what people are bitter about.
What assumptions was I resting on, for lack of a better term? I was just coming from the idea that the incels I’ve read and heard about have as a point of bitterness that they can’t easily have sex with the women they desire and that other men seem to do so easily. Is that incorrect? (I’m only familiar with male heterosexual incels, the term being used here for the extreme toxic involuntary celibates.)
nods
I have a sore spot there because although the word “incel” wasn’t in existence when I was a teenager, I was on the outside looking in and feeling quite left out. I wanted a girlfriend, a relationship. The prevailing message was that any male not having sex was either not doing the things you’re supposed to do to make it happen or had the personality of a botfly or a face and body that would repel a zombie.
I’ve never been in conversation with anyone who identifies as an Incel. But there’s a lot of dismissive rhetoric about them that amounts to “Sore losers, they’re all either not doing what you gotta do and expecting sex to drop into their laps or they are snottly pompous narcissistic losers or they are fat ugly repulsive pigs, and they act nice then get pissed when that doesn’t result in sex, and they’re bitter and hate women”.
Do you see why that has more than a faint echo for me?
OK but you know that the PUA community is largely about manipulating women into sex they don’t want to have? I guess if it were about self-improvement, even on a superficial level (get in shape, get a better job, learn to dress better, etc. in order to get women to like you) I could agree that it has some slight edge over the useless and toxic incel whining. But that’s not what it is.
I think it is important to see the courting-dating-flirting pageant as a structured institution, like the capitalism employer-employee thing. Presumably most of us in here don’t see the job game as inherently natural and blame anyone who complains about not being able to get a job, or being poor, or having shitty supervisors or egregious work conditions. Or, for that matter, people who complain about the slacker employees they’ve got to supervise and for whose conduct they’re held responsible by their own employers. We see the whole context as toxic for pretty much everyone, and we have room to sympathize for people in their everyday miseries without it having to be their horrible colleague’s fault OR their own fault. Even if we don’t have a clear working model in our heads for how it all ought to be set up different, you know??
With sex and sexuality, I think we’re still inclined to think of the interactive behaviors as natural, and hence either someone is a victim of Bad People or else they’re a whiny form of Bad Person themselves. But it’s a structured game, a social instittution (part of patriarchy to be blunt) and it isn’t particularly pleasant for a wide range of people. Both girls and boys find it frustrating and impersonal and hostile to what they want and need and hope to get out of sexuality and intimacy.
Now that post really hits it out of the park.
You’ve been on a roll for a few posts now, but this one really wins the thread.
The tough problem is that the System is more or less fixed. Any one of us can try to find a nicer spot within the System or try to work an angle within the System. And of course we’re welcome, in fact encouraged, to play the game straight up the middle with all the skill, aptitude, and fortitude we can muster. Which might not be much.
What we don’t practically have is an opportunity to change the System at a noticeable rate.
The blindness is to think that only you, or that only your gender/sex/whatever term, is being disserved by the current System. It disserves a sizeable fraction of everybody.
One frustrating, toxic part of incel ideology is the absolute conviction that struggling to get laid and/or find a relationship is exclusively a burden men bear. Women, from birth, can have any man they want just by crooking a finger.
This was so not my experience in my youth, until my early 20s, I desperately wanted a boyfriend and my libido was raging, but no one was interested. At the time, I thought it was because I was hideously fat and ugly; when I look at old pictures, I think I was pretty average looking, but my insecurities and social awkwardness were huge problems. And I got “friendzoned” like 3 separate times, where I had a very good male friend that I really liked and talked to all the time and nursed this enormous crush on, even as he talked to me about how I was awesome because I “wasn’t like other girls” and told me about his romantic adventures (I cringe to admit this, but I was very young). And my experiences were not unique. Lots of my friends were in a similar position. We never once thought of loneliness or unrequited love as a particularly gendered phenomenon. And I don’t think the culture did, either. Loads of stories and songs were about going home and discovering the girl next door, after sowing your oats. Or about hoping “someday he’ll see me”. It just wasn’t gendered.
But the Incel ideology holds it as a matter of faith that women have life on the “easy” setting, that any man they are interested in will initiate a relationship and they just have to wait until they do. Another part of this is that they don’t think women have sex drives, really. Sex is something women do as a favor for men: they may enjoy or it not, but they don’t think it’s like with men, that a woman might be actually sexually frustrated. So if you put that together, they think of women as like dogs in a manger: they control the pussy, and have the absolute ability to give or deny men whenever they want, but they don’t even appreciate or get much use out of this power, because sex is not as important to them. Add the standard misogyny, and what you get is a view that an inferior creature has this infuriating power over you without having to “pay” for it or even understand what they have. It’s like if in a household the child got to decide when the adults could eat, or something. And the things women do do–like dress nice or wear makeup or whatever are treated as deceptive and vain.
Again, thinking women find relationships just effortless and that we don’t have to develop social skills or put in any effort is infuriating. It only makes sense if all but the most attractive women are literally invisible to you, which may be the case. It also feeds into the weird idea that men deserve whatever because of what they DO and women deserve it because of what they ARE. We often use “effortlessly” to compliment women: effortlessly beautiful, effortlessly charming, effortlessly sympathetic. Women are understood as intuitive creatures, and if they don’t have those intuitions, it’s because they lack some essential feminine element. They aren’t quite women, really, and so irrelevant. In fact, if they try to enhance their “natural” beauty or whatever, they are liars and pretending to virtue they don’t have. So they resent women for not having to “do anything”, but don’t see how awful that actually is, to be seen as something with no agency.
^^^ Yeah, this. Nobody benefits from trying to position yourself as the only victim. Or the only category of victims. There’s enough misery to go around.
There’s a thread in Cafe Society discussing the PUA phenomenon specifically.
As I have said there, when I got into that PUA stuff in the early days, at that time it was purely self-improvement advice. And, since there were many women and gay men doing the course, wasn’t focused on women but general attraction.
It could be that the movement became more toxic after I stopped following it. e.g. I never saw the VH-1 show. I’m skeptical though that women can be “bamboozled” into sex with manipulative words.
I’m not sure I agree with this part of your post. I suppose it varies by group and sub-culture, but I feel like I’ve known many men and women who are unlucky in love, and I haven’t known them to be viewed as bad people even when they’re not viewed as victims. It seems quite normal to bemoan the dating game as inherently awful for everyone. If you feel you’ve been unfairly pegged as a bad person for being unable to get a date, you have my sympathy. But I wonder if perhaps you’re over-applying some of what you’re hearing from women responding to men who aren’t just unlucky in love and unhappy about it, but who take out their frustration on women. I do not believe that a person who simply can’t get a date is necessarily doing anything wrong. But a guy who proclaims that women only want to date jerks, for example, might hear from me that he’s probably not as nice a guy as he thinks, and he’s probably driving women away with his toxic beliefs and behavior. Sometimes I might be more snarky and less clear in expressing that, and a genuinely nice guy might overhear and think that I mean that any guy who can’t get a date is probably at fault for his own loneliness. But that’s not what I meant, at all.
Not for being unable to get a date. For whining about it. For complaining about how the game is set up.
“Oh, you probably only drool over the ones who are out of your league. Or you think if you’re nice and kind to a woman she’s supposed to invite you into your bed. Or you never bothered to learn how to slither your way into a gal’s pants. Fucking wanker. The ones who complain have only themselves to blame”.
Late ETA: If you see other people who whine about it receiving this kind of response, you internalize the crit whether you’ve actually vocally whined about it or not. It’s a way of keeping us all silenced about the situation.
I get you, I’ve been there, and after reading these other similarly excellent posts I understand what you were and are saying quite a bit better now. Thank you!
I can believe the PUA stuff started out as benign self-improvement; after all, the incel community started out as a benign support group (founded by a woman, no less.) But what I saw of it in the height of its popularity was seriously gross, borderline rapey. “Negging,” or chipping away at a woman’s confidence to make yourself more attractive to her, was one major pillar; anyone who has worked with DV victims can easily see the parallel to how an abuser starts out. There was also a strong emphasis on physical touch as a way of escalating an encounter faster than the woman would otherwise consent to; I think their term for that was “kino” or something. And there was a lot of stuff about verbally and physically taking charge of the situation in a way that didn’t give her an opportunity to say “no.” I remember an exchange on one of those message boards where a group of these cretins were Monday morning quarterbacking a guy’s failure to seal the deal with a girl he met at a club. He had done everything right–insulting her by implying she was underdressed for the venue, bullying her into accepting a drink she didn’t want, putting his hands on her and steering her out of the club to go back to his place–until he screwed up by letting her follow him in her car instead of insisting they both go in his. She didn’t make it to his place and texted him to apologize that she got lost and so went home because she was tired. Of course everyone knew that was just an excuse. They weren’t chiding him for missing a chance to connect with a girl who really wanted to sleep with him, but for allowing one who clearly didn’t to get away.
Not to get all gender-essentialist here, but broadly speaking, women don’t do this kind of shit to men. Women get sad sometimes when men don’t want them, but we don’t form online communities to talk about how to circumvent consent. We don’t shoot up fraternities to avenge our feelings of rejection. We do speak out against toxic male behavior, and get a bunch of whataboutism in return.
I hear you. And I can believe there’s some thoughtlessness on both sides. Women accustomed to seeing men complain about not being able to get laid, only to learn that they’re exclusively chasing the most beautiful women, or that they still haven’t introduced themselves to the woman they’re complaining won’t sleep with them, might get lazy about giving the benefit of the doubt to the umteenth guy who makes the same complaint, without any evidence he’s doing anything wrong. There’s also the possibility that some of the exchanges you’ve seen are men asking for advice, or at least women interpreting the whining as a request for advice, and responding accordingly. It’s a famously gendered trope that women complain to ask for sympathy and men try to solve the problem, but I think both genders are susceptible to both failing to communicate what they want when they’re venting, and failing to ascertain whether advice would be welcomed before offering it.
On the other hand, some of the men you see complaining and getting smacked in return might be tipping their hands in ways you don’t notice. In other words, the women might not be responding to the bare facts of 1) man can’t get a date, and 2) man expresses frustration, but rather to a subtle 3) man, in expressing frustration, fails to clearly articulate that the dating game is harmful and toxic for everyone, and instead implies that women hold all the power and wield it cruelly and unfairly. Just because a dog whistle is out of your hearing range doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a sound.
ETA: I would also be careful about ascribing intent, as your last sentence seems to do.
I alluded earlier to responses that male whiners get that includes “Well you probably didn’t bother to learn how to do the things you gotta do as a man to make the sex happen (you useless whiny wanker, you)”. The specifics of “the things you gotta do to make sex happen” are essentially the pickup artist manipulative intrusive invasive stuff. So we get told a lot that whether we like behaving like this or not, it’s stuff that males have got to learn or else don’t whine about being left out.
The assumption is that even if what you want is an ongoing mutual-caring in-love relationship, this is the boy role in the script. The girls will try to slow you down without pushing you away if they’re interested in you in that way. You can’t go forth saying (as the girls might say) “I want to get to know you better first and see if I really like you, I want sex but I want it to be with someone I like and might want to stay with” – since the girls aren’t doing pickup artist things towards YOU – and if you go around expressing “I want someone to like me” (first) that comes across as needy and pathetic.
There’s been a lot of excellently written testimonial about the double-binds and damned-if-you-do-or-don’t aspects of the girl role and girl situation, written by women who’ve had it up to here with the situation. It seems to have improved things for all of us that they explained this and we managed to understand what girls are being put through. And to stop judging and labeling.
This is a great and illuminating post (and complements AHunter’s posts). The gender roles in dating culture make things more difficult than they have to be for everybody. Incels could, if they weren’t choads, put their efforts toward breaking down those gender roles, instead of toward hating on women for some fantasy version of how easy women have it.