What fresh insanity is this??
Why are ‘incels’ so angry? The history of the little-known ideology behind the Toronto attack.
Okay, it’s not new. But holy shit.
BTW, read the whole article. Some eye-opening history there.
I think the problem is not men who have problems getting laid. That is not such an uncommon occurrence for men in general at one point in their life or another, but most of them don’t talk about going on a rape-murder-acidthrowing rampage, much less do that sort of thing. Lack of sex/relationships is not fun for anyone, but most human beings deal with the resulting frustration via other means.
The incel types referred to in the OP are maladjusted individuals who blame others for their failures and not only have problems relating to women but probably to anyone. If it wasn’t women it would be someone else they’d blame. Most will probably seethe in private, but as we’ve seen some of them actually do become violent and a threat to others.
They’re entitled little shitheads who are angry the world doesn’t cave in to their demands. They’d rather bitch than self-reflect and correct the traits that are the real source of their problems. Worse yet, some of them prefer to lash out.
People get violently angry for all kinds of reasons–trivial or non-trivial.
There have always been entitled shitheads, just as much there have always been men frustrated by a lack of women wanting to have sex with them. (And no, white men have not previously had the privilege of sex whenever they want it that is now taken away from them.)
Is this just a downside of the current greater ability to find and connect with likeminded people, in this case in a dysfunctional brotherhood? Previously these people just privately stewed and had their private violent fantasies. Now they share them with others and they feed off of each other as hearing that others feel as they do normalizes it for them and emboldens them to potentially act on the fantasy … for both themselves and for the “good” of that fictive kinship.
The only thing different between these and more typical terrorists is the claimed motivation. Otherwise, all the other usual factors seem to be identical, which makes me skeptical that the claimed motivation was anything more than a convenient flag to rally behind.
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Sex is a powerful basic human need. Being deprived of it naturally makes people unhappy. Some people get stabby. Mocking them doesn’t make their basic need go away.
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People naturally seek equality. When they perceive someone else getting laid more than they, it can make them unhappy, especially if that person is perceived as being less deserving or a worse person than they. Like an employee who works 50 hours getting passed over for promotion when the boss’s nephew works 20 hours a week and gets promoted with ease.
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Mocking or ridiculing such people doesn’t make their anger go away. By analogy, if mocking Islamic terrorism were the solution to Islamic terrorism, 9/11, ISIS, the USS Cole bombing and hundreds of other terrorist attacks would never have happened.
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For decades, America has been promoting an entitlement culture. You deserve this, you are entitled to that, you have a right to this or that, etc. So some incels are simply a natural product of the entitlement culture in which they have been raised.
Who was mocking them, before they became actively vengeful?
Virgin-mocking is something that has been around for decades, many decades.
Which explains why this sort of violence has been going on for many decades. Except it hasn’t.
Everything has a starting point, before which it wasn’t a thing yet.
Also, as others pointed out upthread, the Internet now allows people to commiserate together, stew together and prod each other/themselves onto collective action together in a way that would have been hard in the past.
Is there any actual data (not just a few anecdotes) to show any significant number of violent acts are caused by this?
…which they acted out through rape and domestic abuse, supported with the common attitude that the victims “asked for” and “deserved” it.
Seriously, are Dopers defending these Neanderthals?
Well, there are the links in the OP’s cite. For some definitions of “a few anecdotes” of course.
The narcissism of “incels” goes beyond just sex. It’s a COLOSSAL sense of entitlement in all areas of life. Take Elliot Rodger, for instance. I read his crazy manifesto when it was leaked, because, why the hell not? It was morbidly fascinating. It’s truly real-life Patrick Bateman shit.
Among the reasons he was angry:
He already drew an extremely generous allowance from his wealthy family even though he never worked a job in his life, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted to have a net worth of multimillions. So what did he do? He played the lottery obsessively, going so far as to drive all the way to Arizona from California because the jackpot was bigger in that state. Every single time, he was convinced that he would win. And of course, every time he didn’t win, he flew into a rage straight out of American Psycho.
He was already, by any objective standards, a handsome guy. But he wanted to be blonde. He dyed his hair blonde when he was younger at one point, but was pissed off because the roots grew back. So later in life, he became angry every time he saw a blonde person. Numerous times he would randomly get into drunken altercations with guys because they were blonde.
He also wished he was taller (apparently unaware that some of the biggest male stars in Hollywood, like Tom Cruise, are as short as he was.) So every time he saw a taller guy with an attractive women, he IMMEDIATELY leapt to the conclusion that it was because the guy was taller, and that if he were taller, the girl would be “his.”
This kind of attitude overlaps very much with narcissistic, sociopathic individuals, and criminal profilers would do well to study every word of that “manifesto” to build profiles for suspects of unsolved murders. It goes beyond sex, it is a crazy power-mad narcissistic God complex. And a lot of these “incel” guys have it.
Yes, in my opinion. In earlier times, these guys would have just wallowed in alcohol and (if they could afford it) drugs and prostitutes, until they either drank themselves to death, committed suicide, or in rare cases, acted out. Or they might have joined (or started) cults. Now they have forums and an echo chamber.
I just heard about these folks a few days ago on NPR. I don’t want to get into details and run afoul of any rules, but my first thought was: I think we had a few of those folks posting here over the past few years. :eek: Suddenly some of those OPs made sense, and by “made sense” I mean are put in some scary-ass context.
Seriously no. Nothing posted in this thread defends the vitriol spewed or the violent actions taken by those referred to in the op. And don’t insult the noble human species of Neanderthals, 2% of many of our genetic heritages, and probably less violent than the Homo sapiens portions.
Some are attempting to contribute to exploring the questions raised by the op.
Is this “new”? In what way is this “new”? If it is new, then why?
So let’s consider your contribution - are these the same sorts of people who “acted out through rape and domestic abuse”? Personally I doubt it. I do not think that the profile of a rapist or a domestic abuser is or has been primarily inclusive of not having a sexual partner or having been rejected in romance.
The emergence of an “online misogynistic subculture of men who blame women for their sexual frustration” simply was not possible before the online platform for that community existed (duh), and online platforms amplify things, the untrue and evil perhaps even more than the true and good.
I think there are several points made here that are good ones:
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There have always been misogynist-narcissists in society, particularly in heavily male-worshipping societies and they have always, in one way or another, been a threat to women around them.
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Things have been slowly getting better in modern society, so there are some sectors of human society that have reduced the influence of misogynistic male chauvinism
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The internet has allowed people like this to form their own network, and create an ideology and a movement.
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Like with white supremacism, this is fueled in part by a backlash against growing equality in society and panic on the part of people who thought that they were entitled to a certain degree of status based merely on their gender.
I read hunks of Elliot Rodger’s manifesto too, and what impressed me was the internal coherence of his ideology—Women are mindless animals who should have no sexual freedom and men like him deserved sex from the women he found attractive. He was a violent fascist.
Rodger was half-Asian (Malaysian Chinese, I believe) and he had a violent hatred of anyone who was less-white than him. He went on rages when he saw Asian men and black men with white girlfriends. He had a sick attitude towards women and sex, and he had an incredible sense of entitlement—he resented his father’s choice to invest in a personal film project that resulted in a degree of loss of economic status.
He was also a pathetic character in a lot of ways. He didn’t know how to make friends, and a lot of that had to do with his narcissism, but it also had to do with his social awkwardness. One YouTube video I saw renewing his manifesto pointed out that whenever Rodger encountered a social problem, his parents would just spend money to move him out of his situation, like to a new school. No one ever taught him how to care about other people as a first step to relating to them.
I have to say that there were some things in his manifesto that I could identify with—social isolation and difficulty relating with people and making friends, and, heck, also difficulty meeting girls and getting dates. But somehow that didn’t create such a degree of rage in me that resulted in a hard misogynistic ideology. Maybe that was because I never got trapped by an online community of misogynists. I don’t know.
I have heard about studies showing that adult American men in general are increasingly isolated, with few strong bonds with anyone other than their spouses. I have found it to be true. Men have to work hard to have come relationships and society looks askance at adult men who look like they want to make friends.
+1
Nailed it on all counts here!
I… don’t even have anything to add its just the perfect reply.