I would opine that having little choice but to have intimate relationships with people you personally are repulsed by (by your own arguments re:why incels are incels) for money is a lot more damaging to one’s psyche, self-respect, self-image, self-whathaveyou than minin’ coal. Hell, social tropes glorify the humble, oppressed-but-proud blue collar worker. To whit (great fucking song, BTW).
You come across even a single song singing the pride of sex workers, let alone a rich seam of tropes ? 'cuz the only one I know of is more of a “it’s a hard life and all of you cunts look down on them even though they’re good people and all of y’all could have been their sons, but for an accident of biology” type thing. It’s a beautiful (and funny) song, but hardly glorification.
This deserves to be quoted. Well done.
Well again, I can only reference the Mirror interview because it summarized the perspective of a woman who was providing sex work to some of what would have been the most physically unattractive men and she still says she enjoys her work because she sees the value in what she does.
*“My gentleman with learning disabilities used to be really slobbery on my face and it wasn’t very pleasant but those are the parts of the job you accept and I think he got a lot out of it.
“I think you have got to have the right combinations of skills to work with disabled people.”
Looking forward, Marianne thinks work needs to be done to break down both the stigma of disability and also of sex work.
She said: “I consider it the last real taboo in British society.
“We talk about breaking down stigma around mental health but also around sex work.
“To the public you are either a high class call girl or a drug addict walking the streets but a lot of us are middle class women fulfilling a real need in society.”*
Those are her words not mine.
I believe more in individual liberty and personal autonomy than I do in the government babying people and telling them they can’t make their own decisions in a case like this.
Too many Bible thumpers, that’s why.
Looks like the future lies in whining on the internet.
And of course it couldn’t possibly be her rationalizing her circumstances in life, and had she any other realistic/immediate options in life she would absolutely still be selling her arse because… well it’s quite obvious, MOVING ON, personal liberty !
And pay the receptionist on the way out.
And here’s the problem. Incels, and it appears you, seem to have trouble seeing women as people with brains, feelings and emotions. They see women as breasts and vaginas. These women are supposed to feel so grateful about being objectivized that they’ll give the incels whatever they want.
I think most of us would not be happy with even a very realistic sex robot, since a real relationship is about a lot more than sex.
Therapists who are legal and who don’t screw their clients could help incels with this if they wanted to be helped.
You’ve also got evolutionary psychology (not Social Darwinism) all wrong. If a guy refuses to reproduce because the women he wants rejects him, he is not successful in evolutionary terms. He’s giving himself a non-violent long term Darwin Award. Well deserved.
I worked in a field famous for having lots of people on the autism spectrum. Almost all of us managed to find partners and reproduce. So don’t use that as an excuse.
I’d add “treat a woman as a human being, not a body,” but if incels followed this advice, there would be fewer of them.
Then what standard do you use for allowing people to make decisions if they’re not allowed to rationalize their own circumstances how they choose to? The government rationalizes for you? Should the government rationalize all those men out of back-breaking work too? Or that’s cool because they have good tunes to listen to? Or rationalize people out of having to clean up bloody remains at crime scenes? Or rationalize people out of working in sewers?
The world will always have ugly jobs to be done. The capitalist solution in general is to compensate people according to supply and demand, so the fewer people willing or able to do a job, the higher the pay scale is to compensate. It makes sense here as much as anywhere else.
Prostitution already has its own capitalist equilibrium where the payscale is established for average male clients accordingly. It’s just on the blackmarket now, socially stigmatized, and there’s no real niche to it like what that sex worker was describing that might given incel men the kind of feeling for connection or ongoing relationship they might want.
I’d suggest they (and incels alike) join our vast network of ongoing support groups. It’s called “Everyone” and we meet at the bar. Personally, I want a doggo.
You misunderstand what I mean by sex dolls. I don’t mean artificial vaginas. We have those already. I said 50 years because I mean a walking, talking robotic person that can talk to you about your day and sit with you on the couch to watch a movie together and then have sex and sleep with. That’s a long way off. But as I see it it’s the only permanent solution if you recognize that hypergamy does seem to exist and some men will always get cut out at the bottom. Even some women may be getting cut out and want this too.
As another example, take India and China:
“Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India. The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching…”
Unless women start taking on two husbands/boyfriends at a time over there, there’s absolutely no amount of working on yourself that can solve that problem.
By definition even in a 1:1 pairing you will end up with 70 million men left over, some of whom may be happy being alone but a large percent may also be incel.
Now your argument boils down to women must supply sex to men, but we’ll pay them. Or the government will, because it’s a basic need.
You take an awfully long time to make a ridiculous, yet horrendous, argument.
Nonsense. All I’m saying is, just because a person can rationalize or even justify their oppression doesn’t mean it’s not oppression. And taking them at their word is naive at best, cynically exploitative at more realistic.
Let’s roll with your analogy. So everyone must obey market forces. Supply and demand. Train for the skill set in demand by the economy. Adjust and improve to compete. But not incels. Because, reasons?
I didn’t say that at all. Prostitution is legal in many countries and what I described is already happening for example with that sex worker I linked. Why is that horrendous?
What does “need” even mean? I think you could say sex, relationships, and love are important. In terms of happiness, some people probably do need to experience them to be happy. Some people probably don’t need them. In terms of survival, most people would not need these things to survive, but some people might blow their brains out over not having them.
I don’t think the word “need” has anything to do with it.
I do believe incels are subject to the same market forces as everyone else. I am saying we could add new market forces like legalized sex therapy to help balance the forces.
An idea, for TheFuture…
It’s Saturday. Turn off the electronica, get dressed, and go outside. “Outside” outside, the mall “outside”, wherever.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it: As you are walking, catch five (5) “acceptable” women in the eye, nod, smile, and walk on. Say nothing. Make note of what they do.
I don’t care what you do after this, but at least you’re out of the house, making the slightest effort at communicating, positively, with women. It’s a start.
Or, again, you can stay here and whine. Your choice.
Dude if I want to get laid I’ll just make a Bumble account again. Took me 4 days to get a girl last time. She wasn’t the best but she was okay. Or I could do speed dating again. Last time got follow up with two girls from one event. That has nothing to do with anything I’m talking about here.
But I will agree this is wasting my time.
Let’s start with the crucial questions.
TheFuture, have you 1) read through all the papers and articles that are cited in those claims? 2) Have you evaluated those papers and articles for whether the claims accurately summarize the findings? 3) Have you evaluated the basic worth of those studies to determine whether they adequately can be generalized and applied to the larger population which was not studied? 4) Have you searched out and read the additional work on the subject that may correct, debunk, obsolete, update, or expand upon those studies?
My guess is that the answers are no, no, no, and no.
I once spent several months of my life in the basement of a medical school library, where the old, bound journals were stored, reading through every study ever published on lactose intolerance for a book I was writing. I quickly understood that not all studies were equal, even though every one was in a respected, peer-reviewed journal. Some used too few subjects, or drew them from too narrow a base, or studied them for too short a time. Some applied only to the world of the laboratory and not to the everyday eating experience, in which many foods were mixed together, leading to differing digestive outcomes. Some were not double-blind studies or used statistics that might not have been the most apt. Many studied similar experiences but did so with different approaches so that they could not be combined to make a larger point. I needed to become expert enough as an evaluator to judge which I let through my filter and cited as meaningful information to consumers rather than small data points in the pointillistic tapestry of science and medicine. Evaluating the data is a significant and essential part of science, as important as data collection is.
There is a name for sites that dump a gigantic vat of studies at the reader: the Gish Gallop. RationalWiki describes it.
Not surprising that a creationist perfected this technique. Creationism is absolute nonsense designed to prove a religious belief true, an oxymoronic task. But it is structurally identical to all other conspiracy theories, like moon-hoaxing, birtherism, truthers, and whatever QAnon is inventing today. They are form letters, i.e., identical content with blanks to be filled in with whatever Gish Gallop claims will overwhelm skeptics. All CTs look and read and sound and feel the same. This is why CTers find it so easy to pick up on additional CTs. They are all alike. All real science is also alike, though in a totally different way, and that’s why real scientists can pick up on other real science. Both sides can be identified immediately by anyone who has studied them. That Incel page is a classic example of a Gish Gallop. It can be safely rejected out of hand.
But what of the evidence, you ask? There’s an answer to that common to every Gish Gallop ploy. You tell us what the evidence is. You go though the Gish Gallop. You go through the four questions I asked at the beginning. You tell us what gets through the filter that is important, you tell us how you know it is accurate and meaningful, you tell us what all the other opposing research says, you tell us why your interpretation is sounder than the other side’s. This is generally known in science as a review study: you review the literature and try to make sense of all those individual dots without forcing them artificially into a pattern. It is very powerful when done correctly. That’s perhaps why no CTer ever does one.
If all you do is point to a Gish Gallop and tell us we have to read it before you will approve us into your little discussion club, then either you do not understand the most basic necessities of scientific discourse or else or you are disingenuously pushing an ideological point down our throats. There is no third alternative.
You poisoned your own thread by starting with a Gish Gallop. No one who does one can ever be trusted to have a rational debate on a subject. If you’re wondering why people here reflexively negate everything you say, it’s because they’re learned through hundreds of arguments with CTers. All your arguments do is dig you deeper into that hole.