Ignoring the fact that most of those stereotypes do have a nugget of truth to them assists the worst among us even more, by making you look out of touch with reality and causing your message of tolerance to be ignored by the people you are trying to reach.
I’ve seen some of these self improvement points before and have comments
Basically on the level, but it should be emphasized that this does not mean fancy, expensive clothes and “good hygiene” does not mean drenching oneself in cologne or aftershave. There’s something to be said for moderation. Clean is key here, whether you’re wearing a suit or t-shirt and jeans.
I think men over emphasize this. Yes, being athletic and full of muscle is good, but I think some of this is more about what men value than what women do. You do NOT have to be a gym rat or marathoner, and holding up too high a physical standard is toxic. A lot of guys are just never going to look or be very athletic and that’s OK - what women want is a guy who isn’t squishy and can pick up a bit more weight than she can. It’s not a terribly high standard, basically enough to show you give something of a damn about yourself. I disagree that it takes “many months or years of blood, sweat, and tears”.
Of course, nothing wrong with workouts and sports - in many ways I think the physical activity is good for male mental health. It certainly doesn’t hurt. I just don’t think the level you’re suggesting is required.
The irony is that I know people who are autistic who have better social skills than some of these incels seem to have. Of course, a major difference is that autistic people who achieve some success in this area admit THEY have a problem and expend a lot of time and energy on it. The incels don’t admit they are any part of the problem and don’t put in any effort to improving their weaknesses.
Again - I think you’re setting the bar too high here. Not that there is anything wrong with what you suggestion but not everyone is going to achieve it.
What women want are men who will be a help and not a burden. They don’t want a man-child. Have a job. Also act like you have some tiny bit of ambition. If you work part-time be looking to make that full time. Be at least self-supporting - that’s why “lives in mama’s basement” is such a romance killer. Women want men who can at least take care of themselves, and if they can take care of others (like…say… the mother of their children) even better. If you don’t have a job be a full time student or busting your ass looking for work. But if you can work at all then have some sort of job.
And yes, the higher status/income of your job the better off you’ll be dating. Still no guarantees, but better odds.
^ This. Incels want handed to them on a platter what the rest of us work for.
As someone who was married to a disabled person for 30 years, all I have to say to that is that there are a remarkable number of assholes in the world.
There are trolls out there happy to insult and verbally torture anyone with a difference, perceived or real. Which helps no one and nothing.
You say “asshole”, I say “person securing their spot in heaven”. 
That was kinda my original point. If you’re telling incels that they’re morons for being influenced by this stuff, how can you turn around and be sympathetic to young women who are influenced by it?
I’m not dismissing it. I just don’t see how kids entered the conversation when up until then we were talking about sex and relationships. Do you think incels are upset because they want kids and can’t have them? Okay, then just say that.
Again, I’m not dismissing it. The most I’ve said is that having a kid is not the same thing as having a relationship.
Actually all I’ve done is counter speculation with actual data. I don’t even know what you think I’m speculating.
No I don’t know the answer, but anyone who is really curious can do a little research, right? It took me 15 min and a little googling to find those statistics. When it comes to a lot of the stuff we’re talking about, we actually don’t have to speculate.
But if you knew your chances for love weren’t indefinitely doomed, and that odds could improve with a little time, wouldn’t that change your outlook a wee bit? I think so, but what do I know.
I don’t think I’ve posted enough in this thread for me to be “consistently” arguing anything. I suspect you took one thing that I wrote to Velocity and have blown it out of proportion.
I’m just going to just single out this comment, because it’s at the crux of our little back-and-forth and apparently has been a source of misunderstanding.
Do you agree relying on “stories” is part of the problem here? On both sides? Incels put stock in a pessimist story that says they will never get laid, and much of this story comes from misconceptions, exaggerations, and distortions about women and nature. And those who think incels only have themselves to blame for their plight also fall back on stories. Like, “all you gotta do is workout and things will be fine for you” kind of stories. Agreed?
I’m not in either faction. I believe the deck is stacked against many men for reasons that may or may not be in their control. But I also believe the stacking is not as serious as it’s often made out to be, and an honest appraisal of data shows this. Too often, what I see is men eschewing this approach in favor of pet theories and biotruthy just-so stories.
I accept that this was not what you trying to do. But do you see where I’m coming from here? If changing incel’s outlook to be more positive and optimistic is key here, then I don’t know how we’re going to do that if we don’t challenge “stories” that fuel their unhealthy scarcity mentality.
I’m not telling them that.
Seems to me that you were.
Bullshit. What truth is there to the stereotype, which came about hundreds of years ago, that black men are dangerous to white women? The reverse was overwhelmingly much more accurate – white men were extremely dangerous to black women during the time of slavery, since there was essentially no sanction for raping slaves, and no recourse for raped slaves. Or that Jews and Native Americans can’t be trusted? Who was more at risk in any deal or arrangement when these stereotypes came about – Jews interacting with gentile Europeans in, say, the 18th or 19th centuries… and Native Americans interacting with colonists? Are you seriously going to argue that gentile Europeans were more in danger than Jews, or that European colonists were more in danger than Native Americans?
This stuff is based on bullshit put into place to support status quo power structures. There was no truth to them, and very often the truth was opposite.
Starting at the teen years is wasting ten good years of education time. Schools should be teaching social integration, age appropriate sexual interaction information, consent and other topics designed to help kids to fit into the adult society they’ll be a part of when they’re grown.
During this early time, kids at higher risk of social alienation can be identified and steered into more rigorous and targeted groups to give them better assistance with their more specialized issues. Since everyone in school goes to these groups, there’s no stigma. If it’s done well it will be seamless and nobody will ever figure out some are being singled out for more intense education.
Mixed sex, because having areas where talking to “the other” on a normal, equal footing makes it hard to make those people “the other” later on if you have some good experiences and empathy with those who are like you, emotionally, even if they’re a different gender or race or sexual orientation.
ETA: There’s another followup post that I missed, gonna read that first.
Sounds to me like you’re making a personal insult.
Would you like to explain how I’m “disconnected from reality”, since you’re so clearly well acquainted with me?
I am not saying that you are disconnected from reality. I am saying that you’re…
More specifically, you told them that in post #290, when you wrote:
I’ve been attempting to figure out exactly how far you meant that attitude to extend; does it only apply to incels, all lonely people, or to everyone who internalizes unrealistic and damaging messages from popular culture.
To no avail, so far.
And there are a LOT of possible answers to that:
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For most of history half of men failed to reproduce, meaning they were adults but had so little opportunity to have sex with women they failed to produce children.
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Infant boys had a higher mortality rate than infant females (that is, in fact, true today, although the difference is survival is small).
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Boys were encouraged to take more risks to prepare them for things like hunting and warfare that meant more boys died before adulthood due to accidents and a lack of modern medical techniques to save them. Or, if not deceased, were sufficiently crippled as to be considered unfuckable.
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Men were encouraged to take more risks because hunting and defending the group was a necessary duty, meaning a higher mortality rate for men. In this scenario, a woman might be likely to have sequential husbands.
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In warfare, men on the losing side are slaughtered (or castrated - a tactic seen in several past cultures that took the losers out of the gene pool even if they managed to live a long life afterward) and women taken as concubines/sex slaves/whatever you want to call it.
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In warfare, offspring of losing men might be slaughtered (or castrated), but their women used to bear the victors more offspring.
In several of the above scenarios women wind up with sequential mates. A man might reproduce but if his kids don’t survive it doesn’t matter.
I don’t think just one of the above is the answer - the answer is probably a mix of the above.
Based on hunter-gatherer societies we have actual records of, virtually all fertile adults manage to have sexual partner(s) and reproduce, the problem is the differential between whose kids survive long enough to reproduce themselves. The Big, Smart, Strong, Mighty Hunter/Warrior might be able to not only feed himself but more than one woman and their children, as well as defend them from those outside the tribe. Loser Guy might be a crap hunter whose kids either starve or are undernourished, can barely support himself much less a family, and during an attack gets killed by Big, Smart, Strong, Mighty Hunter/Warrior From Tribe From Other Side of Big River, who then steals the mate of Loser Guy and adds her to his tribe, maybe killing off her kids by another man because he doesn’t want to be feeding the competition. Loser Guy still managed to have sex even if his genes don’t survive long term. Meanwhile, women in this scenario are much less likely to be killed by violence than men. Hence, twice as many women are able to pass on their genes (even if a lot of that are under circumstances we’d define as rape).
Which, yes, is a just-so story but is one to counter a just-so story that says half of men in history didn’t have sex or kids. Which also illustrates why nothing is really explained by just-so stories.
Yeah, thanks. :rolleyes:
People who internalize unrealistic and damaging messages from popular culture. They’re treating fantasy and escapism, where everything is better and everyone is beautiful and rich and lucky, as some kind of reality and self-injuring by getting depressed and jealous that they don’t have those things too.
Sweet Jesus. Walk around a mall or a Walmart store. You’ll be rapidly dissuaded from the idea that everyone is like people in the movies or on TV.
It appears that you don’t understand the word most, even when I bold it. You getting cranky with me about the exceptions doesn’t change the rule.
Because “most” is bullshit. Most stereotypes are complete and utter bullshit.
Totally agree.
Agreed, with the small caveat that we need to be careful ourselves about what we actually know or don’t know. But that’s always true anyway, so…
Absolutely agreed.
The only thing I’d want to point out here is, well… something that probably doesn’t need to be pointed out. But I’m me, so there’s the compulsion to say it anyway.
This is hard. It’s really, really, really hard. I don’t know how to do it. Most people, I think, don’t know how to do it. But at minimum (I kind of believe right now) we need to be able to acknowledge the reasons they claim for why they’re telling their current stories. Their “reasoning” (tho that’s the wrong word) needs to be acknowledged, even when we accept neither their stories nor their claimed reasons for their stories. Or hell, I donno, maybe that’s wrong too. It’s hard.
Yes, this is the exact point I was making in my own post.
But I suppose it can never be said enough.
There are a lot of false messages told by popular culture that are not hinted at being false until they hit you in the face with a massive fist. Most applicably, television very, very consistently portrays life as being easy. Apartments are big, people hardly ever seem to work or study their schoolwork, nobody’s really poor, and “really poor” people live lives that actual poor people would kill for. And of course “Ugly” people aren’t really ugly, and “ugly” people still have no problem “getting the girl”.
You can scoff at how obviously false all this stuff is, but here’s no counterpoint - nothing teaches people how hard life actually is, until they run into something that does, forcibly. People come out of college and are astonished to find that, no, their parents lied to them - a degree doesn’t get you a job. People get married and don’t live happily ever after - and things break down. People play football for years and it just ends - no majors!
You get people for whom the best years of their life were high school, or college. Back before things got real, and they ended up in a dead-end job, or employed, and perpetually poor and unmotivated and single and bitter.
Again, you can scoff all day about how fake TV and movies are, but for a lot of people that’s the only real preview of adult life they get. Their parents try and shield their kids from their fights and problems, and the more they succeed the less warned the kids are.
Yeah, I get that. I really do. The question is why we treat some people who internalize those images with sympathy, and some of them with contempt, as you did in post #290.
I know. People are Human, they don’t know what to do.
I’m not defending Hollywood or the media at all. But this isn’t a new problem, it is as old as humanity and story telling.
“Why can’t my life be like in those stories of knights and princesses?” is just as old.
And as far as what people know when they get out of school, yes, I know. You think you know everything, because you’ve spent years surrounded by mostly the same people, the same stories, the same jobs and work ethics. You’ve completed a long schedule of training and think you’re ready. You’re young, immortal and filled with knowledge and certainty.
Then you hit the real world and find out that what you know could cover an ordinary plate while the world is… actual size.