Why have incels gotten so much attention?

[spot261]

Although a point for consideration, i dont fully agree with your rationale. I dont think the issue is defending incels, as it is in becoming defensive. If we make an assumption that the root of the incel problem is somewhere in their psychology gone wrong, our "outrage" may perhaps be where our psychology went right. However, if the goal is to help these people (applying western psychological methods not maoist social reform tactics), i dont know how outrage helps them, although it does serve "us" as a nice pat on the back.

There's a question there about the "purpose" of outrage, or if it actually needs one per se, can outrage not simply be a genuine reaction to that which one finds intolerable?

 

[bernie14]

There's a question there about the "purpose" of outrage, or if it actually needs one per se, can outrage not simply be a genuine reaction to that which one finds intolerable?

Well, depending on how you define a reaction, all "reactions" are genuine, although all may not be constructive

EDIT. ... to self or others.

 

[Bugfatty300]

These two paragraphs, taken together to describe one person, suggest incoherence already. You'd need a warped outlook on the world to mix them.

Did you get the impression these standards were intentional and/or a useful psychological block to continue how they're living? Setting standards way above value in a market would functionally guarantee that they'd not get what they say they want. If this is the case though I'm not sure this should be legitimately considered "involuntary". If I set a standard like "I will never have a relationship with anybody but X celebrity", I can be reasonably certain I'd never see a relationship...but it would be silly to describe this as "involuntary". Were the people you know disconnected from that reality? In practice they're doing a less extreme but equally effective version of that based on what you're saying.

Yes exactly, I believe their entire situation was a self-made cage. I don't think "involuntary" celibacy exists at all for healthy functional people; which they were for the most part as far as I knew. I think it's similar to how people steadily entrench themselves into crazy beliefs that can turn them into frustrated unsociable types, i.e. they're possessed by demons or that jetliners are dumping poisons into the air, etc.

 

[Ryika]

Yes exactly, I believe their entire situation was a self-made cage. I don't think "involuntary" celibacy exists at all for healthy functional people;

Well, that depends on the expectations one has about the partner I would say. If you're really, really ugly, but at the same time want a partner who's not just leftover material that nobody else wanted to jump on, and then also want a partner that you can intellectually connect with at the same time, then I assume it would be pretty difficult to find a partner who is simultaneously willing to accept you and meeting your expectations.

 

[spot261]

Well, that depends on the expectations one has about the partner I would say. If you're really, really ugly, but at the same time want a partner who's not just leftover material that nobody else wanted to jump on, and then also want a partner that you can intellectually connect with at the same time, then I assume it would be pretty difficult to find a partner who is simultaneously willing to accept you and meeting your expectations.

Is this really how you see the world?

 

[Ryika]

Is this really how you see the world?

Sure. How do you see the world? "People just have to believe, and the positive energy will allow them to overcome the odds and find happiness!"?

 

[spot261]

Sure. How do you see the world? "People just have to believe, and the positive energy will allow them to overcome the odds and find happiness!"?

Typically in a middle ground where I can find some kind of happiness but be neither delusional nor reductionist. You seem to be the latter, which is really hard to equate to if you are gauging the person you choose to spend your life with as being the best you could manage, a compromise you made based on not being able to do better. How can a positive experience come from looking at someone in those terms?

Is that how an incel sees the world do you think? That they are unjustly at the bottom of a ladder and resent the fact they can only make do with bargain basement human beings?

 

[Ryika]

Typically in a middle ground where I can find some kind of happiness but be neither delusional nor reductionist. You seem to be the latter, which is really hard to equate to if you are gauging the person you choose to spend your life with as being the best you could manage, a compromise you made based on not being able to do better. How can a positive experience come from looking at someone in those terms.

I don't really understand the argument here. Yeah, every partner is, on some level, a "compromise"; no person will ever find the perfect partner, because such a thing as a perfect partner does not exist; and if they did, then they'd probably grow out of that perfect fit, or we would grow out of seeing them as a perfect fit.

However, if you yourself are so low on the totem pole when it comes to physical attraction and other attributes that can't really be changed by adopting better behaviors and a more positive mindset, then it may very well be that the choices you have are SO limited that any compromise you settle with is not somebody who really makes you happy.

Is that how an incel sees the world do you think? That they are unjustly at the bottom of a ladder and resent the fact they can only make do with bargain basement human beings?

Yeah, that's how I understand the mentality that's common in the incel community. Like I said on the first few pages, I have no deep insight in their community and have only drawn some knowledge by looking into their stuff when they first entered the news, but that's the picture that I saw painted. People who resent the fact that they're, in their mind, physically not attractive, and as a result think they have little to no chance to find a partner.

I very much think that this is a false assumption in regards to most people, and that most of them could probably find a decent partner if they put some effort into self-improvement (partially to get their mind out of seeing themselves as such negative characters), but I do think there are some people who whom it is probably true that they have too many "unchangeable" characteristics (not only the psychical attractiveness, but also things like a person's voice, actual disabilities, etc) to them that saying that they realistically it is not highly likely for them to find a partner with whom they could be happy for the rest of their lives.

 

[red_elk]

I very much think that this is a false assumption in regards to most people, and that most of them could probably find a decent partner if they put some effort into self-improvement (partially to get their mind out of seeing themselves as such negative characters), but I do think there are some people who whom it is probably true that they have too many "unchangeable" characteristics (not only the psychical attractiveness, but also things like a person's voice, actual disabilities, etc) to them that saying that they realistically it is not highly likely for them to find a partner with whom they could be happy for the rest of their lives.

These guys usually struggle to even find somebody who'd see them as attractive male.
Finding partner for the rest of their lives, best they can find and who would also like them, is the next step. This is often a problem for women too - finding partner for sex is usually much easier for them than for men, but finding long term partner is more difficult.

 

[spot261]

I don't really understand the argument here. Yeah, every partner is, on some level, a "compromise"; no person will ever find the perfect partner, because such a thing as a perfect partner does not exist; and if they did, then they'd probably grow out of that perfect fit, or we would grow out of seeing them as a perfect fit.

However, if you yourself are so low on the totem pole when it comes to physical attraction and other attributes that can't really be changed by adopting better behaviors and a more positive mindset, then it may very well be that the choices you have are SO limited that any compromise you settle with is not somebody who really makes you happy.

This seems a really strange outlook to me, I don't personally date with the mindset of "settling", I either have an instinctive shared response to someone or I don't, they aren't on some scale where I know my upper limits. Down the years I've dated a couple of models, a doctor, several nurses, an ex nun, numerous married women, a bank vice president, a historian, a social worker, a philosopher and a fair few people who would conventionally be seen as unattractive but for some reason clicked with me. I've also dated unemployed people.

Not once did I look at any of those people and think, "oh you'll do since I can't get any better", nor did I think "you know what, you're beneath me" or "damn, you're out of my league", the process was always natural, there was either chemistry or there wasn't. I always saw something in that person that made me want to get to know them better in some way and vica versa. The idea of having a "scale of merit", where some people are somehow better than others and you pitch at your level so to speak is just....alien to me.

 

[cardgame]

How does that saying go? something something, x is most important when you don't have it or along that sentiment. They don't have any status, none whatsoever; dating is, at least in their mind, a way to claim some.

 

[spot261]

How does that saying go? something something, x is most important when you don't have it or along that sentiment. They don't have any status, none whatsoever; dating is, at least in their mind, a way to claim some.

Yet they seem to have an often pathological antipathy to the idea. Rather than seeking out opportunities, the movement is centred around rejection of women as being subhuman and responsible for causing all their woes. They don't want to develop or strive to achieve this thing, they want to blame others for depriving of them of it, as though it were somehow women's responsibility to sleep with them.

 

[cardgame]

sociology 101 concept: if you can't get it, reject it so you aren't hurt by it

of course this is dialed to about 11 because they aren't truly rejecting it, they still care immensely

 

[Ryika]

This seems a really strange outlook to me, I don't personally date with the mindset of "settling", I either have an instinctive shared response to someone or I don't, they aren't on some scale where I know my upper limits. Down the years I've dated a couple of models, a doctor, several nurses, an ex nun, numerous married women, a bank vice president, a historian, a social worker, a philosopher and a fair few people who would conventionally be seen as unattractive but for some reason clicked with me. I've also dated unemployed people.

Not once did I look at any of those people and think, "oh you'll do since I can't get any better", nor did I think "you know what, you're beneath me" or "damn, you're out of my league", the process was always natural, there was either chemistry or there wasn't. I always saw something in that person that made me want to get to know them better in some way and vica versa. The idea of having a "scale of merit", where some people are somehow better than others and you pitch at your level so to speak is just....alien to me.

You sound like a rich white guy telling a black guy in the ghetto: "Why do you care about how much money this job pays? You should really focus on how much enjoyment that jobs brings to your life."
That's easy to say when you have options for a dozen or so jobs that all pay more money than you need, while that guy from the ghetto struggles to get by on minimum wage.

Or in other words, of course the idea of settling never enters your mind when you have the attributes required to be successful in the dating game. If we're talking about a guy who scores at the very low-end of physical attractiveness, or worse, who's actually disfigured in some way, that's a wholly different business. I imagine getting _any_ date is difficult enough at that point.

 

[spot261]

You sound like a rich white guy telling a black guy in the ghetto: "Why do you care about how much money this job pays? You should really focus on how much enjoyment that jobs brings to your life."
That's easy to say when you have options for a dozen or so jobs that all pay more money than you need, while that guy from the ghetto struggles to get by on minimum wage.

Or in other words, of course the idea of settling never enters your mind when you have the attributes required to be successful in the dating game. If we're talking about a guy who scores at the very low-end of physical attractiveness, or worse, who's actually disfigured in some way, that's a wholly different business. I imagine getting _any_ date is difficult enough at that point.

Except money and jobs are not sentient beings, they have no inherent feelings or rights of their own. they are resources and the means to gain more resources.

Women are not a resource, they are not a thing to be fought for and earned or bought, nor are they an entitlement. A reasonable society may well make efforts to maintain your well being, it won't make efforts to provide you with sexual partners and nor should it. There's a false equivalency there and it's not a small one, it's fundamental to the issue at hand.

No one has a right to sex, no one is being disadvantaged, discriminated against or disenfranchised if women do not choose to share their bed. It isn't the responsibility of women to provide gratification, even in a relationship.

It's a choice for both parties and if someone can't get a date at all I feel genuinely sorry for them, but I don't feel they should be afforded any special privileges or dispensation as a result. We aren't talking about their basic human rights here, we are talking about a social and personal exchange which has to be freely entered by both parties.

May I ask how old you are out of curiosity?

 

[Ryika]

Except money and jobs are not sentient beings, they have no inherent feelings or rights of their own. they are resources and the means to gain more resources.

Women are not a resource, they are not a thing to be fought for and earned or bought, nor are they an entitlement. A reasonable society may well make efforts to maintain your well being, it won't make efforts to provide you with sexual partners and nor should it. There's a false equivalency there and it's not a small one, it's fundamental to the issue at hand.

No one has a right to sex, no one is being disadvantaged, discriminated against or disenfranchised if women do not choose to share their bed. It isn't the responsibility of women to provide gratification, even in a relationship.

It's a choice for both parties and if someone can't get a date at all I feel genuinely sorry for them, but I don't feel they should be afforded any special privileges or dispensation as a result. We aren't talking about their basic human rights here, we are talking about a social and personal exchange which has to be freely entered by both parties.

May I ask how old you are out of curiosity?

...uhh... nothing of this appears to respond to anything that I wrote in to the post you quoted.

 

[spot261]

...uhh... nothing of this appears to respond to anything that I wrote in to the post you quoted.

It does.

 

[Ryika]

I don't see how. You just hastily refuted a lot of Incel talking points that I never defended while ignoring the things I said in my post.

 

[spot261]

I don't see how. You just hastily refuted a lot of Incel talking points that I never defended while ignoring the things I said in my post.

You said I came across like a rich white man explaining to a poor black man how he shouldn't complain about his low income job.

If you can't see some of the assumptions inherent in seeing an equivalency between the scenarios I'll spell them out for you. Your analogy only works if one sees women as a resource to be collected, if you equate them to "things" tangible or otherwise like money and employment. Your analogy only works if you are applying exactly the same logic as an incel, which is precisely why I refuted it in the terms which would apply to an incel's argument. I treated it as an incel's argument because it was one. You gave a reply which could literally have been lifted from page after page of incel forums on reddit or wherever it is they hang out these days.

The rich white male in your scenario has privilege, he has access to his share of societies wealth and opportunity and the implication is the poor black man does not, he is discriminated against by the structure of society. They deserve the same opportunities, but are not afforded them, there is a wrong to be righted and the rich white man would be bigoted and ignorant to lecture the poor black man.

No such comparison holds here, the structure of society is not discriminating unfairly against an incel because no one "deserves" to have a sexual partner, much less one who conforms to some standard which pits human beings against one another in terms of their inherent value. The analogy is null and void from the word go.

I'm not Brad Pitt, I'm not Bill Gates, I'm not insanely charismatic or seven foot tall rippling with muscle. Put bluntly I'm just a very confident geek. That I've had more than my share of success in the dating game is not something I'm telling you to show off about, but to illustrate a point. There isn't a scale on which people rate themselves and each other, we don't each have a score out of ten (so to speak) and a standard to aim for. We have human interactions and we have sexual chemistry. If we are lucky we might have love and commitment too, but these things play out against a backdrop of human beings interacting in a social environment. There's no shopping list, no points scores, no scale of comparison such as you describe and therefore no finding yourself at the bottom of that scale because it doesn't exist.

If I've done something right it's to understand that and to treat women as fellow human beings who are of inherently equal worth, I've had more than my fair share of female attention precisely because I don't see sex as a commodity, or a right which someone might disabuse me of. It's a natural and eminently desirable outcome of making a connection with another member of the human race and we all have more or less the same instincts here, they just express differently. Some people learn to use and satisfy those instincts in healthy positive ways and in doing so find that attracting partners happens naturally because those partners appreciate the way they are treated by someone with a healthy outlook towards sex. For others that lesson flies by and they struggle precisely because the lessons they have learnt are toxic and obnoxious. Women are turned off by an incel because he is an incel with an incel's attitudes and an incel's behaviours, it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

 

[Ryika]

You said I came across like a rich white man explaining to a poor black man how he shouldn't complain about his low income job.

If you can't see some of the assumptions inherent in seeing an equivalency between the scenarios I'll spell them out for you. Your analogy only works if one sees women as a resource to be collected, if you equate them to "things" tangible or otherwise like money and employment. Your analogy only works if you are applying exactly the same logic as an incel, which is precisely why I refuted it in the terms which would apply to an incel's argument. I treated it as an incel's argument because it was one. You gave a reply which could literally have been lifted from page after page of incel forums on reddit or wherever it is they hang out these days.

The rich white male in your scenario has privilege, he has access to his share of societies wealth and opportunity and the implication is the poor black man does not, he is discriminated against by the structure of society. They deserve the same opportunities, but are not afforded them, there is a wrong to be righted and the rich white man would be bigoted and ignorant to lecture the poor black man.

No such comparison holds here, the structure of society is not discriminating unfairly against an incel because no one "deserves" to have a sexual partner, much less one who conforms to some standard which pits human beings against one another in terms of their inherent value. The analogy is null and void from the word go.

So that's the problem?

When I wrote...

You sound like a rich white guy telling a black guy in the ghetto: "Why do you care about how much money this job pays? You should really focus on how much enjoyment that jobs brings to your life."

...you thought that I meant that an Incel "deserves" to have a sexual partner in the same way a black guy from the ghetto "deserves" a decent standard of living?

If so, then I have no idea how you drew that connection, that's not at all the analogy I made, especially not given the post I responded to.

What I meant with that analogy is that you, a guy who is apparently not at the low end of the scale of attractiveness, are talking about choosing between models, a bank vice president, etc. as a response to my explanation of how an Incel might not have the ability to date people who are on a level of attractiveness that he finds acceptable and must instead either settle for less than what he feels comfortable with or accept that he's going to stay a single.

That's the analogy there; you being a person so drowsed in privilege when it comes to being conventionally attractive, that you don't even consider how the world must look from the point of view of a person who is disfigured; in the same way that the rich guy does not understand why "How much fun is this job for me?" is not a consideration that the guy from the ghetto can really afford.

You make lofty statements about human connections and all sorts of other fancy stuff, that simply don't matter if you are at the very end of the totem pole. And like I said in the beginning, I do not believe that most Incels are in that very place, and for most people, just getting off the incel mindset would already do wonders, but I don't see how you could possibly deny the idea that there may be people who are just too unattractive to really have a good shot at finding a partner that they can be happy with.

Also keep in mind that people who are extremely ugly, or disfigured, often get bullied, and as a result don't have the privilege of being able to muster the self-worth and self-confidence that you're expecting of them to overcome th either.

I hope things make more sense now.

____

With that said though, like I said earlier in this thread, I do think Incels "deserve" to have a partner, just like everybody does who wants one. The need for love and care is SO fundamental to us humans, that people who really want a partner but cannot find one, are extremely susceptible for mental problems resulting from that, this IS an issue of social injustice in my eyes, and such issues should be fixed, or at least mitigated as much as possible.

The problem in this case of course, and thank you for pointing that out so bravely, is that those "partners" are generally humans too, who have a free will of their own, which is why as a result we cannot just "give them the partner they deserve". There are other ways to aid these people though, like offering access to self-help that is designed to boost a person's self-esteem and self-worth. And in cases of gross disfigurement or extremely unattractiveness, free plastic surgery might be an alternative as well.

I'm not Brad Pitt, I'm not Bill Gates, I'm not insanely charismatic or seven foot tall rippling with muscle. Put bluntly I'm just a very confident geek. That I've had more than my share of success in the dating game is not something I'm telling you to show off about, but to illustrate a point. There isn't a scale on which people rate themselves and each other, we don't each have a score out of ten (so to speak) and a standard to aim for. We have human interactions and we have sexual chemistry. If we are lucky we might have love and commitment too, but these things play out against a backdrop of human beings interacting in a social environment. There's no shopping list, no points scores, no scale of comparison such as you describe and therefore no finding yourself at the bottom of that scale.

What are you, a hippie? We know scientifically that people prejudge and categorize other people the moment they see them. We also know that people's first judgement of people they find physically attractive is better than the judgement they cast on people they find unattractive. It is a guarantee that you, as a human, have declared other people to be unfit for a relationship or for intercourse purely on that first impression, without ever giving them a chance to show redeeming qualities.

And no amount of intelligent discussion that you can have with a person will change how you see them as a potential partner if they have a face that you want to smash your fist into, and a voice that makes you physically cringe.

If I've done something right it's to understand that and to treat women as fellow human beings who are of inherently equal worth, I've had more than my fair share of female attention precisely because I don't see sex as a commodity, or a right which someone might disabuse me of. It's a natural and eminently desirable outcome of making a connection with another member of the human race and we all have more or less the same instincts here, they just express differently. Some people learn to use and satisfy those instincts in healthy positive ways and in doing so find that attracting partners happens naturally because those partners appreciate the way they are treated by someone with a healthy outlook towards sex. For others that lesson flies by and they struggle precisely because the lessons they have learnt are toxic and obnoxious. Women are turned off by an incel because he is an incel with an incel's attitudes and an incel's behaviours, it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

#stunningandbrave