Who would choose incel?
I thought “Incel vs Porn” was the least successful of the “Man vs Food” knockoffs.
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Saying that porn is ubiquitous doesn’t really inform any discussion of incel habits. There is some inncuous porn mixed in there to be sure, there is some delightful life affirming porn in there, in trace quantities… and then there is the vast majority of porn which showcases women being hurt, or at least pretending to enjoy being hurt.
One Guess for the kind of porn I think incels focus on to inform their world view.
There are any number of ways we could choose to shape the porn industry to encourage human rights instead of human rights abuses, but that’s not going to get solved in a bbs comment thread.
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You can take regular showers, exercise, and be decent to other humans and still go through life alone and lonely (ask me how I know). Of course I’m not going to start blaming women for not fucking me just because I’m a baseline functioning adult.
I think we would have a lot fewer incels if our social narratives didn’t tell men that they must be assertive, and women passive, in seeking relationships.
This podcast episode covers the origins of the whole “incel” thing. It’s not at all what I expected:
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As others have mentioned, the pestilent Incel ideology isn’t the result of these man-babies having a frustrated sex drive, it’s about their narcissism and deep-rooted insecurity complex. Like any bully, they lack self-worth and attempt to compensate for it by victimizing others. It’s an ideology of hate projected from self-loathing. They’ve bought hook, line and sinker into the sick perversion that manipulating women is the measure of a man, and they both idolize and hate anyone they perceive to be succeeding at what they consider a game. In the absence of a healthy model of relationships, they embrace an antisocial model built on abuse and deception, up to an including outright rape culture.
Sex work is the world’s oldest profession. Incels disdain sex workers because it’s antithetical to their ideology of manipulation.
It’s no wonder Incel ideology frequently leads or contributes to terrorism.
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I watched all of the Sam Neill historical fantasy, Sirens and then had an involuntary epiphany: women are expected to bear the full burden of having sexually capable bodies. Not just childbirth, but attraction. Men aren’t even expected to try very hard to look good -unless its gay men- but everything is ultimately laid at the feet of women.
Incels are taking existing logic, shredding all context with relentless abandon, and taking it to its absurd conclusion.
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I posit two theories, the charitable one and the uncharitable one; and suspect that different incel instances combine them in different proportions.
First, the charitable one: Having effectively unlimited porn freely and discretely available does make masturbation more convenient; but it’s not much of a substitute for an actual partner, either on the basic tactile level or RE: desire for companionship, wishing to feel desired and or loved, etc.
Second, the less charitable one: if your thinking around women is profoundly warped by massive entitlement having access to one of a zillion copies of some media produced by a woman who doesn’t even know you exist(or knows you as the creepiest person in their DMs) isn’t exactly the ownership you think you deserve; and, depending on the type, may also include an anatomically atypical male porn star to nurture your feelings that your troubles are out of your control because of some ‘evolutionary psychology’ nonsense about alphas and betas and stuff.
It probably doesn’t help, in either the more or less sympathetic flavor, that one of the attributes of porn is it’s sheer availability. Something available to literally anyone with an internet connection is of no reassurance to the self-doubting because having something that literally anyone could have doesn’t exactly say much, let alone anything impressive, about one. On the unsympathetic side, the arrangement seems to be that women who aren’t sexually accessible are resented bitterly for it; but ones that are are whores and/or ‘beckies’ and thus inadequate to what one believes oneself to deserve, which is ever one of the ones who isn’t interested in you.
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According to the original thread, that number is not zero, as long as they aren’t the murdering incel… that’s just a bridge too far for some… /s
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I wash my own underwear, so what do I know
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How to… wash your underwear? 
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Thread:
By the way, you know who else was around when all you “socially-awkward” boys “just didn’t fit”? Girls. A lot of us didn’t fit, either. I mean, I know this comes as a shock, because if you weren’t treating us like shit and heaping on the scorn while your buddies laughed, you didn’t even seem to notice we were there.
“Nobody wanted to be with me!” You bemoan, seemingly forgetting all the times you randomly said “You’re ugly!” to some girl just minding her own business or laughing along when your buddy did so.
True story: you want to know who treated me most just like a human being when I was in HS? Not the geeks or nerds who thought it was funny to mock me because I didn’t live up to their standards of attractiveness, but the serial criminal offender who wasn’t so toxic in his pride that he was willing to ask me for help when he needed it treated me like an equal when he did and didn’t act like it was a favour to simply tolerate me at all. We weren’t friends, but he didn’t treat me like shit.
I can’t say the same for all the ones who now claim to have been “socially awkward”. Sorry boys, but in my experience, that’s just another excuse for being an asshole.
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Ubiquitous porn doesn’t solve the issue of societies/cultures where men think sex is owed to them just for existing or being nice. We need significant changes to the way we teach boys and young men about how to act and changes to the stories we raise our kids on in general. I’ve felt for a good while that so many movies and stories for kids where the characters pair off and get married, where they get raised thinking like that’s what’s supposed to happen and that’s what needs to happen, haven’t been good influences.
Looking at the prior locked thread and this thread where the advice given is “Just clean up, exercise, show up and be nice”: Like Mister44 said in the prior thread, that works for some people, but those with introverted tendencies can’t make those adjustments all that well. I’d like to add on that those on the autism spectrum (like me) may have difficulty understanding social cues and be unable to operate properly in certain social scenarios.
As was pointed out in the locked thread, the geeks won, but that still poses problems if you’re someone who’s introverted. The geeks and geeky interests winning was slow-rolling, and from my experience being 28 years old and having gone through adolescence and young adulthood in the mid-to-late aughts, the social stratifications and cliques and groups in schools were still very much there and still very much left a mark on me and others. I’m definitely jealous of the young folks these days who can come from vastly different backgrounds and social groups but make potentially-lifelong connections through playing Fortnite or Minecraft together at school on their phones, talking about the latest anime or Webtoon comics, or get a D&D group together what with Critical Role and others having mainstreamed tabletop RPGs.
Looking back at my time in junior high and high school, I feel like I tried to hard to fit in or squeeze in to some social spaces that I was out of my league for, or trying to act and sound cool, trying to talk to girls and do the “typical high schooler things” but really making myself out to be an idiot. I got invited to a couple of popular kids’ parties never really knew what to do with myself when I was there, and left early. Looking back, I was real close to becoming an incel at times before the incel term was bandied about the way it is today. What happened instead was I found myself more comfortable and able to socialize behind a screen. I cut my teeth on forums and message boards that luckily had stern-but-fair moderators. My online social life expanded, and I’ve made good friends (who are just as valid as offline friends), and I still have good IRL friends I made way back that I hang out with. But I never managed to stay in contact with the friends I made in high school, and the roundabout way I went through college (getting my degree this fall, hopefully, after 10 years of struggling and figuring out what exactly I want to do) made it tough to socialize and make connections that would last past a semester. Over those 10 years my social skills grew in different ways to where I’ve been able to go to game conventions and held conversations and have fun with other people I’ve met there, but exchanging social media info with the peers that I meet there so we can keep in touch and be friends long-term is where I freeze up because I get self-conscious about being seen as creepy or weird. My social skills feel like their disjointed, stunted in some ways and better in others. I wish that back in high school and junior high that I had some form of counseling or better peers or mentor figures that could’ve steered me in a better direction than trying to do things that weren’t the right fit for me so I wouldn’t have to struggle to get better at these kinds of things today.
Concluding this text-wall: A lot of the problems that cause men to categorize themselves as incels could be solved as part of raising kids better and on better media, and the infrastructure of schools. We need a cultural shift that acknowledges that you don’t need to be in a relationship, have sex, or be in a relationship that has sex as a part of it to be a happy, functional, successful person. We need better counseling in schools and better mental health care for adolescents/teenagers that helps kids on the autism spectrum or those with introverted tendencies find places or groups where they can fit in and work at learning skills to better socialize. And lastly, we need a better education system where teachers and school counselors are able to proactively approach students and the parents of said students to offer them that help if they notice problems.
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Not actually not pulling out either. Er, the oldest child of Judah, died before he conceived a child with his wife, Tamar. It was Onan’s, Judah’s second son, duty to father a child with Tamar. That child would be considered Er’s child and that child would inherit Er’s possessions. He pulled out because he didn’t want his brother’s possessions to go to a child he had to father. His crime was not masturbation or pulling out, it was failing to fulfill his familial obligation.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve met someone who knew the real point of that story…thank you!
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Except that more often than not, girls and women who are on the spectrum find a way to accomodate to the social cues. Boys and men do not have to do so.
Is still pale and male. Geeky women are still mocked and laughed at and bullied into place, WELL into our adulthood. We’re not busty and available, we’re on the margins.
Did you try talking to the rejected, bullied girls at all? Or just the popular, pretty ones? Is talking to girls merely an exercise to try and get laid and “be normal”? or did you EVER see young women as people, instead of conquests to fuck?
Literally EVERYTHING you discussed here happened to girls and women. None of us grew up to shoot up a fucking strip mall. THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE AT PLAY THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MALE BULLYING.
But women’s experiences are the default…
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Thiiiiisss
Girls can be introverted and socially awkward. Girls get bullied. Girls – on the other hand – don’t get the luxury of blaming it all on someone else. Girls don’t get a pass on treating a large portion¹ of the human race as playthings and conquests, or prizes to be won.
¹ I am not saying “half” because gender is not a binary. And as much as girls don’t have that luxury, it’s X³ under toxic masculinity for anyone who doesn’t tick the binary box “properly”.
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right? it’s all OUR fault for not being pretty enough, skinny enough, available enough, etc, etc, etc. and that continues RIGHT on into our adulthood, too. It never ends.
For all the BS girls put up with, it’s nothing compared to what gender non-conforming people deal with. FFS, people, stop pretending you’re the only one in fucking pain.
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Some of us were considered pretty enough that we were down right afraid. Being the object of undesired rage and lust when you don’t have a friend in the world you can trust isn’t fun either. Being bullied because of other people’s sex drive sucks too. Bonus points for all the times the bully wasn’t even a peer but a horny teacher, principal, or other adult with power . And yet… Somehow the idea that we should control and dominate men through violence doesn’t seem to be the outcome. I wonder if control and dominance though constant abuse and sexual demands was the end game along. I wonder…
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I grew up Seventh-day Adventist. They are as messed up as other forms of Christianity but they do teach a lot of bible content.
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That can work both ways.
<LordChewy> so my dad found my porn folder
<LordChewy> and he was getting all pissed
<LordChewy> so its all like "does this surprise you? i'm not stupid you know"
<LordChewy> "i know dad"
<LordChewy> "what do you have to say for yourself?"
<LordChewy> at this point i stare at him straight in the eyes and say "C:Documents and SettingsRickyMy Documentsfaxessent faxes"
<LordChewy> and he just shut up
<kingKahn> what is it?
<LordChewy> its his porn folder
(ETA: apparently the preformatted text is being syntax-highlighted as if it were program code.)
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