This isn’t a good comparison. Wanting to play music well is not as powerful or biological as the urge for sex and relationship intimacy (btw incels are about much more than sex, and someone else pointed out on the Dope that it’s a caricature to say that sex is all they’re about - not that that’s what you’re saying, but a direction the thread has gone in)
Also, incels are desiring something that has directly to do with people and the rejection from people thereof. Wanting to play music is for the most part between you and an object - you and the instrument, the music, and not so much about what other people do.
Also, AFAIK, no incel has ever gone on a violent attack with the idea that doing so will get them female attention. Rather, it was when they said, “That’s it, fuck the world, I’m going to punish the world” and decided to be punitive instead. Elliott Rodger, for instance, knew full well that going on a killing spree would mean he’d die a virgin (his manifesto is extremely detailed) and his focus was on punishing the world, not some notion that killing women would get him women.
Finally…you say you wouldn’t be violent. Ok…so…what? That’s like someone saying, “I wouldn’t kill someone because of my religion.” OK, sure, but there are some other people in the world who would. I’m not sure what you’re trying to communicate here. Just because you wouldn’t get violent because your an IMBAP doesn’t mean some people wouldn’t get violent due to being an incel.
Also, from reading about Rodger and other incels, it seems that incels generally fall into two categories: Those who lament Social Darwinism (because they are on the bottom of the heap and “the less get even less”), or those who approve of Social Darwinism but lament that they aren’t on the benefiting end of it (i.e., Elliot Rodger)
OK, I reread it. What’s the relevance of the distinction?
OK that’s one. It doesn’t go very far to establish it as a general social trend. Do you have a cite from someone who knows how to capitalize and doesn’t misspell “girl”?
People saying stupid things online is kind of the point of the incel movement. I don’t think Twitter establishes much about the attitudes of society in general.
This is kind of like saying, “Those hungry people are stealing our food, what do we do? We should teach them that one does not steal food, but rather, have food given to them consensually.” Which sounds all good and ideal but doesn’t address the issue - I’m sure many of them KNOW full well that it has to be given consensually. Not that I’m equating food to sex, but you get my point - when someone has a biological desire/need that is going unfulfilled, saying “You need to get X thing that you want consensually” isn’t addressing the situation from *their *perspective - they’re still as far away from Thing X as before.
If I may ask the question - why is it that society has a movement that says that slut-shaming is wrong, but still thinks virgin-shaming is OK? In both cases, isn’t it shaming someone for their sexual life?
This is something of a cart-before-the-horse explanation. It’s more likely that rejection makes one angry/desperate, than that being angry/desperate gets one rejected (after all, if one were getting accepted and welcomed, then what would there be to be desperate or angry about)?
Sure, it becomes a self-perpetuating loop after some time, but people don’t get angry or desperate for no reason. There usually is some First Cause.
Kind of like, except missing the key point. Change it to, “Those sugar-starved people are massacring home bakers so that they can eat cake, what do we do? We teach them that you can’t kill people just because they refuse to bake a cake for you.” In that case, I’m fine with teaching people don’t murder bakers.
And yes, there’s a biological urge. Civilization is, to a huge degree, teaching people to prioritize being decent fucking human beings over giving in to their primate selves.
Nobody says that virgin shaming is okay, so your question is nonsensical. At the point where women who have lots of sex go on murderous rampages against men, and the response to the murders is to say, “Guys, let’s stop slut-shaming women!”, I’ll find that response similarly ridiculous.
As for those who say, “Better mental health services are the solution” - sure, it can only help, but people who need mental health treatment the most are often the least likely to seek it. Those who would voluntarily seek such treatment are already those who aren’t hopeless or utterly radicalized yet and aren’t the greatest threats.
I don’t think this is entirely wrong, in a way - giving young men concrete steps to improve their ability to communicate with women (and let’s be honest, to get women to go out with them/have sex with them) isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, you take sex ed in school and they teach you all about the penis and the uterus and STDs and all the physical parts of the machine, but they don’t tell you how to operate the machine properly. And part of it is social cues.
But the whole pickup-artist movement which overlaps with various elements of the “red pill” and “manosphere”, with the incel subculture being the seediest, basement-level, underbelly of it…it’s so filled with relentless negativity. Like (I imagine) most men between 18 and 30, I spent a little time going down that rabbit hole. It’s so negative and so nihilistic, it’s just incomprehensible to me that guys would want to live their lives that way. Can’t they channel this energy into something productive?
The old method for guys who were frustrated about not being able to get laid, was to get a guitar and sing about it. I’d rather we go back to singing songs because you can’t get no satisfaction, rather than shooting people.
PUA is such a revolting form of what could be a positive thing. A strong sex ed course could say things like:
Here are the biological facts.
Here’s how to keep your body, and your partner’s body, safe.
Here’s what consent is.
Here’s how to ensure consent is present in all your sexual encounters.
Most folk want to have some kind of sexual relationship.
If you do, here are some basic things you can do to increase your chances (e.g., hygiene/grooming, respectful flirting and signal reading, difference between crushes and relationships, why rejection isn’t a big deal, etc.)
That last one is gonna look ridiculous to some people, I’m sure, but I do think some level of it could be helpful for a lot of teenagers who didn’t pick up on this stuff automatically.
I think it’s not so specific as “an insult directed at men by women.” I talked about it a little upthread. I think we, on the internet especially, have developed a societally embraced archetype of “loser” that many of us trot out when we want to wound someone. That archetype includes someone being a socially inept person living in his mother’s basement who lacks sexual outlets and who therefore takes out his frustrations on women. I’m sure you’ve seen it on this board. Someone complaining about something, or being nasty, and others will say something like “You need to get laid” or “You’re just angry that no girl is willing to touch your junk” or “Spoken like a 30 year old virgin from his mom’s basement.”
That isn’t an attack on the person for being a virgin or lacking sexual prowess. That’s an attack on the person by calling him a virgin or claiming he lacks sexual prowess. The insult is in saying the person is like those other people who are pathetic. It’s quite similar to using a homophobic insult against a stranger. It isn’t necessary that the target of the insult be gay. The insult itself shows the attitude of the speaker toward gayness.
So a bystander to that who is a virgin is receiving the message that they are pathetic, just as a gay bystander to homophobic insults is receiving the message they they are pathetic.
While I don’t think this is a root cause of Inceldom or anything, I think it is pernicious and reinforces the idea that men are impressive by virtue of sexual experience, not their characters.
Ah. This is the piece I was missing, then. If virgin-shaming is typically men shaming other men, then I withdraw that whole series of posts. I still think it’s a shitty thing to do, and I still think that it’s a very minor piece of the puzzle, but folks who identify it as a larger piece of what’s going on aren’t holding women responsible for the Incel movement.
When someone condemns slut shaming, is there a logical line to “if these women weren’t having so much sex, they wouldn’t be shamed”? When someone condemns fat shaming, is there a logical line to “if these people wouldn’t eat so much, they wouldn’t be shamed”?
Are people here blaming virgin-shaming, or are they just pointing out that it’s a shitty thing to do?
To use the terrorism analogy, how many Iraqis were turned toward radicalization when their family members were killed during the Gulf War? There have been more than a few threads here taking the Bush Administration to task for starting that war; are they being blamed for terrorism?
In Deadpool 2, when Deadpool is trying to mock Colussus and the X-Men, he says (from IMDb):
I don’t know how much it happens one-on-one. It may be that people are nicer to individuals than they are to classes, or that no one beyond a certain age will admit to being a virgin.
WADR it seems your articles are repeating your point. I get that. What I don’t see is how mentioning the trigger that caused him to kill women is necessarily blaming women, despite what some clown on Twitter says.
“She dodged a bullet (almost literally) by breaking up with a sociopath” does not seem to me to be less an example of blaming women than “asshole is triggered by break up”. It doesn’t contain any hint of “she shouldn’t have broken up with him” or “she owed him sex so he doesn’t shoot people” AFAICT.
Hardly likely. People who blame others for there problems aren’t good partners. Not having a partner doesn’t make me blame others for my problems. That’s all on me.