Huh? They are upset because they feel they are owed sex by women. Is that a legitimate gripe? Is it a legit issue?
They need to learn this is NOT a legitimate gripe. Giving them affirmation seems counterproductive.
We cannot negotiate with terrorists, especially socially awkward or ugly ones.
In fact we need to step up the program; ladies, start looking more disgusted by sweaty misogynists, single men; start being more handsome and charming.
We’ll need funding to expand the wedgie project from schools to all workplaces.
Don’t mess with Chad!
It depends on how useful you want the term to be. A detailed deadly plan involving many people is fundamentally different than a guy who rents a van and drives it on the sidewalk, imho. Wanting the U.S. to remove it’s troops from Saudi Arabia is a fundamentally different type of goal than wanting the government to issue sex slaves, again imho. What’s so hard to understand that some people don’t think lumping them together is a particularly good idea?
A lot of people are concerned about what “terrorism” actual is because they are more interested in the ratio of white/Christian to brown/Muslim attacks – one way or the other.
I agree that the concerns of decent non-hateful people who are unhappy because they feel sexually/romantically deprived should not be mocked or contemptuously dismissed. And we as a society need to do a much better job in general of not shaming or denigrating virginity, celibacy, voluntary sex work, and respectful decent clients of sex workers. (There’s a good recent column by Dan Savage on this issue.)
But when unhappy sexually deprived people resort to hatred, bitterness, entitlement and misogyny, not to mention actual murderous violence, to make themselves feel better about their lack of affection and sex, they forfeit all claims to sympathy and respect. Nobody is entitled to sex or romance from anybody else, and being bitter against the world because you didn’t happen to get lucky in the sex/romance lottery is not a “legitimate gripe”.
Note also that for centuries, if not millennia, unhappy unattractive lonely/sex-starved women have been a classic target of society’s scorn and mockery. But they haven’t started a movement to encourage and cheer on hatred and murder out of sheer vengeful bitterness. Where’s your concern for the “gripes” of the “involuntarily celibate” who aren’t spiteful, hateful, whiny, resentful, terrorist and terrorist-enabling men?
Forgot to mention that this distinction operates across all the other grievance/hatred divides, too.
E.g., ordinary Muslims who are upset about Islamophobic bigotry/racism, or oppression of Palestinians/Rohingya, etc., deserve to be listened to with respect and empathy. Islamist fanatics who weaponize such grievances into an excuse to murder innocent people, on the other hand, have lost all claim to be listened to with any respect whatsoever.
Similarly, white working-class people who feel steamrollered by shifts in the US economy and abandoned or neglected by powerful elites have a valid claim to attention and consideration. But when they start joining white-supremacist/neo-Nazi militias or “sovereign citizen” movements to take out their resentments on other people, they have thereby removed their concerns from the category of issues worth giving a shit about.
Being a loser isn’t a “grievance.”
I’m not sure that their gripes are legitimate, and the issue that they can’t get laid is not one that needs to be addressed by the public.
About the only think that I think that we could do for them is to legalize prostitution (which we should probably do for a number of reasons). Anything else is them complaining that other people have the freedom to not find them attractive, and while that’s a legitimate gripe, it is one that can only be taken up and solved by oneself.
If prostitution is legalized, the losers of the incel movement will shift to raging over the fact that they have to pay while others get sex for “free”.
It is worth noting that in Toronto, prostitution is essentially legal. Technically the law is kind of confusing, but in actual practice, escort services are about as secretive as convenience stores. Call one of the openly advertised services, and a man can have sex with an attractive woman any day of the week for a fee and there is no chance at all he’ll be arrested. Toronto, being a huge city, has all the choice a lonely man could want and a permissive view on the part of law enforcement.
So if Alek Whatshisname didn’t even ave that excuse just what the hell was his grievance?
Ehhh, some may. Many would never become incels in the first place.
People are not entirely rational, and people who are sexually frustrated are even less.
Doubtful. As RickJay noted, “incels” can also be found in places where sex-for-pay is readily available. Nor is sexual frustration something that can only be relieved by means of a sex partner.
I don’t buy the notion that easier access to sex-for-pay would work as some kind of “incel” vaccine. And as noted in the article I linked to above, misogynist hatred and violence should not be appeased at the expense of sex workers’ safety and comfort.
The way to keep (at least some) unhappy lonely people from becoming vile hateful misogynistic shits is not by handing them prostitutes but by teaching them that they are not automatically entitled to sex or romance, and that their worth as a human being or as a man/woman isn’t fundamentally dependent on their sexual/romantic status.
Fair enough. I’ve never visited prostitutes, nor found myself with that level of sexual frustration, so it’s hard to say. I would think it would help, maybe a bit. But maybe not. The idea would be that they would be reliving their frustrations before they get to that point.
My point was that that is the only thing I can think of that can be a part of public policy that would have any effect. If it wouldn’t have any effect, then there is no part of public policy that can help them.
Yeah, we told them that. They didn’t much appreciate it.
Have these people not heard of porn? How sexually frustrated can they be?
Not all that often, and not loudly enough to drown out the accumulated cultural volume of thousands of years of patriarchal dominance telling them that they are automatically entitled to sex/romance, and that not being able to get sex/romance does call the fundamental nature of their manhood into question.
Traditionally, women who don’t attract mates are encouraged to hate themselves, while men who don’t attract mates are encouraged to hate women.
Also, while they aren’t getting any, other people are getting more than their fair share. This is the injustice.
Porn is… not quite the same thing.
Physical intimacy requires physical presence. The imagination can fill in some gaps, it can even make you feel as though you are romantically intimate with your sexual partner, even if it is a strictly short term or even financial relationship. It can’t quite replicate the actual feel of another human’s touch.
If porn was enough, none of us would ever leave our homes.
I get that that is the state that they are in, I just don’t know a good way to explain such. They are not in a rational place, so rational arguments have little effect.
To some extent, I blame romantic comedies. Some people take them as a documentary in the human mating rituals. Which, of course, makes about as much sense as learning to be a cop from the Police Academy movies. The problem is, is that there really is little in the way of positive role models for men to look to for romance. Pretty much all celebrity romances are either fake or are based on mutual compatibilities that don’t exist on the “mortal” plane. As a celebrity once said, “Who’ll be my role model, now that my role model is gone?”
I mean, really, romance doesn’t come with an instruction book, and there is very little feedback as to what you did wrong in approaching a person you are interested in. It’s a hard thing to learn, with many of the lessons being very costly.
I doubt its about Sex, Toronto is all over the place with regards to pay as you go plans. No, I think this is about their inability to score the hot chicks. I would think people like these losers, are what arranged marriages were for.
I was shown a post today by an incel calling for banning make-up. Because slightly less hot women use it to deceive the Chads into sex. And that’s why those women aren’t giving sex to the now incels.
Also some plan where everyone has a government sex rating and you can only have sex with people of the same rating. A woman’s rating goes down with every new man she sleeps with.
I’ll see if I can find a link to this stuff but it’s pretty toxic.
:rolleyes:
Isn’t it enough that we have to worry about terrorism motivated by religious fundamentalism, white supremacy, environmental extremism, and anti-government radicalism? Now we have to watch out for organized loserdom too?