You can about sum up these guys by stating that they (a) see women as purely sex objects, and (b) hate women if they can’t have the sex they feel they are entitled to, and that rather than taking a rational look at themselves or others, they rationalize their resentment by resorting to (c) evolutionary psychology and twisting it in all sorts of weird ways. They need to be looking at therapy instead of Jordan Peterson.
The validity of evo psych itself is a separate and hotly contested subject. As I see it, it isn’t inherently bad or wrong. Evo psych is not about saying that human nature is dark, therefore society will necessarily be dark. Its motive is to look at the elements of human nature so we can understand what makes us good, what makes us bad, and how we can use this knowledge to change society for the better. Contrast this with the MRA/incel sewer rats who want it to justify sexual predation, and denigrate women when the sexual predation doesn’t work.
I’m partly faceblind. I once went into a bar, back when I was in my twenties, and a group of men around a table started calling to me to come over and sit with them. I assumed that these were people who knew me – maybe had met me at a party given by somebody else who I knew – and went over and sat down at their table.
They were so obviously taken aback that even faceblind and socially clueless twenty-some-year-old me gradually figured out that they didn’t know me at all – and had never expected or intended me to come sit with them. They weren’t trying to be my ‘suitors’. They were trying to harass me.
Do you seriously think that men catcalling women on the street think this is going to make any of the women turn around and say “Yes! That’s a great idea!”? They’re not trying to get laid, they’re trying to harass the women.
I had a friend around that time who was hitching and took a wrong ride. The driver pulled a knife on her and raped her. He let her live, she reported it, he was caught and went to jail. He didn’t try asking her first, let alone courting her. He didn’t want willing sex; if he had, he’d have tried asking – she might have said yes, at that point in her life, and he wouldn’t have risked going to jail. He didn’t want willing sex, he wanted rape.
Sometimes, yes, men actually are suitors – and sometimes this works, and sometimes the person being courted isn’t interested. (Women complaining about actual courting are generally either complaining about excessive persistence, or about inappropriate circumstances.) But that happens, believe me, to women as well as men. I can guarantee you that there are men in this world who won’t have sex with every woman willing to have sex with them – and that this is true even when the woman is young and physically attractive. The idea that any woman can get laid with any man she wants is utter myth. Can nearly any woman get laid with somebody, if she doesn’t care at all who and under what circumstances? Probably, but so could the incels. If nothing else, they could pay for it.
This is an incredibly key point that I’ve found is strangely difficult for many to accept. Rapists want rape. They want forced, non-consensual sex. They don’t want willing partners – if so, they’d find another way. It’s really not that hard to find a consensual sexual partner. Rapists want unwilling partners, that’s why they rape.
I’m not sure why this is so hard for so many to accept. Rape is about rape. It’s not about desire for consensual sex.
I’m very skeptical that anyone with such an attitude actually understands what it means to be “nicer”. Seems more likely that they have a false sense of what it means to be “nicer” and “less narcissistic”, but most women are seeing through this and recognizing that these are spiteful and unhappy people who just want to use women for sex.
If your own reason for being “nice” is to get “results”, you’re really not “nice” at all, you’re just a manipulative douche.
And most of these guys, in my observation, tend to equate “being nice” as either:
a.) Merely NOT cheating on, beating, or insulting their partner
b.) Being a clingy doormat
NOBODY is owed a relationship. Believing that “being nicer, less narcissistic, less selfish” somehow should get you “results” (like a relationship is a prize you get or something), is a sickening attitude.
There may be a difference between “Being nice in order to get sexual results” and “Being nice and expecting that maybe someone would wish you as a partner instead of going for those skanky tramps who will drop their panties for anybody”. I’m not sure. I have heard both male people and female people express a degree of annoyance and dismay that people of the opposite sex do not adequately value people who are nice.
With the relative rare exception of an occasional Janet (from Rocky Horror Picture Show), the female people expressing that sentiment are not held up for contempt and ridicule for expressing this, and are seldom accused of being nice in order to be included in some sexual-romantic action. Generally the way it’s expressed is that they want to be valued as a person, for who they are.
Women in our culture are cast as sex objects, meaning that in lieu of being valued for who they are, they are often valued as sexual commodities.
Men in our culture are not cast as sex objects. They’re cast as appetite objects, the embodiment of horniness, which is itself a sexual commodity, and, like with women being sex objects, tends to not be appreciated on the person-level, the vulnerability-level.
Yeah, no one is owed a relationship, and no one is owed sexual activity either (an overlapping but not entirely identical consideration). But let’s unpack that a bit before we nod and move on, OK?
We have at least a moderate consensus now that if people go to a venue where they can hook up and meet the kind of people they are attracted to, it is socially unacceptable to shut the place down and harass or attack the people who go there, as long as it’s between consenting adults. Think of Stonewall, and also Pulse. So people are owed the freedom to pursue relationships and sexual activity without interference, but they aren’t entitled to “just have them”, it’s up to them to make it happen. Right?
We also have a growing consensus that if people desire to connect and perhaps pursue sex and/or romance, but are unable to achieve those connections without types of help and accommodation that other people do not need — think about physically impaired people in skilled nursing facilities, and those with neurological conditions that make communication problematic — then we should consider providing them some accommodation if it enables them to pursue these things.
Now let’s imagine taking that back, taking that away from them, just long enough to imagine them complaining. Do we have understanding and sympathy for them for their situation, that they don’t get to have sexual and/or romantic relationships?
Now, sure, admittedly the incels and other such folks are in the situation they’re in because they have hideous social habits, the personalities of decaying dead fish and the armpit odor to match, that they dress funny and act creepy and so on.
But maybe they don’t. Maybe (at least before becoming bitter and hateful about it) they really are nice people and that there really is a social barrier to them being readily able to make a sexual-romantic connection. And that it has something to do with gender-polarized roles and expectations for which they are a bad fit. I don’t know that that’s what’s amiss with the incels and associated other left-out male folk, but that was certainly my experience (and although I may have been socially awkward and inexperienced for my age, I don’t think I was ever horribly bad company, I do think it was mostly structural stuff).
^^^ re: post 86, I should clarify — I do not identify as an incel (and most certainly not as a pickup artist or men’s rights asshole). It’s more like I hear about what they say and it makes me wince because there’s a shitload of overlap, and it doesn’t do me any good to pretend that I don’t suspect we’re coming from a lot of the same place.
One doesn’t always get to pick “one’s people”. If you know what I mean.
Guaranteed results, of course, is ridiculous. But isn’t the point of increased social approval and acceptance as a benefit of improving oneself in the way society demands sort of an implicit goal of social expectations?
The problem with this is that their proposed solutions are:
Deciding that they can’t be helped, that it is evolutionary destiny, written in their genes, and that their only real option is to descend into a puddle of self-indulgent despair or to violently lash out at the rest of society.
Removing agency from women–there’s a lot of weird incel/redpill chatter about government agencies assigning women, gross Gor-style fantasies, and romanticized ideas about a world in the past, before all this stupid women’s lib stuff, where they could have gotten some sort of woman.
This is then presented as a sort of false dichotomy that can’t be argued with: if you suggest that women deserve agency, then it’s all hopeless and they might as well kill themselves, because evolutionary destiny means that if women have choice, they won’t chose an incel.
When you say “accommodations for shut-ins”, you mean increasing ways people can get to know each other–increasing access or social skills. Basically, providing opportunity. Incels don’t believe opportunity will help; it’s destiny. They want a matchmaker or a slave dealer to give them an object and they have decided that’s literally and fundamentally the only way they can ever have a “relationship”. Women having agency is an absolute deal breaker in this paradigm–and since they know that’s not going away, they despair.
ETA: They see themselves as Jabba the Hut and think that Slave-Leia was their only shot. I’m not even being metaphorical. I blame Slave-Leia for a lot.
When not referring to them as ‘sluts’, ‘cheap’, ‘the town bicycle’ or other such charming epithets. Many men, especially younger ones, will happily seek out sex with women known for ‘putting out’, but they generally don’t want a long relationship -or children- with them. More accurately, men near-universally want a woman who’ll willingly have sex with them but no-one else.
In my personal experience, what people want in a mate varies so much not only between individuals, but over time, that it really can’t be boiled down to a simple set of generalisations, but personality is always huge.
I think the ‘handsome prince’ in fairy tales is a personality blank not because that’s not important to girls, but because it’s so important that it’s left for their imagination, otherwise any deviation from the ideal could render the prince unattractive, and the ideal can vary so much.
A huge part of their diagnosis of the problem is factually wrong, too. They believe women (unlike them, the incels) are not in a structured situation but instead are totally creatures with the freedom to do as they please with no repercussions, and that therefore women’s behavior within the patriarchal system is women’s choice, women’s fault. This in spite of women talking and writing at great length about the ways in which they get ostracized and punished for not acting in the ways that the incels are complaining about. ETA: see Filbert immediately above
It’s just that there’s a core of validity in their complaints despite all that.
But their complaints don’t define the group; the complaints are shared with a much larger set. It’s the solution to the problem that defines the group.
The guy who is attractive as a husband is NOT necessarily the guy a woman is sexually attracted to.
I find it hilarious that people think the masculine traits that women are attracted to (confidence, physical adeptness, strength, etc.) are surrogates for wealth before the much more obvious metric–good health. Humans are really no different than the rest of animal-kind. People are biologically driven to seek out mates that look like they will produce healthy, fecund offspring. We may be culturally driven to seek out mates that enhance our own status, but that has little to do with what makes a pussy or dick twitch at a fundamental level.
Except, you seem to be describing people who are just awkward and have problems with relationships. That’s fine, a lot of people have those issues. In fact, the incel movement started out that way. But it evolved into a very hateful, misogynist culture.
Being upset about being lonely, or being rejected does NOT in any way justify this sort of ideology. We all get rejected. We all get lonely. It sucks. But turning to a belief system to that endorses rape, sexual slavery, harassment and assault is NOT a valid reaction.
No offense, but this surprises me, Ahunter, as you’ve always been very supportive of women’s rights. And the fact is, these guys are the very opposite of that. I can’t see you, of all people, defending them in the least.
I really don’t know much about this incel thing.
But it’s really easy for a group like this to become toxic in popular culture. Partly because there will always be jerks, and the jerks tend to be noisiest.
But also because a group like this is just inherently going to be vilified eventually. The whole concept is just something that society is at best going to ridicule.
What I am saying is, it’s possible that all the good guys left / converted into jerks and the whole group is toxic now. But it’s also possible people want to focus on the few jerks and ostracize the whole group. Genuinely I don’t know, I’m wondering.
Incels and especially the red pill crowd do not deserve to be defended. They are truly horrible people. But evolutionary psychology does needs to be defended. That’s not to say that every finding ever produced in that field is airtight, any more than this is the case in the rest of psychology. But there is a lot of validity to that line of inquiry even if hardcore feminists and social scientists abhor the implications.
Thanks, the thread kept veering off into another bash-the-incels thread (of which we have had many.) I want the discussion to only be about the scientific aspect of the matter, not the misogyny or patriarchy or things of that sort.
To reply to you with the face, I think the cite the other poster was referring to was this: Study shows women find rich men more attractive | Daily Mail Online
