These are the same, or very similar to, in the very least Pickup Artists. Something goes awry when these men try to envision women as understandable, so there must be a code to win the yellow brick road to pussyland. A secret, but very repeatable code. While I feel sorrow for their plight, it becomes difficult past a point. Why get angry at the immovable object instead of bending? Eh?
Sadly, there are some women who get hurt by a sexy man and seek comfort in the arms of a pickup artist, only to vye for the attention of sexier men all over again. Sad story. Both are misinformed. Both are wasting one another’s time.
All I can say is this. Life is not fair. Some people are advantaged. Some are not. We all need to find someone. Reducing women to a logical step-by-step process is sure to fail as women are notoriously ill-behaved.
I agree with everything you said, but especially this. And I think the anger that these young males are feeling isn’t rooted in simply their lack of success. Lots of people have low success but they aren’t angry about it. I think these young men are angry because they think women get breaks that they don’t get and people refuse to acknowledge this.
According to them, there are no women who are adult virgins. Women can get laid without even trying. To get a job, all they have to do is put on some make-up and bat their eyelashes. There’s always an infinite well of sympathy and compassion for women, but for guys, it’s “Suck it up, cupcake.” This is a bunch of hogwash.
And yet at the risk of inviting criticism, I have to say that there is a tiny speck of truth buried in that hogwash. It sucks being a woman in a million ways, but I do think that there are advantages that come with being a woman, especially a fairly conventionally attractive woman who can pass as heteronormative. Like, I know I will never get the “creep” treatment. Weird and quirky, sure. But I don’t have to worry about whether I send out “creep” vibes. The “creep” stigma is something a lot of socially awkward guys face even when they aren’t doing anything objectively creepy (I’m thinking of a specific guy in my office who the grape vine has labeled as “creepy”). And I don’t know how to reconcile this fact with my personal disdain for creeps. I have been stalked and harassed by such people, so I know they are real. But I also don’t want to contribute to the pressure that young men face to conform to a standard they aren’t willing or able to meet, not any more than I want to do this for young women.
So I think a lot of the hate-rage coming from the Incel’s is just straight up jealousy and resentment. They think women have it easier and that this translates into disadvantages for them, since it can be argued that opportunities are ultimately a zero-sum game. I wish there was a way for us to push back on this idea while also conceding that women and men ARE indeed treated differently…sometimes in ways that are unfair to men. I don’t know how to call someone out for being a whiny asshole when they are whining about something–even it is just a tiny speck–that I know to be true. Do we just tell them to suck it up or ignore it like other minorities do? OK, but I don’t want someone to do that tell me when I complain about racism or other isms. Do do we gaslight them and tell them that men and women are treated the exact same or engage in a pissing contest over who has it worse? OK, but the former is disingenuous and the latter is unhelpful. So for me, I find this subject matter kinda complicated. Just calling these people whiny assholes isn’t all that satisfying to me, even if I agree that’s what they are.
I disagree, while they couch this is, ‘I can’t find love or affection, woe is me!’, that’s absolutely NOT what they mean. Of course they could get a date, and affection, but not from the girls they think they ‘deserve’. They think they are all worthy of hot model girlfriends who are a ‘ten’. They aren’t interested in that shy awkward girl, or the one that’s a little chubby, the one that’s never dated.
This is about entitlement straight up, in my mind. Look around lots of ‘less than typically ideal’ types, find a way. They never want to work on themselves, of course.
Would you say the same thing, in reverse, to the shy, awkward girl, et al.? “Hey, there’s a guy who’d go out with you. He may be ugly, and not very interesting, but anybody is better than nobody.” If they’re unhappy, do you tell them to work on themselves, or are they entitled to be asked out as they are?
This isn’t a game of musical chairs; one chair is as good as any other as long as you find one when the music stops. The idea isn’t to just find anybody, but to find somebody that you enjoy being with, and who enjoys being with you.
So, are their standards unrealistic? For some, almost certainly yes, but I don’t assume it’s true for all. That’s just a way of automatically blaming people for their unhappiness and writing them off. Not very helpful.
You of course are correct. The claim I think reveals a casually held negative stereotype of those who enlist as losers who have no other job opportunities and no attachments.
But it raises what to me seems like an interesting question - given a person who is predisposed to becoming an incel does military service make such more or less likely?
Certainly veterans are at significant risk of mental health, substance abuse disorders and suicide as a result of their service.
But my WAG is that a person who is poor at forming attachments and self-centered benefits from being part of a military family with its attachment to other squad members. Also as these at-risk men return to the civilian world if they perhaps revert to no attachments and become unhappy and angry, I’d guess they are less likely to blame that condition on women rejecting them but hook it on to more vivid traumas that swamp that.
Bottomline if data existed I’d be shocked if the ranks of the hateful incel community contained many veterans. I’d wager that being in the military was protective against becoming an incel, perhaps even more than being active in any regular group activity of the general case (be that being an active member of a congregation or whatever).
I think it is of note that the Toronto “suspect” had joined up and dropped out before completing recruit training. He asked to leave by day 16. Those most at-risk I think cannot manage the attachment and thinking beyond yourself that military experience requires.
I say this as one who has not served but has respect for those who have.
It doubles back to a recurring question in this thread, chicken-egg. Which is more primary? They are men who have poor ability to form attachments and are unhappy which is unremediated in today’s world. I think that is primary and that much of this thread is an exercise in a reverse causality fallacy.
Certainly not to the extent that mass murder elevated them. The Isla Vista and Toronto attacks brought 10x as much attention to the incel issue/cause as it would have gotten otherwise. That’s what media does for you.
I think people tend to fall back on the platitude “There is someone for everyone”. We will readily acknowlege that not everyone is employable (at least in terms of getting a “good” job with livable wages and full benefits). The same with other resources or opportunities (not everyone can be on the cheerleading team, not everyone will be accepted for a mortgage). But we have a different view of romance. This is unfair world for everything except that.
I totally agree that a lot of young people (not just Incels) have unrealistic standards and are aiming way out of their league. Of course dating is not just a game of finding someone you like. Someone also has to like you back. However, the harsh truth is that not everyone is likeable, just like how not everyone is smart, funny, or physically attractive. How do we teach young people the truth (Not everyone wins in the romance game even when you have realistic standards and are trying your hardest) without implying they are a failure with no worth? I think it would be a hard message to hear for even the most stoic person.
And not even just this - plain math as well. Take a nation like China, for instance, where there may be 50 million more men than women. And even elsewhere, almost every nation in the world has somewhat more men than women or vice versa. The “there’s someone for everyone” platitude holds no mathematical water.
In their view, before the sexual revolution men who were 3s had sex with women who were 3s. Now the 3s all want men who are 7s, and with all the women dating up a lot of guys feel very angry and forgotten.
Throw in the loss of white privilege in the age of multiculturalism and feminism, and you have a recipe for rage.
Ironically there never was a golden age for men regarding sex. Most guys had a wife they maybe got along with. That isn’t like every guy was living like Heffner.
I think media and field reports from the most attractive 5% of men has skewed a lot of men’s impressions of what the dating market is like. Can celebrities and highly attractive men get endless orgies and one night stands? Yes, but most men can’t (unless you’re willing to do it with a bunch of 2s).
Well, the Middle Eastern men who do it, we call them terrorists, but I’d guess that a lot of their motivations are exactly the same, regardless of the religious justification they try to wrap it in.
I think, though I am not sure, that prostitution was more common in the past than it is now. It’s my impression that patronizing prostitutes was extremely common in the 1800s and 1900s and probably up until about WWII, and you didn’t have to have a lot of disposable income to do it.
I think it’s probably harder to find escorts or whatever else you want to call sex workers, than it was in the past. Not that I have any experience with it, but I take it you have to go through things like Craigslist or Backpage, which they’ve recently cracked down on; you have to go through some effort to arrange the meeting, and incel types have no ability to put any effort into anything, and it probably costs more. It might be cheaper in some places but those are places likely to be more sketchy and some incels are probably scared off by the possibility of getting busted, especially if drugs are also involved.
My guess is that the true hardcore menacing ticking-time-bomb guys like Elliot Rodger was, they could have regular sex with escorts or even an actual girlfriend or wife, and they’d still be fucked up and still get angry about something else in life that they perceive to be unfair, and take it out on innocent people.
Here’s a twisted fuck from the other direction. A Libertarian economist who asks—rhetorically, I hope?—if you feel sorry for a hungry man who steals then why don’t you feel sorry for a sex-starved man who rapes?
It’s in their own ‘manifestos’ that the sex by itself was insufficient. They were angry they couldn’t pick and choose from highly desirable (as they defined it) women.
Numerically, how would this work, though? Women can’t all be pairing up with middle to upper echelon men, because there wouldn’t be enough to go around. So obviously a good many of these women are either dating “down”, “across”, or not at all.
While it’s probably truly difficult for a mediocre-looking, low wage-earning man to date nowadays, it’s also easier to ruminate about the difficulty.
