Why have incels gotten so much attention?

[Senethro]

I read it exactly that way Senethro. Response unchanged and reiterated.

Speaking of which, isn't it the incels that are usually pissed that people aren't "putting out right?"

Then your response to me was kind of a non-sequitur, hence why I thought you'd misunderstood me.

Rejecting potential partners due to their prior consensual (or even non-consensual, if it makes any kind of difference) sexual behaviour is creepy. I guess another way to interrogate the creepfactor would be to ask if the gender of their previous partner makes a difference.

 

[Ryika]

Rejecting potential partners due to their prior consensual (or even non-consensual, if it makes any kind of difference) sexual behaviour is creepy.

Most devout Muslims around here make a great deal about wanting their partners to be virgins, because they do not share the sex-positivity of Western countries.

So aren't you being Islamophobic here?

 

[Manfred Belheim]

There was a whole forum there, look through it by all means, google "incel forum", go to reddit. I'm not trying to antagonise you here contrary to appearances, I'm just finding it genuinely quite amazing and disheartening that people would be so determinedly focused on denying something presented to them by someone smarter and more eloquent than you or I.

If you're talking about who I think you are (although it's not clear, and I'm not sure why you're being coy) then I don't recall anyone denying anything that they said. Unless you just mean "disagreed with the opinions of", which isn't the same thing.

I was invited to look around this place by someone, I'll freely admit that, someone very capable and successful who had shared personal insights into this issue and been made to feel ostracised and hounded. I came in with a view to being a neutral outsider but the truth is I'm genuinely shocked at the level of minimising, denial and groupthink going on. I now see why she felt that way.

You obviously haven't looked around here much if you think this forum is characterised by groupthink. Or at least you are if you think there's only one such group. I can't really think of any online space I've been in with higher levels of diagreement.

If you want to see what the incel community are about, I've tried more times than I can recall to point you in the right directions, to allow you to gather your own opinions on that rather than presenting you with anecdote after anecdote to be dismissed. The numerical data's out there too, you don't need me to find it and you'd only view it with suspicion if I did.

I think you've just pointed us to one single forum haven't you? Which mainly seems to consist of a small number of miserable people who don't pose any obvious threat to anyone.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Rejecting potential partners due to their prior consensual (or even non-consensual, if it makes any kind of difference) sexual behaviour is creepy. I guess another way to interrogate the creepfactor would be to ask if the gender of their previous partner makes a difference.

How is it remotely creepy? "Old fashioned" would at least make some sort of sense, even if it's still a value judgement, but "creepy"?

 

[Farm Boy]

Then your response to me was kind of a non-sequitur, hence why I thought you'd misunderstood me.

Rejecting potential partners due to their prior consensual (or even non-consensual, if it makes any kind of difference) sexual behaviour is creepy. I guess another way to interrogate the creepfactor would be to ask if the gender of their previous partner makes a difference.

Nah. Your statement is messed. I was waiting for marriage. I was looking for somebody waiting for marriage. Nonconsent changes the situation rather drastically, seeing as it is beliefs on how to structure one's life through one's will that is/was the relevant characteristic being sought. I suppose a widow would have matched preferences or a previously married victim of abuse, but that, like the "nonconsensual sexual behavior(WTH?)" didn't come up in my 20s. W/e. I get it. You consider my behavior threatening and alarming in its preference for monogamy. Shaaaaame them pants off.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Let's try this again.

Then your response to me was kind of a non-sequitur, hence why I thought you'd misunderstood me.

Rejecting potential partners due to their prior consensual (or even non-consensual, if it makes any kind of difference) sexual behaviour is creepy. I guess another way to interrogate the creepfactor would be to ask if the gender of their previous partner makes a difference.

What standards make some reasons to walk away okay but not other reasons? Let's get a model that anticipates "not creepy-ness" based on the stated world view.

Note that based on your language alone, you are implying that even rejecting someone on the basis that they cheated on a previous partner is "creepy" (no qualifiers on consensual sexual behavior, so your statement includes serial cheaters). Perhaps you would be fine dating someone who has cheated on 5 different people previously, or has slept with over 200 different people by age 27. If that's your preference so be it.

When you start pointing fingers at others for being "creepy", that needs some standards. What are creepy reasons to reject someone, and what are non-creepy reasons to reject someone?

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Where does it stand on the creepiness scale if you prefer your partners to have slept with 50+ people?

 

[Broken_Erika]

Where does it stand on the creepiness scale if you prefer your partners to have slept with 50+ people?

Swinger Scale?

 

[Senethro]

Nah. Your statement is messed. I was waiting for marriage. I was looking for somebody waiting for marriage. Nonconsent changes the situation rather drastically, seeing as it is beliefs on how to structure one's life through one's will that is/was the relevant characteristic being sought. I suppose a widow would have matched preferences or a previously married victim of abuse, but that, like the "nonconsensual sexual behavior(WTH?)" didn't come up in my 20s. W/e. I get it. You consider my behavior threatening and alarming in its preference for monogamy. Shaaaaame them pants off.

Does that really not set off any warning sirens in your own head when you state that you would have had a negative preference against women who had engaged in consensual sexual activity vs. victims of rape/incest? Do you not pause to ask yourself what this suggests you value about women and their own ability to consent/manage their own life and if this is consistent with your other values?

If it is "beliefs" that you are interested in (and I accept that) then why could a divorcee (no fault) not sincerely hold those beliefs? Why the focus on virginity?

 

[Ryika]

Does that really not set off any warning sirens in your own head when you state that you would have had a negative preference against women who had engaged in consensual sexual activity vs. victims of rape/incest? Do you not pause to ask yourself what this suggests you value about women and their own ability to consent/manage their own life and if this is consistent with your other values?

What kind of a dumb accusation is that? He prefers people who have similar values as he has, like most people do. A rape victim may very well be a person who would have preferred to stay virgin until marriage, but had that option taken from them. They are physically no longer a virgin, but they still hold the same value system which states that sex is something that should be preserved for after marriage as he holds, have not shown behavior that is inconsistent with that value system, and as a result, would be a preferable partner over the person who chose to have sex with another person before marriage. There's nothing creepy about that.

The only dilemma here is how to "evaluate" the rape victim in terms of being a potential partner. That's an interesting dilemma, because most people would probably agree that one should not hold the fact that they were raped against them for obvious reasons, but whether the individual can actually do that, may be a different story if one has never even considered the scenario as a possibility and suddenly find oneself in the situation where they have to fit that situation into their world view.

 

[Traitorfish]

Most devout Muslims around here make a great deal about wanting their partners to be virgins, because they do not share the sex-positivity of Western countries.

So aren't you being Islamophobic here?

Isn't this also true of Christians and Jews? I don't know about other religions, but an preoccupation with virginity, and specifically female virginity, seems to be part of a part of a broader Abrahamic tradition.

Consider, which religion specifically venerates "the Virgin"?

 

[Farm Boy]

No. No it does not. I was looking for somebody that approaches the issue of sexual intimacy in a similar manner to me. Which after a decade more of watching relationships come and ago seems like it was one of the kinder and more sensible opinions I held at the time. A divorcee could have matched preference in the post you quoted. Intentional behavior is the action that was preferred, it's a bit hardcore focused on hymens or something weird to hold a non consensual event against somebody as "their behavior." It's quite literally not.

 

[Ryika]

Isn't this also true of Christians and Jews? I don't know about other religions, but an preoccupation with virginity, and specifically female virginity, seems to be part of a part of a broader Abrahamic tradition.

Consider, which religion specifically venerates "the Virgin"?

Probably, I think there's a lot of that in certain parts of America? As well as child marriage.

Speaking only of where I live though... I don't think we have that type of Christian around here (or if we have, they don't show it much), and I don't think I have had much contact with Jews in general, so I couldn't tell.

 

[Senethro]

No. No it does not. I was looking for somebody that approaches the issue of sexual intimacy in a similar manner to me. Which after a decade more of watching relationships come and ago seems like it was one of the kinder and more sensible opinions I held at the time. A divorcee could have matched preference in the post you quoted. Intentional behavior is the action that was preferred, it's a bit hardcore focused on hymens or something weird to hold a non consensual event against somebody as "their behavior." It's quite literally not.

The whole thing sounds way closer to being hymen reverent than being belief reverent to me, but if a previous divorcee (who did not otherwise engage in sexual contact outside of marriage) could have fit the criteria then I guess thats good evidence otehrwise.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Does that really not set off any warning sirens in your own head when you state that you would have had a negative preference against women who had engaged in consensual sexual activity vs. victims of rape/incest? Do you not pause to ask yourself what this suggests you value about women and their own ability to consent/manage their own life and if this is consistent with your other values?

If it is "beliefs" that you are interested in (and I accept that) then why could a divorcee (no fault) not sincerely hold those beliefs? Why the focus on virginity?

Incoherent reasoning is a bigger warning sign than most particular preferences. You still haven't presented any rationale for why expectation of virginity is creepy compared to arbitrarily chosen alternative expectation.

Each individual divorcee might buck a statistical trend, but you're not playing the odds going that route regardless of male/female.

There's been a lot of pushback in this thread but nobody has yet demonstrated why it is necessarily bad to merely reject someone for any reason whatsoever. Why is only dating people above a certain height better than only dating people who've never been married, for example? Or are all of these possibilities equally bad from your point of view?

 

[Farm Boy]

The whole thing sounds way closer to being hymen reverent than being belief reverent to me, but if a previous divorcee (who did not otherwise engage in sexual contact outside of marriage) could have fit the criteria then I guess thats good evidence otehrwise.

I guess I just don't know why voluntary celibacy would be creepy. It's choosing something about onesself for onesself. It wasn't women's fault I didn't find somebody to marry at 16, and it'd be weird(and creepy) to thing it were. Isn't that the bit that makes "incels" have an unhealthy worldview?

 

[cardgame]

The whole virginity hang-up just reeks of patriarchy. Granted, less so if mutual but it still smells like it.

Does it not call back to women as property? A non-virgin is "used goods" and therefore of lesser worth? Because that's the vibe I get from most virgin fetishists. A friend of mine had a crush on this girl, who then went away to college. Then she came back to the local area for summer and he learned she was no longer a virgin and he dropped all interest. What does that say about him? She's still the same person as before. But now he can't plant his flag, as it were, and claim her.

Not coincidentally, most of these people hail from patriarchal religious households or cultures. In this case, fundamentalist Presbyterianism. Color me surprised!

 

[Akka]

For someone who brag so much to be anti-conformist, you seem to just mindlessly follow a set of, well, expectations, just switching the "traditionnal" one with another and thinking that changing the value change the process.

 

[cardgame]

Nobody's completely original. But I would probably surprise you if we played 20 questions or something.

I mean, do elaborate on these supposed expectations and "process" that I follow.

 

[Farm Boy]

Claim. You guys have some tucked up ideas about relationships and exclusivity.