This is a teenage sociopath who murdered a person because he was disappointed.
Sorry to misunderstand you. It really did sound like you were defending the practice.
Misogyny is a fine word and can be used to describe trash like this guy. It can also be used to describe guys who just sorta feel that women are inferior to men but, eh can’t live with em, can’t live with out them. Incel is a particular subset of men, who have adopted the label themselves, that feel like women are evil for not giving in to their will. It is kind of like saying, “why are you calling that an AK-47 when we have the perfectly good word, gun?” More specific.
Agreed wholeheartedly, and despite your parenthetical, I feel the need to clarify that it’s definitely not my intention to erase anyone, and to readily acknowledge that my perspective has a skew just because my childhood experience was male. I’d barely know what to say to my own younger self, let alone young women going through the same thing mutatis mutandis.
Still, though, it’s great how many people have solved the entire problem of socially isolated and maladjusted kids forever. And so easily! It’s a wonder it took so long for this thread to happen, given how obvious it all is. All any of us needed to do was just suck it up and stop being a socially isolated loser! Gosh, if only somebody had told me the abuse I experienced at the hands of my peers was all my fault and I deserved it, which definitely nobody ever did, that would have made everything so much better. I’d have just gotten up one day and started acting like a more popular kid, and that definitely would have worked out just fine.
Oh, and to suggest that this miracle solution for awkward kids might be naive or simplistic is absolutely to imply that the kid in the OP was correct to get sucked into a toxic ideology that preys on such kids and commit a murder, because obviously. So everyone should definitely point that out some more.
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A person is dead. Dead. Not sadder but wiser. Not left with a lot of things to bring to therapy. Dead. Fucking perspective. This isn’t about every poor teen struggling with their individual life problems. A woman was murdered because of a toxic ideology that enables self pitying men to murder others and a bunch of men show up to whine about their feelings by relating the murderer’s ideology to their own feelings. No one is saying there is a miracle solution to being unpopular. But being unpopular is something one just has to accept sometimes. It sucks but it beats being murdered so there’s that.
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It genuinely amazes me how these topics specifically get this reaction.
If someone kills a bank teller during a robbery, the narrative is never “We’ve all been there, wanted more money, just couldn’t figure out how to make it happen when we were younger, some never do” or “I get the need for more money” - the focus is on the slain innocent that was the victim of the perpetrator.
The fact that relationships are hard, that society doesn’t really help us, and that some people just, generally, will always suck at them for multiple reasons (including many outside of their own control) says precisely zero about someone taking that reality to the point of murder.
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You mean all the chagrined hand-wringing some people (almost always men) seem to do whenever yet another horrific story comes out about how yet another dude felt he was being slighted by society and decided to lash out violently?
I wish I could be amazed, but a lifetime living as a Black woman in America has me beyond jaded - it just makes me sad and angry, simultaneously.
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I think personally it comes from confusing the right to seek a like minded partner on sexuality to the supposed right to that same sexuality. It’s worse than that though. People I once considered rational, thoughtful individuals who suggest that promiscuity in women or even the option to work will, in the long term, destroy the family, because someone needs to focus on that, and society has traditionally had the male out working sort of crap.
But somehow it’s always this topic where acts of assholery-to-violence inevitably get metered out with “Well, I understand where they were coming from” rebuttals, and I just don’t get it, except as proof positive that gendered life experiences at a very very deep subconcious level are not treated equally by a far, far larger part of the population than I realized.
Even as a moderator, the stark realization of that every time something like this happens makes me weep for us all.
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Like minded?
I agree.
You’re not the only one who’s noticed.
And here’s the thing about that which some commenters here may not realize, or maybe they just don’t care:
If someone’s first impulse upon hearing stories like this is to try to rationalize, justify, minimize or in any way sympathize with the perpetrator, then they’ve just raised a big fucking red flag with women everywhere who are in the habit of self preservation and watching out for potential predators.
That may not be their intent, nevertheless it’s a direct result.
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As some one who can actually relate to fearing that I will be raped and maybe even murdered by my peers, I try to remind myself that it’s only because this thought is so beyond the pale for some people that they literally cannot imagine it. Not because they simply think this is acceptable and that lacking social and sexual gratification for their desires makes them the real victims of this fucked up situation where sex and intimacy are concerned in our culture. I tell myself that not because I have infinite sympathy and am a sucker but because I want to try to maintain enough faith in humanity to hold on to some shred of sanity.
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Thanks, damn autocorrect.
Even more than that - it should raise a flag within yourself. As a teen, the mindset of manipulating relationships to get what I want hurt people I actually gave a shit about. It wasn’t until I did some self-retrospection as I moved into adulthood that I realized how fucked up I was being. And that was with a male culture that, at the time, was totally fine with my being an asshole.
If you as a fellow man, realize that the plight of Incels hits you more deeply than this act, accept and internalize that and think about how to change that. Don’t ignore it or rationalize it to “upbringing” or “society’s fault” or whatever. Because people are indeed dying from this mindset.
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This site, being a haven for geeks (in the most positive sense of the term), has a greater-than-average proportion of guys who were socially awkward and inappropriate when young. Some of them never got entirely past it, and think a story like this is an occasion to discuss their own experiences of being sexually frustrated young men. That lack of self-awareness suggests part of the reason why they were, and perhaps still are, in that position in the first place.
To be clear, that’s making no excuse for this “I can see where he’s coming from” behaviour. There are plenty of geeky guys here who managed to mature, do some introspection, and figure out how to be a (non-toxic, compassionate, empathetic) man.
Especially since there’s no special plight of incels except that of a thwarted sense of entitlement. Rejecting that is the first step toward the kind of change you’re suggesting, but that is deeply ingrained in men in general (the stories I’ve heard from the women I date…).
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How would this be any different from a 17 year old kid who murders a 7-11 clerk because he didn’t have enough money on him for a Big Gulp?
If one goes off on tirades blaming murder victims, we are supposed to consider such behavior in a different light?
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Maybe because while none of us have had feelings that would make us want to rob a bank or harm other people, we might relate to some of the other feelings. They can relate to the incel, but not the murderer. And of course this doesn’t excuse their behavior. It should be condemned and punished. He shouldn’t be pitied, but despised. But because one may relate to some aspects, it makes them question “what went wrong?” Or even self reflect - shit - could I ever have been lead down that path? Is the toxic online community they have made for themselves going to pump out more people like this? What has changed in society since I was 17?
ANYONE at 17 killing someone else is tragic. I suppose there are evil, broken people in the world, but there are also people who are brainwashed, gas lit, and lead down the rabbit hole and encouraged. They are radicalized into thinking there is no other way. Whether that be incels, kids in gangs, or religious radicals, no one at 17 knows WTF they are as they are still developing. It probably didn’t have to end up like this.
But, we have no idea what was going on in this guys head. He likely isn’t anything like anyone here, just like sharing eye color has no relation on people being alike. Other people may have felt lonely and hopeless, but none of us would have dreamed of hurting someone. So that means we were nothing like this guy.
YMMV.
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It’s a pretty short argument
They define “family” as a man telling “his” woman and children what to do, and them doing it
So, therefore, any freedoms for anybody but that guy destroys “the family”
Q.E.D. /s
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The rub is that many women were/are socially awkward too - nerdom and geekdom are NOT just limited to straight White dudes.
When is the last time you heard about a woman going on a freakin’ violent killing spree, because she wasn’t getting all the Helmsworth-quality dick she thinks she’s ‘owed’ by society?
*Edited for typos.
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For denizens of the manosphere, the geeky women – the ones who really embraced their Happy Mutant status – were never good enough. For all their supposed uniqueness and independence, incels and the like were slaves to the conformist standards of toxic masculinity.
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EXACTLY.
It’s entitlement born of systemic misogyny, all the way down.
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Thankfully, there’s not a toxic online (sub)culture dedicated to turning socially awkward and sexually frustrated young women into self-hating, potentially murderous piles of awfulness.
Might it have something to do with how these topics specifically get the same reactions on the other side? Nobody’s stumping for murder here. Most often kids vulnerable to a movement like this are doing harm to themselves instead of others, and still people are going to be lining up to say they deserved it when all they had to do was stop being a loser and start being successful, easy as that…
The “incel” movement is exceptionally shitty. The guys who get drawn into it are potential terrorists, but like just about any terrorist foot soldier, by the time they come to actual violence they’re as much victims of the ideology as perpetrators of it, and of course it’s impossible to defend them because long before they actualize violence, they’ve spent a lot of time talking violence to earn cred with other members of the movement.
Could why be I’ve seen nobody actually defending that.
Incidentally, I’d say the same of an Islamic suicide bomber or somebody who goes on a shooting spree because of something they heard on Fox News. Their attitudes are horrific and their acts inexcusable. But there’s still an element of tragedy to anyone finding themselves in a situation where violent extremism can seem like an attractive solution. I personally cannot understand someone who doesn’t notice that happening to themselves and pull the emergency brake immediately. But that is the part I don’t understand and can’t sympathize with.
But that’s not what the responders focus on. Instead they lead with trivializing the social circumstances that presumably led the perpetrator to identify with a toxic movement to begin with. That’s especially easy in threads like this because it’s a cultural mainstay for us to double down on belittling the socially ostracized, and to blame them for their own circumstances. And, readily granted, “incels” emerge from a deeply pathetic place. But maybe focus on the crime and the toxicity, not the how pathetic the perpetrator is?
People keep comparing this to shooting a bank teller because you’re poor. But threads about bank tellers getting shot don’t start off with people trivializing poverty and saying “all the robber needed to do was stop being poor like I did.” If that happened, I imagine there would be some annoyed responses from people who have been poor but never shot anybody, and who were not in any way defending robbing banks or murdering bank tellers.
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Uh… Judging by the femme component of some movements… Yes there is. It just doesn’t enable this particular kind of manifestation. It sure shows up around race though. In fact it is often women’s fear of rape and murder that is used to get them to sign on. And then the sense of acceptance and not being socially ostracized helps bind them to the ideology.
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