Yeah, you can come up with exceptions, but that doesn’t mean that shortness, bad skin, etc. aren’t difficulties for dating. I could mention some overweight women who are in happy relationships, but does that mean that thinner women don’t have an easier time of it? Any of these things can be overcome, but they don’t help.
I’ve asked the same question, with pretty much the same response. Paradoxically, I think women may not be the best to ask about this. It’s a cliché that men try to fix things when women just want reassurance, but I sometimes think the reverse is true, too. When we want a genuine critique, and advice we can act on, I think women may see it as a time to offer support and reassurance.
You seem to have figured it out, though. I’m happy for you.
Sure, if you’re still living with family but are also doing positive things with your life that means you’re not a loser, either. Hell, I’ve been called a loser because I’m in my 50’s and have never owned my own house and I’m a lifetime renter, but that no longer bothers me - there’s more than one way to be a responsible adult, or, in the context of this thread, a “non-loser”.
My intention what not to include “living on your own” as part of a checklist for determining loser/non-loser, it was to point out positives in the poster I was addressing. Living successfully on your own is a positive. Having friends is a positive. Owning a home is a positive. There are a LOT of positive things one can do or be, but you don’t have to do or be ALL of them to be “non-loser”.
True, all those negatives don’t help - the point being they aren’t the harbingers of doom, either. I had horrible skin in my teens and twenties (I’ve recounted some of my skin problems from my 40’s in this forum, too, one thread quite infamous at this point). Yes, there are people who wouldn’t date me for that. There were some who could overlook that.
The incels are holding up an impossible standard, and ignoring examples that are proof those standards aren’t necessary. MOST short guys do have relationships with women (or other men, as they prefer) even if they are at a disadvantage. MOST fat people have relationships. Etc, etc. They won’t have as many opportunities or as much success, but it’s not out of reach.
I wonder about this. I work with young children, and helping them learn social and emotional skills is a big part of what we do. What does a 5 yr old incel-to-be look like? What skills is he missing that other kids have?
Not a psychologist, but I would think suggestive signs would low empathy, high anxiety, risk aversion, low self-efficacy, and difficulty regulating one’s emotions.
I wonder if another sign might be sportsmanship. Are these the kids who are overcomed with frustration every time they lose games, maybe going so far as to accuse others of cheating just to save face? Facing the social consequences that come with this reaction, do they then retreat from any activity that feels like a contest?
I don’t know anything about the psychological makeup of these guys, but I think it’s worth studying.
I agree wholeheartedly with these posts. I do think the sex part of Inceldom isn’t the key, it’s just an easily glommed on “defect.”
I think it’s hard for people to pinpoint, at least in some circumstances, why we feel the way we feel. And then we fall back on reasons we’ve heard other people give for lack of having our own because it’s easier and seems less personal. I don’t just mean women, and I don’t just mean giving relationship advice. I mean in general, people will fall back on easy, safe explanations.
I think one of the saddest things about the “incels” is that getting girlfriends wouldn’t solve their problems. They are looking to achieve some media-driven ideal of what it’s like to be in a relationship. I think most of them would be completely incapable of handling a real relationship. When your girlfriend is the only thing keeping you from being an angry pathetic loser … you’re still an angry pathetic loser. And when you feel your girlfriend is the only thing that stands between you and pathetic loserdom, you tend to vacillate between slavish devotion and jealous anger. This does not bode well for maintaining relationships and when the relationship crashes and burns their issues escalate again.
While I’ve dated a lot and had plenty of sexual relationships, I’ve never been married or lived with a romantic partner. And I took me an incredibly long time to realize that it was because I did not want it. On some level the media-fueled social propaganda worked on me and there were times when I wanted to want it. And time when I thought something was wrong with me. But, bottom line, I really didnt like or want the reality of the committed relationship- they require lots of compromises and lots of work and accepting lots of things that I didn’t want to accept. Plus I prefer sleeping alone.
Once I realized this I became a much happier person.
ETA: I once went to lunch with my Mom and one of her friends. After the meal, the woman told my mom — “She could get married if she wanted to.” I was torn between being insulted and feeling that someone “got it”.
I’ve not read the whole thread, but I wanted to make the same point I made in the last thread, and which some of you have made here.
This isn’t about not being able to get a date, or be in a relationship. This is about an inchoate hatred for humanity. A hatred of the Chads and Stacys, the shiny happy people going about their lives, living in apartments, planning families. They mostly can’t articulate a reason for their hatred, but they feel excluded and denied from the things they see others having.
Think of Iago. He gives a long list of contradictory reasons he feels Othello has wronged him, but he reveals himself in one line: “I hate the moor.”
Think of John Doe in Seven. His sin is envy. He feels a terrible envy and resentment towards the normal people of the world.
Can you imagine an incel in a relationship? What would they do? Bike rides, dinner and a movie, a trip to the art gallery, a quiet evening at home?
It is to laugh.
If you compare these people to the simple awkward guy who can get a date because he doesn’t have good social skills, you are making a category mistake. Incels have much more in common with ISIL terrorists than with awkward dudes. They are at war with the world.
Sadly there’s not much to do about it, short of uninventing the internet and all means to kill a lot of people at once.
Not to make it a height thread but there is a VERY widespread preference by women across many cultures and nations to have their male mate be at least the same height or taller - not a shorter guy.
Yes but – women as a group have a lot of generalized preferences. However just like men, they make compromises based on what they themselves are bringing to the trading table. It may not be romantic, but consciously or unconsciously, most successful relationships are fairly balanced ‘gift’ wise. There’s a lot of women who would overlook height preference. And there’s also quite a few extra-short women too.
My dad is 5’6". Married a remarkably beautiful woman, is a very successful person in pretty much every kind of measure – self-made man, beloved near and far, an outsized contributor to society in an unusual number of areas, and quite short. Not that handsome either, really.
I think men often fall into the trap of thinking that women are more like themselves – fixated upon specific physical qualities – than women actually are.
The “good old days” were terrible, but each era has its problems I guess.
One way in which the “good old days” really were better than the present is the fact that assholes had a much more difficult time finding anyone at all ever to talk to, and had no prominent role models to look up to. No confirmation, no commiseration, turned down for everything. They basically had to either stop being such an asshole, or curl up and die.
Oh, definitely. That explains why groups like the KKK, the Scientologists, the People’s Temple, and the like, certainly never had lots of people joining them in the past oh wait
While there are most likely people who really do just hate the world and want to watch it burn, not everyone on an incel forum is one of those guys. As we’ve seen from this thread, there are people who are at risk of joining such a demographic who nonetheless do not… and a common theme is connections to others. They actually have friends. They have actual social interactions with people, even if they aren’t romantic relationships. You’re never going to save everyone, but there is good to be had in saving those you can.
In the “good old days”, behaviorally challenged youth were told straight-up they weren’t destined for great things. They were institutionalized or warehoused in residential special schools where the education was inferior, but at least no one expected those kids to be eager and competent participants in the rat race. Even if the best thing they could hope for was a menial job, no worries! A menial job didn’t necessarily sentence a person to a lifetime of dependency. You could still buy a car and rent an apartment on minimum wage. And since women had low expectations for themselves back in the “good old days”, it wasn’t too hard for a low status man to find someone who’d overlook his poor social skills and grooming…as long as he brought home some bacon. So back in the “good ole days”, being a weirdo wasn’t a huge barrier to success, however you want to define that.
Today, you have to take a personality test to get even a minimum wage job. You’ve got college graduates competing against high school graduates for minimum wage jobs. And today, women have more agency. They expect equal partners–someone who can be just as nurturing and thoughtful as they are. Fewer of them are “settling” for the first guy who hollers at them because more of them want to focus on college and career.
Back in the day, families could commit you to an institution if they believed you were disturbed enough to warrant it. It wasn’t unheard of for someone to spend most of their lives in an institution. Now I don’t want to go back to those days, but it is apparent that there is currently very little a typical family can do if their adult son or daughter is disturbed and therapy is no longer cutting it. Residential facilities are very expensive. Most insurers will only pay for a limited stay. So unfortunately, lots of young people are going with the “curl up and die”. We need to do something to stop this. And in stopping this, I think we’d also keep some young people from selecting the “blow everyone up and then die”. I don’t think the latter are cut from the same cloth as the former group. But I think the rise in both reflect the shittiness of our society and the even shittier job we’re doing with mental health care.
It seems to me that the internet is here to stay. We are never going to abandon it for the sake of our children’s psyches–and I don’t think we should, quite frankly. But that means something else has to give, and I think that “something else” has to be our old-timey concepts of human behavior. Are Incels just a bunch of assholes choosing to be assholes? Or are they humans responding to a specific cultural milieu–the same as ISIS terrorists and the Japanese hikikomori–and as such, require specific external interventions to be fixed? I think if we continue to see this as a problem of “assholes being assholes”, nothing will change. But if we see this as a problem of social programming, then we will be more effective at stopping future attacks and fostering healthier behavior.
Yes, and people get deradicalized from ISIL all the time too. There are also people who are curious about Al-Qaeda or ISIL but never really make the leap. As you say, a connection or two is helpful. People attempting to de-radicalize someone always start by bonding with them, establishing trust and beginning a conversation. This might work with someone deeply into the incel ideology, if such people could be identified, and could afford mental health treatment. I think that would be difficult since incels aren’t an organized terror group. And I have no doubt that on the forums, there are people peeking in with sympathetic curiosity, but who won’t fully commit.
None of this is counter to my main point, which is that incels are not simply lonely guys who can’t get an intimate relationship for one reason or another. They are adherents to a violent anti-social ideology.
Except you really, really don’t. Neither you nor k9bfriender are displaying hostility to women or blaming them for your shortcomings. That’s a big piece of being an incel. The other big piece is a sense of entitlement, and none of either of your posts suggest that you feel that either.
Incels don’t feel sad that they can’t attract women and wonder why they can’t. They think bitches who act like they’re too good for them are the source of their problems and should be punished for it.
Don’t compare yourself to those guys. That’s like a kid who gets picked on comparing himself to a school shooter except he doesn’t have any intention of hurting anyone. Sure, the picked on kid has a thing or two in common with someone who’d willingly shoot down classmates, but not the defining things.
I can’t draw a Venn diagram here, but I see Incels as the point where “people who can’t get laid” intercepts with “psychocopaths” and “sociopaths”. There are psychopaths and sociopaths who can get laid, as well as people who can’t get laid who are neither psychopaths or sociopaths. My concern is that people in the latter group may be labeled “incel” if they complain too much about their lack of romantic success. I probably would have been concerned about people putting that label on me had it been a “thing” 25 years ago. Btw, that’s not directed at anyone who has contributed to this thread.