Speaking as a person doomed to perpetual solitude, I’ll paint egg on my face and state that this is entirely the point. It’s deliberate, and it happens for a simple reason: if you’re doomed to perpetual solitude for one reason or another, then your problems are not your fault, and more importantly you don’t have to do anything but kvetch. If your problems are beyond your power to correct then your kvetching doesn’t make you a whiny little asshole; it is instead a justified protest against the tyranny of whatever’s oppressing you.
This is a really comfortable place to be. Getting the brass ring requires work, but sitting around and kvetching is easy and fun. Certainly a socially awkward person would rather sit around and kvetch than attempt to date! And that’s the whole appeal of the Incel hate group - it lets you place the blame for your problems on somebody else.
I do doubt it. Bullying is terrible, but it does not cause inflated egos with expectations of hot blond women. The manifesto was a long screed of victimhood with “Life is not fair” as the dominant theme, and he noted being an aggressive asshole when it served his purposes. So, no. He was probably a bully himself and lacked the self-awareness to see it.
I don’t think that viewing a relationship with a woman - or any person of your gender of choice - as a “brass ring”, a prize to be won or attained or earned, is a helpful mindset. You can’t earn a person, they have a will and ideas and agenda of their own, and there’s no algorithm that says “if I do X, I get Y”: long story short, women are people same as men are. And sure, some women do want the good-looking guy with a fat bank balance, just as some men want the blonde arm candy: like I say women are people, and people aren’t always good. Point is, a lot of women don’t: they want the guy who’s smart and nerdy and respectful and caring and fun to be with, the guy who doesn’t see them as the prize in a Christmas cracker. This doesn’t mean that you’re putting women on a pedestal and worshipping them, that’s just coming at the brass ring from a different angle. And yeah, it does require work: sometimes you need to look at the aspects which are going to help you be more attractive, like grooming and dress and fitness and appearance. That takes work for women, too.
Obviously it’s not a helpful mindset, but it sure fit in the sentence nicely, huh? And conveyed what I was trying to say. (And also, why did you use the same term yourself, if it’s so wrong?)
It’s quite clear that the incel bullshit about women is bullshit, and their statements about what women, well, all their statements about women about women are a complete stinky pile of crap. But the point is that they’re just making excuses because they want to shift the blame away from themselves because it’s way easier than accepting it’s their own fault they’re single. Incels see women as brass rings to win, and since they haven’t ‘won’ one, they’re losers. And so they claim the game is rigged and get all mad and violent about it, and use this alleged riggedness as a justification for ‘cheating’ to win (ie: raping and such).
Outside of misogynistic fantasyland, obviously women are people with their own wants, needs, and preferences. I mean, obviously.
Sure, but neither is a relationship going to happen if you do absolutely nothing to make it happen.
If you aren’t a good friend to other people, why would they be a friend to you? Because of your innate awesomeness?
I agree that you can’t earn friendship with friendship tokens, and you can’t earn a sex partner with sex partner tokens. But you can un-earn them. You can have a friend or relationship that you drive away because you always take and never give.
As best I can tell friendships actually are based on innate awesomeness. You have to also refrain from driving them away, but if you are trying to earn friendships with favors and gifts people are going to start looking at you funny. They gotta just like you for who you are.
And sometimes you do need to work on who you are, or at least how you present yourself. Hell, I did, I was an insufferable smart-mouth brat throughout my teens and early twenties, until I wised up, stopped trying to show off how clever I was all the time, and started getting fit and taking better care of how I dressed and presented myself. Not coincidentally, that was about the time that my love-life began to pick up. People can’t see your “inner awesomeness”, all they have to go on is what they see you do: does this person look worth spending my time with? And just not being actively bad isn’t enough, you need to display positive qualities. Is he interested in things? Does he seem happy in his skin? How does he treat others? How does he treat me? This is what friendships and successful relationships are based on, not how sharp are his cheekbones or what kind of watch does he wear.
Well, some of us are more innately awesome than others, so I guess some people might need more work than others.
There are various reasons why the perpetually single are perpetually single. Some people absolutely do need to work on various aspects of their appearance, physique, personality, and attitude if they want to make themselves appealing to other humans. (Persons who are violently misogynistic should probably start by abandoning their inciting internet communities and learning what decent humans act like, for a start.) Others just need to somehow change the circle of people they run in, and have some good luck.
A relationship is what happens when you and another person derive mutual benefit from interacting with each other. At least that is what a fulfilling relationship means to me.
Since no one is owed a platonic or romantic relationship, that means they can’t count on one to just fall into their lap and stay there. They have to make an effort to add enough value to other people’s lives. If they suck at adding value, they will lose socially. If they are effective at adding value, they will win. The word “reward” also applies. Charismatic, compassionate people are generally rewarded with lots of friends. I don’t see the problem in saying this, because it’s obvious that generally speaking, you get out of relationships only what you put into them.
I’m not the most outgoing person in the world and I don’t have a ton of friends, and I’m perfectly okay with this. If I were sufficiently motivated by the rewards of a rich and active social life, perhaps I’d work harder at making friends. But I’m not motivated because I find it too much work.
Of course you shouldn’t throw favors and gifts at people with the expectation that you will be their friend.
But to keep any relationship going, there must be some care and feeding involved. “Care and feeding” could mean anything from laughing at someone’s jokes to baking someone a four-tier cake to spare them from a nervous breakdown the day before their wedding.
I’m surrounded by people who have “innate awesomeness”. They are charming in their own ways and have gifts and talents that I admire. But I only have a handful of friends. These are people who, if they called me up at 2:00AM from the side of the road in the pouring rain, I wouldn’t hesitate to pick them up. When they need a listening ear, I drop what I’m doing and ask them what’s going on. I’ll cheer them up when they are glum and validate their feelings when they don’t want to be cheered up. And I trust that they would do the same for me. Yes, we have a lot in common and our personalities mesh. But we’re friends primarily because of the care and feeding we willingly do for each other. Not because we think our personalities are wonderful.
I think a lot of Incels (and others) take the advice “just be yourself” way too literally. “Yourself” may be a collection of bad and annoying habits. There’s nothing wrong with deliberately changing “yourself” if “yourself” is getting in the way of reaching your goals. Sometimes changing might even mean forcing oneself to do “dances” that don’t feel natural–like engaging in small talk, paying compliments, resisting resting bitch face, and accepting invitations. Some people might think this is phony sell-out behavior. But I choose to think of it as getting what you want.
Five years ago, I had no friends. I was depressed over my social backwardness and alienation. I even had a bonafied personality disorder diagnosis. What helped me was realizing that social connectedness isn’t an innate thing–something you’re either born with or not. As long as you have basic competencies, you can enable a feeling of connectedness through learnable actions. If my friends knew all of my “innateness”, they’d probably run away screaming. I can’t control my “innateness”. I despise some aspects of my “innateness”. But I can point out something that I just know will make Sassafras bust out laughing even though it may only evoke a “meh” in me, and I can agree to go walking with her at lunch even though it’s hot and humid and I’d rather veg out in front of my computer. Perhaps I’m a weirdo, but I think if I waited for Sassafras to be attracted to my innate awesomeness, let alone detect it through all my baggage, I’d still be that misanthrophic person I was five years ago. YMMV.
Its more than that, though. Just being awesome is not enough to maintain adult friendships, particularly once you start having kids, a demanding job, and other competing priorities. The couple of friends I have live out of state and it’s hard for me to stay in touch with them because my life is so crowded right now. But despite this, I make an effort to reach out to them when I can and fit them into my plans when I’m in the area.
Well, ya obviously got to keep in contact with them, at the very least. Innate awesomeness doesn’t radiate past state lines without a little reaching. Myself I only have one real friend (outside of extended family that has to put up with me) because there just ain’t enough days in the week to allocate to regular hangouts with anybody more without eradicating my relaxation time. (That’s the other other other other other other reason I don’t date - my schedule’s not quite open enough.)
I s’pose I should just rescind my ‘inner awesomeness’ comment and retreat back under my rock - my point was that most people probably have aspects of their personality that, when unencumbered by shittiness and terrible habits/behaviors/hygene/whatever obscuring them, allow for a genuine connection that isn’t a total artificial sham. Even most of the incels probably do, somewhere in there, buried under a titanic mountain of shittiness that they learned from the internet and which has saturated their very pores. I mean, maybe they do.
The thing is, when you look at people who are social successes, they don’t just sit back and expect people to like them.
They put in a lot of time and effort cultivating social connections. Yes, it’s not all “I’ll do a favor for Stacy and then she’ll like me”. But it’s “Hey, I heard Stacy had a rough week. I’m going to call her and cheer her up.” “I’m going to walk up to that person in the corner of the room and introduce myself.” “I’m going to chat with the barista making my coffee.”
For an introverted person this is really hard. I’m introverted, but I have lots of extroverted friends. And why is this? Because they’re the ones who put in the work to maintain social connections. Is it phony? No it isn’t, if you truly enjoy interacting with other people. But it is often done consciously, people who value social connections consciously make an effort to reach out to other people because that’s how you establish and maintain those connections.
Yes, if you do it with the expectation that if you contribute X social tokens you’ll receive Y social tokens in return, it’s going to fail. But if you never reach out to other people they’ll stop reaching out to you. If that doesn’t bother you, and you’re happy to live your life with only superficial social connections, then good for you. But if that makes you unhappy then you have to start doing things differently.
And yes, maybe you’re just an unlovable loser who everyone hates for good reasons that you’ll never be able to change. There are people like that. We’ve all met the lonely person who’s also a bitter asshole. They’re alone because they’re a bitter asshole, and they’re a bitter asshole because they’re alone. Lots of people like that.
Er, I’ll just assume that all this second person in here is the general second person. I myself consider it a poor friendship if you don’t meet face-to-face at least once a week; that’s why I only have time for one friend. (Not counting family which I spend two nights and an afternoon with a week usually).
Good lord, that’s appalling. Makes me ashamed to be male. (Though it fails to make me ashamed about my appearance - sure I’m physically unappealing, but that’s not really the problem.)
We should give incels sex robots that forcibly refuse to let them leave the house. I’d say the sex robots should also give them honest compliments about their appearance too to try to combat the reported delusions they suffer under, but there’s no chance they’d believe the robots anyway.
