Except that it doesn’t in all the way that actually matter. You are trying to force a narrative and reasoning onto a group that doesn’t exist, and in fact believes the exact opposite of you and would probably hate everything about you.
Yeah, but it’s generating a discussion and I think at least some people get what I’m trying to say who didn’t previously. That doesn’t mean I should use it. I’m just experimenting. I’m still trying to learn how to make social ripples. As I said previously, I’m not good at this.
Commenting because i want to remember to find back and say something when it’s not late at night, and i have time to put something together.
It’s not a discussion I’d want to open up in mixed gendered society.
You’ll be getting screamed down.
I doubt you could open this on another site without vigorous hate comments.
I’m a generous person, so I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. But don’t expect that everywhere.
Like in all wars, an individual joining culture wars proceeds from two false principles: 1. there’s strength in numbers (at the compromise of individual conviction) and 2. enmity can be ascribed wholesale to other groups (rationalized because individuals within it played the same logical fallacy you did in (1.) “The occasional assholes found in my group are just random assholes and don’t really represent me, but the assholes in your group are acting to type, because you’re all assholes.”
Why not join the non-joiners? The people who don’t see other people as things; as devices for their financial benefit, or sexual amusement, or simply the ego-boost of feeling superior. Or, absent that, see others as objects beneath contempt, even perceived as threats. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” Instead of making a virtue of ignorance and ill-will, try a look at things from a detached point of view, though it may initially cause feelings of alienation. The non-joiners are harder to find. City folk have an easier time of it. Sometimes they can only be found in books.
It’s impossible to see all Russians and Germans as thugs just because that’s what passive education (amusement) tells us, after you study for the love of learning and discover Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Von Humboldt, etc. Read only a few articles about the tortures inflicted on girls and women by men, that have no reciprocity in nature or society, and the world seems irredeemable. But then there is the example of Françoise Gilot, often-tormented lover of Picasso; who’d beaten and extinguished cigarettes on his previous lovers. Rather than join the she-woman man-haters club, she made a happy life with another, much better man, Jonas Salk; who’d saved millions of lives from polio.
I helped an old lady load her bags into her car. She punched me in the nuts, took my Cilantro from my cart and yelled, “This is mine now!”
The Boy Scouts have it all wrong.
I’ve been arguing for a long time now that most “incels” are actually good people, and that the angry woman-hating type like Elliott Rodger is a small minority. (By incel, I mean the traditional definition of the term - “involuntarily celibate.”) There are many people, such as the severely burned, the autistic, the intensely-socially-anxious, handicapped, blind, quadriplegic, dwarf-height, hideously ugly, etc. who will either not get a mate or will struggle a lot more to get a mate than the average person. None of that means a character flaw or failing on their part; it’s just the hand of cards they were dealt. “Nice guys” like the OP who struggle with relationships but are genuinely good-hearted, fall in that category, too. (And I mean genuine nice guys.)
True enough.
But once again, “Nice Guy”, “nice guy” and “incel” are all now snarl idioms that have lost all mooring to the conventional dictionary definitions of those words.
IMO we should all banish those idioms from our vocabularies, unless we are explicitly referring to the angry women-hating extremists.
If you want to be understood, you must use terms that mean the same to your audience as they do to you. And you sure won’t be doing that if you use those words for non-extremists. That war was lost long ago. And they weren’t such great terms even back in the old days of more rational neutral or affirming meanings. They are not worth rehabilitating. Just stomp them out of your vocabulary like a smoldering cig butt you find on the sidewalk.
I really don’t understand why you’re identifying with them, either. Because you sometimes get frustrated about sex and they get frustrated about sex isn’t enough. Almost everybody sometimes gets frustrated about sex. It’s what one does about that frustration that’s the issue. You probably have five fingers on each hand and so do most of them; that’s not a reason to identify with them either.
Not as I’ve ever seen it used.
Except that’s not what the word “incel” means any longer.
Exactly.
Dr. Brian Gilmartin never quite managed to get the term “love-shy” off the ground.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Shy-Man-Syndrome/Brian-G-Gilmartin/9781568332697
I’m not so sure. ISTM part of what makes someone an incel is that they blame their own shortcomings on the wrong things. “I don’t make enough money”. “My muscles aren’t big enough”. “I’m not good enough at sports”. Things like that. When I was younger, in my late teens and 20s, I used to think that way. Eventually I did meet someone, got married, and have a good life with my wife. Looking back, however, the problem was never with my physical appearance, how much money I didn’t make, or how good I was at sports. It was my personality that was the problem (too much of an introvert who gets into a rut of only hanging out with people I already know and not wanting to meet new people), and personality is a lot harder to change. I’d go so far as to say that barring some kind of disease / traumatic injury, personality doesn’t change.
Agreed. At least now I do, back when I was younger I would have lacked the wisdom to agree. I think the wanting to be with someone who isn’t into them comes from a fear of ending up alone. The thinking probably is something like this. “If they don’t like who I am, I’l pretend to be someone different, and maybe they’ll like that person”. Of course that won’t work out, because pretending to be someone you aren’t is incredibly exhausting, and won’t work out in the long term (and trying to change who you actually are is, IMHO, almost impossible, even more so than pretending for a really long time).
I agree with this as well. Yes, appearance helps for some things, but it isn’t going to overcome incompatible personalities. If appearance was all that mattered, we would never see the good looking / famous people getting divorced. It does mean that sometimes we end up with someone we found attractive based only on appearance, and the incompatibility in personalities ends up leading to failed relationships.
Aww , @Gatopescado
You are so giving. 
I wanna know if you said anything to the poor old lady, before I pass judgement
I can buy that.
Yeah, this. The incel way of thinking is incredibly toxic. No one owes you sex no matter how nice to them you are. Fuck, would you even want to have sex with someone who’s only doing it because they feel like they owe it to you because you are nice? (The general “you”, that’s not directed at anyone in this thread).
If any given woman is not interested, move the fuck on. There are four billion women out there. Go and have social interactions (not even necessarily romantic ones) with new people and eventually you’ll find someone you hit it off with.
And if a woman you were interested in decides she wants to sleep with someone you consider a “jerk”, get the fuck over it. It’s her decision, not yours. It has nothing to do with you.
Yeah, this. If you don’t want to go through the motions of acting like a “stereotypical man” in order to attract women, don’t. You’ll attract women who are into stereotypical men if you do, and those are not women you’re going to be compatible with if that’s not who you really are.
Just act like yourself, interact with lots of people, and eventually you’ll find someone who likes you for who you are.
Yes, exactly this. If you play dumb to attract men, you’ll attract men who want to be with a dumb woman. What then? Do you just play dumb for the rest of your life? Do you lock them down with a long term relationship and the reveal that you’re actually smart once they’re committed?
Why not just act like yourself and find someone who likes women like you? Seems like that’s what you chose and it worked out great. And likewise for the OP.
And for a lot of them (not you) that “personality problem” is one of entitlement and just generally being kind of a crappy person. It’s like, if a guy blames women for his inability to get a date, he probably has a problem with blaming everyone for his misfortunes, and that character trait is not attractive. The harder he leans into the red pill shit the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Obligatory XKCD
Me, I’m not all that attractive. I’m extremely introverted. I don’t flirt. At my worst I was an emotional wreck, to the point that I was a bit flummoxed by my husband’s interest in me - I thought maybe he was desperate or something. But he wasn’t. It was a real connection. Over time I can see what I brought to the table even at my worst. And I think I’ve changed for the better over time. But doing that work on yourself… Well, it’s a lot of work. A lot of people would rather blame someone else.
That is human nature, I think, because blaming someone else conserves a lot of energy you would otherwise have to spend changing yourself.
That said, I think it’s possible to be totally fine as a human and strike out a lot in love. There doesn’t have to be a reason. So my advice to someone struggling wouldn’t be “assume something’s wrong with you.” I think it would just be live your life, and get into it, tackle projects, have experiences, learn new skills, and maybe it happens for you, maybe it doesn’t, but either way it’s not effort wasted.
I think this is where some women get it twisted. If a guy complains he can’t get dates, they assume it’s his fault. Reality doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you’re just unlucky. It’s probably better for all concerned if we can extend some compassion to each other.
The thing is that an incel isn’t someone who isn’t getting sex but wants to; it’s someone who isn’t getting sex, wants to, and decides that this is SO IMPORTANT that they center their identity around these facts.
Normal people who aren’t having sex aren’t “incels” because they don’t take the fact that they aren’t having sex and turn it into a toxic identity to stew in.
I don’t think the OP is looking for advice on how to have healthy relationships. I think he’s currently succeeded at that, to at least a reasonable degree.
I think he’s feeling that he was miserable as a youth, and could easily have slid down the “incel” path, because he has some traits in common with them. And he’s looking for a way to help “people like he used to be” to identify, and cope, and develop in healthier, happier, more socially productive ways.
Like a healthy gay guy who contemplated suicide in his youth wanting to reach out and help other troubled young gay men.
Does anyone still self-identify as a Nice Jewish Boy?
Did anyone ever? That’s something a Jewish Mom (yours or someone else’s) identifies you as, not a self identity. 