Symbols of success are totally subjective and close to 100% about ego. The hard fact is that society and the working world are undergoing monumental shifts. By necessity there will be changes required in the perceptions of what a good job looks like, success, AND the symbols of success.
We live in changing times and things are shifting much more quickly than in times past. I don’t see a lot of distance between, ‘I’m a nice guy, where’s my woman?’, and ‘I got a degree, where’s my great job!’, or ‘I can’t even afford a house/car!’, part expectation, part entitlement but out of sync with today’s world in a lot of ways.
It’s going to be really hard for some people to recognize things have changed and so must their expectations. And with big changes in the fundamental structure of work and society there will always be collateral damage, some people are going to get left behind. And some will be bitter and angry.
A sense of entitlement always can be traced back to specific messaging a person has received. A person will likely feel entitled to something if they have not been taught that thing is hard to acquire or achieve for the average person.
For a lot of Boomers, getting a good job after college was not that hard. Was it easy? No. But for the average person, it wasn’t that hard. Working in retail didn’t require you pass a personality test. You didn’t need two-three years of experience to get an entry level job. You didn’t have to have a social media presence just to make it to the second round of interviews. You were only competing for jobs against people in your city or state. Not people from the other side of the country, let alone folks in other countries.
So when Boomers scold their 20-something kid for not being able to land a good job like they were able to get as a 20-something back in the 1970s and 1980s, they help to foster a sense of entitlement and bitterness in their kid. Whether they intend to or not.
I think Incels feel entitled and bitter because they believe that “everyone else” can find someone just by rolling out of bed. Pussy and dick fall out of the sky for everyone else, but not for them. And why would they not believe this? Every image they see in the media reinforces this notion. Their parents tell them “to just be yourself and you will find someone”. They see “ugly” girls getting hollered at on social media the same as the “hot” ones (always glossing over the fact that the “ugly” girls still make some got-damn effort but whatevs). On TV they see schubbly stupid manchildren characters paired with good-looking put-together women characters. In movies they see the hero always getting the girl(props to Into the Spiderverse for deviating from this trope). The entitlement and bitterness are understandable when one considers how the average young person is programmed by the environment around him.
So I agree that the Incel’s expectations need to change. But I think non-Incels can help with this a lot.
The thing is, though, that these altered expectations apply to young women just as much as young men. But we’re not seeing a female “incel” movement devoted to taking out their frustration and bitterness on malevolent denigration of the opposite sex.
Young women are constantly getting hit with a lot of demoralizing programming too, of course. “Lose weight so you’re not such a fat cow.” “Look at all these beautiful women choosing a bridal gown and you don’t even have a boyfriend, you pathetic dog.” “Don’t get drunk or hang out with strangers and risk getting yourself raped, you irresponsible slut.” “Don’t be all paranoid and unfriendly to some guy just because he’s a stranger, you neurotic bitch.” I’m not saying that guys don’t suffer, I just don’t think that a guy’s frustration at not being able to live out some action-hero fantasy in real life is a uniquely devastating degree of suffering.
Well, I concur that it’s our responsibility as a society to give all of today’s young people a helping hand in their adjustment to our rapidly changing world. I just don’t see why our attention should be focused on the ones devoting themselves to spewing vile threats and smears against women. I don’t think the self-identified incels are the people most deserving of our help here, although if some of them manage to deprogram and reform themselves as a result of healthier social programming for young people in general, that would certainly be a good thing.
Funny story: I was in a position not far removed from option b. Back in the day I used to hang out with this very attractive woman. (Seriously, think Meg Ryan or Cameron Diaz. She got offered modeling contracts.) She made it very clear that there wasn’t going to be any physical contact beyond friendly hugs. Of course I was honest with my friends, most of whom knew the score in the first place. But, while I’m reluctant to admit this, my ego did get a huge boost when I got envious looks (“how did a weird dork like that wind up with her?” looks) when we went into a bar or a show.
Perhaps it is because girls and boys are different kinds of people. They are awash in different combinations of hormones and are socialized differently and have different innate strengths and weaknesses. When a girl is unhappy because no one wants to be her friend on the playground, she can cry and elicit sympathy from her peers and authority figures. Young boys still get dogged when they cry. Heroes don’t cry. They get a gun and shoot em up. So why wouldn’t they harden their skin so much that they react with rage and violence?
Girls suffer from low-confidence in math-related subject matter more than guys do even though both are exposed to the same pedagogy. What do you think is the better explanation? Girls and boys simply react differently when exposed to the same set of stressors, or girls just willfully choose to be mathphobics? Because the second seems to be what you are communicating in the context of male maladaptive thinking. Girls are influenced by their environments but boys act badly because they choose to be bad. Is that what you believe?
Girls are usually equipped with the emotional and verbal skills required for communicating ones angst and sadness. They aren’t shamed when they attempt to communicate these feelings. They aren’t encouraged to be tough, to be a silent, stoic rugged individualist. They are encouraged to get help even when they don’t really need it.
Girls are taught certain things and they react to those things in the way that makes sense to them. Guys are taught certain things and they react to those things in the way that makes sense to them. Violent bitter young men make 100% sense given the shit that’s in mass media Just like anorexic anxious young women make 100% sense too. What is so controversial about this?
I don’t give a fuck about Incels. But I do think we can and should try to prevent the Incel mentality from spreading. No one is born an Incel. Those mofos are created. And pointing at the well-behaving, happy celibate girls really doesn’t stop them from being created. If anything, it probably just worsens the frustration.
J
You also had a society that placed more pressure on women to get married (not denying that it still exists but was worse the further back you go) so marrying a “social weirdo” who could at least put a roof over your head was better than being an old maid. These days, there’s more freedom for women to decide that staying single is better than settling with some marginal creep.
But the real influencers in the continuation of toxic masculine stereotypes, is not women, it’s other men!
If men want to see this change then THEY need to speak up and speak out, and call out, what they want and what they see, that needs to change.
Misogynists don’t care a whit what women think anyway, or listen to what they say. Society needs to stop pushing shit onto women because they’ve higher developed emotional literacy, this isn’t women’s problem to solve. And we’re certainly not obligated to change our behaviour to sooth these guys wounded egos.
I haven’t read a incel forum in maybe a year, so I went looking on Reddit. Found them. I also found what I knew would be there, and today’s sampling is three separate posts:
This is not a support group for men, it’s the opposite of a support group for men, and it’s full of sadistic shitbags. Which is something I do care about, although that doesn’t preclude me from telling them all to suck rocks in general. In order for the manosphere to have winners it must have losers, and here they are, they own this one hundred percent.
No, what I believe is that people of whatever gender choose to deliberately act like assholes to other people. There are plenty of boys and men (probably the substantial majority, in fact) who get exactly the same socialization pressures as self-described “incels” but choose not to take it out on others via malevolent misogynistic ranting.
I have all the sympathy in the world for people who are feeling anxious or angry or frustrated or stressed due to toxic gender expectations. But my sympathy dries right up for the minority of such people who decide to deliberately make other people suffer in order to soothe their own pain.
Mostly by themselves. They may not be choosing to be frustrated and unhappy, but they are choosing to be misogynistic assholes. And to act as though it’s just society’s fault for “creating” them is an insult to the many other frustrated and unhappy men (and women) who don’t take out their own problems on other people.
It seems that we have totally different philosophies on the root causes of human behavior, Kimstu. I don’t think anyone chooses to do anything deliberately without a reason that seems logical to them. I think people–men and women–act badly for concrete, discernible external reasons. The whole “we make choices” thing just isn’t intellectually satisfying for me. And this kind of argumentation never will be satisfying to me.
Despite the calls to make mass media more “body positive” due to the collective suffering of women, there are millions of women who grew up being bombarded with the “skinny=beautiful” messaging who nonetheless aren’t eating disordered or neurotic about their bodies (you should see the smug smile I have on my face for being one of these special women). Does that mean that anorexia isn’t a culturally-influenced disorder? Every single disorder enumerated in the DMS-V has a concomitant set of risk factors. A person can possess all those risk factors and be perfectly healthy. A person can only have one and yet be severely disordered. All this means is that human behavior is complex and that our models for understanding the world are not 100% accurate. Big fucking whoop. We’d be incredibly stupid if we used the fact that most celibate men don’t turn into violent killers as an excuse not to identify the risk factors of the prototypical Incel.
Chalking this whole thing up to “choices” is a colossal intellectual cop-out. It reduces a complex situation down to simple morals. I just can’t join you there, sorry. Making this a moral thing basically guarantees that nothing will change. I really want them to.
Why are you calling out incels as people yet those who spread some of the more toxic expectations and pressures you characterize like a societal phenomenon? It’s harder to put in perspective since it’s less of a hive thing, yet surely you must have witnessed the kind of online comment where someone wants to denigrate the millennials or fellow millennials for not doing their part to get on the path of propagating the species by hitting milestones.
I bring this up (and to an extent it has endured from ancient times, treating the childless as inferior) because those who have a vested interest in replacing the human population have taken an ownership of what is at the root of all problems. Those who can’t figure out how to encourage younger people to get in relationships and maybe more without belittling them, being dismissive of their needs do have some ownership if they are in influential real life familial or other roles. As I said though, it is difficult to put this in perspective, and I won’t hazard any guesses, it may be the case for many incels that this factor is neither here nor there.
I mean, if it came out that the average Incel has an IQ of 85, has social impairments, has at least one psychiatric and one neurological diagnosis, has few positive social experiences, has no area of achievement (athletic, art, academics, etc.), has spent at least three years in special education or alternative schooling, and has neurotic and/or overbearing parents, then would you say that an Incel is still making “deliberate” choices, Kimstu. Or would you at least consider the possibility that maybe someone who pings all these boxes could easily fall through the cracks and land in with a shitty crowd if no one cares enough to pay attention to them?
So, having been following this thread since it seems vaguely pertinent to me right now, my question for everybody is;
Why does it have to be a binary answer to where this group comes from?
To me, it seems like the discussion has come down to nature vs nurture and I find that too simplistic to be correct.
I said this topic seems pertinent to me right now. I feel like I could be considered high risk for being radicalized into this group. But I’ve been at high risk for drug addiction, poverty, and suicide in the past yet somehow avoided all those (not saying I’m not poor, just not in poverty). I don’t think I’m going to fall into this group, I like sex, with women especially, but yanno, I just spent 10 years with a woman who cheated on me on a pretty regular basis. Whats ti keep me from becoming a bitter old fuck? It’s not upbringing entirely, I’ve pretty much been the rebel child my whole life, defying family expectations and traditions. Yet I don’t look at women through the lens of my exwifes actions, even if I’m pretty much done with marriage.
The problem is that you seem to be mistaken about what “incel ideology” is. You (and/or a number of posters in this thread) seem to assume it’s about hating women and wanting to kill them because they won’t open their legs for the incels as they should or something like that.
There’s all sort of random misogynistic stuff being posted on incel boards, but the central idea around which all the rest gravitates is that mating is driven almost exclusively by biological imperatives. So, the male population is divided in, say, 10% of alphas with whom every single woman will want to have sex with, 70% of beta with whom they will reluctantly settle for if they can’t grab one of the most desirable type (and will drop in a heartbeat if they have such an opportunity), and 20% of losers at the evolutionary game with whom no woman will ever want to sleep (so, there’s no point in even trying). Those losers are themselves, the incels.
What is the most striking on incel boards isn’t the non-existing “how could we kill as many women as possible” statements some are imagining, but the incredible amount of self-loathing, as pointed out by previous posters. It often looks like an “I’m uglier than you/ less desirable than you” competition.
Incels don’t think that “any woman should drop and spread her legs for them because they are interested in her”, as the OP believes, they think almost the opposite, that no woman will ever spread her legs for them regardless, and no amount of effort could change that. They also tend to believe by the way that attraction to women is similarly dictated by biology, and so looking for someone more in their league isn’t an option, either. Evolution dictates that men will only be truly attracted to a subset of desirable women, and anybody in a relationship with a less desirable woman is just faking, pretending or deluding oneself, and hoping for something better (in vain if they’re aren’t an alpha) and no such relationship could ever be satisfying. Neither women nor yourself can go against what biology dictates.
So, this “ideology” precludes the two obvious solutions to their involuntary celibacy : improving oneself (impossible, you can’t escape your genetic determination, your jawline doesn’t have the proper shape or whatever and no amount of self-improvement will make you sexually attractive) or aiming for someone in their league (same thing : no amount of trying can make you actually desire a non-desirable woman).
Note that a bit like conspiracy theorists, they’re fully convinced that they’re the only ones who understood how life really works, and if you try to “educate” them you will appear to them as a deluded person speaking from a position of ignorance.
Plenty of people seem to get something out of reveling in their own filth and/or misery. Nothing new under the sun.
I guess it prevents them from having to face reality and the necessity of actually doing something with their life. The dice are cast, their (miserable) future is already determined, so no need to care anymore about anything, no reason to hope and be inevitably disappointed, to make any effort likely to fail, to try to overcome whatever issues they might have. It’s comfortable, I guess, if in a very negative way.
Actually, they sound exactly how the severely depressed sound. A rando severely depressed person just “knows” that things are absolutely and permanently terrible for them , and they will argue this till they are blue in the face. They are also convinced that only they are wise enough to see the world for what it is, since it is everyone else who is deluded (I’ve believed this myself at certain times in my life.)
This attitude is prevalent on forums devoted to neurological conditions, especially the autism spectrum. You often come across someone who believes that any self-improvement is tantamount to being “fake” or losing one’s identity. And as perverse as it sounds, there is some logic to this thinking. If you’ve been brought up to see yourself as someone with special needs–someone who needs special accommodations and interventions and variances for bad behavior–then that likely will be a huge part of your identity. I can see how someone may think that being able to act like a “normie” as an adult indicates that they never needed all that hand-holding as a kid. Was I faking then or are am I faking now? It’s just easier on the psyche to maintain the status quo, as pathetic as that is.
I also see the attitude on other forums populated by sad sacks and unfortunates. r/lostgeneration is rife with this attitude. You offer advice to someone who is a recent college graduate with no job prospects and out comes the chorus ready to shout you down for being a “boot strapper”. In their minds, expressing any kind of optimism or advocating self-agency is akin to telling someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They would prefer to believe that there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to fix their situation, because otherwise they’ve got to blame themselves for their lack of success. (It never seems to occur them that one can be a victim of an economic system AND a survivalist. It’s either/or in their crazy brains.)
I really do think this is what happens when miserable people find each other on the internet. As you say, misery loves company since believing you are the only one who is miserable makes for a lonely existence.
What we need to do is instead of making fun of these “incels” is to tell young men to focus first on themselves - getting their education and starting a career. Worry about women later.
So many young men in their early 20’s do stupid things. Alot tied to wanting sex and companionship. They get lonely, horny, and frustrated when they look around and all these other guys have the beautiful women and they cant even get a date. Its a recipe for major problems like the incel stuff we are talking about or else young men get seduced into bad marriages by women who might only want someone to pay their bills. I work with a couple of young men, now in their 30’s, who back in the day got married to some woman they picked up in a bar and later took them for all they had. A young man in the military is especially vulnerable since he often is away from home for months but always has a steady paycheck coming in.
So I think we ought to help out these young men by helping them to work on their careers and getting themselves established first. Good career. Pay off their bills. Have a house. Basically be financially in a good place. Wait until they are near 30 and have the craziness out of their heads before being worried about marriage or settling into a long term relationship or becoming a father.