I’ve never really struggled with friendships, but I’ve had plenty of other issues. One thing that became clear when having CBT was that I do have to work to do things that other people find easy. Telling someone to just be more social is like telling a depressive to just cheer up.
I don’t think there’s any rule that says incels can’t also be stamp collectors or videogamers. The desire for romantic companionship may not be universal among all people, but it’s pretty damn close. If you never have that in your life, I’m not sure all the stamps in the world can fill the void.
TWO POINTS
• People aren’t obliged to like you. Yes, you (whoever you are) are entitled to not be bullied, harassed, picked on. But people in your life, your school, your occupational workplace, etc, do not have an obligation to be friends with you, to be your lover, or to otherwise connect with you beyond cordial businesslike exchange and common courtesy.
but
• It is genuinely an awful experience to be an individual person that no one likes, loves, want to bang, etc.; and while, YES, the reason for that may be that one is an insufferable asshole, it may be the case that these “incel” guys have a point about belonging to a category of people who get marginalized, categorically, by how things are set up. Heck, they could have a point about that even if they ARE mostly insufferable assholes. It should not be news to anyone that sexuality is socially constructed and, moreover, constructed in a way that distorts human sexuality for the preservation of some social institutions. Anyone who has paid a modicum of attention to what feminists have been saying should be well aware of that.
The first point doesn’t invalidate the second.
And in any of those communities, if someone wants to talk about their social issues, what is the reaction? Those are there for talking about specific hobbies, not for providing support.
It is more insidious than “Oh, I can’t get a girlfriend, so I’m going to join the incels.” It is more like, “Here is an interesting forum. The people on here seem to understand my problems. When I talk about my problems, they don’t call me a loser, they accept me, and help me feel better about my lack of friends and romance.”
They don’t go straight in and dive head first. The first encounter they have with the community may not be people calling themselves incels. They could be Men going their own way, or pick up artists, or just a general support group for lonely people.
It seems to me that people here are thinking that radicalization is a single chosen step. That someone one day says that they’ve had it, and now they hate women. It is a much longer process, one that could be disrupted if they were to find a more positive group that would accept them and give them the support of a community.
Thank you for saying this. It’s troubling to me how people keep glossing over the whole violent hatred of women thing. If there are incels who truly couldn’t find any other community to accept them, it’s because they were already such extreme misogynists that no one else would put up with them.
Even that seems kind of unlikely, considering how many posters in this thread are just full of compassion for men who think women owe them sex and deserve brutal punishment for failing to provide them with it. So for those who are calling for greater sympathy for the incels, well, I don’t buy that our society lacks appropriate sympathy for these men. If anything, it has too much sympathy for them and too little sympathy for the targets of their hatred.
I will pay myself on the back for working on my social skills.
But I know being a woman has helped me with this. Especially a fairly okay looking woman with some financial means and some cognitive abilities. And oh yeah, I was not raised on the informstion highway.
Our generation did not grow up in the midst of social media. Our bullies did not encroach into our bedrooms. We did not have access to their inside conversations and snarky commentary. We were regularly confronted by reminders of all our inadequecies, sure. But at least no one could literally see that you have zero friends. Young people nowadays keep a running tally of all their social media “friends” and “likes”. If you ain’t got none, you ain’t no one.
When I was a kid, people had short memories. But the internet keeps memories forever. When I was a kid, you could make a faux pas and only relive it in your nightmares. Today, your pratfalls can be up on youtube before you even get home from school.
When I was a kid, I did not know it was possible to do everything “right” and still end up a failure. Well, let me backtrack. I knew people could be harmed by discrimination. But it was inconceviable to me that you could get good grades and go to a good school and wind up with a crappy job. Or no job all.
Kids today hear stories like this all the time. Because there are entire internet forums dedicated to failure. Internet denizens have a million cautionary tales to hand out to youngsters. It contributes to a feeling of hopelessmess and “Why even bother?”
And we can talk as much shit about “kids today” as we want. But they did not make themselves shitty. They were raised by all the bootstrap-pulling Boomers and GenXers. So if we are going to make this an issues of morals, to be fair and complete we need to talk shit about parenting today. I do not see that happening in this thread, though.
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Thank you for that. I was worried a bit that someone would ask for a cite from this thread of someone explaining that the only reason that people have difficulty with social issues is because they are misogynists or assholes, and I’d have to scroll up to yesterday. Now we have it on this page.
I glanced through the thread, and I see no examples of what you claim. Could you please cite these posters who are "just full of compassion for men who think women owe them sex and deserve brutal punishment for failing to provide them with it. " Just one will do, but your statement does imply that you think that there are quite a number, so, go ahead and call them all out.
I can sympathize with the average incel because I can understand what goes into making a person into one. I also think that we need to figure out a way to eradicate them from society with a comparatively minimal amount of blood spatter. Sympathy is not condoning.
k9bfriender, I actually think it is more a feeling of “These guys do not make me feel inadequate” more than “These guys get me”. Not everyone cares to be “got”, but no one likes feeling inadequate.
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I don’t think they are somehow completely deprived of other access. I think that someone can feel a pull toward a group that validates them for the thing they feel most isolates them.
Which is why I think it’s important to try to get at the root of these radicalizations and try to stop them before they happen.
I agree with that, because all too often it’s not their blood that’s spattering, it’s everyone else’s.
I also agree that sympathy, and making an attempt to see the other side’s perspective, is more likely to result in a positive outcome than condemnation. I think this is true of most things generally.
The problem is that their whole shtick is so generally offputting that it’s really hard not to discuss them with contempt. That’s not the same as treating them with contempt. But discussing them? I mean, Jesus, this whole Chad thing…they’ve literally created a personification of the attributes that they hate. That’s always a sign of an intellectually-shallow, and dangerous, ideology to me. The Nazis did it with “the Jew.” And indeed a lot of Nazi propaganda depicted powerful Jewish men defiling German women. The KKK and assorted American racists did it with their whole “Mandingo” stereotype of the sexually-threatening black male. It’s something that fucked up people do.
I guess the trick is to try to reach these guys before they reach puberty and discover the minefield that is human sexual relations. But how do you do that? And how many of these people are simply operating under the effects of mental imbalance or deeply-rooted psychological issues, and can’t be helped with anything other than the right medication - which they may refuse to take?
Perhaps there needs to be a study to look at risk factors for incel-type radicalization. Without knowing the conditions that cause young men to glom onto this destructive mindset, we can’t really do anything except spitball.
The risk factors are likely a confluence of multiple things. We can speculate that social awkwardness is a component but is this ineptness the product of poor socialization or it is more organic (like Asperger’s)? We can speculate these guys are struggling because they’ve been left behind socioeconomically, but is low self esteem behind their lack of attainment or are external forces in play? Are these men from broken homes without stable parents or are their families pretty much the same as anyone else’s? Do they have close female siblings or are they more likely to be only children? Growing up, what messages are they receiving about relationships and gender roles? Are fathers active parents to them? What about their mothers?
Lots that we don’t know and it makes it hard for me to see what could be done in terms of prevention.
I don’t want greater sympathy for incels. I want to figure out what works to prevent the creation of incels. And I don’t want to sit around patting myself on the back for achievements that weren’t really of my making. Luck plays a huge role in some of these issues.
I can sympathize with how they got where they are, and the problems they have had, while simultaneously viewing everything they do or say with contempt. I’m complex that way.
I’m not even optimistic enough to believe there’s a solution. I think the availability of the internet is at fault for the rise of this phenomena - without it a protoincel will not find themselves connected with a support community that supports them by telling them that all their problems are womens’ fault and that hating women for it is okay, and thus only a fraction of them would blossom to the ‘realization’ of that on their own. But the internet isn’t going away, so there’s no way to close people off from learning that easy, comforting, assholish way.
You do realize that having some insight into bad behavior (or thinking…since most self-identified Incels have not killed or inflicted violence on anyone) is not the same thing as having sympathy or even compassion for it, right? I mean, I understand why someome would be racist. But that does not mean I care for racists.
And you do realize that some of the folks posting here on the side of looking at this thing through a clinical lens are women, right? I despise misogyny as much as I despise racism, but just because I am target of both does not mean I cannot talk about this like I would any other social ill.
As a proud determinist, I can’t go there with the moralistic, self-righteous rhetoric you seem to want us to echo. I see no contradiction in me calling Incels assholes while also appreciating that the majority were not born this way and the majority can be rehabilitated. I am also in favor of throwing them in prison if they lay a finger on anyone or threaten harm against anyone.
This is a complex problem that necessitates discourse more nuanced than “evil guys just being evil”. Even if we just want to call these guys “evil”, we still need to identify why they are evil so we can stop the “evil” from growing.
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First part of eradication is to prevent the radicalizing behavior in the first place. It’s the same thing with religious extremists. People who are made to feel as though they are part of the outgroup, in every situation they are in, are going to be frustrated. If there are outlets for those frustrations they will take them.
What the solution is, I don’t know. But calling people losers or assholes or lazy or misogynists because they don’t have a robust social life is part of the problem, certainly not part of the solution.
(And I am certainly not saying you are, just a general statement, as there are those who do.)
I have less sympathy, I have more empathy. I’ve seen that road from the path I was on. It was not a road without its temptations. My main difference from a number of people that became radicalized to full “incel” state is that I had a few really close friends who did help to keep me within mainstream thought. I almost chalk that up to luck, more than anything I did. I just happened to attract a couple of people who, unlike pretty much everyone else, found my personality to be enjoyable to be around. Without that, I don’t know where I would have ended up.
I dunno. Sure, because these guys are not "Chad"s themselves, then they are not going to fill an insecure person with insecurities. And that may be part of the draw.
But really, when you see that there are others who have gone through what you have, and when you share your experiences and emotions with them, and rather than laugh and sneer and call you an asshole and a loser and a misogynist and lazy, as most of the world would do, they instead empathize and commiserate, that’s how people get drawn into a community. Look at cults, look at radicalization of religious extremists. They prey on the people who are not accepted by mainstream society, and attract them by offering them the understanding that they are elsewhere denied.
One of these things is not like the others. A “general support group for lonely people” is not fundamentally centered around the aim of hating/resenting and/or exploiting women. The MGTOW and PUA communities are.
Sure, a lonely guy might accidentally wander into a MGTOW or PUA or incel site initially thinking nothing more than “hey, here’s a place for guys to talk about difficulties with dating women or feeling bad about not being able to date women”. But a lonely guy with any integrity/principles/compassion wouldn’t voluntarily stick around such a site once it becomes clear (as in, once he’s read about fifty words of what’s posted there) how misogynistic and hateful it is.
If lonely guys are treating virulent misogyny as just a minor drawback that they’re willing to put up with for the sake of feeling like they’ve got the support of a community, that’s a choice they’re deliberately making, and that’s on them. Anybody who isn’t willing to go on looking to find a better alternative to loneliness than organized misogynistic hate has no business expecting continued sympathy for their loneliness from the people they’ve voluntarily chosen to hate.
I watched my older brother go through radicalization, even though I had no idea that that was what it was at the time. He didn’t have many friends in school, and when he got out, didn’t really keep in touch with the few he did. He didn’t’ want to work for anyone else, so he got a chainsaw and a lawnmower, and called himself a landscaper.
The only social connections he had was that he would go out to eat, and flirt with the servers. They would kinda flirt back, as they were looking for tips, but he took that as actual interest. Then he would ask them out, then get infuriated that they had a boyfriend.
He was the one who introduced me to the PUA schtick. I thought it was stupid and pathetic, but he taunted me that because he had this book, he was sure to get laid, and since I didn’t follow it, I wouldn’t. Well, he didn’t get laid following the book, so that made him angrier. (I didn’t get laid not following the book, but I was okay with that).
He then spent a small (or large, really) fortune, talking to “russian women.” He would tell me all about how these girls were so into him, and that they really enjoyed his letters, and thought they were making a connection. Of course, every exchange cost like $50 for “translation services.” Eventually, he got upset that these women seemed to be just stringing him along. :rolleyes:
He put quite a bit of work into trying to get a connection. He just didn’t have the slightest clue how to do it. I would say that, to be honest, I was the lazy one. I didn’t care nearly as much about sex, and I had a few friends and a gaming group, so I wasn’t really happy, but I was content enough.
To be fair, he didn’t go incel, he went SovCit instead, which is probably an even stupider rabbit hole to go down.
Point is, though, we actually had pretty much the same experiences in many ways, and it was only my connection to the world through friends, and to some extent through work that kept me from going down that road.
Strangely, I would say that the best boost to my social skills actually came from playing RPG’s. Once you realize that people don’t make sense, it becomes much easier to accept that people don’t make sense.
:dubious: Massive goalpost shift there, k9bfriender. There is a huge fucking difference between “have difficulty with social issues” and “truly couldn’t find any other community to accept them”.
Although I agree that virgin shaming is a problem particularly among males, I don’t see anyone calling guys misogynistic simply because they don’t have active social lives. If they say misogynistic things and act as though women are adversarial animals good for nothing except sex, then yes they might very well be called misogynists. I think it’s unreasonable to expect that they wouldn’t, to be honest.
Religious extremism attracts aimless youth because it fills a void in their lives. You can try to fill that void with other things, but if you really want to be effective, you must also harden people against extremist ideas. A two-pronged solution, in other words.
With proto-incels, we may need to take the same approach. If you see incel-like “logic” being used in a discussion about dating, it needs to be challenged and shown for what it is. Perhaps being challenged will cause the proto-incel to withdraw and seek a more accepting echo chamber. But if done respectfully, it could also cause the proto-incel to reconsider his beliefs, especially if men with a history of prolonged singlehood are the ones delivering the message in an empathetic way.
Are there forums online for single guys explicitly for men who disavow the negativity and hatred of the incel community? Seems like that could be a start.