Maybe more moms should troll Tinder:
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And I’m glad I didn’t say anything like that.
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Didn’t say you did; that’s just what some others seemed to be taking away from it.
The bottom line is that life is hard and many people are lonely, for various reasons: it weren’t, there would be no sappy love songs or rom-coms.
But blaming others or lashing out like so many incels/MRA’s/PUA’s do won’t fix that problem; it only exacerbates it.
“Look at all the lonely people; where do they all come from?”
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Had to chuckle when the author went out of his way to claim that patriarchy wasn’t responsible for the difference in ancestry, only to cite conquering forces and old fashioned polygyny- patriachal systems in which women had little or no choice.
None of that really supports the idea that men are at a disadvantage in the dating marketplace.
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It wasn’t my answer, it was Putnam’s. He would not claim this is the only source of the problem and neither would I.
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Hey - women mate with ugly losers all the time. Haven’t you ever spent a weekend afternoon at a flea market? WOWZA!
If women only mated with the top Nth percentile:
- There would be no poor people.
- There would be no ugly people.
- There would be a LOT of virgins.
- We would all look alike.
Oh, you can say, “The world is a richer place for the variety of humanity, blah, blah…” but I, for one, think we would have bred* ourselves into a blind alley and gone extinct if it weren’t for weirdos and trolls hooking up and making lots of randomly-bred Happy Mutants.
*I mean that literally and figuratively. Some of humanity’s best stuff came from ugly ducklings, outliers, and rebels.
Well, yes, but you cannot deduce from that study that women chose to concentrate on the most attractive men. The explanation is different: wars and rape. The article takes Attila as an example of a very succesful father, genetically speaking. Do you really think that women throw themselves at his feets because he was attractive? More likely is that he raided their village, killed all the men and raped the surviving women.
In today’s world, that is not a usable strategy, at least in developped countries. In any case, it does not prove your theory that women concentrate on the most attractive men.
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Maybe I should explain a bit better what I meant before this thread closes.
My observations, earlier in life, taught me that there is a large variation in what is considered acceptable flirting behaviour. I move from one city to another when younger and found out that what was acceptable in the first city and may lead to casual sex, was not in the second one. I believe that casual hook-ups were also much more rare in that second city. The attitude of parents towards teenagers in couples was also markedly different.
I have no explanation to that phenomenon. At the time I moved, the cities appeared comparable economically and socially, but for that striking difference. But the cities had a different history, maybe mores were formed at an earlier period and were passed from generation to generation.
But if I had been raised in that second city, I would have believed that casual hook ups were impossible, but for a few very attractive men. I would have had no way to know.
Maybe that is an explanation to the phenomenon that people on the internet do not understand each other about that subject? If one come from one environment and the other one from another, yet both assume their surroundings are the same everywhere, you will have that effect that one writes “just be yourself” and the other thinks finding a partner is impossible. Because that is what happens around each of them, but the other writer does not know.
Note that these clusters of people with relaxed or uptight attitude about sex need not be the size of a city. I believe that there are smaller groups as well. I also believe that most of the people a given person knows are rather homogenous. So, in the end, each of us has a “bubble” of relatives and friends around him or her which is somewhat homogenous. Yet, on an internet bbs (but not on social networks like facebook), we confer with people who have a very different “bubble”.
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People from Central Europe consider everyone with the last name ‘Esterhazy’ to be direct male-line descendants of Attila the Hun. That doesn’t even count the descendants who lost the surname through brides taking their husband’s surname. How often have you run across the name ‘Esterhazy’? I don’t even live in Europe, and I run across it on a regular basis. There’s a human genome dissertation waiting to happen.
You’re trying to make it about morals – what’s fair, who deserves what…
I’m one of those people who grew up weird and awkward. It took me a long time to start to figure things out and to feel less alienated. I empathize.
But right now I’m not talking about morals or what’s fair or who deserves what – I’m talking about what creates the best outcomes. If showing sympathy to members of ISIS got them to leave ISIS and stop killing people then I think it might actually be a pretty good strategy.
If you think allowing people to become murderers is preferable to showing those same people sympathy because the latter would be somehow unfair, then I don’t know what to say to you except that I disagree that being fair is more important than preventing murder.
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You’re point? is that really an actual problem?
So was/am I.
But women don’t get that same consideration? Fuck that.
IT’S NOT OUR FAULT THAT SOME MEN FEEL ALIENATED. It’s like saying it’s black people’s fault that some white people feel alienated.
I do feel sympathy for people who feel alienated. But by the time they decide that it’s all women’s faults, they are already lost. Until they are willing to do the work of walking back from that obvious BS, then it’s pointless to engage them as a woman. No amount of sympathizing on my part is going to bring them around, because they already hate me.
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I guess not. Preventing murder being more important than fairness is itself a moral position.
Where did I say that? I think there’s room in this world for sympathy to women and incels.
And actually, I think using effective strategies to prevent people from murdering women is a pretty good pro-woman policy.
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This is BoingBoing. I’d wager most readers here grew up like that (I certainly did). But again, this is not what we’re unsympathetic toward. Incels, MRAs, PUAs, fundie cannon fodder, etc. are also steeped in and actively embrace toxic masculinity and a sense of entitlement, and I doubt you empathise with those things.
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Oh, HELL, yeah! I, too, moved around a lot as soon as I achieved escape velocity. Unfortunately, I got trapped back here in Colorado due to family ties, much like getting a paw caught in the La Brea tar pits. I still had my ‘other city’ wardrobe and manners. By the end of the first 90 days back here, I was dressed head-to-toe in ‘rape prevention’ costume* because the entire state is chock-full of ultra-aggressive ‘incels’. By, ultra-aggressive, I mean they walk right up to you and make obscene propositions. When you turn them down, they start screaming at you, red-faced, about how you ‘have to’ oblige them and that you’re too ugly to have a right to say no. But it’s not the fault of the internet, I starting experiencing that kind of entitled rage way back when I was a 12-year-old, getting creeped out by 50-year-old neighbors and classmate’s dads.
*‘rape prevention costume’ = Carhartt jeans, steel-toed workboots (for kicking) and giant loose shirts to wriggle out of when someone grabs the back of them. Mostly, just trying to not look vulnerable or female. I pretty much look like this guy, even though it didn’t help him any:
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You don’t think that women have tried preventing our own beatings and murders? How about some more men step the fuck up and do the work instead of blaming women for men beating and killing them.
http://www.flare.com/news/violence-against-women-in-canada/
We are not to blame for their alienation. Misogyny isn’t a problem we can solve as women.
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*cough*DonaldTrump
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I didn’t say it was your fault, or women’s fault in general. I didn’t say anything about whose fault these issues were.
I didn’t say that women haven’t tried to prevent their own beatings and murders. I didn’t say that men don’t have any responsibility to prevent those same beatings and murders – in fact, I am saying pretty much the opposite.
Again, i didn’t say their alienation is the fault of you in particular or women in general – I didn’t say anything about fault or blame. Again, I didn’t say solving misogyny is a problem that is on women only to solve.
I’m pretty sure @rocketpj who initially suggested sympathy for incels might be better than alienating them further is a man, and I am also a man. Am I allowed to agree with @rocketpj that we as men might be more effective in reducing the alienation of incels by showing them sympathy?
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Incels do. That’s their thing. It’s our fault that the hottest of women don’t fall all over themselves to fuck them.
You’re saying that people who advocate for that deserve sympathy. That’s the definition of an incel.
People who have no sympathy for women and in fact celebrate those who murder women? At what point is it okay to condemn people for their believes that dehumanizes others? Is it just to the point where they murder someone and not before? At some point people have to be held responsible for what they put out into the world. I’m going to suggest here that by the time someone actively identifies as an incel, they are actively participating in dehumanizing others. Does that mean they can’t walk that back at some point? No. Not at all. People can be redeemed. But if someone is spending time online harassing women, because they feel like they can’t get laid, then why precisely should I or others here feel sympathetic for them in that moment. They made that choice to harass women.
Incels are not innocent lost puppies who just need a hug. They have already tipped over into a more dangerous place.
Again, I have sympathy for people who feel alienated, and like I said, I feel much the same myself. But I’m also not threatening people and worshiping murderers.
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if you define “incel” as “one who threatens women or worships murderers” then that’s true. Otherwise, I think you have a bit of a “no true scotsman” thing going on.
Again, you’re trying to make it about fairness or who deserves what – which are considerations I’m intentionally putting to one side.
i don’t think sympathy would make any racists less racist, but I do think it help some incels feel less alienated. In other words, I think it might work for incels but not for racists. That’s the difference.
Assuming it works: because it works. Assuming it doesn’t: there is no reason to.
Yes, so they probably do not deserve any sympathy. That is irrelevant to any consideration of whether sympathy works.
“Incel” just means “involuntary celibate” as far as I can tell. It doesn’t seem to me like it’s really an ideology or a worldview but a bunch of alienated young men feeling intensely sorry for themselves. That can lead bad places. If you have any really good ways to prevent that sort of thing, then please share! Otherwise, I’m suggesting that sympathy might possibly help. It also might not! But you don’t know until you try.
So do ours.
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