Incel question

Rest of post snipped.

Don’t you mean that an ex is entitled to half of the assets of a relationship regardless of gender? Making this about women stealing from men is part of the problem.

Does it work the other way around - that if a poor man marries a wealthy woman, and they divorce with no prenup, they get 1/2 and 1/2?

I agree with all of this.

I also think a major source of the problem is that almost all young people are living their lives through the internet. They are getting a very distorted view of what “normal” is, and that goes for Incel and non-Incel. The insecurities that young people had 30 years ago are magnified by a million now. Girls are depressed because they don’t look like an instagram model and can’t possibly compete with them for “likes” so they might as well stay home. Boys are convinced they are lame-os for not having a scroll of selfies with pretty girls or a Twitter feed with awesome flirt game. You can “follow” a kid who bullied you in the fifth grade and see his pretty girlfriend, vacation photos, nice car, beautiful family, college acceptance letters, and the number of “friends” he has. When we were kids, we weren’t subjected to the success of our bullies on a daily basis. We could forget all about them very easily.

And we all know what we would say to young person who is dealing with all of that. “Don’t compare yourself to other people.” “Don’t follow your childhood bullies on Facebook.” But we speak out of both sides of our mouth when we then turn around and advise that person to be more socially aware (kind of hard to do that without doing any self-comparisons) and to stay socially connected (cuz maybe the bully was also a friend at one time…and maybe they can open a door to opportunity for you, as all the “networking” gurus will tell you).

The “stop comparing yourself” advice just doesn’t work well for this new generation (I don’t think it ever worked well, tbh). They are living in a world where everyone is scored normatively, so that advice doesn’t jibe with reality. I think what at-risk youth need is to be pulled away from screens and placed into situations where there is no scoring, where they have no choice but to socialize and deal with the wonders and imperfections of human beings. Incels are fixated on the “hot chicks” they see in mass media because they have limited experience with any “chick”. Give them a safe place to socialize in meatspace, and maybe these guys wouldn’t develop so many bullshit notions about both women and men. It is easy to believe BS about stuff you have little first hand experience with.

It seems to me there are many parents who are willing to overlook their son’s poor socialization as long as he’s safe and sound under their roof. Maybe they were raised similarly so they don’t see the big deal. But they didn’t grow up with an effluent pipe of radicalization discharging right into their bedroom. That is a new thing that needs to be dealt with head-on.

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Yes. That’s quite possible in a community property state.

It’s not very common, because a) women are on average paid less than men, and b) some percentage of men have a problem if their SO makes more than they do.

I was specific about assets of the relationship. Pre-relationship assets can be determined to not be part of the community property of a relationship. A wealthy women with no prenup is at the same risk as a wealthy man–assets are divided depending on the laws where the couple lives, not divided based gender.

This is true, of course.

I am not a lawyer, but have worked in IT at law firms for more than 20 years. The last firm I was at had a large, very high-end matrimonial department.

It was always astonishing to me how incredibly shocked and angry wealthy women were when they found out that the law in this state is gender-neutral.

Even the most accomplished, feminist, modern women always seemed to feel that this was *wrong *in a very fundamental way.

I’m hardly in the MRA camp, nothing like that, I just thought this was funny.

Good that you specified “healthy”. My first relationship, which came about out of desperation with a young woman I had nothing in common with, didn’t help at all. I’m not saying it hurt, even though I wouldn’t be in another relationship for 7 years or so. It’s also a problem when someone is, say, 30 with little experience in relationships. I was mature beyond my years in some ways, but at 30 I had dated very little. I wasn’t about to date 18 year olds, so I was up the creek until I met somebody who could deal with someone who needed to develop relationship skills. In our twenty-some years my past has occasionally caused problems (such as getting unduly stressed when Ms. P is pissed at me; it was ingrained that I needed to be perfect in the way I treat other people). I think we’ve had to work harder because, among other things, I just didn’t have the experience navigating the ups and downs of being in a relationship.

I’m pretty sure no one would have ever put me in the incel category, although “forever alone” would sure fit. I may have even used that terminology within a month of meeting Ms. P.

Oh, I totally disagree with this. I think most of the incels have a fundamentally unhealthy perception about what constitutes a relationship. An idea that is heavily focused on having a sex partner. And totally ignores the fact that healthy relationships require work. And compromise. And sometimes not doing what you want to do, because the other person doesn’t.

And someone that has already been drawn into the incel community is going to approach this fledgling relationship with the idea that this woman is a golddigging bitch that is out to hurt him. And he’s going to analyze her every move to try and prove this. And he’ll find something, because people inherently do lots of ambiguous things.

Maybe my perception is colored because of something that happened to someone I knew at work. There was a man that worked there, a kind of average guy. Didn’t have much luck with women. He was kind of chippy about it, too. But some friends of his thought all he needed was a good women. They set him up with one. They went out two or three times. But I guess she wasn’t feeling it and she didn’t want a long term thing with this guy.

He took it hard. Really really hard. In fact, he went to her workplace with a gun and the intent of killing her. Luckily she wasn’t there, so he just killed himself instead.

For me, the biggest turn-off ever are those guys that, deep down, hate women. As soon as I get that vibe I’m out the door and I don’t look back.

And my weakness is the guys that truly love women, that are genuinely interested in you and know how to make you feel like you are the most fascinating person on earth. Even though I know they might feel that way about someone else tomorrow. But I’m not looking for LTR, I’m not jealous and I enjoy the game.

Heh, I used basically this description for myself just last evening while chatting with my mom about my status. (The exact phrase I used was “gonna die alone and unloved”.) And yes, I’ve been in a relationship - I’ve been engaged! And it was quite amicable, until she regained religion which killed it.

I, as a person who’s had a relationship, am indeed not an incel, but I very easily could have been one - in fact I detected that I was flirting with such inclinations after spending a couple decades in a close friendship with a woman who I strongly suspect would have accepted my marriage proposal way back when if not for her religion. I wasn’t technically friendzoned because she new damn well how I felt, but it was still frustrating, and I detected some ugly bitterness developing within me. So yeah, I could have totally gone incel, previous relationships notwithstanding.
(In case anyone’s curious, I got off that path by the simple approach of eradicating my self-esteem. In all of fiction and pop culture the heros and protagonists always get the girl; I’m not one of them, so my failure and solitude are natural and expected! Nothing to get upset about; all good. :cool:)

Right. Relationships aren’t something that just happens to a person; a relationship is what happens when two or more people produce a bond with each other. This bond general comes about through mutually beneficial actions, sustained through time. If someone doesn’t become proficient in these actions, they will struggle to form relationships.

“All an incel needs is a relationship” sadly misses this point. What they need to know is how to form and maintain relationships. And this knowledge starts with learning how to be okay with themselves.

I struggle to articulate this, but I think there are a lot of people that really struggle to see the opposite gender as people. It’s like it never even occurs to them. And this isn’t a new thing: a highly gender-segregated societies really strongly encourage it: your spouse is your economic partner and your co-parent, but your same-gender friends and family members are where you go for your emotional needs.

Back in the day, men and women alike almost had to get married for economic reasons (she can’t work; he can’t cook!) and I guess it didn’t really matter if you liked each other. You had your family, your friends, eventually your same-gender children to have real relationships with, and as long as you lived up to the pretty clear expectations about your role in the marriage (work! cook!), it didn’t much matter if you were soulmates. This is why marrying outside of your group–race, class, whatever–was so risky. Without actual, you know, friendship or even the concept of it, marriage really needed a rock-solid mutual paradigm of how it was going to work. Compatibility was as much about mutual expectations as anything.

But now, we don’t have to get married. Even if you can’t cook, you can microwave. Women can earn a living. And many of us expect so much more out of marriage–we want emotional fulfillment, a friend, a partner. We want someone who likes us, listens to us. We want someone we sacrifice for and who sacrifices for us in return, working together toward mutually agreed upon goals. We want this because we are raised with opposite gender friends, because our opposite-gender parent was involved in our lives, because we’ve read books and watched movies that asked us to identify with characters of the opposite gender. So we can imagine the idea of an SO that we like, that has intangible but important differences from others in the same category of looks, wealth, and future prospects.

But there are still a lot of people that are raised in the old way, as far as gender goes. They don’t have opposite-gender friends. They either don’t have opposite gender siblings, or they are raised very differently. There are certainly women like this as well, who want to get themselves a “King” or some shit, who don’t even worry about whether they like the man they are dating, because it isn’t about that. They couldn’t like a man as a person the way they like this friend and don’t like that lady they work with. I had a student in here yesterday crying because her mom doesn’t want her to go to college and keeps telling her to “get a boyfriend”, like that’s a career plan.

With men and women, sometimes this works out. They find each other, they have a strong enough set of shared expectations, and it’s okay. They get what they want. But for people that don’t find a counterpart, the whole dating world is a mystery. They don’t get the fundamental idea that you’re looking for a friend. When people say that’s what you’re “supposed” to do, they dismiss it as blah-blah-blah bullshit because they can’t understand it. It doesn’t seem real.

I think the points some others have raised in this thread are also very insightful–I am sure monstro’s point about how social media intensifies all those feelings of being left out are 100% correct–but I also think there’s just this weird paradigm shift we are in about how genders relate to each other.

This is true, but I have my doubt this is where incels come from. People raised with these older standards and expectations tend to be in like-minded communities, surrounded by others that aren’t necessarily looking for soul mates. I wouldn’t expect them to be out there in the wilderness struggling alone.

That said, almost as a rule, incels do wax nostalgic for the olden days when relationships were transactional and borne out of economic need. They hate feminism because they know that autonomous and empowered women aren’t motivated to settle; the sexist past is idealized because they believe men like them would’ve found mates in this bygone era.

This sounds like delusional thinking to me, though. Men who are emotionally immature, socially awkward/anxious, and financially insecure (like many incels) have always had poor romantic prospects. In many respects, their chances were probably even worse in the past. This is because a man’s income used to make or break his chances with the opposite sex; nowadays, at least women make their own money and so don’t care so much about that.

I think my first girlfriend was willing to put up with me being socially awkward because she equated graduating from college (I was a senior when we were dating) with financial security. She was all ready to get married, and even told people we were going to get married. She was a decent enough person, but we had nothing in common and I decided I wasn’t that desperate. She started dating someone right after I broke it off, which made me feel a lot less guilty. She definitely was “old school” in her thinking, which made us a very bad match. I know a guy who said that he wished he lived in a community with arranged marriages because he didn’t know how to get dates (I’m guessing he was 30 or so at the time). I’ve never heard him say anything negative about women as a group; he was just confused by what he saw as a game with rules he couldn’t understand. This guy is definitely more socially awkward than I am, which is saying a lot.

I’ve known people who say that they don’t understand math. I have a friend who says he can’t read a map. I sometimes wonder if everybody has something like that which just utterly mystifies them. Whatever it is for you, imagine you had that same frustration around dating and relationships. I’m sure that all the advice is well-intentioned, but it may never make sense to the terminally clueless, myself included.

The other day, I was talking to my older sister about Incels. Earlier she had been bashing the whole “debutante ball” thing because of its promotion of class snobbery and exclusivity. But while talking about Incels, it occurred to her that one benefit of things like debutante balls is that both young men and women get training on the proper ways of doing the dance (literally and figuratively). At the very least, it demystifies some stuff.

you with the face, I think only for the lowest functioning Incel can you say that things would have been worse for him in the past than now. I say this because modern employment is so socially oriented–much more than it was in the past. A socially inept person back in the day did not have to pass a personality test just to get an interview for a menial job. He didn’t have to have a social media presence or be a “good team player”. So I think it is harder for the socially inept to get and keep good employment than it was in the past. And it’s pretty hard to do the relationship thing in the US if you are a male over a certain age who doesn’t have any job.

As Manda JO said, contemporary women care more about a partner who is “with it” socially and emotionally since they DON’T care about money so much now. So if you’re socially inept male, you really will be at a disadvantage. Especially if you also come with some other baggage (mental illness and poor employment prospects). Your average woman can put up with one of these things. But all of them? That’s a tall order, especially for a 20-something young woman who is career-oriented and looking for a equal partner rather than a long-term project.

I think all the men posting here who have said they could have been Incels likely have resources that your typical Incel doesn’t have. I think the ego is pretty resilient as long as it has some symbol of success and worth to hold onto. So having a good job might keep someone from going over the edge. Having friends and close family might also be ego-protective. The memory of a past successful relationship, even if it was a long time ago, might be just enough to sustain a person through really dark thoughts and feelings. But if you have none of these things or perceive yourself as not having these things, then you’re at-risk for rage and bitterness.

Coming from a stable family typically with a father figure who’s a model for consistency in respectful treatment of women can also help be a lasting buffer from slipping into some of that negativity. I am speaking from personal experience and what I see in some who never had that (…not that I think there are simple solutions to prevent it from happening as much as it does).

This statement is based on what? :dubious: If anything, my observations would lead me to the exactly opposite conclusion, women being asked about what’s wrong and men being told to chill down (and in some circumstances, being forcefully or even violently removed from the scene). Even though I could have forgotten, I can’t think of a single instance of male agression I witnessed where the man was asked about his feelings.

In my experience, female agression is usually handled in a vastly more delicate way than male agression.

I agree, see post #95. Male aggression sets off a lot more societal alarms (to be fair, partly because men are usually stronger and more capable of violence.)

I am also very curious about WHY there are incels. I think it may just be an extreme example of larger trends. Young people in general have less sex than in yesteryear. Interactions are often via phones rather than hands and eyes. Are confused ideas about sex and confused ideas about, e.g. politics, just symptoms of a recent and pervasive social disruption?

I doubt this, except for small values of “surprising number.” But perhaps I’m blindered by growing up before the post-rational era.

The only reason there are incels is because there is an internet.