Are you asking for examples only from this thread, or outside examples, too?
I didn’t say anyone was sympathetic because of the anger, antisocial behavior, or misogyny. There might be a few who feel that way, but I think the sympathy is more for lonely single men in general. The point I was making was about how the whole violent misogyny thing keeps getting glossed over in a discussion that’s about members of a violent misogynist hate group, NOT lonely single men in general.
Someone who’d never heard of incels before this thread might get the impression that they’re a support group for lonely men, or even that “incel” is a slang term for a guy without a girlfriend. But it’s not like the incels keep their seething hatred of women and more successful men a secret. I am troubled by the apparent willingness of some posters to turn a blind eye to this, especially since it’s only been a few days since the Toronto van attack.
Some people are doing that. Others don’t seem able to acknowledge that incels even have a poisonous attitude.
I don’t think the violent misogyny is getting glossed over so much as that there’s just not much about it to discuss. What would you want that thread to look like?
“Violent misogynists are bad.”
“Yup.”
“Totally agree.”
“+1”
“QFT”
I think it’s just the nature of online discussions, and maybe this board in particular, to coalesce around the disagreements and distinctions.
If the violent misogynists aren’t being discussed, that’s a good thing. No one is on their side.
If we frame racism as, say, an aesthetic issue, we run into the problem that racists and Nazis and white supremacists aesthetically prefer white, don’t we? If we frame it as a religious issue, well, that appeal failed once before, and astonishingly (just kidding) seems apt to fail again today. If we frame it as a legal issue, sometimes we win, because after many decades of relative sanity we have built up enough mutually-supporting laws to withstand attacks on them. Still, in areas in between where the laws apply (most notably during encounters between police and minority suspects), that, too, seems to fail much too often. What I’m saying here, basically, is that you can’t reason someone out of an idea that had nothing to do with reason in the first place. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that racism is inherently irrational and that neither racism nor reason (or most other systems of thought) works very well when combined with sex. Sexism too, though in this case it is both unreasoning and inextricably and poisonously involved with sex.
I’m trying to find the deeper meaning in this. Under what circumstances, and when, is misogyny the result of radicalization? Certainly, if really poor parents don’t encourage respect for the opposite sex, and inattentive and sexist public or private primary and secondary education don’t do it either, then maybe young boys could eventually develop bad habits not only of thought but of action. They may even develop, from externalizing their own inadequacies and shame, antagonism towards both authority figures (often women) and women in general. That’s not being radicalized: that’s being grotesquely, pathologically, awful with the permission of all the people over many years who should have stopped you a long time ago, and inevitably finding a (usually internet) community that tells you you’re normal and okay, even though you know you’re not.
I remember a time (it was, sadly, really short) when even the worst racists I knew were too embarrassed to utter the racial slurs they were accustomed to using in the annual town meeting because my father was on the board of selectmen, and there were children in the room. Shame, actually, was once important when it came to the people who were bigoted and ignorant and cowardly, because shame/cowardice usually is a hidden fourth column that defeats the bigoted/ignorant. Eventually, actually pretty soon after Reagan’s election, that went gradually away – I knew it had when a local pastor, as I was helping him repair his porch, used an unacceptable word several times in a row, just (I think) to test me. I decided to fail his test.
But we’re still talking way off-topic, right? Racism is awful and satisfies a social and psychological need to feel superior in the absence of any objective evidence, whereas “incel” philosophy is…also awful and satisfies a social and psychological need to feel superior in the absence of any objective evidence. And they both have a sexual component that just makes everything worse.
You know that all of that occurred because of a lot of really unpopular laws and court decisions that just plain outlawed, not persuaded, white racists from avoiding all that, right? The garden-variety ignorant bigoted racists did not change: not even a little bit. But slowly, the consequences of their behavior did, and finally even most fish-brained bigots eventually decided to keep their matches in their pockets to keep themselves out of prison.
Oh,dear. If you don’t know what to do on behalf of would-be rapists, but you insist on doing something, please pause and think.
Not really interested in offering “hope” to people whose “hope” is to sexually enslave others. Fine with offering therapy to help “incels” to get over such a nauseating idea of “hope.” But as I said, it does seem that parents and teachers are already left far behind by the time these misfits go from unpleasant to malignant.
First, holy shit, those guys are terrible.
But second, I absolutely want to study Nazis etc. to figure out why they got into it and how to get them out and how to present alternatives to Nazi ideology to intellectually vulnerable youth, such that nobody every finds Nazism to be the best organizing philosophy for their world. I’m not super-impressed with Antifa’s punch-a-Nazi campaign, but folks like Life After Hate are doing yeoman’s work in helping Nazis leave the movement.
It ain’t handwringing. It’s diversion, trying to get rid of the pool of recruits, and incidentally trying to help some folks with their mental health issues.
I’d prefer that to the way this thread has gone. But if people thought about it really hard, they could probably come up with something more significant to say about violent misogyny in a thread started in response to a mass murder committed by a self-identified member of a violent misogynist hate group. Several posters have already done so. I have an arm injury that’s making it painful for me to type right now, but I’ve still managed to peck out more than a “+1” on the subject. The article linked in the OP doesn’t just say “Violent misogynists are bad”, nor does the SPLC entry on male supremacists that I quoted upthread.
Anyone who really cares about preventing similar attacks or helping the incels themselves should be talking about misogyny because misogyny is a key factor in this problem. It’s not the only factor, but I think it’s a much bigger part of the answer to the question “Why are incels so angry?” than loneliness or poor social skills.
I’m sorry you’ve bought into the myth that if you work hard you’ll automatically be successful because it just ain’t true in the real world.
Lots of people don’t have to work at athletic skills, but some do. Lots of people find social skills easy. I didn’t. But rather than sit on my ass and blame the entire world for my problem I actually did the hard work of learning better social interactions. Yeah, I get that it’s harder for some than others. Sorry the world isn’t fair.
But when I read Elliot Rogers thinking that if he just sat outside a coffeehouse or something and women would throw themselves at him, begging for sex then getting outraged that it didn’t happen that way then yeah, he didn’t do the basic work of social interactions. These guys don’t want relationships, they want sex slaves. That goes way beyond normal “woe is me, I don’t have a girlfriend”.
Like me, at first.
Still, never heard of InCels, as a movement, before this thread.
Name one. With quote.
Naming one of them would be nice, too. IMHO’s standards are slacker than GD’s, but you still need citations to support your claims.
I’d be the second one to admit that I’m a clueless, old, white guy (IIRC, monstro was the first and she pointed out my tinges of racism and misogyny, with which I don’t agree, thinking my dumbth already covered those bases) and I’ve been taken to the woodshed for it. I like to think I learned something from the experience, and I also like to think that all hope is not lost for these assholes when they reach full incel crazy. Most hope, yeah, which is why we need to intervene early, and I have some idea how they get radicalized.
In college some of us would congregate, drink, and get high. Once Big Ed, recently disappointed in love, launched into a rant, calling all women “fucking connivers” and explaining why and how. Being high, we mostly laughed at him, but looking backward I can see that had the internet been invented and he didn’t have a support group that liked women, others could have built on that with a feedback loop. Like most incels he wasn’t crazy enough to kill, but he would help fill the ranks and make a couple of serious nuts look like a movement.
Maybe we can’t reach the nuttiest, but there’s a possibility with the foot soldiers, so empathy and understanding are important.
And heads straight into “whoa, this dude is beyond nuts.” Maybe there was a point where friends could have knocked him upside the head, but it’s sounding more like a type of psychosis. And I don’t think insanity has been given enough credit for explaining the worst incels.
As a former letter carrier, some reasons are: truck broke down, the mail sorting machine was slow (manual in my day), the Postmaster had a meeting before you went out, and it is a very heavy mail day which slows you down.
Just to set the record straight.
And many others would not.
To many of us saying “misogyny bad” is more significant ways is still not worth a post.
OTOH the questions that have been discussed are worth discussion to more of us.
Is this really new or at least are there more of these people than before?
If so, why? Are there root causes that can be addressed?
Are these relatively few board posting hatemongers, to use monstro’s appropriate convention, the Incels, one manifestation of a greater deeper and more common problem within our society, a problem that many more manifest as self-hate only, or sadness, who we never hear from? Buried, so to speak, in the large suicide numbers, for example?
You’d prefer those conversations not be had, those questions not discussed, no problem-solving modes engaged. Only pile on of misogyny bad in more verbose and significant ways. Fine on you.
There are plenty of misogynists in our society who are not advocating killing women. Just like there are plenty of racists in our midst who would actually be horrified if someone mowed down a crowd of black people. Incel’s have not been radicalized into the low-key misogyny that is rampant in the mainstream…that could be argued may be harboring in all or most of us. They’ve been radicalized into thinking that women (and their associated Chads) need to be killed. That is extreme.
The fear I have of the KKK and Nazis has nothing to do with their racism. I’m under no delusion that the normal, everyday guy on the treat is free from racism, so I’m used to racism being a barrier to my freedom (whether realized or psychological). I’m afraid of their violence. These groups are a physical threat to me and civil society. Replace their racism with some other -ism, and they would still be scary because they are indiscriminately violent.
The Incel’s misogyny disgusts me but it doesn’t make me afraid. It’s their willingness to kill all of us because they hate the social system that much. They don’t drive their cars down sidewalks just to kill girls. They want to kill us all.
Oh dear yourself. What are you even saying? Are you saying that just because I am humble enough to admit to not being an expert, I can’t be optimistic that there is a solution out there? I can’t urge other people to think of solutions? I can’t find “evil guys are evil, so fuck them” a boring discussion without any substance?
I’m afraid the sociology 101 class I took in college didn’t equip me with the expertise to know all the answers. But being an intelligent, rational human being, I know there are things we can do to try to mitigate the problem, at the very least. Do you agree? Or are you a fan of just throwing up your hands and saying “We’ver tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
I think most radicalization has similar causes. The individual quirks of the radical and their environment will largely control which flavor of radical they become.
I don’t know if Hitler was a virgin for most of his adult life - although I’ve heard the idea floated. But he certainly had sexual issues. He was also missing a testicle, supposedly, and he was embarrassed that his father was an illegitimate child and possibly had Jewish ancestry.
I think his father was also Catholic, possibly leading to Hitler’s hatred of Catholics. Daddy issues…never a good thing.
This is a silly post.
If they were the slightest bit open to working on themselves, or their issues, they’d already be well on the way to the maturity required to handle their lives, and not stuck where they are now. But they aren’t.
They see all of US, and society, as the problem. They are *only *about blaming external things for their difficulties. So unless you’re going to force them into something I’m not sure how ANY outreach can help.
I’d rather dollars go to helping those actively seeking help for their mental health problems.
I might have a little bit of personal insight into this…
I was a pretty late bloomer as far as having any kind of success with women was concerned. In retrospect, this was kind of absurd- I’m tall, fairly good looking, sociable, non-creepy, kind, funny, etc… I just went to an all-male high school and never learned how to act around women. Not in a “did a lot of really creepy, pushy and inappropriate stuff” kind of way, but more in a way that was terrified of them- like they were from another planet or something.
So I didn’t have a lot of success, although not for a lack of opportunity, it turned out. (thinking back, college was one huge series of face-palms for all the chances I missed, both to just get laid, and for deeper relationships)
But in my head what was going on was a total lack of a clue as to how to interact, a lot of dismay at being overweight, and overwhelming self-consciousness because I was in my early 20s and still was a virgin. So my self-confidence was pretty much zero when it came to women, and I often didn’t believe that women could be interested, or that some behaviors could actually be a come-on to me.
I can completely see how if I had turned it outward, and placed the blame on others rather than myself, I could have gone down a lot of these “incel” lines of thought. I already had the envy and frustration- it was (and is) still baffling that some guys I knew managed to get laid at all, and yet I (from my perspective at the time) couldn’t. I thought “What the hell is wrong with me?”, but had I just been narcissistic enough to assume the problem lay outside of me, I can totally understand how I would assume a lot of really negative stuff about women. It does look like that from the inside of that situation, although with a little bit of tempering and self-awareness, you realize that it’s not them, but you.
I think that’s the main problem with most of these guys- they assume that the problem isn’t with them, and they get wound up in a vicious circle of having their observations back up what they already believe in a sort of confirmation bias kind of way. Which winds up their mental fermentation even more, and makes them think even wilder stuff.
I’m curious about your answer to a question and I forgot to ask earlier:
If someone cares about preventing similar attacks to the Pulse nightclub shooting, or 9-11, or any of the ISIL-backed bombings, what should they be talking about as a key factor?
I think that turning it around piece can be largely impacted by who a person associates with and listens to, though I’m certain our innate personalities play a role as well. Propaganda works. (I hope by now we’re all aware that it works.) If people are given a constant-enough message of someone else being to blame for their problems, many people will start to believe it.
Humans are very malleable in many scary ways.
What makes you think so? Although Hitler comparisons are super-cliched, the fact remains that the guy had issues growing up that made him who he was, and some of them are similar to the phenomenon that we’re talking about.