Well now, that you’ve typed that, of course there is.
Here’s the thing, though; power imbalance.
Women don’t hold the majority of power & resources in the world - men do.
‘Women who hate men’ generally don’t have an entire support system embedded into the foundation of society facilitating them…
Good point about the power imbalance, yeah. And that goes back to what’s behind this incel stuff, ultimately, as well as rape – it’s not really about sex, but about power and entitlement.
I doubt there is a single reader/poster on this site who has not had at least some portion of their life in which they did not have enough money, but nobody says “because of that, I totally understand why that guy held up a bank”. We’ve also all had times where we haven’t had as much sex as we’d like…but none of the women and mostly none of the men here say “because of that, I totally understand why that guy killed her”.
The incel IS the murderer. They are not two separate people. Why are you focusing on understanding his feelings?
That’s because pulling oneself out of poverty is demonstrably hard in our society. Pulling oneself out of an entitled mindset and working on some simple changes (showering, washing one’s underwear, treating women like people instead of props, etc.), not so much – even in a society where patriarchal norms are deeply entrenched.
The incel “movement” (as we know it now) emerged out of a negative reaction to PUA and/or bodybuilder sub-cultures. Both of those groups preached superficial changes to clothing, hygiene and fitness as part of their programme of tricking women into having sex, but were still mired in immaturity, toxic masculinity, and patriarchal conformity (see also MRAs). The incels for whom the shiny shirts and the hats and weightlifting didn’t work never understood that all the body spray in the world couldn’t cover up that stench, even though it would cost them a lot less in terms of effort and money to get rid of it than it would be to do a load of laundry and take a shower.
Damn good question.
I’m not.
Like I said, some people may relate to some aspects and wonder where he went wrong. But in the end:
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.
ETA - People want to make sense of senseless violence.
None of us? Really?
I’ve had stronger urges to rob a bank than I’ve had to go on an incel killing spree. In other words, I’ve come to near despair about money before, and I’ve thought “what would it be like to rob a bank” and left it there. I have had literally zero urge to hurt someone because I wasn’t having sex.
The murderer is alive and the victim isn’t. That’s what went wrong.
No, nothing could have. Because if I were able to self reflect, I’d never go down that path to begin with.
So, to be clear, that, IMHO, is an important and critical discussion. While I’m sure some people are just wired a certain way, I personally believe society plays a huge, huge role in creating the precursors necessary for murders to appear, and absolutely for misogyny and bigotry to every appear as “ok” in the first place.
My point was, however, that for whatever reason, stories about bank robbers or poeple who mow down congregations of minorities or even child molestors don’t end up full of the discussion of how the individual went down the path that they did to the exclusion, even, of discussing the crime commited itself!. For whatever reason, it seems almost exclusively to happen with “incel” stories, and as a moderator and someone who was very much a dick to his partners in my adolescence, is a huge, massive, gigantic red flag that something is wrong here.
I mean, there hasn’t even been any victim blaming in this topic. It’s as if the victim didn’t exist in comparison to other heinous acts.
I think TERFs might fill some of those criteria.
As if…
You think pulling yourself out of feeling totally excluded from human society is easy? If it were as easy as “put on clean underpants” there’d be no problem. In fact, there are plenty of people who have been in this situation who wore clean shorts the entire time, showered daily and always treated women with respect. And also didn’t join toxic movements or become violent, by the way. The learned helplessness that comes with being socially shunned for a long period (which often has less to do with any actual physical presentation than with the fact that kids are cruel and capricious shits) is extremely hard to break, especially when everyone’s presumption is that they must be doing something insultingly stupid and trivial wrong.
What makes kids like that vulnerable to “incel” ideology is that those in the movement start off affecting sympathy and then offer a (completely bullshit, conspiracy-theory-ish) “explanation” as to why all the facile “fixes” well-meaning bystanders keep pushing at them over and over don’t work. That explanation involves male entitlement to sex and the notion that a warped straw-man version of feminism has distorted society, both of which are utterly despicable positions to take and not even a little bit true, but they’re not any less true than “you must just not be changing your underwear regularly,” which, if you are and still feel like a social pariah, is doubly insulting.
Whatever differentia you think you see, the way these threads run is always the equivalent of “lol, stupid poor person, I bet he hasn’t even tried just not being poor” instead of addressing the toxic, predatory ideology and the murder. There are plenty of people who have come through that situation without joining a poisonous cult, hating women, feeling entitled to anything or murdering anyone, and yet everybody loves to zero in on the things those people had in common with the murderer, rather than the murder, in order to minimize and mock them.
Then when somebody objects to that focus, they get dishonestly accused of rationalizing murder, because that’s easier than having the tiniest bit of self-awareness about how the scattershot hot takes about the perpetrator are hitting people who didn’t earn the shot.
Ratio and AMPLIFY:
The WOMAN WHO WAS KILLED IS THE FOCUS HERE. A SOCIETY THAT ALLOWS and ENCOURAGES MEN TO TREAT WOMEN LIKE PROPERTY IS THE FOCUS HERE.
The focus here is NOT why some loser who probably doesn’t even wash his fucking underwear should be ‘commiserated with’ or pitied.
This is a story about one woman who was brutally murdered and another who was violently attacked and scarred for life both physically and emotionally. Maybe the murderer’s feelings aren’t the ones we should be concerning ourselves with.
No, but it’s a lot easier if you’re a middle-class white cis-het male living in America. And I’m not ready to pity a geeky guy in his 20s or 30s (as most of these incels are) who’s lived his entire adult life in a country where the popular and business cultures are tailored to his interests and passions.
I understand how socially awkward people can be shunned and consequently get bitter, and how that attitude can draw them into all manner of grifters’ “solutions” (e.g. the manosphere, religious fundamentalism, cults). I know that changing that is more difficult than changing one’s underwear (hence my discussion of incels vs. PUAs). But ultimately it is an attitude that can be addressed productively with less difficulty than dealing with the consequences of poverty or disability or race or sexual orientation and identity can be.
Those who address this very mutable attitude by listening to BS artists who appeal to their sense of entitlement get as much sympathy from me as any victim who buys fully into a dangerous scam even when everyone (including the media and often friends and family) is telling him it’s a scam: not much.
No. As several people – including a site moderator who’s seen this for at least a decade – have pointed out, they get accused of considering the feelings of the murderer over the feelings of the victim (assuming they consider the victim at all).
This basically sums up the problem. It’s also not a shock to those of us who have been assured on more than one occasion that we don’t exist.
Geeky girls are fake. Women online are just guys driving trollies. We hear it all the time.
Basically, the murderer and his enablers come from the same world as the apologists where people like me are an afterthought if we’re thought of at all. We’re not human, just a placeholder for their thoughts and feelings. So why waste time on a victim that isn’t real, when there’s a poor, misguided boy with hurt feelings to worry about?
And their sperm depositories, don’t forget.
No… I guarantee you that I would not meet with approval.
Hands up who feels like a target?
.
.
.
Not seeing any boys raising their hands… 
My life experience (or PTSD if you must) doesn’t help here.
I think I understand your point (I had to read that first sentence a couple of times.)
In your opinion, why do you think the discussion is different for bank robbers, racist mass murderers, and child molesters?
Thank goodness for small miracles? Their lives were needless cut short for no rational reason. It’s tragic. In these sensational stories, it rarely is the victims that live on in infamy. We remember the heinous criminals and their acts. I am not sure why that is… That is a good question.
