I blame them for their misogynistic behavior, not for who they are. That they may have been bullied doesn’t give them lease to bully others by treating women as objects, laud men who lie to women for sex, and scorn men who have healthy relationships with women. Being assholes isn’t a mental illness.
I don’t think I’ve accused you of anything. I’m under the impression we’re having a genial discussion.
I empathize with people who suck at forming real human relationships, but I don’t empathize with their anger, resentment or misogyny. I empathize with the working poor white people who felt abandoned, but I don’t empathize with their decision to take it out on the country by electing a nihilistic narcissist. I empathize with people colonized by American imperialism, but I don’t empathize with suicide bombers.
But let me ask you this. What good does my empathy and sympathy actually do any of them? In the end I’m going to judge them by their behavior, not their hardships.
I understand what you’re saying. I’m not suggesting we should stop caring. Intersectionality is the map of society with a handful of greedy sociopaths sitting on top of the whole mess. And we should continue to fight bullying, bigotry and exploitation. But people have a choice. You chose not to use your hardships as an excuse to treat other people as less than human. You chose to take responsibility, not for your circumstances which none of us really can, but for what you decided to do in them, which all of us do whether we acknowledge that choice or not.
This brings me right back to my point. If people want help being better human beings and are willing to put in the work that self-improvement requires, they should of course be helped. And while I’m not going to spend all my time helping them, I’ll be happy to treat them with dignity and compassion. But incels by self-definition don’t want to be better people. They want to be better users of women. And they’re going to get judged with all the wrath I can contribute to the court of public opinion because we encourage the behavior we want and discourage the behavior we don’t. That’s the only way society changes, the only way it gets better for everyone, including them if and when individually they ever decide to stop seeing sex as a commodity.
Incels can have a place in our communities when they stop thinking of themselves as incels, aka when they stop seeing women as objects. That’s non-negotiable.
I hear what you are saying. Where I think we differ is on what to do about it.
In no way are they justified or correct in their hostility and alienation. But I believe the solution is not to just write them off as hopeless monsters who made their own choices. Many of them are making choices from within a pathetically small subset of options.
(NOTE - not equivalency, just analogous) It isn’t too much of a leap to extend our empathy to the alienated, whatever the backstory. I have no problem grasping that an African American male who grew up in a brutally racialized society and ended up in a prison or worse outcome is at least partially defined by the society that created that circumstance. He did make his own ‘choices’ at certain points, but ‘become a well educated highly paid paragon of society’ may not have been on his more accessible menu options. That is a serious societal and cultural failing.
Gang recruitment is often about providing a place where people are accepted and fit in when their society does not offer such things. It is only a couple of steps to one side or another to accept that others are seeking to feel like they belong to something as well.
None of that gives anyone the right or excuse to commit crimes of violence against anyone else. But unless we try to understand what is happening we have no hope of finding a better way.
Surely you understand why it’s wrong though to ask for compassion for incels from women? It’s one thing to ask I, who identify as male, to understand their circumstances. But asking their victims is fallacious. One doesn’t ask targets to care for their predators.
You’re not saying much that I disagree with. Once someone has crossed the line into violent acts then they need to be held accountable.
Western culture is painfully alienating for many people - all of us suffer from it at times. The well adjusted adult is as much a marketing trope as anything else. Most of us try to find a way to enjoy our lives and have meaningful relationships as we mature. Some of us struggle more than others with that - especially in an absence of role models.
I had a brutal time in ‘middle school’ but was gifted with fantastic and supportive parents, so was able to get through it with nothing more than typically North American low grade depression etc. Some of my peers had less support outside of the social group and so had a much harder time. A distressingly large percentage of them are now dead, and still more of them have settled into just becoming assholes. That’s a damn shame, in my opinion.
Yes of course. This specific instance (incel alienation) is a guy thing and we need to work on it as guys. But more generally we are all part of the same society and need to all be on board for making it better, I hope.
Them feeling bad doesn’t make their behavior even remotely okay. Even in the cases where there is no direct violence/murder of women, many engage in stalkerish/borderline behavior, by their own admission. Even if they don’t bring it into the physical world, harassment of women online is also NOT okay.
Their behavior is the problem. Many, many, MANY of us feel lonely and left out by society. That doesn’t make it okay to take it out on others. EVER.
And I am not saying that it is OK at all - the actions and words are abhorrent. I am saying that we need to find ways to bring them back into society in a healthy way, rather than further alienate them.
I am finding it profoundly weird to be in this conversation and arguing for empathy with people whose actions I disapprove on every level.
For context, until very recently I worked in a frontline job with people who have some very extreme behavioural issues, up to and including sexual violence. It was never, ever, an easy path, and in more than one situation I became the target of some pretty serious violence myself. But the task was not to lock them away, the task was to help them find a way to engage with their lives in healthy ways that don’t involve harming others.
Nobody is a write off, I hope. (I will make some exceptions for genocide level monsters), Nobody deserves to be subject to the violence and depradations of others either. And we need to find a way to square that circle.
If they are unwilling to see me as a human being, how can we square that circile. Maybe that sounds cruel and bitchy to you, but MY HUMANITY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE. given how much bullying shit I’ve had to put up with in my life, and I don’t harass and bully others (same with @anon73430903) shows that their behavior is a choice.
I’m certainly sympathetic to people who are in pain especially those who are there for the same reason I had been in the past. I am NOT sympathetic to those who choose to make the lives of others hell because of that pain.
They’ve chosen to identify themselves proudly as incels. Making that as unacceptable to society as self-identifying as a Nazi is the first step toward bringing them back into society.
Once they get rid of the sense of entitlement that binds them together in a toxic mutual support network we can start considering their own shortcomings as individuals and how they’re best addressed.
For that matter, do you only look at partners who can ‘make a home’ for you? Are you that focused on their financial state? And if not, why do you suggest that other people are?
I am not sure whether this has already discussed or not, but I remember several articles about dating sites being full of fake female profiles. I could imagine that service to be useful against that.
Also: it seems that everybody on this thread imagine that only men would use that flirting service. The original linked article states that 30% of the customers are women. Since I believe that no more than 30% of tinder profiles are female, it means that men and women use that service in roughly equal manner.
Disclaimer: I have not used dating sites myself in the past 10 years.
Quite. I’ve had several women say, after finding out that I was attracted to them, that they had assumed I was gay because I never gave off the right signals of interest in them.
