[Content warning: misogyny, slurs, sexual coercion]
I.
A definitional issue: I am using the word “incel” here, despite its association with terrible misogynists, because I feel like it is the simplest word to gesture at the group I mean. However, I am not using it to refer solely to terrible misogynists, but instead to any person who has gone an extended period of time without having a romantic partner when they would like to.
I am not using the extreme definitions of “incel” that require people to not have any preferences. While I don’t consider, say, a sixty-year-old man who won’t sleep with women over the age of twenty-three to be incel, I think that most people do have reasonable preferences about values and lifestyle compatibility in their partners, including incel people, and the inability to meet these preferences leads to great loneliness.
Interestingly, sexless people are about as happy as people who have sex. I can think of several reasons why this might be the case: many sexless people are asexual, low libido, or voluntarily celibate; many people who have sex are in coercive or unpleasant sexual relationships, or have to worry about unplanned pregnancy or STIs; many sexless people have close friends and a lot of emotional support, which ameliorates the pain of sexlessness; many people who have sex are still lonely. Nevertheless, I think the problem of inceldom is a genuine issue for those who want romance and can’t have it.
II.
When one discusses incels, one inevitably comes to The Asshole Question: namely, “how come these assholes can get a girlfriend, and we incels can’t?”
The Asshole Question in its strong form– arguing that assholes can all get laid, and that incels are generally nice– is clearly untrue. Some involuntarily celibate people are, frankly, terrible. If one looks at the Incels subreddit, for instance, it is astonishingly full of comments like the following:
When you post close ups of your gaping assholes often with various objects stuck in them, and we jerk off to it and some retards even leave comments, we don’t think to ourselves “wow, what an amazing gorgeous girl.” We think that you’re a disgusting whore and we get off on that. We get kicks out of how pathetic you are while boosting your ego so that you don’t stop.
and
Women can smell Chad genes from a mile away, if Chad locked himself in a bomb shelter, women would break down the door with muli million dollar equipment to extract his semen.
and
But then again, what is a woman? A rather weak creature that is beneath the man. Equipped with less intellectual gifts, not as beatiful or well formed as the human male, repulsive actually. A creature that is 3/4 of its life sick and isnt even possible to satisfy her man at all times. Because nature doesn’t allow it. It’s common knowledge that females are lesser beings.
These aren’t cherrypicked, by the way, I just looked at three of the four top posts when I was writing this section of the blog post. (The fourth was a man who was sad that even an incel woman wouldn’t sleep with him, and did not contain any douchebaggery.)
Now, one might argue that years of loneliness twist people and make them bitter, and that’s not false. But I also know lots of incel and formerly incel men, many of whom have been lonely for years if not decades, and none of them have wound up opining that women are lesser beings and that they get off on how pathetic porn stars are. I would suggest that if your response to emotional pain is “maybe half of humanity is subhuman”, this probably says more about your character than about your circumstances. Loneliness alone is not enough to make someone a misogynist. Frankly, I think it’s offensive to all the perfectly lovely incels in the world to say so.
The weakest form of the Asshole Question– “why do there exist at least some nice people who can’t find romantic partners when there also exist at least some assholes who can?”– is also easy to answer. Some people are extraordinarily bad at selecting partners, and preferentially select people who treat them like shit. Other people are deceived and wind up accidentally dating assholes. Still other people are willing to put up with a douchebag who has money, good looks, or high status.
But there’s an intermediate question, which is the one I think people are usually asking. They say something like “even given that some nice people find romantic partners and some assholes don’t, I think that assholes in general are more likely to find romantic partners. Why is that?”
III.
The first thing to address in that question is whether it’s true.
I will have to use virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romancelessness statistics, but these are bad enough. In high school each extra IQ point above average increases chances of male virginity by about 3%. 35% of MIT grad students have never had sex, compared to only 20% of average nineteen year old men. Compared with virgins, men with more sexual experience are likely to drink more alcohol, attend church less, and have a criminal history. A Dr. Beaver (nominative determinism again!) was able to predict number of sexual partners pretty well using a scale with such delightful items as “have you been in a gang”, “have you used a weapon in a fight”, et cetera. An analysis of the psychometric Big Five consistently find that high levels of disagreeableness predict high sexual success in both men and women.
If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the population most at risk of being miserable and alone. “At risk” doesn’t mean “for sure”, any more than every single smoker gets lung cancer and every single nonsmoker lives to a ripe old age – but your odds get worse. In other words, everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty darned accurate. But that shouldn’t be too hard to guess…
I am going to be a little bit unfair to Scott here. He admits he’s using virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romanceless statistics, and I don’t exactly have any good way of measuring inceldom either.
Now that I’ve admitted I’m being unfair… I would like to point out that “having a high IQ” and “being an MIT graduate student” have no relationship with whether you’re an asshole at all. There is no significant correlation between IQ and agreeableness; there is also no significant correlation between IQ and dark triad personality traits. (I was unfortunately unable to find statistics about the disagreeableness or dark triad-ness of MIT graduate students.) It may perfectly well be that intelligence is sexually unattractive to most people and also people are attracted to nice people. In addition, high-IQ people and MIT grad students may have priorities other than having sex: if you spend all your time solving math problems instead of going to parties, of course you’re more likely to be a virgin.
So let’s look at Big Five and the works of Dr. Beaver. There is a small problem and a big problem with Scott’s statistics. The small problem is that there’s a bunch of sex you’re vastly more likely to have if you’re a terrible person: rape; cheating on your partner; helping someone else cheat on their partner; getting someone drunk or high to have sex with them that they wouldn’t have sober; convincing someone that you love them when you don’t for the purpose of getting laid; “convincing” someone who said “no” at the beginning of the night; and so on. Since presumably terrible people aren’t Captain Planet villains who turn down all the ethical sex because they want to increase the amount of sex-related suffering in the world, we can expect terrible people to have more sexual partners than non-terrible people, all things equal. But I don’t think that’s that large an effect.
The big problem is that sluts are evil.
That is, in general, people who desire lots of sexual partners tend to be disagreeable, lower on honesty-humility, impulsive, risk-taking, avoidant attachment style, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic.
To be clear, only three of the nine questions on the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory are about sexual behavior. The other six are about desire. You can score very highly on the SOI while being a virgin. While I don’t know of any studies that exclude the three behavioral questions, I believe the evidence suggests that people who want lots of sexual partners tend to be jerks.
Imagine a very attractive guy who has no interest in sex outside of committed long-term relationships. He loses his virginity to his high school girlfriend, dates a girl for a while in college but breaks up with her a year after graduation, dates around for a bit but doesn’t sleep with anyone he’s dating, meets his wife at 26, dates her for two years, is engaged to her for one year, and marries her at the median age of 29. Afterward, he is monogamous and does not divorce; his wife outlives him. He has had three lifetime sexual partners, well below the average for men. But that’s about his interest level, not his attractiveness. He could have had casual sex if he wanted, but since he didn’t want casual sex, his sexual partner count is lower.
IV.
I feel like a big problem is that people tend to combine “casual sex” and “dating” into a single category, when in reality they’re quite separate issues. Men, as a group, are more interested than women, as a group, in casual sex– possibly because casual sex is less enjoyable for women, possibly because women are more likely to fear social stigma and violence, possibly because women are at higher risk of STIs and pregnancy, and possibly because women typically find sex with strangers a less appetizing prospect. Since most men are heterosexual, it is significantly easier for women to obtain casual sex than it is for men to obtain casual sex.
However, women being able to easily obtain casual sex is mostly a product of them not wanting casual sex. It’s not really an advantage to be able to easily get something you don’t want anyway. “Yay! It is super-easy for you to risk serious health problems, stigma, and violence in order to have a physically and emotionally unpleasant experience! Lucky!” While the situation is great for women who like casual sex (boy, is it ever), it’s not that much of an advantage for women as a group.
And, frankly, casual sex isn’t what most incels want either. If they did, they’d just hire a sex worker. Admittedly, hiring a sex worker is not particularly validating of one’s attractiveness, but neither is fucking the guy who messaged everyone in a fifty-mile radius on OKCupid, and the sex worker is no doubt a good deal more attractive. But hiring a sex worker won’t give incels what they want, because what they usually want– quite reasonably!– is love, affection, romance, and someone to share their lives with.
And love, affection, and romance are far more gender-balanced markets.
I will use marriage as a proxy for long-term relationships, as it is easier to find statistics, and marriage is the end goal of long-term relationships for most people anyway. There are approximately as many men as there are women. There seem to be more exclusively gay men than exclusively gay women in the US; depending on definition, men may also be more likely to be asexual. Marriage is generally monogamous, which means that for every married man there is exactly one married woman. Consensual non-monogamy is relatively rare and MMF triads are not notably less common than FFM triads– certainly not enough to have a notable effect on the dating market. Non-consensual non-monogamy is more common, but it’s unclear to me how often a cheating person monopolizes two people’s affections (as opposed to two married people cheating on their spouses with each other, casual sex, etc.) While men are more likely to cheat than women, this may not lead to an imbalance if (a) women are lying, (b) men are more likely to have casual sex or hire a sex worker, or (c) the men are all cheating on their spouses with the same small pool of women. For the sake of analysis, I’m going to act like this isn’t an issue, but if you have less uncertain opinions than mine about cheating you may come to different conclusions.
So the next issue is how much people desire to get married; maybe men as a group want to get married and women as a group can take or leave it, just like men as a group want casual sex and women as a group can take or leave it. Among never-married young adults, men and women are equally likely to say that they would like to get married; women age 18-34 are more likely than men in the same age group to say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their life. Anecdotally, one notes that the vast majority of How To Get A Partner magazines and self-help books are aimed at women. Therefore, I think that– if anything– men as a group are the ones dragging their feet about long-term relationships.
However, my analysis is a society-wide analysis. It is very possible that there are subcultural imbalances.
Consider the book Promises I Can Keep (summary here). Poor women in working-class neighborhoods tend not to get married. This is because there is a tremendous shortage of men who meet very reasonable, basic requirements like “is not a felon” and “has a job” and “does not beat me” and “is not an alcoholic.” Because these women value having children a lot and they don’t have any good options for husbands, they tend to become single moms; they see no realistic prospect for their children to have a committed, loving father.
A lot of the incels I know don’t commit crimes or drink, don’t beat up their partners, and not only have jobs but also make an above-average income. So why aren’t they marrying the women of Promises I Can Keep? Well, first of all, they’re unlikely to meet those women: both the women of Promises I Can Keep and my friends typically spend time around people of their own class background. They probably don’t even use the same dating sites.
Even if they do meet, they might not be particularly interested in each other. My friends probably don’t want to help raise two or three children that are not genetically related to them, and they certainly don’t want to raise children with someone who thinks not spanking is neglectful. They probably don’t want to devote a significant fraction of their income to helping their wife’s poor relatives fix their cars and pay the rent. They don’t want a partner who thinks that homeopathy is an appropriate treatment and that her new husband is due to God rewarding her for donating to her church. They would like a partner who reads books and blogs and who is able to participate in a discussion about trolley problems or Magic: the Gathering. I don’t know the culture of the women of Promises I Can Keep well enough to know what their dealbreakers about my friends are (see: spending time around people of your own class background), but I’m pretty sure they also have them.
To be clear, these are all totally reasonable preferences to have! In fact, it is good to have these preferences! You should marry someone whom you can talk to and who shares your interests and values and worldview; you shouldn’t raise children with someone unless you agree on parenting philosophy, at least in broad strokes; if you’d feel super-resentful about some aspect of your relationship, don’t get in the relationship. (Of course, it’s also great if you do want to help raise your partner’s children and help their impoverished relatives.) But it does mean that my friends and the women of Promises I Can Keep are unlikely to have happy relationships with each other.
For every man who can’t find a partner, there is approximately one woman who also can’t find a partner. (This is pretty obvious in the Promises I Can Keep case, which is balanced by a large number of incel or situationally homosexual men from those neighborhoods, who are in prison.) However, it is very unlikely that you will be able to have a happy relationship with her, or otherwise you already would. Sorry.
V.
The other important aspect of the incel problem is shyness. In my anecdotal experience, it is hard to overestimate the importance of shyness in keeping incel people of the sort who are likely to read this blog post incel.
Lots of incel people don’t have many friends to begin with, so they don’t get a lot of opportunities to meet people they might want to date in the first place. The odds are very much not in their favor. Even if they do have friends, lots of incels are shy specifically about flirting: they’re afraid of being seen as creepy or making people feel uncomfortable; they don’t know what to do, and it’s frightening. It is extremely common in my experience for incels to be so scared of flirting that they accidentally give off I-am-not-enjoying-this-please-stop body language, which means that even getting hit on isn’t necessarily a solution; interested people are likely to notice that they’re uncomfortable and disengage.
Incels are often advised that confidence is attractive. I’m not sure if this is true in the general case, but for incels I think that becoming more confident will, in fact, increase their chances of getting laid. This isn’t because people find confidence attractive (although many people do), but instead because incels are constantly self-sabotaging because of their own insecurity. Of course, being confident in your own attractiveness as an incel is sort of like trying to fly by tugging firmly on your shoelaces.
This is another reason why you can have both women and men who can’t find a romantic partner. If they never meet each other because they’re both holed up in their rooms reading the Kingkiller Chronicles, if they never hit on each other because they’re afraid of coming off as creepy, or if one of them works up the nerve to flirt with the other only to flee because they assume the other’s terrified body language is a rejection, you can have two people who would have a quite happy relationship both be lonely.
VI.
The worst part of the incel problem is how hard redistribution is.
Like, it’s super-easy to redistribute money. You take it from rich people and give it from poor people. There are, of course, implementation problems, but the principle is simple.
But you can’t really redistribute love.
If it were possible, I would happily take the Caring What We Can Pledge to give ten percent of the love and care I experience to those in need. But I can’t. My husband and my friends love me; there is no way to make their love for me become love of someone else. And I’ve learned that providing emotional support to someone out of obligation, when I don’t like them as a person, leads to burnout which leaves them worse off than they were when they started. Besides, most people want to be loved for themselves and not treated as an object of pity.
It still saddens me.
Thing of Things 
“””
I would suggest that if your response to emotional pain is “maybe half of humanity is subhuman”, this probably says more about your character than about your circumstances
“””
What it says is what your character has become. When you put it that way it sounds like “character” is the pure and immutable essence of who you are, and how one reacts to pain is a function of that. It’s not. How you react to pain is a joint function of character and circumstance. But your character today is a function of your character in the past, and how you have acted in the world, and how the world has acted on you.
A person with an admirable character can bear the suffering and tragedy of life without being corrupted by it. But it’s not because that’s what they are and that’s what they’ve always been. It’s because that’s what they’ve made themselves into over time. It’s a choice. Good or evil, you get to choose. It’s not binary but it does tend to be self-reinforcing. We aren’t born predetermined to take one path or another. Or at least most people clearly aren’t.
LikeLiked by 7 people
I’m pretty sure we all agree that people become. That said, it really is a mantra in incel space that women are to blame for the failures of these men. Furthermore, after literally decades of pointless bickering, we still have come nowhere near settling the “nice guy” debate.
The very obvious point is, nope, these guys are not “nice.” On the contrary, they are literally repulsive. So, the question is, why? What made them this way? Do we lay the blame on women? Do we say, they might have been nice, if only they had gotten sex as a teen?
I don’t know. Somehow I doubt it is that simple.
There is a clear sense that incel space, along with the broader “manosphere” and “alt right” (etc.) is a result of our time. However, nothing requires that I see these things as a justifiable results of our time. History is replete with cause and effect, social movements that zig and zag through a matrix of backlash. Round and round it goes. Still, angry, bitter men who hate women are awful. I don’t want to be around them. I rightfully avoid them. For them I feel very little sympathy.
LikeLiked by 2 people
They hate more than half the world – they hate women, “Chads”, and “normies,” which seems to encompass everyone except the fifteen hundred or so subscribers to the subreddit, and some number of similarly situated people.
It’s very sad – their radicalization means they don’t want “self-help” or even really sympathy from “normies.”
LikeLike
If I understood Ozy’s post correctly, the word “incel” as they used it refers to a much broader class of people than people in “incel space.” I would guess that the proportion of sad lonely men who specifically seek out online communities based on the identity of being sad lonely men is a tiny fraction of the whole.
LikeLike
I certainly hope this is true. Below a give a Fermi estimate of the number of “incel space” men, which turns out to be in the five figures. This is a really small number. There might be more “juggalos” in the world.
Regarding “sad, lonely men,” no one is promised a life free of sadness, so I’m not sure how relevant they are when discussing radicalization. After all, most of these guys will figure out social stuff, sooner or later, just as “sad, lonely women” do.
For example, I figured these things out. Most people I know did. I’m a nerd. I’m surrounded by nerds who struggled. So yeah. We can support each other. For example, we can encourage each other to avoid incel space and the manosphere and all that reprehensible garbage.
Cuz good fucking grief the whole manosphere is a trainwreck of failed people.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Less of this, please.
LikeLiked by 4 people
1: Holy fucking god those incel quotes at the start. Especially 1 and 3.
2: “While men are more likely to cheat than women, this may not lead to an imbalance if (a) women are lying” – yes, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of finding out how honest someone is by asking them.
3: I fully agree with you RE shyness. This was a universal problem for me as a teenager and very young adult (“she’s very pretty so she can’t fancy me; she must only be flirting with me out of some kind of cruel trick”), and even today it’s enough to stop me approaching a stranger and chatting them up even if it’s an appropriate environment and I think I’m getting signals.
LikeLiked by 2 people
> But hiring a sex worker won’t give incels what they want, because what they usually want– quite reasonably!– is love, affection, romance, and someone to share their lives with.
I wonder.
I agree that most incels don’t really want to do casual sex, because, as you say, they could just hire sex workers, or just go to a swing house or other orgy system (every major city has orgies; you just have to look for them), or get into spiritually empty hookup culture etc. (go on Fetlife, pretend to have a fetish if you need; won’t take long). So many incels seem to pathologically avoid any sort of situation which might lead to actual, physical sex, all the while complaining that they’re not getting any. It’s textbook self-sabotaging behavior. I think shyness is defensive: deep down they know they don’t want to be with that beautiful woman (if she says “yes”, then what? what if I don’t perform? what if she’s boring? what if my pain never goes away?), so they keep well away.
Why self-sabotage? I think what many/most incel men are working hard at lying to themselves about wanting casual sex; but the fact that they don’t want it doesn’t mean that they want love instead. Love means caring means nurturing means working every day at it. The kind of guy I’m thinking of, he doesn’t picture himself every day cooking or helping with household chores or traveling together or holding their hand when they’re sick. They wouldn’t want the trouble of nurturing a simple friendship, let alone a romantic relationship. What, stop browsing reddit and go outside to hang out with someone? Nossir, thank you very much. No, their desperation is deeper, it eats them from the inside; they don’t picture anything, they just yearn for … something; some false, impossible shore.
To put it short, I think what so many incel men expect from women is nothing less than the solution to the fundamental existential problem of the human condition. Of course, women can’t provide that, but we’ve been taught again and again that they can; they’ve been made symbols of it, objet petit a with a dress and a ribbon (I can’t even begin to imagine how many videogames, cartoons and comics taught me that the goal is to get the girl; about none of them ever tried to depict what happens *after* you get the girl).
From this I predict that, when a man like that do get a sexual or romantic relationship, it won’t count. He’ll have some elaborate excuse for why this is isn’t valid, it isn’t real, it isn’t the one (how could it be? it feels fake, disconnected; he’s still existentially anxious; nothing changed). Some men have sex with literally dozens of women and still think they’re dorks and all women despise them. Most will eventually resign themselves into bitter old men, perhaps fantasizing of going their own way.
What men like these mean isn’t sex or a magical pixie girl to fix their lives. It’s a cause. Something bigger than themselves. Something more to life than code to become richer to buy videogames to distract themselves from the angst of living just to code to become richer to…
With the death of religions and the failure of 20th-century Communism, I think we’re kinda short on causes right now. I sure hope some good, humanitarian movement starts getting traction, because otherwise all these angsty men will keep flocking to the other kind of movement.
LikeLiked by 6 people
(Sorry for crappy writing. My mind has some obscure bug which makes me unable to write properly without an edit button; I only see the problems after I click “post”.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes. This. So much.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Eh, no. Not so much.
I can’t blame you too much for trying to analyze what’s going on in the minds of a category of people you don’t belong to and pick out their faults according to your speculation, because I do this (at least privately) a lot. But it’s hard not to feel annoyed at seeing such an insulting assessment of a group that I’m quite close to, which from my experiences is overall not valid at all.
It’s easier to specify the part that I have to admit has some truth to it than to point out all the other things which strike me as blatantly untrue of at least many, many incel guys. The part about shyness being a defense against having to deal with what happens if you’re successful is IMO worded in too extreme a manner and my kneejerk reaction was anger. But on second thought I see that it’s true in a certain sense at least for me. I clearly remember the day that I surprised myself by blurting out to a good friend something like, “When I consider asking someone out, I’m not nearly as scared of rejection as I am of her saying yes.” It has been said that there’s a certain ease and comfort in being miserable, and I think those are wise words although they only describe one piece of the puzzle.
And okay, you bring up a good point about guys being taught that “getting the girl” is an end in and of itself, although again I believe that is only one aspect of a much more complicated story.
But the part about incel men generally not actually wanting to be there day after day for their lover, not even wanting to bother with a simple friendship or poking their head outside… That especially is a horrible characterization which is flatly contradicted by many of the frustrated guys that I’ve known.
On a warmer note, I completely sympathize with the “bug” in your mind that doesn’t allow you to notice mistakes until right after hitting “post”, which has caused me issues commenting at this blog as well.
LikeLiked by 11 people
@liskantope — The thing is, I lived it for at least a decade before I began to get my shit together, and I was lucky to do this before the Internet was a big thing, so I never was tempted by the incel rabbit-hole. In any case, yes, this rings very true for me.
Regarding the fear of social stuff, it’s complicated. Certainly I went out and tried to have friends. To a degree I succeeded. On the other hand, this exists: https://www.reddit.com/r/Incels/comments/5vkh1s/a_comprehensive_guide_to_ldaring/
For myself, while I was (at the time) “incel,” I never fell all the way into the “NEET” category — and this was the late 80’s, early 90’s. I’m sure “NEET” people existed, inasmuch as the world is large, but not as a thing that anyone aspired to.
In any case, it is fair to say the post by @leoboiko paints a kind of “worst case” picture, it is, I think, a real thing in the world.
LikeLike
@Veronica: It’s perfectly plausible to me that there are a significant number of incel men (not just a tiny handful) who are the way that leoboiko describes. It doesn’t ring true for me because most of that description is not remotely the way incel men seem to me from my experience, and it doesn’t help that leoboiko wrote in a sweeping “this is probably generally the source of the problem with incels” way. But we all (including me) have to step back and admit that, absent actual statistics like Ozy and Scott provide, our psychological analyses are mostly based on our own experiences, and those can be surprisingly different despite the many things we have in common by being on this blog.
LikeLiked by 1 person
(Ironically, the guy I knew who fit leoboiko’s description best — as in, didn’t want actual relationships with people and couldn’t feel connected in such relationships even when he tried them — pursued and engaged in all kinds of casual sex all the time.)
LikeLike
Can attest to liskantope. The description in the top level post was a really good spot-on description of me that felt emotionally resonant – except for two points.
1. I looked to my relationships with men to help me achieve transcnedence and not hate myself. And I guess on that note I rather liked the idea of “every day cooking or helping with household chores or traveling together or holding their hand when they’re sick.”
2. I was not incel. In fact, I’ll go stronger. I was voluntarily noncelibate and kind of slutty (though having 3 partners, 2 of whom were serious/long-term is fewer than some of the incel people on this thread).
Still, I appreciate leoboiko’s description. Even if it doesn’t describe the group they wanted to talk about, it described me at a point and it described an issue I struggled to overcome.
Like, part of why I have such a strong distaste for Blanchardianism is because of how much of a struggle it was to conceive of myself as an individual with value outside of what I did for others. And framing transition as a way to placate society/get together with straight guys does an affront to that struggle. Thank you leoboiko.
LikeLike
Go read the moe essays that @nostalgebraist mentioned below. (He linked to the intro section. I linked to the rest.) Then reread @leoboiko’s post.
I see pretty obvious parallels.
LikeLike
> “The kind of guy I’m thinking of, he doesn’t picture himself every day cooking or helping with household chores or traveling together or holding their hand when they’re sick. They wouldn’t want the trouble of nurturing a simple friendship, let alone a romantic relationship. What, stop browsing reddit and go outside to hang out with someone? Nossir, thank you very much. No, their desperation is deeper, it eats them from the inside; they don’t picture anything, they just yearn for … something; some false, impossible shore.”
This is so accurate about me. I really don’t know why people sign up for all that extra work. Maybe they understand they have to to compete, maybe they don’t mind working for the status payoff.
The false, impossible shore is one of the most annoying parts because it means when I do feel sexual attraction, I have to remind myself that the porn fantasy driving my hormones simply isn’t out there to be had, and attraction to the real deal is useless for what I really want. I don’t necessarily consider it self-sabotage; it’s the same attitude that kept me out of a lot of other situations I don’t regret, such as mortgages, smoking, and junk food fat.
LikeLike
I don’t think that’s quite right, although I’m only speaking for myself. Until a few months ago, I was incel for about five years. I tried (with no success) dating sites, asking for casual sex in some (relatively) appropriate settings, and also probing celibate female friends for interest in romantic relationships (that’s what worked out in the end).
I don’t consider casual sex bad. I’ve had two experiences that might qualify as that (so two fifths of my partners), and while they weren’t good, I think it’s more due to the partner than the casual sex itself (one might argue that casual sex doesn’t allow for great selection). I certainly don’t consider it morally wrong, and I have friends who have casual sex on a regular basis and that I have every reason to believe are good people and respectful of their partners. It’s just that I feel I’m conditioned by society to think that sex is a deep and meaningful thing, and so I find myself reluctant to the idea of having sex with someone I don’t appreciate. So yes, to an extent you’re right when you say I didn’t want only sex and that’s what et me back and prevented me from seeking out sex workers (although I seriously considered it but never went through with the plan). But deep down I’m pretty sure I did actually want, at the very least, a friendship, or a meaningful intellectual relationship. I’m not sure what is the impossible sort of relationship you think incels desire, but I can tell you that I absolutely don’t recognize myself (or, well, me from a few months ago) in that description.
LikeLike
Eh, I think some reasons such people don’t just hire prostitutes are
a) they are not necessarily much less terrifying to proposition
b) the people worried about being “creepy” might also worry about being “exploitative”, which is silly but still eh
c) a lot of internet incels anecdotally seem to be college aged and not yet independent from their families, which might make hiring sex workers difficult for a variety of reasons
I do think it is basically a shyness/social anxiety thing.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah, like some of the others have said – there are all kinds of people, and that (leoboiko’s) description may well apply to plenty of guys out there. But I don’t think it’s an accurate general description that covers most “incel” guys.
I basically am one, and so are a few of my friends. (Like Ozy, I don’t usually use that term due to its associations with misogynistic groups, but if that’s the term we’re using here I might as well).
I certainly don’t avoid situations that might lead to actual sex. They just don’t happen in my life. I also have no idea how to find out about swing houses or use websites like Fetlife or anything like that, so that’s not such an obvious option. (Whether or not I really want to have that kind of casual sex is something I’m not always sure of. But there are definitely days when, if I did know someone was interested in doing that with me, I would.)
Now, it’s true that I have some uncertainty about what a real romantic relationship would be like, and whether I’m ready for it. But I don’t know if that’s because of laziness or selfishness, so much as that it would be a big thing that I have no experience with, and I don’t have much reason to estimate my social abilities highly. But I would still like to try, if I knew how. I certainly would not give up a chance to hang out with someone I liked to stay inside on the internet.
I will agree with you on a couple points, though. I think it is true that a lot of media encourages guys to think that dating a girl will fulfill all their longings in life. That’s part of the reason I dislike a lot of American pop culture – most pop music and a lot of movies focus on romantic and sexual relationships and almost seem to portray them as the only valid emotional experience in life. I think that can definitely contribute to incel people’s sense that they’re missing out on an incredibly important human experience that almost no one else is, and their tendency to idealize romantic relationships past what’s realistic.
And yes, I’m sure there are lots of lonely people out there could benefit from being part of a good cause. But I’m about to graduate college as an environmental studies major, and I still feel a little sad about not knowing how to date. I think my difficulties do have a lot to do with being shy and socially anxious and lacking confidence, as Ozy discusses.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Now, it’s true that I have some uncertainty about what a real romantic relationship would be like, and whether I’m ready for it.”
You’re not ready. But don’t let that be the reason you don’t try; a few relationships that fail can be a great learning experience that will help you get ready.
“I think it is true that a lot of media encourages guys to think that dating a girl will fulfill all their longings in life.”
This is not a guy specific thing. I’ve never understood why some feminists suggest this is guy specific when discussing niceguy-ism. When that’s not the topic, lots of feminists have noticed that fairy tales give the same bad message to girls! Everyone gets unrealistic expectations about love.
Even if you avoid all the pop culture it’s hard to have realistic expectations without real world experience. That includes about things like who’s your type or who would consider you their type. It had not occurred to me that a solution to lacking social skills was to date an extrovert and get them to do most of the talking. When I met my wife I figured she was definitely not my type and deluded if she thought I was hers, but I figured after all these years what do I have to lose? I needed all the practice dating I could get and *fingers crossed* maybe she’ll sleep with me before she figures out how boring I am. Turns out we hit it off. I had only been interested in introverted women in the past, as I imagined that’s who I would be compatible with, but they were as reserved and anxious as I was so not much happened. I don’t bring this up to suggest what worked for me will work for you; I think I got pretty lucky, but don’t let faulty assumptions narrow who you consider.
LikeLiked by 2 people
As much that there is of Scott’s writing on the subject that I appreciate, I’ve always thought his “nice guys are disadvantaged” argument using statistics was one of his weak spots, so I’m glad to it critiqued. Indeed, I dislike the constant implication in his writing of “nerd = nice person = fairly innocent, wholesome person who doesn’t drink, swear, or gamble”… and I say this as an unabashed nerd who considers himself a nice person and is probably fairly innocent and wholesome in the grand scheme of things. This is a large part of what drove me to write my first-ever long post on Tumblr back in January 2015 describing my experience of mostly-male nerd social groups, which is quite different.
I have another big issue with Scott’s statistical analysis, which is that it seems pretty obvious to me that having more studying responsibilities (in the case of an MIT student, much more) leads to less time for dating/romance/sex.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Men who play college-level sports have practise, work-outs, &etc. in addition to being a student. Do they have trouble?
LikeLiked by 2 people
@roe0 — Well, athletes will to have strong and mostly gender-normative bodies, so they will likely help their dating prospects. After all, few will deny that looks matter. On the other hand, I know some pretty good looking nerds who do well. Likewise I’ve known athletic people with chunky bodies and not-conventionally-attractive features who had difficulty.
The point is, it’s complicated. It’s not a simple story. The world of romance does not fall out into neat categories of Chads/Stacies-vs-“normies”-vs-incels.
But yeah, on average I get athletes have an easier time dating that the members of chess club. Our choices are not between absolute perfect fairness and absolute unbearable unfairness. There is much middle ground.
LikeLiked by 1 person
veronica d – Right, exactly – it’s complicated.
I would also add being an athlete demonstrates – in a very public way – being at the top of a dominance hierarchy (and this works within the team as well – ie. the captain or quarterback or whatever is more sexually successful then the benchwarmers or the place-kicker).
But it’s not a matter of not having *time* – people who spend all their time playing guitar or learning to play a sport really well don’t have this problem if they get good enough.
I don’t have much to say about fairness – the world is how it is and everybody, at some point, has to contort themselves to find their niche in it.
LikeLike
I’m totally willing to bite the bullet that being a future MIT grad student is more time-consuming than being a football player at a large school.
LikeLike
So, if we took the amount of time the football player devoted to pursuing romance/sex, and made room in the busy schedule of the MIT grad for that same amount, you think that would work?
LikeLike
(Note: I’m switching to Berkeley because it has both an excellent graduate program in physics and a division 1 football team)
The thing about being a football player (or even a guitarist, assuming other people know) is that it involves publicly doing high-status things. The things the Berkeley grad is doing may or may not be high-status to the women he wants to attract, but they’re definitely private.
So I think that, even if the number of women interested, say, in reasonably successful physics graduate students at Berkeley is such that there are proportionately as many potential matches for the grad students as there are for a Berkeley varsity football player,* and even if our hypothetical grad student and football player devote the same amount of time (outside of their programs) to seeking romance, the football player will have an easier time simply because of the public nature of his program.
Of course, it’s very likely that the football player has more potential partners just because there are more graduate students than football players.**
There probably isn’t a “solution” to the public/private problem, in the sense of evening out the time required for the grad student and football player to find a partner, but we could, as a society, do well to provide resources aimed directly at the grad students to help them look. This could mean someone tosses together a smart-graduate-student equivalent of seacaptaindate.com, it could mean the department or the university generally holds some sort of mixer, or it could just mean social clubs that hit the right demographic profile keep grad students in mind for recruitment.
* Holy crap that was hard to write out; sorry if it’s also hard to parse.
** I think so, anyway. Berkeley’s physics department alone might not be able to field a full football team with its graduate students, but all of its STEM departments could probably get 3-5 together, I would guess.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@gazeboist — If all we needed to help nerds get dates was a better website, then it’s hard to believe we couldn’t spin up a couple dozen in a couple days. After all, about 3482039480986094598093949 dudes in the bay area know Ruby on Rails (or whatever), and you can spin up a virtual server farm for cheap.
I know MIT has stuff like tech squares (http://web.mit.edu/tech-squares/www/) and mystery hunt and so on, which get reasonably okay gender mixes. But shy is shy. Plus, nerd girls are just as weird and awkward as nerd guys.
Plus, sexual chemistry either happens or it does not happen. It’s complicated.
Honestly tho, I’m way less interested in how many of the tech elite remain romanceless through university, since “socially awkward late bloomer” pretty much defines this set, as does “focused on schoolwork leave me alone I have a project due!!!” The question is, how do they fare as the years roll by?
Does anyone have numbers? I know quite a few MIT grads, some of them nerdy as fuck like OMG. On the other hand, most of the guys I know seem to have girlfriends or wives. Like, even short-fat-bald-weird guys I know turn out to have a cute girlfriend, at least often enough.
Which fine. I haven’t done a survey. But still, these are not the guys on the incel forums, at least not in substantial numbers.
(As an aside, I get the impression that the Boston nerd scene has way better gender ratios, along with better gender relations, than the bay area nerd scene. For one thing, as a city we are not so singularly STEM/tech dominant. Plus even in tech space, much of that is biotech, which seems to have a decent gender mix, at least better than bro-tastic silicon valley startup hell. Likewise nerdy-and-cool humanities types are pretty thick on the ground here. In any case, this is anecdotal, but I hear way more horror stories from my west coast friends, and I suspect something like this explains the difference.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
FWIW, I skimmed through today’s postings on the /r/incel, and the guys I read mostly don’t think that they’re alone because they’re *too nice,* They think they’re alone because they’re unattractive, socially incompetent, and unlovable.
They resent women for applying standards that leave them out, and resent “normies” for giving them self-help advice. They practically jump down the throat of anyone who posts a conventionally attractive picture, rather than sympathizing that “if you look like that and can’t get laid, you must be really really really nice!”
And their biggest resentment of women, at least in today’s skim, was that they believe that unattractive, socially incompetent, and unlovable women can easily find partners.
I think they’re probably mistaken about everything, but unless it’s a total joke like /r/dreadfort, it’s really sad.
LikeLiked by 1 person
We have this lovely thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Incel/comments/665jwc/do_you_think_that_a_more_wholesome_rincel_would/
Just read the thing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Whoops – I was reading /r/Incels, not /r/Incel.
Sometimes I really hate Reddit. I’m still not sure which of those two subs is more sincere and which is more of a joke.
LikeLike
I think they are both sincere, just different.
LikeLiked by 1 person
/r/incel gives me a little hope – there are people there honestly soliciting and offering advice, some of it good. /r/incels makes me really sad.
(At least based on today’s skim of both groups).
LikeLike
“And their biggest resentment of women, at least in today’s skim, was that they believe that unattractive, socially incompetent, and unlovable women can easily find partners.”
Yes. This.
I feel a hell of a lot of sympathy for unattractive lonely guys. I arguably am one. But there does seem to be this bizarre idea that only unattractive males can’t find partners, as if they’ve overlooked the women they know that they don’t find attractive. Which is exactly what they’ve done.
The number of lonely men and women is logically likely to be pretty similar.
LikeLiked by 4 people
It’s hard to find good, actionable advice for finding love/sex. In the mainstream you find advice like “Be more confident,” but how does a shy person do that? It’s not like flipping a switch. A big reason incels are drawn to men’s rights or PUA communities is that they get specific. Instead of seeing posts that say “Be more confident,” they’ll see posts that say: “Here’s a script. Practice it 5 times a day in front of a mirror while smiling. Listen to a recording of yourself saying it and work on speaking more clearly.” Regimens like that can actually work to build confidence (not to mention elocution!).
Why the communities that offer the most concrete advice for lonely men are perennially wrapped up in misogyny, I have no earthly idea.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It is kind of a “given” in incel space that PUA stuff doesn’t work for them.
LikeLike
Wait, who’s Chad?
LikeLiked by 1 person
A “Chad” is a good looking successful guy who can effortlessly get women.
LikeLiked by 1 person
An attractive asshole.
LikeLike
It’s kind of weird that online dating hasn’t solved the “shyness” problem. I mean, you can just do a run around the whole “signalling I’m interested while exercising plausible deniability to avoid social awkwardness” thing, since if you’re messaging someone on a dating site, *of course* you’re interested.
I don’t have answers either, but there’s something else going on here, I think, besides “two people who would be happy with each other if they only left their rooms and met”.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Online dating does seem to be helping at least a little. “Severe shyness keeps someone from even sending a single message on an online dating site” has explanatory power. Or they’re afraid of telling people in real life that they’re LDRing. I guess I agree with you insofar as there’s a deeper explanation for why even making a public OKCupid profile is too intimidating.
LikeLike
Fair enough – but online dating – I would have thought – is going to cover everyone who is in the lower-but-not extreme end of the extroversion distribution – which describes most introverts. It’s a heck of a lot easier to send messages on dating sites then it is to flirt in a noisy bar or party full of people.
LikeLike
@roe0
It’s also a lot easier to ignore messages. If a guy doesn’t get feedback to what he is doing wrong in real life because he is not approaching moves to a situation where he doesn’t get useful feedback because his approaches get ignored, then he is not much better off.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree that the online environment helps a lot with shyness, and it’s great to know for an almost-certain fact the relationship status is of whomever you’re interested in. Unfortunately, in my experience with online dating, I was only able to get matched with and then get a reply to my first message from a very tiny proportion of the women I saw there (let alone get to an appropriate point to ask someone out). While my experience appears to have been fairly extreme, I’ve heard from a lot of other guys who report similar difficulties getting even one foot in the door.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That is perhaps a clue.
LikeLike
When I was on a dating site I was definitely one of those girls who would respond to maybe 1% of messages. This was due to ridiculously high message volume combined with very poor average quality (of messages; if the message didn’t grab me I wouldn’t even look at the guy’s profile because of the volume thing).
This seems to be common and I’d suggest it might be the biggest problem with online dating that needs fixing if it’s gonna work.
LikeLike
Liskantope, did some of the connections lead to dates, and if not, why do you think that was?
IMHO, general dating sites are going to have a tiny return. Plenty of people there are already casually dating, so they’re pretty choosy.
For the rest, after a while you only respond to the messages that really stand out. Which is unfair, because it selects for writing skill, but there it is.
So yeah, you’re right that dating sites aren’t a magic bullet. That said, I have a friend who fell in love in his 30s, for the first time, when someone responded to his OKCupid ad, so it happens, although I appreciate that watching it happen for someone else just makes it worse..
LikeLike
Honestly tho, the OkC model is a clusterfish, enough that I don’t blame people for hating the experience. Like, I have a profile, but honestly it’s so useless. I’m not going to pay to see who “liked” me, nor do I want to send random messages to random people, cuz shy. More or less no one ever messages me, so it’s really a complete fail.
One of my poly partners, on the other hand, is young and conventionally attractive, so she gets two or three messages a day from thirsty men. The thing is, she rarely responds, cuz big nope. Even when she responds, she hasn’t yet met anyone she wants to date. They just — nope double nope with a side of nope. I once asked her why she continues. She said basically, “It’s the only way I’m going to meet dudes, and maybe sooner or later I’ll like one of them.”
So it goes. It seems like a rather inefficient approach.
In theory I like the Tinder model, where you can just do the swipe thing, and then only after you’ve indicated interest do you have to invest much effort. That said, it’s still a hyper judgemental meat market. It probably works well enough for super conventional folks. It doesn’t seem to work well for weird nerds. As a queer trans women, I’m not going to bother with it.
Honestly, I’ve met most of my partners on Facebook. It’s a circle of friends with shared interests. We get to know each other. It’s easy enough to message people. Total win.
But then, “queer trans lesbian neurodiverse tech nerd (but I repeat myself)” is a pretty narrow demographic. I don’t expect that my experience will generalize.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was thinking mainly of my experience on Tinder when I wrote the parent comment, although I was on OKC on and off for a while before then with no better success. I like the aesthetics of OKC, and it has helped some people I know find their fiances / spouses, but it didn’t get me very far. The one sort-of-date that I got through OKC stopped replying to my messages shortly afterwards when she met her fiance-to-be on there. Anyway, here in Europe OKC seems pretty much dead.
Here are my hard numbers for Tinder, based on careful estimates: out of 5,000 women’s profiles that I right-swiped, I got ~13-15 matches and a total of one person who replied to my first message (several others sent the first message but ignored my reply; a couple of others I didn’t try messaging at all). Anyway, I wound up getting a date with her, although things quickly fizzled out after that. After doing the roughly 5,000 right-swipes while periodically switching photos and so on, I decided it wasn’t worth the massive amount of time I was putting into it. Although my story is fairly extreme, I’ve heard several similar reports from guys who use Tinder, although I did know one guy who was getting a date every week or two from Tinder.
So, as to why only one of the connections led to a date, well, that was the only match that led to back-and-forth messaging in the first place…
Anyway, I think Ozy said something in the early days of this blog that rambling stories about lack of romantic success in the comments falls under the category of Things That Annoy Them, so I’ll stop here.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Veronica
But you can see mutual likes on OkC. So you can really use it kind of like Tinder – go through the high-compatibility profiles, put a Like on the ones you like, and see if anyone reciprocates, and then reach out if they do.
I do think OkC is much more efficient than Tinder in the sense that you can filter by compatibility and various other important things (“show me just poly people” saves a great deal of time for instance). Especially for kinda weird people looking in a specific niche, or for people who don’t have a whole lot of success, having to swipe through a bunch of obviously irrelevant Tinder profiles is a big time sink. The only reason I’m still on Tinder in spite of this is that swiping is kinda fun. (Looking at people on OkC and Tinder are kind of my hobbies now, which on the one hand is ridiculous, but on the other hand this means I actually get some dates. (I find the really hard part is the dates themselves. I still don’t understand how to actually meet a partner on these sites, but maybe I’ll find out.))
Possibly relevant: I am much more interested in meeting women than men on Tinder at the moment (partly because that’s just my preference right now, partly see my comment below when it gets through moderation), but my match rate with women is much lower than my match rate with men.
LikeLike
Currently I have one mutual “like” on OkC, but it is a friend’s partner, who is actually quite a lovely person. However, I’m sorta hesitant to expand my polycule in that direction for “reasons.” Anyway, I find Facebook a more pleasant way to interact with people. It feels like less of a meat market. I’m not afraid to just chat up someone there. So yeah.
LikeLike
So if I’m understanding the landscape here, online dating has *magnified* the gender difference in the front-loaded investment costs of initiating a relationship.
LikeLike
Highlighted, I think, not (necessarily) magnified.
LikeLiked by 1 person
See, I don’t know if this is as much of a thing as people think it is.
If you put it like that, it is, because you described it in terms of ‘initiating a relationship’. But there’s a dominant narrative in some areas that because men in mainstream culture need to initiate flirting and be the asker-out, that they put more effort in and more is required of them to find a partner, and I think that’s just plain not true.
If you think about it in a very stereotypical way, a man has to make successful approaches. A woman has to attract approaches a) at all b) of what she finds to be acceptable quality.
The ridiculous amount of time, money and effort that goes into creating what we think of as ‘put together’ and an attractive look in a woman surely ought to count as contribution toward making the encounters happen that might lead to a relationship.
It’s just sort of buried because nearly all the stuff women have to do to attract potential matches, society has turned into ‘stuff women should do all the time forever for no real reason or we’ll shout at them’.
Obligatory Rachel Bloom clips:
LikeLiked by 3 people
I appreciate that point because I did express myself poorly and my thoughts on this are still disordered.
A better way to put it might be: Online (hetero) dating throws into sharp relief the market as a filtering mechanism for men.
(To your point: make-up and grooming allows a woman to filter more)
LikeLike
I think I’ve finally (a more than week after the fact) figured out what’s wrong with loki’s comment. I don’t know about other people here who have shared their stories here, but when I’m talking about men who would like to be dating someone but aren’t, I’m not talking about gender conforming men. There’s a lot of talk about fear of rejection in this discourse, there’s a lot of (more sympathetic) talk about how nerve-wracking it can be for a man to ask someone out, but, well … that’s not the problem, frankly. That’s not where the extra burden comes from.
The burden, for me, at least, comes from the fact that you are asking me to take the initiatory role when that role just plain doesn’t make sense for me. It’s not how I experience attraction.
A digression to explain how I do social things is in order. I become friends with people through mutual interest in some activity or set of activities. Sometimes this is meeting to discuss a shared interest, sometimes it’s working on schoolwork or a project together, sometimes it’s playing games of some sort. Very rarely, it’s going to a class and talking in the space immediately around it. I can think of exactly one case where I was attracted to a woman who was not currently in the process of becoming my friend in this way, or had not already completed the process. She was a co-worker of former co-workers who I was visiting in the context of my former job, just barely falling outside those categories I mentioned before. So, anyway: the set of women I’m attracted to is for all intents and purposes a subset of the set of women I’m friends with. What picks them out from other women I’m friends with, playing an equal or sometimes stronger role to looks, and almost always a much stronger role than compatibility (to the extent I can gauge it), is their perceived interest in me. That is to say, 40-80% of my attraction to (specific) women, is rooted in my (subconscious) perception that they are attracted to me. Those perceptions aren’t particularly accurate; I’m 2 for 6* in cases where I have explicit confirmation, and can think of 2-3 more where the answer is more or less obviously no based on a bit of system 2 analysis and/or some later information. Oh, and I’m not actually sure that one of those two, my high school girlfriend, really counts as a “yes”.**
Asking someone out is, for me, a guessing game in two parts. The first question is, “Is she actually attracted to me, or am I just telling myself a story?” The second question is, “Am I actually attracted to her, or have I tricked myself into believing so ‘for her sake’, because social gender expectations mean she won’t be the active party regardless of her actual feelings?” And, well, I don’t really like hypnotizing myself into being attracted to someone so I can help them resolve a crush they don’t actually have. It’s a bit of … emotional labor … that I’d rather not be performing. And more to the point, it’s worse-than-useless emotional labor. By performing it, I create a need for emotional labor from women who aren’t attracted to me (by artificially creating a crush I need to resolve), to nobody’s benefit. And, I mean, I know it’s a bit hypocritical for me to be asking women to approach me, rather than waiting for me to approach them (or even making plausibly-deniable requests that I approach them), but I feel like, as the pseudo-demisexual in the room, I’ve got a pretty reasonable case for being the marginally more passive party.
All of this is to say: when I, at least, talk about how being the initiatee is easier, I’m expressing a desire to take that role. When I say I’m jealous of how women are able to approach the dating world, I’m expressing despair at the fact that, when a man signals attraction at a woman, she can signal receptiveness and reasonably expect that this will lead to the guy to ask her out. Maybe it’ll take a couple rounds of ratcheting up the signalling, but eventually he’ll use his words. Meanwhile, when I try to signal openness in the corresponding situation, all I ever get are increasingly strong signals of attraction. And I get that there’s a lot of social pressure on women to not ask men out; a female friend of mine once told me about a guy who explicitly rejected her because of the fact that she asked him, rather than the other way around. This is obviously terrible, and women who would like to ask men out or otherwise be the initiator but are stymied by this idiotic social rule have my sincere sympathy. That said, having to signal that I am not going to reject you for the very fact that you asked me out is in fact a large barrier for me as well, could I perhaps have some corresponding sympathy.
The answer seems to be ‘no’ a lot of the time. When it isn’t, the best advice I see is typically either “be so attractive that you overcome the barrier by sheer number of women attracted” or “get better at reading women”. This is, quite frankly, not very helpful. What I want is a way to signal “it is ok to approach this one, I do not bite”. Sometimes people give advice for solving the distinct but related problem of “how do I signal attraction to a woman if not with explicit words”, alternately phrased as “how do I signal to a woman that I might want to ask them out (or maybe just have sex, depending on the circumstances) in the future”. I think I’ve got a pretty good hand on that one, though; I am perfectly able to signal “yes I am attracted to you” in cases where it applies (I often fuck it up, but that’s more about in-the-moment situational awareness than a question of what to do).
Which, then: I want to send the two-part signal “yes, I am attracted to you, and you should say something if you are in fact attracted to me,” and I am frustrated by the fact women do not need to add the second part, since society does it for them. Loki seems to be talking about having to send the first part, which is not something I find burdensome at all, or perhaps having to do Mysterious Things in order to generate the message to which I would respond, a task which I have had the ambiguous luck of avoiding thus far in my life (I think, anyway). This entirely avoids the problem I am trying to express.
In conclusion: ladies, society is stupid; please take responsibility for your own crushes, at least where your crush is separable from your sense that the object is attracted to you.
* There are two women who were attracted to me that I’ve excluded from this count. One was not someone I considered a friend; I was only aware of her attraction to me shortly before she said so explicitly. In the interest of honesty/openness, I did turn her down, as I barely knew her. The other never said anything explicitly, and I was not attracted to her; nevertheless the fact that she was clearly interested in me was almost enough to do it on its own. I asked a friend who I knew would be able to confirm, and this friend said the time had passed, and I sighed with relief.
** I asked her out based on not-particularly-clear signals from her, in some ways just to test the hypothesis that she was attracted to me. She said yes, possibly because she was 16 and couldn’t think of anything else to say. We stumbled through the relationship in spring, drifted apart over the summer, and broke up that fall. I’m still not sure if either of us was ever interested in the other (romantically, that is; we were reasonably good friends and both capable of holding up our end of a conversation) in a “real” way, since we were
shy teenage nerdspretty terrible communicators.LikeLike
Actually, I wonder if this isn’t the same thing as my objection to the “GNC men don’t want GNC women” thing below. Down there, I defined “gender non-performing” as a thing in between gender-conforming and gender non-conforming, sort of like cis-by-default, relative to “true” cis and trans. Gender anti-conforming is perhaps a better term for what I mean (in this comment, at least, though not the one above it) by gender non-conforming, so I’m going to switch to that.
So, anyway, consider six groups: GC men, GC women, GNP men, GNP women, GAC men, and GAC women. In my experience, the distribution of GC/GNP/GAC people is distinctly skewed, with most people clustered somewhere in the GC/GNP zone and a long tail of GAC folks for both genders.
Not initiating as a man is a pretty straightforwardly GNP thing to do. Initiating as a woman, though, is pretty solidly GAC, and women get slapped down for it if they aren’t willing to adopt a strongly GAC persona. The result is a big group of GNP men and GNP women who don’t initiate. The (straight) GNP women get less romance than GC women, because GC men prefer GC women, but they still get some, because GC men don’t ignore them entirely. Meanwhile the GNP men get virtually no romance, due to the rarity of GAC women.
LikeLike
@gazeboist
The male pursuer/female pursuee model puts different burdens on men and women. Many women get bothered a lot by pursuers, which can be a shitty experience. On the other hand, men get to put their ego on the line, which can be a very shitty and depressing experience if advances get denied repeatedly.
The one advantage of the female role is that it seems easier to get positive feedback by dressing up provocatively. Once in the dating environment, it is mostly a passive performance. The up and downside is that it is highly dependent on looks. A woman can presumably increase or decrease the number of men approaching her by dressing up in a more or less attractive way. Her looks provide a baseline here though, which means that not so attractive women or older women can be unable to dress up enough, while very attractive women can’t dress down enough when they want to avoid (over)attention.
For men, the advantage is that you can pick, but the downside is that you need enough confidence to get started and stick with it to develop pursuing skills. It seems to me that a lot of incels and ‘nice guys’ suffer from lacking confidence and/or lack a belief that they are worthy mates, so they don’t even try, in some cases after being discouraged by bad experiences and not seeing a way to get positive experiences/success.
—
As for your GAC/GNP distinction, you ignore the possibility that GAC may often be incompatible with GNP. For example, a man wearing a dress is GAC, but I think that a lot of women who are afraid to dress up provocatively or otherwise ‘put themselves out there’ are not looking for cross-dressing men. They may be fine with a man who is not aggressively male, but not a man who actually crosses the gender boundary like that. The same for GAC women and GNP men.
In general, I think that GNP and GAC can exist for various behaviors, where most people are not GNP and/or GAC for all those behaviors. Furthermore, a person may want to date people who are gender non-conforming when it comes to behavior A and anti-conforming for behavior B, but wants gender conforming behavior C. In fact, people who are Kinsey 0 or 1 clearly have some kind of desire for gender conformity in their mates that forms the basis of their attraction.
Ultimately, people who themselves are not fully gender conforming live in a culture where conforming gives higher status and is portrayed as attractive. Furthermore, there is no reason why a dislike or inability to act in gender-conforming way has to mean that one doesn’t like to experience gender-conforming behavior in others. I may not like dressing up in a suit and I can rationally understand that high heels are uncomfortable, yet a woman in high heels may trigger my lizard brain.
Such asymmetry can be regarded as inconsistent merely if it is a conscious choice. Attraction seems to be unconscious for most people and thus cannot be judged as if it was rational.
LikeLike
“And, frankly, casual sex isn’t what most incels want either. If they did, they’d just hire a sex worker.”
You make it sound as easy as ordering a pizza. It is illegal in most places, as far as I know; compared to the consequences that normally scare shy people away from approaching strangers, getting arrested seems catastrophic.
LikeLiked by 12 people
I imagine a lot of the incels also have prejudices about what sex workers are like that make the prospect seem less appealing to them than it might otherwise be.
LikeLike
Agreed. I think plenty of incels do want casual sex; they just want it with someone attractive who won’t charge them exorbitant sums of money or arrest them for solicitation.
LikeLike
That depends on what you mean by “most places.” If we’re talking about North America, then yes it is illegal in all of Canada and most of the US, but it’s legal in some Nevada counties and in Mexico, both of which are within a day’s drive of a large portion of the US population. Looking elsewhere in the Anglosphere, it is legal in New Zealand, either legal or decriminalized (that is, exchanging sex for money is not a crime, though related activities like soliciting or running a brothel may be) in all of Australia, and decriminalized in all of the UK except Northern Ireland. It’s also legal or decriminalized in most of continental Europe.
If lack of access to legal prostitution is the reason that incels exist, then incels should be a very regional phenomenon. For example, there shouldn’t exist any incels in the San Francisco Bay area that can afford the cost of a weekend road trip + $500,* because there are legal brothels in Nevada within 4 hour drive from San Francisco. Considering the large overlap between the rationalist community, Bay Area residents, tech workers who make good money, and incels, I expect that I would have heard about this by now if it were true.
* That’s a typical hourly charge at a legal Nevada brothel, from what I’ve read.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Fair enough regarding legality in various other places, though my original comment was not intended to claim that lack of access to legal prostitution is the sole cause of incels; rather, what I mean is that the existence of sex work doesn’t necessarily prove that incels wouldn’t give it a try.
LikeLike
$500 an hour? For the U.S., $300 an hour seems to be pretty common for escorts advertising online. I guess this fits with the general reports I’ve heard that legalized Nevada prostitition is incredibly corrupt with heavily artificially restricted supply and many hands taking their various payoffs and adding to the costs (and part of the reason the sex workers are always arguing for decriminalization, not legalization).
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Morgan
A decent number of incels may be demisexual. Or…they may have tried a prostitute and found the experience quite unsatisfying. Visiting a prostitute for your first sexual encounter is surely quite sub-optimal anyway:
– It’s timed and the virgin can’t just postpone if it doesn’t work out without losing the money he paid (which can be a major part of the income of the virgin), but no pressure.
– The virgin is dealing with one of the most sexually experienced women, while not really knowing what to do. The male gender norm strongly discourages copping to this and letting her take the lead. So the combination of internalized gender norms and the situation results in a high stress ‘exam’ scenario, which is the opposite of what makes for pleasant sex.
– There is big societal stigma, so if anyone you know figures out that you visit a prostitute, you lose major status, but no pressure. It’s worse if you can be arrested for it.
– It’s in an unfamiliar environment that is usually quite sterile. Laboratory sex
– Many sex workers don’t want kiss their clients or have them touch their face, which cuts down on the level of intimacy a lot.
I’ve been told that there are sex workers who offer a ‘girlfriend experience,’ which solves some of these issues, but I think that most first time clients are not going to be aware of this and/or opting for it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Aapje
Your list of reasons an incel might find a visit to a prostitue sub-optimal reminded me of a funhouse mirror of reasons a lot of straight women find casual sex sub-optimal. High-stress, societal stigma, low intimacy. but for somewhat differing reasons. I don’t know that it means anything, but it struck me as interesting.
LikeLike
1) Tangentially related – what are the male/female ratios like among demisexuals (self-identified or otherwise detected)? More demisexuals among women would predict less casual sex in that group as well, though I don’t think the numbers support this as the sole explanation.
2)
If poor single mothers are balanced out by men who are incel due to being in prison or otherwise removed from the pool, who are the women who balance out the nerd-class incel men? There are obviously some nerd-class incel women (I’ve met a couple), but they’re clearly outnumbered.
I think most of what you say is true, but this seems to be a missing piece.
LikeLike
@gazeboist — One possible theory is that the actual number of long-term incels is so low that the numbers are basically statistical noise. According to figures cited in this article [1], less than 2% of women and men are still virgins into their 40’s. Although that might be quite a few in absolute figures, only a certain fraction of that number are actual nerds, and the corresponding women are simply living their lives and not gathering on bitter hate sites.
Furthermore, for many guys, “incel” is a stage they pass through in their teens and early twenties. The corresponding women are simply dating the other guys, some of whom are a few years older, all this interspersed with periods of being single and complaining that all the “good ones” are taken.
[1] http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/a33782/involuntary-celibacy/
LikeLiked by 1 person
@veronica d
Swedish statistics show pretty substantial gaps between male single person households and female single person households, when viewed by age (keep in mind that women live longer, so (a major) part of the higher number of older single women is their partner dying).
We know that women are far more likely to date older men than vice versa, which is probably one reason for the gap.
So I think that it is very wrong to write this off as statistical noise. Keep in mind that there is overwhelming evidence that people are far more emotionally sensitive in their youth, so I think that it is fair to say that being denied major needs at a young age is far more devastating than being single when older, especially after already having made memories and being able to draw on them*. It’s even worse for young men to be single in that societal disapproval is far worse than for single young women.
PS. I also wonder if your 2% figure is very meaningful as ‘incel’ isn’t the same as virgin. An incel can be a non-virgin after a single (unsatisfying) sexual encounter (which may even have been rape) and yet never have had a relationship that they found even remotely satisfying to remedy their loneliness and/or sexual needs.
* For example, if self-worth through sociosexual validation has been established at a young age, it seems far less likely that a prolonged period of ‘incelness’ will drive down the level of self-validation to the levels experienced by a person who never got that sociosexual validation in the first place. AFAIK, it is also true that certain psychological attitudes get ‘locked down’ at a fairly young age and become very hard to change afterwards. For example, you have people who keep struggling with fear of abandonment for their entire life due to a youthful experience, even if for most of their life, they do not get abandoned particularly often compared to others.
LikeLike
@Aapje — How are statistics about people living alone in Sweden going to tell us about the number of incels? First, Sweden is a small-ish country. Second, Scandinavian is a rather particular culture. Will it generalize? (Are we interested in the global picture? If so, are you accounting for China and India? Or are we going to focus on the Anglosphere, where I assume most of us live? In any case, why Sweden?) Third, someone could live alone but be the center of a 12 person HAWT af polycule. It seems like weak evidence.
(I think it is totally fair to hold you to a very high standard of proof, since you’ve held me to that standard.)
#####
Indeed “incel” is not the same as virgin. That said, quite a few incels claim to be life-long virgins. Lacking any numbers on how many incels there are, and lacking any numbers on what proportion of incels are virgins, versus “had sex one time”, we really have little else to go on.
You might count the number of active posters on the various incel forums, and then try to account for those who post on multiple forums with different usernames, etc. I haven’t done this, but I suspect you’d find less than 10,000.
Well, for what it’s worth, let’s do a Fermi estimate. We have:
r/incel
r/incels
/r9k
loveshy
wizchan
sluthate
There are probably a few I’m missing.
I’m can’t easily get good numbers from all those sites, but the front page of wizchan indicates that it had 600 uniques this week. r/incels, on the other hand, has 12,000 subscribers. However, who knows how many of those are actually incel versus how many are non-incel but supportive versus how many are curious onlookers. If we guess maybe 10% are active posters (which seems reasonable for Reddit), that gives us 1,200. Some of those likely overlap with wizchan, but whatever. That’s about 1,800.
I suspect that /r9k, r/incel, and loveshy are drawing from a similar pool. Let’s increase it to 4,000. Sluthate is it’s own little hellhole, but I sense that it is tiny.
Okay, this is a bullshit Fermi estimate. Make of it what you will. That said, the population of the Angloshpere is roughly 450 million. Even if I’m off by a factor of 100, it’s still tiny.
You can pick apart these numbers, but I doubt you’ll find better ones.
LikeLike
@veronica d
Those statistics were the ones that I could find easily and they were presented in a way that was suitable. My assumption is that these kinds of statistics are fairly similar across first world nations. For example, the same can be seen in the UK and Japan and… the US.
I’m not writing a scientific paper here, so I’m not going to bother with such rigor in the future.
Also, I don’t live in the Anglosphere, although I’m probably living in the most American-centric EU country that is not the UK. My interest is in broader patterns, far more than specific countries, since cultural changes are clearly not limited to single countries. I see Americans invoke American exceptionalism far more often than I consider reasonable.
Anyway, you are correct that my evidence on this specific point is not very strong, although I think it unreasonable to call it weak. My argument is not that one should take all my claims as gospel, but rather, that it is a reason for some serious inquiry into this. Ozy actually is willing to look into this seriously, but mainstream science really isn’t, right now.
I merely held you to the standard of using articles that make claims that match their sources more than ‘not at all’, as well as not presenting correlation as causation, when it’s easy to come up with plausible confounders. I consider these minimal standards of proof, not very high standards.
Even the most unbelievable low estimates of the percentage of virgin men, make for millions of people in that group of 450 million who are virgins. If a non-negligable number of sexually frustrated men are technically not virgins, which I suspect is true, that number may be way higher. 4,000 is just a fraction of those.
Yet earlier you took this fraction and declared that ‘Men disappear down a rabbit hole of isolation and hate. I don’t know why, but it is hard not to notice.’
Do you think it reasonable to make far reaching claims about large groups of men based on such a small fraction of them? How would you react if a person would do the same for black people, Muslims, Mexicans, etc, etc? Would you be OK with: ‘Black people disappear down a rabbit hole of isolation and hate. I don’t know why, but it is hard not to notice.’?
LikeLike
Aapje — I’m talking specifically about men who participate in “incel culture.” This is about the radicaliztion of lonely men, not men who are lonely but figure out how to deal with it, just as “romanceless” women do.
LikeLike
@Veronica d
If people are oppressed, most will cower, but some will radicalize. The middle ground is like the death zone between the trenches in WW I. Every minimally sensible person will round themselves off to trench A or trench B instead of standing in the middle, being shot at by both sides.
That you see a lot more ‘women who deal with it well,’ but not so many ‘men who deal with it well’ is because the former group gets sympathy and support, while the latter group gets scorn and bullying. There are surely at least 4000 women who are extremely bitter about men and are not dealing with it in a healthy way, but they are much harder to notice because they are part of a spectrum. The woman who makes a misandrist statement doesn’t stand out as much and a pretty large part of the society will defend her statements (see the scorn heaped on #NotAllMen). Her message is seen as harsh, but necessary, after all, aren’t women the victims? When a man makes similar statements, his stereotyping is seen as targeting the real victims, so his statements are read very differently.
Once I realized that the actual level of victimization of men is far higher than most of society believed, I started to react more strongly to negative stereotypes about men.
IMO, people don’t reject negative stereotypes in themselves, but they tend to reject them more strongly as they believe that the stereotype diverges from reality. So if there are strong negative stereotypes about men in society, the people who believe them are far less capable of seeing misandry for what it is.
LikeLike
I don’t know. I haven’t met every class of women who exist. My understanding is that there are more fundamentalist Christian women than fundamentalist Christian men, so there’s an imbalance there?
But to a certain extent this is an odd question– if I say “Magic: the Gathering is male-dominated, but female-dominated hobbies also exist”, it’s not obvious whether the ‘counterparts’ of Magic: the Gathering players are yogis or makeup addicts or knitters.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Well, sure, but if you then add that “for every male hobbyist, there is a female hobbyist somewhere, with some interest”, I’m going to wonder if you have one in mind, especially if you point out that, say, the women who might be playing recreational football are playing recreational field hockey instead.
This is a relatively minor quibble, though, and overall a very good/important post (as I tried to get across initially).
LikeLike
“it’s not obvious whether the ‘counterparts’ of Magic: the Gathering players are yogis or makeup addicts or knitters.”
This is almost entirely tangential, but please don’t call yoga practitioners “yogis” — especially not female yoga practitioners. A yogi is a holy man, many traditions don’t even allow women, and for those that do the female term is “yogini”. (In fact, “yogi” is the explicitly male term; the neuter form is “yogin”.) What you’re doing here is like calling anyone with a cross necklace a Franciscan friar.
(Lest I be misunderstood, this isn’t a “cultural appropriation!” claim, not at all: it’s purely terminological. Nor am I trying to shame you in some weird way. I want to be extra clear about that, due to the horrible moment we’re stuck in right now.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you! I din’t know that and I’ll be more precise in my language usage in the future.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Out of curiosity: is there a (short, simple) term for nonreligious practitioners of yoga?
LikeLike
Counterpart to Magic: The Gathering practitioners might be Wiccans. Socially marginalized and mostly female.
LikeLike
You can’t simply change ‘less interested’ to ‘not interested’ without any justification like this. It’s not an advantage to more easily get something that you don’t want at all, but it’s definitely an advantage if you can easily get it when you merely want it less.
My perception is that marriage is more often the end goal for women than for men, who are more often content with indefinite cohabitation (and IMO this is quite logical, since women benefit more from marriage on average).
—
Other than these nitpicks, it’s a pretty good post.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This seems to be false: http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/marriage-and-mens-health
The measurable life outcomes for married versus unmarried men differ quite a lot. The difference is less stark for women, particularly as they gain economic independence.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t consider it reasonable to count that correlation as causation, as it seems obvious to me that women are more likely to date and especially marry men who are healthier than average. Research suggests that men and women tend to consider healthy people quite a bit more attractive. Army recruits are also less likely to have mental or physical disabilities, but that’s not because the army heals people. It’s because they select the most capable specimens.
Poor people are also far more likely to get divorced. Your article says: “A major survey of 127,545 American adults found that married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood.” So part of the outcome of the survey is surely because poor people live shorter lives and also get divorced more (and they probably lose their partner more often as well).
Anyway, I was not thinking about health, but about legal benefits, which more often go to women. For example, women tend to live longer, so are far more likely to inherit the wealth of the husband or get a widower pension than vice versa.
LikeLiked by 1 person
BTW, you can also interpret your article as arguing that marriage is especially dangerous for men, since men suffer a far greater elevated death rate after divorce. As modern marriage quite often ends in divorce, it may be safer never to marry (especially since I think that men are way more likely to lose their former support network when marrying, so when they divorce, they more often are very alone).
LikeLike
@Aapje — We’re both going to have a hard time teasing out causality here, but don’t play the isolated demand for rigor game. Whether your supposed “legal benefits” to marriage are sufficient to motivate women more than men is also unproven. Good luck proving it with the data we have.
Over the years I’ve seen quite a few articles that compare the health and happiness of married versus unmarried men, alongside the health and happiness of married versus unmarried women. The differences are pretty sharp. And indeed, we cannot easily tell a causal story, which, I wish social scientists were better data science and causality inference, but they are not. I cannot fix that. However, the differences exist. They are measurable.
The point is, something is causing the difference. Furthermore, one wonders if women simply handle being alone better than men do. I cannot prove that, but many small pieces gesture toward that story.
For example, lonely women do not create terrifyingly awful “incel” culture. They simply read Cosmo, buy shoes, cuddle up with their vibrators, and then laugh about the whole situation while drinking wine with their friends. Men disappear down a rabbit hole of isolation and hate. I don’t know why, but it is hard not to notice.
(#notall-whatever, obvious generalizations are obvious, etc.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Aapje — There is a lot written on this topic. Here is another article that summarizes much of the research: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201701/is-it-true-single-women-and-married-men-do-best
For example:
In any case, it is a complicated story. That said, I am unsurprised to find a notable difference between lonely men and lonely women. I’m certainly quite skeptical of any suggestion that marriage benefits women more.
(That said, I’m pretty sure it benefits children quite a lot, and many women want kids.)
LikeLiked by 3 people
really makes u think
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Veronica
I need to point out that my claim was that marriage is less beneficial to men compared to merely cohabitating long term. You presumably misread me, as you have been arguing the benefit to men of being partnered compared to being single, which is a very different claim. I never claimed that single men were better off…
—
You actually also argued your point a little poorly, as I’ve found Psychology Today to be quite bad at following the evidence in the past and the article that you used to support your point is no exception. The PEW survey that they link to actually shows that men over 65 who are partnered self-report spending more time on hobbies as they aged than single men over 65. These are relative changes over time, not absolute figures. So it’s consistent with the survey results if single men constantly have a lot of time for hobbies, but that partnered men lose time for hobbies earlier in their relationships, but regain time for hobbies in the latter years of their relationships. So the conclusion by Psychology Today can be the opposite of the truth.
A lot of relationships involve getting children and raising children takes time. So it’s not surprising that men have less time for hobbies as they get children and then have more time as they are done raising their children. The real question is why partnered women don’t show this pattern. Perhaps the male gender norm of being a provider results in them sacrificing their hobbies, rather than their working hours to care for children, while women cut their working hours, but not their hobbies. Another plausible reason is that single women are far more likely to be single mothers, so they are more similar to partnered women in how much they sacrifice their hobbies, than single men are to partnered men.
I strongly suggest that you put Psychology Today on the list of sources that you won’t believe without verifying their claims (assuming that you have such a list, as I do).
—
As for your perception of a lack of incel aka misogynist/misandrist culture among women: I would suggest that a large part of this perception is because misandry far more acceptable in modern society than misogyny, so:
– women who make misandrist statements stand out less from the baseline, while most men know better than to be open about their frustrations, so the ones that do stand out
– women can make misandrist statements in many places, while men can only do it in small enclaves. If you concentrate bad things in fewer places, it looks a lot worse. Imagine standing on the beach with a bucket of manure in your hand, while looking out over a perfectly clean ocean. That bucket surely looks really disgusting to you. Now imagine that without you knowing, someone emptied a bucket of manure into the ocean, making it a bit more dirty. You are probably not going to notice that it is not clean. It’s the same amount of manure, but dilution makes it very hard for you to see.
– as women are more likely to be misandrist in normal environments, they are more susceptible to being policed for truly outrageous statements, while the enclaves for misogynist men are far more likely to result in a positive feedback loop.
Also, as a woman, you surely won’t feel that misandrist statements are as offensive as misogynist statements, just like the opposite is true for me. So please be careful when comparing the two, as you are likely to be both oversensitive to misogyny and under-sensitive to misandry.
Finally, I don’t think that female incel culture can exist as an exact mirror of male incel culture, because women are in a very different situation. In general, the complaints by men tend to substantially differ from the complaints by women. I think that one of the most frustrating problems in gender debates/theory is that often, one gender gets taken as the baseline and analysed and then, when an exact mirror of the issue doesn’t exist on the other side, people declare that the issue only exists on one side.
LikeLike
It seems to me that a big part of why women don’t create “incel” culture when they’re single is that they’re better at non-romantic relationships. Female culture has lots of room for deep, emotional friendships that fulfill most of a person’s emotional needs. Male culture, on the other hand, is full of boundaries that make it impossible for guys to get too close — if they do, they are stigmatized as “gay.” How many straight guys (at least in English-speaking countries) are comfortable with hugging their male friends, saying I love you, calling their dads every day for an hour of chat? Not many, so when a guy doesn’t have a romantic relationship, that often equates to not having *any* intimate relationships.
Another thing is that relationships often have higher costs for women. There’s a lot of emotional labor that tends to be done by her by default; she is likely to drop out of education or make moves that hamper her career; she risks pregnancy. So when a woman is single, her friends in relationships don’t say “you’re a loser,” they say, “Good for you, prioritizing yourself!” Because they know that women in relationships often don’t prioritize their own development.
For men, though, being in a relationship is a benefit without as much sacrifice. Insofar as it does involve sacrifice, that’s often silent, because there isn’t social acknowledgement of it. So single guys don’t think of it as a tradeoff; they imagine a relationship would be pure benefit. Their peers may also give them a hard time for being single, because they are seen as not being “good enough” to attract a woman … it’s assumed NOT to be a choice.
LikeLiked by 1 person
There is plenty of sacrifice by men, it’s just not acknowledged.
LikeLike
My impression is that Ozy was using “less interested” in a statistical sense, where “women are less interested in casual sex than men” really means “fewer women than men are interested in casual sex”. And Ozy mentioned that women interested in casual sex (with men) do have an advantage.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@tcheasdfjkl
But is it true that more women than men categorically refuse to have casual sex or do women merely have far higher standards? The difference is very important!
Imagine that we have two people: Bob and Alice. Assume that they have an equal libido and are equally good looking, but Bob is more interested in casual sex in the sense that he has far lower standards than Alice. He is willing to have casual sex with 9 out of 10 women*. Alice is willing to have casual sex with 1 out of 10 men.
Now imagine that Alice and Bob are both horny and meet someplace. The chance is 9/10 that Bob wants to have sex with Alice, but only 1/10 that Alice wants to have sex with Bob, if we assume that their preferences are random. If it is sexually frustrating to get excited and turned down, but not (very) sexually frustrating to turn down a person whom you never saw as a viable sex partner, Bob is going to be far more sexually frustrated than Alice**.
Now imagine that sexual preferences are not random, but that all the Alice’s in the world have somewhat similar standards. Pretty much all of them want to have sex with George (Clooney), but pretty much none of them want to have sex with Bob. If we assume that George will have lots of casual sex, he will be that 1 out of 10 men for a ton of Alice’s, while Bob will be that 1 in 10 for no Alice.
So now George has a ton of casual sex. Alice has less than she prefers and would have in a world that merely has Georges, but enough not to make her immensely frustrated. Bob is immensely frustrated as he has near-zero sex, while he sees Alice having sex with much better looking George, while Bob cannot even get similarly looking women interested in having sex with him.
Now Bob notices the pattern that Ozy has found as well: that highly promiscuous men are more often assholes. So he incorrectly concludes that women choose their partners in large part based on how much of an asshole they are, which logically makes him bitter, as it directly goes against a just-world belief.
When Bob talks about this observation with Alice and George, they don’t understand it at all. Social research shows that people tend to underestimate luck and overestimate their own agency. So George thinks that it is far easier for Bob to become somewhat more like George than is true.
Alice has also been taught a just-world belief and believes that women’s preferences are far more random than they are. She also projects her own situation (many men who want to have sex with her, but few that meet her approval) on men. The logical conclusion of these false beliefs is that only the worst men cannot get any women interested in having casual sex. So in the best case scenario, she assumes that Bob is simply acting very badly due to nerves or such and gives bad advice (‘be yourself’ being the epitome of bad advice to men). In the worst scenario, he simply gets called names.
In both scenarios, he is not told the actual truth or given any helpful advice, so he gets more bitter and more drawn to the dark triad.
What irritates me is that our society spends a lot of effort on bullying incel men and after some of these men then start misbehaving in response, this is then taken as evidence that they need more bullying.
* These numbers are just illustrative.
** and she is going to be far more non-sexually frustrated, over getting approaches by many men she doesn’t want. I see plenty of women who are quite upset over that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Aapje
>But is it true that more women than men categorically refuse to have casual sex or do women merely have far higher standards? The difference is very important!
I’d either say the difference is immaterial (because very people hold categorical beliefs like that about anything) or that of course women have higher standards. There’s no real reason why women should categorically dislike casual sex, so the main reason why women would want less casual sex than men is that in their cost-benefit analysis, it’s not WORTH it.
So, what would change a person’s cost-benefit analysis? Stuff that reduces risk (good birth control, social proof of the casual sex partner, supportive environment, nonjudgmental culture), increases reward (good sexual self-knowledge and communication skills, social proof of the partner, loneliness, inhibition-reducing drugs, high-status partner for bragging rights or psychological boost) or increases drive regardless of cost-benefit analysis (drugs, attraction).
I’m not sure in what category George (Clooney) falls – random pretty-faced dude could hit both attraction and increased reward, while actual George Clooney probably also feels like a risk-reducing option (most people know him from the good guys or good-hearted bad guys he plays on TV).
I mean, sucks for Bob in your example and I definitely don’t think he should be blamed for his luck, but it’s not as if Bob is pursuing sex that’s not worth it to him either.
LikeLiked by 1 person
More precisely, I meant that there were two overlapping bell curves and the female curve is centered around a point more towards the “not interested in casual sex” end than the male curve is.
LikeLike
@Mircea
All the things you mention are either something that has to change on a societal level or are dark triad if Bob employs them (like getting someone drunk).
Most of society judges men by their sexual success, their ability to get into a relationship and by their ability to solve things on their own & sees this as a useful way to manipulate men into societally beneficial behavior. I don’t think that people truly want to change this, as they have internalized this as important for society. They may rationally feel sorry for men, but many people also rationally agree that insects would make for more ethical meat, yet they refuse to eat them. Emotions drives behavior far more than rationality.
We see an unwillingness to help men in how government funding is allocated. The way people talk about male victims. The problems that people see and don’t see. Etc, etc.
The only solution is to slowly shift the emotions, only after that will people be willing to make changes.
LikeLike
It’s almost inevitable that these conversations circle around to what standards women hold, versus what standards men hold, etc. It’s a pretty tedious conversation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Justify the use of “manipulate” here.
LikeLike
One example:
Do you consider it manipulation when women were convinced that their proper place was in the home and this was what they were suited for? And that they don’t deserve love if they refuse this arrangement?
Do you consider it manipulation when men were convinced that their proper place was to provide for their household and this was what they were suited for? And that if their (lack of) skills makes their best option a job that causes harm to their bodies, this is something that they should accept as a price for being loved?
You might call this patriarchy, although I prefer gender norms.
The statistics rather clearly show that the female gender norms around work have been reduced far more than the male gender norms for the same. Ergo, my claim that men are manipulated more than women at this point.
LikeLike
Aapje — Harm to their bodies?
How many incels are coal miners? It seems like most are either tech workers or NEET.
The stuff you’re talking about seems to impact working class men more, which is related to the stuff Ozy linked to about single mothers. Likewise, I read an article maybe a year ago (no link) about working class women who were focusing more on education and careers, rather than relationships with the available men. That said, men continue to out-earn women. They continue to have higher labor participation rates, etc.
The point is, women are marginally less economically dependent on men. In turn, we’ve seen women raise their standards on what kind of men they want to be with. I don’t blame women for this. It is possible to have a rewarding life without being shackled to a jerk. In short, this is what independence looks like. Step up, or go your own way.
These changes, however, happened over the same decades as the collapse of the manufacturing sector, and the aftermath of that, and so it’s no surprise to see an economic shitshow. But is this “manipulation”? I don’t see it.
Furthermore, this does nothing to explain discourse around “beta cucks” or “lie down and rot” or the general level of self-destructive nonsense we get from the incel crowd.
LikeLike
@veronica d
It’s most evident in working class men, but the gender norm teaches all men to care for their bodies less. Both by taking greater risks and by not caring for injuries as much.
The statistics are obvious, an overwhelming percentage of deaths on the job are suffered by men. Of course this hurts working class men more, but if I would focus on the more subtle effects for white collar men, you’d (rightly) complain that the evidence is less clear.
As for men earning more, this is evidence of men being manipulated into providing. Men report lower job satisfaction than women, yet work more hours. What you need to look at to see whether men or women are more manipulated in this respect is the spread and median. Men overwhelmingly cluster at an extreme. Women cluster in the middle, with quite a few outlier down and up. Men have very few outliers to ‘stay at home husbands’ and cluster away from a more balanced life-work balance, unlike women, which provably gives women higher job satisfaction.
If men sacrifice their job satisfaction due to gender norms more than women, are you willing to call them more manipulated, in this respect?
Please note that I have not and will not blame one gender for the way things are.
I admit to going a bit off topic.
LikeLike
Let me clarify:
1. I believe that the vast majority of humans care substantial less for the well-being of men than of women. Note that I’m claiming that this is a unconscious difference in caring, not rational.
There are many independent pieces of evidence that show this. To give one example: Boko Haram initially targeted men and boys and killed them, while explicitly choosing not to harm women and girls. The West did not care. As it was the goal of Boko Haram to cause outrage in the West for PR purposes, they started kidnapping girls. They couldn’t bring themselves to actually killing them, like they easily did for men and boys, but that was not necessary anyway, because we got #bringbackourgirls. So the killing of men was valued less on the emotional level than the kidnapping of women, both by Boko Haram as well as the West.
2. I’m claiming that when there is a choice between making men or women suffer, there is strong bias to make men suffer. Note that I’m not claiming that society sees male suffering as a goal in itself, but rather, the lesser evil, when it is seen as necessary to achieve a goal that requires suffering. I’m not claiming that the bias is 100%, so if the needed level of suffering is high enough, women are made to suffer as well, but less so.
3. It’s pretty evident to me that society teaches men that they are ‘good’ if they voluntarily accept suffering and if they punish other men who don’t act ‘good’. I call this manipulation, because men are not given a rational choice to accept or reject this arrangement once they have mentally developed and have become somewhat resilient, but instead, they are indoctrinated at an early age by instilling strong emotional feelings when they act not ‘good.’
Imagine placing a shock collar on a kid and zapping him/her when eating a bit of candy. The kid may later rationally decide that there is nothing wrong with eating some candy, but most likely, the association of candy with pain will never go away. Even if the emotional manipulation is rationally recognized, the anticipating of pain with candy has become a scar that is deeper than the will. As St Augustine argued: “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.”
Of course, men are not given shock collars, but they are denied social acceptance if they disobey, which is one of the strongest needs and things quickly escalate to violence if the social shaming is insufficient.
4. I claim that the relative lack of care for the well-being of men explains a lot of the different responses to men and women. To bring it back to male incels, they clearly get way more social shaming than women who are incel.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aapje I think #1 is correct, the others are dubious.
Society is more than willing to heap suffering on women, but not the same kind of suffering. It is more willing to subject men to the horrors of war and to most kinds of external physical danger, but more willing to neglect medical problems that target women, subject women to unnecessary and harmful medical and cosmetic procedures, and trap them economically and legally in abusive relationships. (It prefers to trap men in abusive relationships socially through persuading them that women can’t abuse them .)
Furthermore, it teaches both sexes that it is good to accept suffering, especially when it is the correct gender-appropriate type of suffering. Men should subject their bodies to mine work and warfare, and women should subject their bodies to obligation-sex and repeated pregnancies that end in unnecessary caesarians and episiotomies, and both of them should accept their fate without complaint.
Gender roles control and abuse men and women in different ways, but not men more than women. Men are glorified as providers and leaders and as such deprived of support because they shouldn’t need it and despised if they fail. Women are pedestalized as prizes, innocents and mothers, and as such treated as possessions, deprived of basic bodily autonomy because they can’t be trusted with it, and despised if they fail in their own areas of requirement.
Progress toward fighting these norms might be uneven, but it’s inaccurate and counterproductive to fight over who has it worse.
LikeLiked by 3 people
@loki
Substantially more money is spent on medical care for women than for men, so how do you justify this statement? The only arguments that I’ve seen for what you claim is that medical research tends to be done on men and that doctors have a harder time identifying some diseases in women. The former seems to have a strong biological component, as women tend to have more hormonal variability and can get pregnant which is problematic for various reasons (including the ethics of accidentally harming a fetus). So it seems logical to use men as you have fewer variables and ethical issues. You can just as easily argue that this places male test subjects more at risk for the benefit of women who don’t have the risk of the medicine having bad side effects. So if we assume that doctors underestimate how different the female body can react to medicine, this seems to argue for my claim more than the opposite.
The greater difficulty in identifying some diseases/conditions also seems to be primarily biological. So both claims boil down to doctors not spending enough extra effort for women. I find it unreasonable to portray these as heaping suffering on women by choice. Moloch does not have gender bias and it’s existence for both men and women doesn’t tell us much about situations where things were willed.
The neglect also can’t be that bad given the many years that women live longer than men, unless women are extremely biologically superior to men (way more than even the very large gap in life expectancy that currently exists).
In the West, isn’t circumcision the only common gendered & unnecessary medical procedure that is considered mandatory by certain groups and which often is favored in itself, rather than to be beneficial to the recipient?
Breast implants are pretty clearly not favored in themselves, but get done to achieve a desired body by women who want to increase their attractiveness. They also involve far more agency as the procedure is not performed on an infant without consent.
AFAIK, neither is significantly correlated with unhappiness, so in so far as both are causing suffering, it is fairly minor on the whole.
This is Moloch, not willed. The division of labor in relationships is clearly directed at the typical non-abusive relationships, not the minority of abusive ones.
I never claimed that women are not made to suffer. I claimed that society will want to keep the level of suffering of women substantially below the level of suffering of men (although people delude themselves into thinking that women suffer more and thus feel that they are being fair).
Unnecessary caesarians and episiotomies? Are you claiming that doctors do this for fun???? Or is there a way to have babies without risking these procedures?
Also, obligation-sex is way more of a norm for men. Men get virgin-shamed (pushed to more sex), while women get slut-shamed (pushed towards less sex). And both genders get pushed to get children quite strongly, although women are the ones dealing with the direct effects of pregnancy. However, this is obviously due to biology (most men seem to have misplaced their uterus).
The common belief in society is that women have it way worse. The evidence that society presents for this is provably often false (like claims about rape and domestic violence victimization). If society tries to compensate for a disparity that doesn’t exist to the extent that is claimed, you’d expect overcompensation.
Women report higher happiness than men, women live longer than men, women are less victimized than men, women are less often casualties during wartime, women get way more societal support relative to their need (services for the homeless sexual victims, domestic violence victims, etc) and so on. Everything points to overcompensation. To claim anything else, you need to believe in major biological advantages for women.
The problem is that most of society believes that women have it worse, so this fight has to be had anyway. We’ve had feminism work on helping women and they had quite a bit of success. But they succeeded by hyping female adversity, so their success in actual achievement doesn’t result in a more accurate perception. The hyping is just becoming more and more outrageous.
But the emperor has no clothes and that needs to be pointed out*.
* Of course, the tale is very unrealistic in that the emperor ignores the heresy in the crowd, rather than seek to punish the heretics, as happens in reality.
LikeLike
This is all missing the notion of agency. Yes, more men die in war. But to a large degree men occupy the positions of power that command these wars. Yes, in a barbaric conflict, a whole village of men and boys might be massacred. However, the women are raped and possibly taken as slaves. There are still places where women cannot own property, where they in essence are property, first of their fathers and then their husbands.
It is better in the west, but the remnants of these views continue to exist.
Men are expected to occupy dominant roles. But there is a thin line between that and men expecting to take dominant roles. When they fail …
We can have sympathy with men insofar as they are bullied. However, women still struggle to play a game where a notable number of the players consider them objects of competition and not legitimate competitors. Much of this is unconscious and present even among not-outwardly-dominant men. (#notallmen)
Sure, I can sympathize with the men who lose the game, but I still have to deal with the men who win the game. Look at the leadership of this country. Furthermore, when dealing with the “losers,” I cannot fix their unrealistic expectations of women. In many ways, they are simply childish.
Men are expected to be stoic. Women are expected to nurture. The point is, men who fail badly at the dominant-and-stoic game do not shed their expectations of women as nurturers. They do not shed their dysfunctional sexist narratives. (#notallmen, #notallnerds, there are billions of people, every story happens.)
Furthermore, look at the fixation on “dark triad” stuff among this class of men. Sure, some women are attracted to men like that. Sometimes those men can be otherwise quite attractive.
If you look at male serial domestic abusers, you will find that they are mostly all good with women. But obviously they have to be. You’ve selected for that. After all, those who are not good with women have fewer opportunities to be serial domestic abusers. A “charming sociopath” might surround himself with beautiful women. A non-charming sociopath struggles alone until he goes on a rage-orgy and shoots up a school.
That said, I know a lot of cool, emotionally well-adjusted men who do well with women. In fact, in my cube farm at work I’m surrounded by three such men. Two of them are married. One is unmarried, but I sense he does okay. They’re all pretty good looking (insofar as I can judge men).
These men are way better role models than Hannibal Lector or Donald Fucking Trump. (Good grief.) They aren’t rare. Go to any nerdling meetup and you’ll encounter cool nerd couples who approach gender in a variety of cool ways. Just open your eyes.
As an aside, I am aware of the “alpha nerd” discourse, and that using as my example good looking men with degrees for {high status school} and working at {high status techco} earning big salaries is perhaps not fair to some cheeto-stained NEET incel guy. But I am talking about role models, in contrast to the “dark triad” types. After all, cheeto-stained NEET incel guy isn’t going to pull off a Hannibal Lector either.
Of course, one can stay inside, don’t meet women, and only view the world through the lens of the “manosphere.”
Men built the manosphere. It is build in their own image. It reflects their own preoccupations.
LikeLike
@Veronica
The women are not raped, they may be raped. Interesting how you hedged two of your claims, but not the third. And rape and slavery has been reported for men as well.
But I’m not talking about barbaric conflict (which is so vague a term to be rather meaningless), but about organized warfare of let’s say, the last 1000 years in the West. What you generally see during history is that war is fought away from civilians whenever possible and that women and children are evacuated away from the fighting, while fighting-age men are moved towards the fighting.
This is silly hyperbole which you clearly know by your use of weasel words (‘in essence’).
This is not correct since men and women play a different game, where they are each others objects of competition. Don’t you think that it is obvious that women compete with other women for the best man? How are men not objects of competition in the game that women play?
You make a mistake that I see a lot of feminists make by equating being forced in role A with agency while equating being forced into role B with a lack of agency. This makes no sense except to use motivated reasoning to preserve a victim narrative.
Women are probably no better at this than men though, yet the narrative is that they are. Again, the part of my argument that you keep ignoring that anti-male statements are far more normalized, so your perception is probably very skewed.
Dark triad male behavior is espoused on websites that are spit on by the mainstream. Dark triad female behavior gets cheered on one of the bigger talk shows that has received 4 daytime Emmy nominations.
But of course, anyone who complains about female dark triad behavior is judged himself to be misogynist and most people refuse to listen.
The extreme denial that you display in your comments (where you even deny the extremely obvious truth of female competition) is exactly what makes men extra bitter, because they get bullied for their valid complaints, rather than get sympathy. They get attacked for behavior which is minimally harmful, while far more harmful behavior by women gets ignored and justified.
You claim to oppose bullying of men, but your statements are drawn from the cultural narrative that bullies men. You may not mean to, but you contribute to it.
No, you really can’t.
LikeLiked by 1 person
>I would suggest that if your response to emotional pain is “maybe half of humanity is subhuman”, this probably says more about your character than about your circumstances.
Why don’t you tell me what it says about my character and about my circumstances, then, and I’ll decide for myself which one is “more”?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Honestly I think that quote from Scott alone would go a long way to Deradicalizing the Romanceless on it’s own. Shout it far and wide.
I wish I’d read it 10 years ago when I was terribly terribly lonely. Sometimes simply telling someone “no, it’s not that you’re inherently defective as a person, it’s probably just your demographics” can be very reassuring.
Sadly some people take the opposite approach. Anyone (male) talking about being lonely becomes a fun target for socially acceptable bullying.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I do think there’s one completely reasonable change to demand from mainstream culture to deradicalize the romanceless, which is to *stop openly shaming them*.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I sympathize with asexuals, but I think it might be a good move for society to transfer shame from the involuntarily celibate to the voluntarily celibate. We really need to get those birth rates up.
LikeLike
Who’s “we” and why do “we” need that?
LikeLiked by 6 people
I can point to over 7,000,000,000 reasons that’s wrong.
LikeLiked by 2 people
>But hiring a sex worker won’t give incels what they want, because what they usually want– quite reasonably!– is love, affection, romance, and someone to share their lives with.
I mean, there’s also an aspect of social validation, being an incel/virgin is very low status in itself within a lot of environments.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah, hiring a sex worker doesn’t help with the “can’t get any” stigma, though it at least lets you lose the v-word. Also with pointing out that hiring a sex worker still comes with an enormous payload of its own shame.
The main things stopping me from hiring a sex worker when I was incel were a) not knowing how and b) imagining what people would think if they found out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As someone who used to be a sad, lonely, nerdy, shy, desperate kid, but managed to find love, I think I have a way of re-phrasing “the asshole question” which could be illuminating.
The question is usually, “Why go girls often/always go for guys who are assholes and who hurt/use them, rather than nice guys like me who’ll treat them right?”.
I think a lot of it comes down the gender roles and how masculinity works in our culture, even if the people asking this question can’t/don’t phrase it this way. I think it could be rephrased more productively as:
“Many women desire a man who conforms to traditional masculine norms, which I (the speaker) do not conform to, disadvantaging me (the speaker) in the dating pool. I have, over the years, been psychologically and physically abused by traditionally masculine males who are punishing me for my nonconformity, and thus view all such individuals as potential future abusers of me or past abusers of people like myself, ergo label them “assholes”. Furthermore, such individuals often hurt their romantic partners due to adherence to these traditional masculine norms. While I lack the positives of traditional masculine norms (which I minimize), I also lack the negatives, and therefore label myself as nice by contrast (regardless of other, independent negative traits I may possess).”
I think this not only fits with what I see online (with the obsession with “Chad”, “alpha/beta males” and other such funhouse mirror versions of the issue) but my own experience, in which I would (and to some extent still do) treat conformity to traditional masculine norms, especially if clearly deliberate, as an indicator of being in the same group of people who tormented me. Most particularly, I remember young teenage me disliking anyone who drove pickup trucks (this was in The Deep South), since, although I couldn’t put it into words, I associated them with performative masculinity and my childhood tormentors.
I would also like to note that I think “shyness” is confusing a proximate cause with an ultimate one. I was never shy as a kid; quite the opposite, I was always approaching people and talking to them about my interested (whether they were interested or not), etc. I had shyness beaten into me once I got older, by those who wanted to make it clear my differences made me “less than”. Shyness is still a problem that must be dealt with, but I’ll go out on a limb and predict that many of these lonely folks share the experience – shyness originates from the need to watch yourself constantly to avoid mistakes, or to simply avoid any situations which could lead to those mistakes, and the inevitable consequences.
I’m not really sure where this goes, and it’s not the Grand Unified Incel Theory by any means, but I do think there’s a strong undercurrent in these type of groups of individuals who, whether by preference or nature couldn’t/didn’t conform hard enough to traditional masculine norms and consequently found themselves “cast aside” in favor of people who did. And it’s not just guys – women can be every bit as ruthless in enforcing traditional masculine norms as men. They probably don’t have the language or introspection necessary to articulate it, and that’s where this lashing out at perceived enemies comes from.
LikeLiked by 10 people
Indeed and I think that the way that society reacts to even very mild complaints about these issues (not talking about hardcore misogyny) just reinforces these beliefs.
After all, if incels see gender normative people as abusive and the response to ‘I want to have a good life, but without gender conforming’ is being gender policed, then this just reinforces the belief that gender normative people are abusive/assholes.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I extremely agree with this comment. A “confident nerd” doesn’t act the same way as a “confident normie”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Something that has confused me about some of these gender nonconforming men is how they seem to want to date only women who are gender conforming. The same men who lament they are unable to find someone to love, will reject the idea of dating gender nonconforming women, even though those women are more similar to themselves in outlook.
I don’t get it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is probably very dependent on what you mean by “gender nonconforming”, and what the people you’re talking to hear when you say the same.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I suppose when I say a woman is gender nonconforming, I’m thinking of things like she doesn’t want to dress up in tight constricting clothes or painful high heels, or she doesn’t want to wear makeup and spend an hour doing her hair in the morning, or she doesn’t read fashion magazines and feel at home with the former-high-school-cheerleader crowd but maybe would rather hang with the gamers or the home-brewers or the trivia night crowd. But maybe the people hearing it are hearing something totally different. Or maybe they’re hearing something similar to what I mean and they just think that women should conform to the cheerleader type thing even though that thing sucks (in my opinion). Hard to tell.
LikeLike
@jdbreck — The way I see it, you either feel sexual chemistry or you do not. They desire what they desire. So it goes.
On the other hand, their lack of self-awareness is stunning.
LikeLiked by 1 person
When you talk about GNC men, I think “fat nerds”. When you talk about GNC women, I think “deliberately (or not) androgynous women who are not NB or genderfluid, and possibly also trans women”.
One of the great successes of feminism is that a woman can do a hell of a lot of things and still be “conforming” to her gender. This is, I think, less true of men; if anything, the set of things a man can do has shrunk.
I was orignally going to have a note at the top of this comment about how when I say “doing things”, I mean that in a career/hobby/what-you-choose-to-do-with-Saturday-night sense, not things like wearing or not wearing makeup, or how a person chooses to dress. The thing is, though, feminism has succeeded harder than that. It’s now difficult-to-impossible for a woman to fail to conform, in my view). That’s not true of men, though. The easiest way to be a GNC man is to modify your appearance out of the short hair + pants or shorts + buttondown/polo/t-shirt expected male look. Acceptable male hair is getting longer in semiformal circumstances, which is nice, but it’s still generally easier for a woman to deviate significantly from the “standard” template without acquiring the GNC label.
So, long story short(er): at least the way I read the terms, you can’t pair up GNC men with GNC women, because gender-conforming women are a much bigger group than gender-conforming men. This isn’t because women are generally more gender-conforming than men, but because the female gender role / style template has expanded pretty significantly over the past 50-ish years, while the male role/template has not kept up. This is the same problem as “women can be careerists but men can’t be househusbands”, expanded to cover cultural cues in addition to economics and family roles.
(I am talking about the dominant western culture presented in media in this comment. That culture is the topic of this post, and no other. I am aware of the fact that what I say is less true in other cultures; nevertheless I am not bringing them up because they are not the filter through which I read people.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
You make a good point there. I think it’s very true that men’s roles have remained very narrow and strictly defined while women have managed to push the boundaries of acceptable female roles to be a bit roomier than they used to be.
LikeLike
Wait, maybe I can actually get a shorter version:
Let’s say there are three ways you can handle your gender, socially: you can perform it, you can perform against it, or you can just not perform it. The way I view current social gender expectations, “gender nonconforming women” means something like “women who are performing against the female gender role”. Meanwhile, “gender nonconforming men” includes both the men who perform against the male gender role and those who simply don’t perform it. So when you try to match gender nonconforming men with gender nonconforming women, you wind up with this big forgotten group of gender nonperforming men stuck in the middle.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Ah, that’s interesting. I would personally count the women who aren’t performing gender in the group, so my perception is that the women’s group is larger than how you’ve defined it there. I’ve often felt that men [who are attracted to women] only really see women who are actively performing gender as women who count as potential romantic partners, and the rest of womankind is effectively invisible. This leads to men feeling there is more competition than I think there really is, as with a gender ratio close to 50-50 it seems there should be someone for everyone. But if the bulk of the men, including the gender nonconforming men, are competing only for a small subset of the women, then it introduces an artificial sense of scarcity.
LikeLiked by 2 people
IDK. I’m 27 and incel, though I don’t like the communities around it.
On jerks, I think a large part is just that the extroverted assholes are both more visible and more likely to have partners, than the introverted ones. I also that that growing up a lot of incels had internalized the idea that they had to be good people to be romanatically succesful. Also people often take a just world approach and say that the reason they are incel is because they are simply bad people. Hence all the finger pointing at people who literally abuse their partners.
I don’t think that the incels don’t desire casual sex. I think they do as much as most other men. I don’t think their lack of use of escorts justifies that conclusion. I mean, first of all, I don’t think that most men who aren’t satisfied with the amount of casual sex they get, hire sex workers to cover the gap, and that seems like the kind of thing you would need to conclude if you thought the lack of use of sex workers reflected the true desires of incels.
A lot of incels don’t feel they are they are in some sense broken because they can’t attract women. Having to pay a woman to sleep with them wouldn’t change that. Also like you say, shyness is a large part of why incels are but that shyness is driven by a fear of social repercussions, and hiring a sex worker is still highly stigmatized.
If one want to deradicalize the romanceless one first needs to understand why incels are. I may be generalizing too much from my own experiences, and those I know but I think it comes down to mental issues + the left wing/feminist dialogue around sex and dating being very ableist.
Your right incels are largely driven by shyness, though I would say fear is more accurate. Fear of doing what is wrong. Fear of getting hurt. Not by rejection, but by other people. The incels I know, myself included largely had a youth of social stigmatization and abuse. As such we fear, even if it is not rational, doing anything that could open us to further abuse.
The dialogue around sex and dating that comes from feminist/left wing spaces very much sends the message that people would be completely justified in hurting us if we fucked up a romantic interaction because our attraction to women is very liable to be creepy/evil/wrong. I thinking of things like scott aaronson’s comment 171, theunitofcaring’s response to that, as well as comments like this one http://raggedjackscarlet.tumblr.com/post/148333074928/thathopeyetlives-raggedjackscarlet-was. I can’t speak to whether the author is correct about dr.nerd love, but that is certainly the kind of belief that I internalized in my teens.
Looking in my past, so, so many times I held back from oppurtinies because I was very scared of doing something wrong. I’d be sitting in line at an anime con and talking with the girl next to me for ~40 minutes, and consider asking her if she wanted to grab some food afterwards. But then wouldn’t. Why? Because so many thoughts like “Shes just being polite”. Or “She just came to the anime con to have fun, not get hit on by guys”. I know some people are going to argue that it was a rationalization for a fear of rejection, but it wasn’t. Why? Because I am able to hit on and flirt with women now because I had the realization that having an uncomfortable social interaction was not the end of the world. That it was nonsense of me to worry about the well being of others to such an extreme. That I would never learn how to date with out making mistakes. With out sometimes doing something that other people might find uncomfortable. That it was wrong for other people to expect me to be perfect when I had no experience.
IME if you want to deradicalize the the romancless thats the kind of message that needs to be sent. That it is okay to make mistakes. That sometimes in sex and dating you will do things that make people uncomfortable. It doesn’t make you a bad person as long as you learn from it, and its not something you set out to do. But thats not the kind of message you get. The kind of message you get tends towards this https://captainawkward.com/2013/04/20/476-i-have-anxiety-that-women-will-have-anxiety-about-me-approaching-them/.
Even her second response isn’t very good. https://captainawkward.com/2013/04/22/477-again/ which pretty much boils down to, no you should absolutely still worry about starting conversations with women and if you have anxiety about it then you shouldn’t because your anxiety is probablly justified.
Starting a conversation with people is not something people should be worried about. Like, baring chasing a woman down a dark alleway at a 2am, if you have anxiety over starting a conversation with another person, your very likely miscalibrated. An art gallery? Fuck that noise. Talk to them. Then if they decline, go away.
And yeah, people will absolutely send out non verbal signals and such, but you can’t *learn* what those signals mean with out actually approaching. If you tell people who haven’t learned what the signals mean, that they should only approach when they are confidant, then they will never approach.
Anyways what LW asked was:
>It’s possible to be an anti-sexist, pro-feminist, actually nice person without **constantly** worrying about accidentally oppressing women, right?
And what he should have been told is “Yes”. You want to deradicalize the romancless? That is the message you send.
And I can understand why this is not the message feminists/left wing spaces want send. They don’t see it as in their interests to suggest that (some) men worry less about making women uncomfortable. Though I would argue it is.
As for me? Though I am still a virgin I am far more comfortable flirting and talking to women now than I ever was. Why? /r/theredpill. It was the one space I found that was truely positive towards male-gynocentric sexuality. It convinced me that I wasn’t a bad person for the desires I had. That there was nothing inherently wrong with wanting to talk to girls because I found them (both physically & mentally) attractive. That I needed to learn, and that part of learning is making mistakes. That it was unjust of others to expect me be perfect, or to refrain entirely in the absence of perfection.
Of course /r/trp comes with a whole lot of other toxic messages, but as long as trp and its like have a monopoly on positive spaces for male-gynocentric desire, that is the kind of communities men who struggle with romance are going to get move towards.
You want to prevent the romancless? Then we need left wing dialgoue on sex/dating where the focus isn’t on making men more virtuous people which only convinces the Scott A types, that their problem is that they are morally flawed people.
LikeLiked by 10 people
I should note that ozy, your writings are very much along the lines of what I think of in my last paragraph. I would like if there were more people like you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I feel somewhat obligated to comment on this.
I acknowledge suffering from the problem described here.
I acknowledge that in my case my extremely strict criteria worsen my chances of finding a mate. (Having biological children of my own is RIGHT OUT, and playing a parent figure for someone else’s children is something that I’m only willing to consider in an extreme case. Also, I’m somewhat gynophilic and I confess I do not find each and every body type attractive. Also, I’m not willing to spend the rest of my life with someone who does not generally desire my company.)
To me, the greatest issue is that the older I get, the less opportunities I seem to get to meet new people. And all my friends tend to be married and have children, and their social circles aren’t getting wider either. It was far easier when everyone was a student. Somehow I view my dating history more or less a game of musical chairs, where I lost before I turned 30, and when you’re out, you have no way back in.
I live in a culture where talking to strangers is generally frowned upon, and I thoroughly embrace this part of the culture. I think one should widen their social network by being a better friend to one’s existing friends. The concept of approaching a stranger in a public place and trying to get to know them feels totally alien, and I’m astonished that some people do seem to suggest this. If I’m minding my own business in a public place, I do not appreciate strangers striking up a conversation with me.
My hobbies aren’t very social, and I do not want to take up a hobby as an excuse to meet new people.
I am not completely unable to talk to strangers or even go to Tinder dates (although the latter did feel very unnatural and the conversation was never relaxed). But something I definitely do not know how to do is how to go from “strangers” to “not strangers”. I think this is about being able to instinctively trust a stranger (which I can’t do, since I do not have that instinct) and being able to pretend being a friend while still being a stranger. I think many people do this without thinking. For me this is next to impossible.
The most worn-out advice is “just be yourself”. But being myself is the problem.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I like to read the “be yourself” advice as “be your best self,” as in focused on your core values and free of insecurities.
One thing I really like about DBT is how it tries to find a middle path between accepting yourself with your limitations and pushing yourself to be who you want to be. I think both poles are consistent with “be yourself.”
LikeLiked by 3 people
If you aren’t yourself, no one would date you, they’d at most date the person you’re pretending to be. Then you have to work to maintain the facade and can’t be honest with your partner, which is terrible. Better to be single and celibate forever.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That entirely depends on which outcome people consider more terrible. It is non-obvious that this is ‘faking it’ for everyone.
LikeLike
If you’re not faking, aren’t you being yourself?
LikeLike
I think that you parsed my comment differently from how I meant it (I meant that faking might be the superior option, given the available options).
But I actually want to make a stronger claim: that pretty much everyone is faking it to some extent, so I fundamentally disagree with presenting this as a black/white option.
For example, have you ever done something for your partner that you preferred not to do, without complaining? If so, you faked.
I would argue that the trait that made humans so successful is that humans are quite good at adapting to the world, rather than require the world to be adapted to us. We are so good at it, that we cannot even accurately see the distinction between our true selves and the facade(s) that we have build up.
We also tend to have different facades. At work, you present yourself differently than to your partner and different again to other people.
I agree that it is better to have a partner that you can interact with using a thin facade, but it is silly to decide for another person who can’t find such a partner, that they cannot be happier with a fairly thick facade. You do not have the needs that other people have.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I intentionally self-monitor to avoid faking with a partner. It’s certainly possible that I slipped more than once, but I don’t endorse having done so and I’d be better off if I hadn’t. If I’m honest with my partner about my preferences, they can trust that they’re never unintentionally placing me in an uncomfortable position – if I didn’t want to do something, I’d say so, so if I don’t say anything, it’s fine. This both eliminates a source of second-guessing and insecurity and gives us more accurate information about how to make each other happy.
It’s bad that we have to present a facade at work, but not nearly as bad as in a relationship, because the primary purpose of work is to financially support yourself, not to get great interpersonal emotional fulfillment. While not having to use as much of a facade at work is a strong plus, it’s not worthless otherwise, unlike a relationship.
It’s not logically necessary that being single is better than faking, but given the obvious and massive amounts of suffering resulting from this kind of deception in romance, it’s clear that singlehood is better.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Make-up was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, and I kind of feel like it maps.
ie. If you end up with the type of guy who likes you in make-up, you’re stuck spending time applying make-up….
LikeLiked by 1 person
@blacktrance
A group of people seem to suffer very much from being alone. See incels. Their behavior suggests very strong dissatisfaction with being single.
LikeLike
There’s a sense in which incels suffer from being single, but putting it that way leaves out a lot of relevant details. A lot of them suffer from being bitter, but conceptualize it as suffering from being single. There’s also a lot of internalized social norms along the lines of “you’re a loser if you’re single”. Some of them even describe relationships as unpleasant, but think they should want them anyway. I’d say they’re suffering more from not being okay with being single than from being single in itself.
LikeLike
That seems uncharitable. If a person values a relationship highly, but also believes that they do not have the traits/skills to make a relationship work, then it make sense to both desire and fear relationships.
If a woman with vaginismus has a craving for PIV sex, but also fears it, is her craving false?
Now, I agree that being bitter can increase the suffering, but that doesn’t mean that bitterness is the only cause of unhappiness. You can use that reasoning to dismiss pretty much any complaint. For example, you can use the same reasoning to argue that rape victims suffer from being bitter, not from the rape itself. Or that a person who has lost a limb doesn’t suffer from having lost a limb, but from being bitter about it.
Ultimately that argument just boils down to extreme stoicism, where you claim that any suffering is due to a lack of acceptance of hardship, not due to hardship itself.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This brings to mind a certain pattern I’ve noticed. Over the years I’ve communicated with a number of “romanceless” men. One obvious point: they are not all the same. A second perhaps less obvious point: I’ve noticed a correlation between bitterness, sustained failure, and a certain rigidity of thought. In short, these men are desperately unhappy and deeply stubborn, clinging to their dysfunctional behaviors. It is a cycle of terrible.
Note I said “correlation” and not “simple causal story.”
But still, any correlation implies some underlying causal structure. Personally, I think these factors are interrelated, in the sense that they reinforce each other, compounding into a highly defective personality. Spend ten minutes browsing any incel forum and you’ll see the end of this trajectory.
#####
I think it’s a really, really bad idea to try and compare rape and loneliness. They are both painful, but many things are painful. For example, a person might feel great pain if their spouse leaves them. However, that does not make them a victim. Spouses are allowed to leave. Part of being a functional adult is dealing with this. Likewise, part of being an adult is accepting that people get to make their own decisions regarding sex and romance.
And yes, this might require stoicism. The universe is not here to please you.
Asking a rape victim to show a similar level of stoicism has a very different social implication. Whereas no one is owed sex or romance, we are owed bodily autonomy. In fact, that is the entire issue here.
#####
Regarding “being yourself,” the most useful sense is be you best achievable self. Rigidity will trap you, as will insecurity, as will vascilation, as will “people pleasing,” etc. Find the middle path.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s not about them lacking the traits/skills to make a relationship work, a lot of them describe relationships as typically being bad in general (not just for them), and desiring them anyway because they think they should. It’s not uncommon for people to want something predictably bad for them.
You have a point about the bitterness argument being too general, so here’s a proposed test. If you ask the guy who lost his arm why he wants it back, and he gives an answer involving him enjoying the normal use of an arm, he’s really suffering from its absence. If he has difficulty coming up with an answer, or says that he wouldn’t feel like a loser for lacking an arm or that he’d be able to show it off to others, it’s bitterness. Of course, the two kinds of answers aren’t mutually exclusive, but the proportion and emphasis given to each is indicative.
Based on what I’ve seen, the incel answer is mostly in the second category. They don’t talk nearly as much about how nice it would be to emotionally support and be supported by someone they love, to have someone they trust and confide in, or that they could share a life with as they do about how they wouldn’t feel like losers, have marked a checkbox in the to-do list of life progress, and be validated by someone’s attraction. And sometimes they just think they’ve been cheated of something they’re entitled to.
If they understood what’s good about good relationships, they’d also be better at them.
LikeLiked by 2 people
>I’d say they’re suffering more from not being okay with being single than from being single in itself.
Eh. I am totally OK with being single. The parts of my brain that let me function the way I want appear to disagree with me.
Although, I suppose that means it’s still true that I’m not suffering so much from being single, as from the fact that prolonged isolation kills executive function. If I could work 4-16h every day on whatever I want, even the days where the work turns out frustrating would be so much better than no work at all.
And the solutions to the isolation problem just feel horrible, and the fact that isolation is the problem isn’t as internally obvious as the lack of food being the cause of hunger.
I dunno; the idea of seeking someone out solely to use them as executive function enhancement feels evil. And I rather doubt that anyone who would make this a business arrangement wouldn’t be able to pull it off. (That includes therapists. I’ve met a whole one therapist who isn’t aggressively normal, and I don’t really feel like 1h of conversation each week is all that helpful even then.)
LikeLike
@Veronica
I wasn’t comparing rape to loneliness except on the abstract level of ‘bad things’, but I do think that loneliness is a lot worse than most people give it credit for.
Extreme solitary confinement can be seen as torture and it can cause severe psychological damage. Complaining that incels are psychologically damaged and offering the advice that they just should start to act normal, seems like a bad way to help people recover.
I’m not a psychiatrist, but AFAIK, ‘man up’ is not considered to be a good psychological intervention.
LikeLike
I haven’t told anyone to “man up,” although I think “harden up” is pretty good advice for a lot of people. However, I don’t claim it is universally good advice.
The thing about solitary confinement is there is a lock on the door. These men don’t have locks on their doors. For example, the “moe guy” that @nostalebraist mentioned is not locked inside. Instead, he finds merely being in the presence of a pretty woman intensely painful, so much that he cannot be around them.
In other words, he is hurt by women merely existing in a public space.
I could play “remote Internet therapist” with the guy, and indeed I have opinions (it is obvious, for example, that high school traumatized him). But all the same, women get to exist in public spaces. We have agency, our own hopes and dreams.
There is a bigger point here, though; namely, women are not characters in his story. We’re not here to play some supporting role in his life. Women are people.
Over the years I’ve listened to a number of “hard case” incel guys talk. In doing so, I’ve noticed a pattern, something that men might be less sensitive to, but that sticks out to me. The pattern is this: it feels as if they regard women as something like a character in their stories.
Which, yuck.
Men are still the default. Most movies still feature male protagonists. Men still occupy most leadership roles. In so many subtle ways, men still expect women to exist “for men.” Feminists have pushed back against this quite hard. We will continue to do so.
For the incel men, they probably aren’t going to listen to me. If any do want to listen to me, I think DBT (or something like it) would probably help. Mostly, however, I leave them alone.
LikeLiked by 1 person
IMO, an important piece of the picture to keep in mind here is a possible difference in (explicit or implicit) advice that men and women are given — as distinct from differences in either desire or success.
There’s a definite strand of male dating advice that really does boil down to “be a hypermasculine dick” (e.g. the darker PUA stuff, of course, but it’s much more widespread as a feature of the way many men tend to banter among themselves about women). And then there’s the kind of male dating advice that is probably both good and pretty gender-neutral, stuff like “be less shy, be confident, put yourself out there.” But it’s very easy — especially if you are receiving these two kinds of advice at the same time with no clear markers that they are different — to conflate the latter kind with the former, because “less shy, more confident” (etc.) reads as more masculine than feminine, and it makes sense to explain all of this with the simple hypothesis that “more masculine = better.” Hence “the kind of confidence that means you feel comfortable leaving your room sometimes” and “the kind of confidence exhibited by a hypermasculine asshole” appear to be two points on the same spectrum, with the latter merely further along than the former (and thus even more attractive).
I don’t know if there’s an analogous dynamic for women, but if there is, I imagine it’s a different dynamic, since you don’t have the same level of overlap between “leave your room sometimes” and “embody your gender role.”
If we assume that that incels (specifically the type who talk about it on the internet) are indeed interpreting all social signals as “more masculine = more attractive,” then I think this explains a lot of things, including some of the misogyny. Instead of viewing steps to become more sociable, etc. as steps toward getting a relationship while still being basically themselves (even perhaps their somewhat GNC selves), they see these as merely a bit of progress towards what all women actual want, which is this horrible guy they can’t stand. And this produces this despair about the prospects of satisfying relationships, both because they don’t want relationships where they have to pretend to be that guy all the time, and because they don’t want to be in relationships with people who like that guy — and, according to what they think they’e being told, all women like that guy. Hence they develop a resentment towards women.
This clicks nicely with the combination often seen in incel-heavy subcultures between positive attitudes towards cartoon/fantasy depictions of relationships and femininity, and negative attitudes towards real women. This is usually attributed to standard patriarchal stuff about pedestals, purity, and so on, and I don’t doubt a large part of it is due to that. But in the fictional depictions of women preferred by these groups, there are regularities that I don’t think can be explained just by the stereotypical male fantasy of pure-and-virginal-yet-super-sexy women.
Specifically, the depictions are distinguished by their friendly and non-threatening (verging on utopian and/or childlike) quality, and by their focus on either friendship or sentimentalized monogamy as opposed to the chaos and hookups of “the dating world.” I’m thinking, here, of MLP and the kind of anime that produce the most “waifus.” Someone I follow on tumblr once joked that the appeal of MLP was as a “being-friends-with-girls simulator,” and I think he’s probably right, with the word “friends” playing a surprisingly significant role: for this audience, it’s a simulator for “normal, human” interactions with girls which are not tainted by a constant awareness that one ought to be as masculine as possible, or by the sense that the girls are all evaluating you on this alien(ating) principle of “the more masculine the better, even to extremes.” The sense that all real women are like that causes these men to develop arbitrarily harsh levels of misogyny in the real-life sphere (“3D” in otaku parlance) while simultaneously maintaining a fantasy sphere centered around women doing mundane personal activities that have nothing to do with sex (something the traditional macho misogynist would have no patience for).
To riff on this category of media a little more, this fits with a trend in anime in the last ~10 years where the “harem” genre, about a generic male protagonist being simultaneously wooed by a number of more distinctive women, have given way to “moe” and “iyashikei” anime which are entirely about groups of female friends, with no male protag in sight. Also relevant in the otaku world is the “nakige” or “crying game” genre of sentimental computer games, which evolved naturally from pornographic, sleep-with-all-the-girls games in response to otaku consumer preferences. Nakige are supposed to make you cry, so they tend to be about tragedy befalling a heterosexual relationship (the latter always present due to the porn game origins), but the tragedy is rarely infidelity, usually something external and impersonal like illness or plot-magic. Romantic competition tends to be conspicuously absent, on both sides.
I’m going on about this longer than I expected to, but I think there’s something here. On the internet these days, we’re very used to the idea that male misogyny goes together with fandom for MLP and cutesy-girl anime, so that treating this connection as counter-intuitive seems naive and/or contrarian. But a priori, if you imagine you didn’t already know about it, it really does seem bizarre that misogynists would enjoy these shows, of all things. (On the otaku side of things, this series is an interesting, and IME representative, primary source.)
To get back to the main point, I think there is a subcategory of straight men who get convinced that “romance” in the intimate, connecting-with-another-soul sense is actually impossible, because actual heterosexual relations just consist of people performing extreme gender roles at one another, with all the resulting from-Mars/from-Venus failures to connect. They feel unable to open up about this because this kind of mushy talk would just mark them further as terminally unmasculine. If they encounter the Nice Guy discourse, it just looks like more evidence of this. Depending on who they are, there might be simple changes they could make that would put them in a good position in the dating world, but these changes look suspiciously like “be more masculine” and just induce further despair.
The obvious solution is to present positive dating advice for men while making it clear that the advice is not about optimizing masculinity at all costs, even if it might look like it. But that won’t be easy, since it’s not the kind of thing that sounds good when you say it outright. IDK what the best approach would be.
LikeLiked by 14 people
Hey @nostalgebraist, are there links anywhere to the rest of that Moe series? He mentions there are more chapters, but provides no links.
LikeLike
Actually, it turned out pretty easy to Google. for others, here:
http://animediet.net/commentary/moe/moetics-my-otaku-life-part-1
http://animediet.net/commentary/moe/moetics-my-otaku-life-part-2
http://animediet.net/commentary/moe/moetics-my-otaku-life-part-3-fin
And dammit will someone please invent cyborg bodies soon so I can be a moe girl!!!
LikeLike
Interesting, “normie relationships are just mutual gender role performance plus sex” is something I used to find correct, though I no longer think it is true in most cases.
What you describe about male dating device is also why I found it very unpleasant back when I still identified as male (I mean, I still find it unpleasant, it just is no longer directed at me).
LikeLike
So I read the moe thing. Wow. I’m agog. It is actually horrifying.
Obviously he was the victim of serious trauma. I wonder how much work would be required to overcome the trauma? Is it in his capacity?
His views on women are beyond objectifying. Honestly, he seems unaware that women are people. We have inner lives, the capacity to exist for ourselves, but he does not see this. His sexism is extreme.
Can we blame his sexist views on the bullying, on the loneliness?
It is complicated. I suspect that if he had not been bullied, he might have grown into an emotionally well-adjusted man. On the other hand — well obvious things are obvious.
I don’t mind if he retreats into 2d. It doesn’t hurt me.
LikeLiked by 2 people
To be fair, I’m not sure if the author aware that other men are people, or anyone other than himself. The bullies and jocks and other Chads in his narrative seem separated from him as well.
That kind of alienation is very sad, and I wish there was more we can do about it.
I also don’t get it. I was a lonely alienated boy in high school, and I was angry about it sometimes, but I never thought other people were fake or unreal – I just thought I was getting it all wrong somehow, that I was the one who wasn’t real.
LikeLike
I too was bullied in high school, and all of his anecdotes were familiar to me. On the other hand, there is no scale to measure the degree of bullying. Perhaps he was bullied more than me. Perhaps his environment was markedly less validating. I don’t know.
On the third hand, he is responsible for his thoughts. For example, he is not “more evolved” than I am. I can understand how such thoughts form, as a defense mechanism. However, they are false and self-limiting.
LikeLike
I was going to object to this claim, until I realized that I’ve actually never discussed women-as-a-subject-of-attraction with an exclusively male group.
LikeLike
I feel called out
LikeLike
” Someone I follow on tumblr once joked that the appeal of MLP was as a “being-friends-with-girls simulator,” and I think he’s probably right, with the word “friends” playing a surprisingly significant role: for this audience, it’s a simulator for “normal, human” interactions with girls which are not tainted by a constant awareness that one ought to be as masculine as possible, or by the sense that the girls are all evaluating you on this alien(ating) principle of “the more masculine the better, even to extremes.” ”
This mirrors my totally different experience very strongly.
Basically, I was your stereotypical awkard introverted nerd, and when I went to a new university, I joined the LGBTQI group (since I’m bi), and it was great for me in the same way: it gave me an opportunity to nurture friendships and interact in an environment both free of the pressures of masculine gender roles and where I could interact with women in a zero-pressure environment because there was zero chance they were interested in me for reasons that had *nothing* to do with my value as a person.
My ability to socialize both in general and with the opposite sex grew more in the first year with that group than in my entire prior life. 10/10 would recommend.
LikeLike
I suspect it wouldn’t work as well for straight guys.
LikeLike
I’ve said this elsewhere before, but I think it’s really a shame that virtually all discussions of gender differences in desire for casual sex leave “sex” woefully underspecified. This elides crucial distinctions and hides what I think are important causal mechanisms and opportunities for improving the situation. (This link from the post goes a bit in that direction, but I think this needs more attention and emphasis.)
Definitions vary, but the prototype of sex is PIV. PIV is the only thing that virtually everyone agrees is sex, and if you say that a cis man & a cis woman had sex, people will very often assume there was penetration involved.
On average, PIV is a lot more enjoyable for men than for women. Most women do not orgasm from vaginal penetration; for some women it’s difficult and/or unpleasant, plus there are pregnancy risks (which may cause women to prefer PIV with people they know well rather than random strangers).
So if by “sex” you just mean PIV, I completely agree with “men really want sex, women largely don’t (especially casual sex), this huge imbalance makes men sexually frustrated and women who actually like casual sex really lucky”.
Of course people don’t literally just do PIV. According to Ozy’s link, 2/3 of sexually active heterosexual college students included oral sex in their most recent sexual encounter. But men were more likely than women to receive oral sex, still (63% vs. 44%, or 59% vs. 52%, depending on whether you look at “received” statistics or “gave” statistics (I have no idea why those would be so different)). Either way, women in that study only about a 1/2 chance of getting oral – which of course is not the only thing likely to lead to orgasm, but still.
But I think the important thing here is the expectation. People are not very good at talking about sex and negotiating what they want, so the preexisting cultural expectation of what “casual sex” is likely to include is pretty important for people deciding whether to engage in it. And people don’t really want to end up in a situation where the person they’re hooking up with is disappointed that they’re not gonna get what they thought they’d get, especially if it’s a random person they have no particular reason to trust very much.
So I think a course of action that can decrease the imbalance in desire for casual sex – to nearly everyone’s benefit, I think – is to diversify cultural conceptions of what counts as sex and what things might happen in a sexual encounter; to denormalize the expectation that heterosexual sexual encounters will center around PIV; to normalize talking explicitly about sex and specific sexual desires and negotiating specific interactions.
LikeLiked by 4 people
By “included oral sex”, do you mean they had oral sex, possibly in addition to other things, or do you mean that they only had oral sex?
I think you mean the former, but it’s a bit hard to tell.
LikeLike
Yeah, the article I was summarizing doesn’t make that clear either, and neither does the abstract of the study that the article was summarizing, and I don’t have access to the full paper.
LikeLike
But my impression is probably the first.
LikeLike
@tcheasdfjkl
Yeah, but this just goes back to the issue of guess culture vs tell culture.
LikeLike
That’s part of it – more ask/tell culture would indeed move sexual norms to be more female-friendly. But that’s because the cultural default is male-normative. (Not “male-friendly”, since clearly this state of affairs has poor results for men as well.) So there’s two parts to this problem – overreliance on cultural defaults, and what the cultural default is.
(Yeah, likely partly biological and not just cultural, but we need not be slaves to our biology)
LikeLiked by 1 person
To clarify what I mean: Say the cultural default for casual sex was that both people would give each other oral. It would still be bad if people had trouble departing from the default – lots of people don’t actually like oral, and lots of people like other things – but in that world I think the gender gap in interest in casual sex would be much smaller and possibly nonexistent.
LikeLike
I have to object to that framing. I don’t see how guess culture is male normative or more beneficial to men. If anything it benefits the more tentative party, as ask/tell culture requires choosing early based on little information, while guess culture consists of a lengthy exam with minimal commitment to keep going.
Guess culture allows the woman to determine if the guy has mastered subtle dating norms, which suggests that he has more social skills, which may be negatively correlated with predatory behavior, It suggests that he has more sexual experience and women tend to be more passive in bed, so his performance is on average a bit more important to her experience being pleasurable than vice versa.
LikeLike
I don’t mean that guess culture is male-normative, I mean that “sex = PIV” is male-normative (and therefore moving away from the default via ask culture is more female-friendly).
But also I disagree with you anyway. I don’t see how ask culture requires making a decision quickly based on no info. Really good ask/tell culture is verbose, and if your decision depends on your comfort level you can just say that and be like “let’s hang out a bit first and see if we get along”.
And guess culture is a huge part of rape culture.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Certainly I am vastly more likely to be willing to have sex with someone if there is explicit communication.
LikeLike
Re: subtle dating norms: yeah to some extent that matters, but also I haven’t mastered subtle dating norms so I like there to be some leeway there
Re: “It suggests that he has more sexual experience and women tend to be more passive in bed, so his performance is on average a bit more important to her experience being pleasurable than vice versa.”
I agree with the last part, but due to the aforementioned cultural standards for sex, a guy having a lot of sexual experience is not necessarily that encouraging. I think open-mindedness, considerateness, and willingness to discuss options are better signals (for me, anyway).
LikeLike
@tcheasdfjkl
Yeah, I agree with that.
However, I have strong doubts whether verbosity will allow a majority of people to gather as much information. The visitors to this blog are surely huge outliers in their ability to reason and their level of introspection. Most people seem to learn by doing, where they fail and adapt, rather than build a complex model.
It seems to me that ask/tell requires one to have a fairly advanced model that one can reason about, to know what to ask and how the answers have to be interpreted. This is especially true since there is a game theory component where both participants have an incentive to ‘oversell’ their own qualities and to figure out where the other person is overselling.
Guess culture can work with a far more fuzzy ‘this feels (not) good,’ which may work better for a substantial segment of society. There is a reason why most people stick to guess culture.
Sigh. Statements like these toss out all the grey and the possibility that guess culture actually works better for some people to reduce the risk of a bad experience and instead turn it into a simplistic good vs evil narrative.
LikeLike
I think we might be using these terms differently?
I guess I use a mix of ask and guess, but even at my askiest I don’t stop evaluating vague fuzzy impressions and paying attention to feelings I don’t understand. The more asky I’m being, the more likely I am to say something like “I don’t really understand my feelings right now”.
This might make me a Fake Ask Culture Girl, but I think it’s also important to know what one may ask – or at least what questions may be unexpected impositions, so you can adequately hedge them to make it clear you know you’re imposing.
No you’re tossing out all the grey! 😛 “Guess culture works better for some people” and “guess culture is a crucial component in rape culture” are not actually mutually exclusive; mentioning rape doesn’t mean no other things can be taken into consideration.
LikeLike
I am not disputing that this works for you. I am arguing that my perception is that a lot of people are not going to be self-reflective enough to think, let alone say: ‘I don’t really understand my feelings right now.’
A lot of the things that are attributed to guess culture (like rape culture) is actually people doing guess culture badly. I think that it is wishful thinking to believe that people are going to do ask/tell culture immaculately.
It seems very plausible to me that verbally dominant people will steamroll over verbally weaker people. Just look at the feminist narrative about men talking over women, not taking them seriously, etc. If you make ask/tell culture the default, these things will just be called part of rape culture.
LikeLike
Ah, I see what you’re saying, thanks. I was going to object that rape culture is less “doing guess culture badly” than “guess culture is exploitable in ways that hurt people”, but I think you are pointing out that ask/tell culture is also exploitable. I think you’re probably right about that, though I still think guess culture is probably more exploitable (but I haven’t thought about this enough to be very confident in this).
LikeLike
Thanks for posting this, Ozy. You have some good insights, and it always makes me happy when someone writes about the issue of lonely, shy people without dating/romantic experience in a compassionate way.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I wonder how much of this phenomenon (dudes who can’t get laid but wanna) is correlated with being obese? I’ve never met a guy who was skinny and thirsty.
Just a weird anecdotal bias, or have other people seen this pattern?
LikeLike
I have personally not noticed any obvious correlation between weight and inceldom.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was skinny and thirsty. Possibly too skinny. But yeah, I’m sure obesity doesn’t help in our culture.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In college I was incel and rejected 3 or so times for being too skinny. Or so I was told. I think my crap social skills and depression played a larger part, but there are definitely lots of people who aren’t attracted to skinny guys. They like *muscles* and strength and such.
LikeLike
I try not to comment here out of politeness in not wanting to rag on the host and because the other commenters usually have my positions covered, but there is one point here that strikes me as particularly undermining to this essay’s case that hasn’t been mentioned.
“For every man who can’t find a partner, there is approximately one woman who also can’t find a partner. (This is pretty obvious in the Promises I Can Keep case, which is balanced by a large number of incel or situationally homosexual men from those neighborhoods, who are in prison.) However, it is very unlikely that you will be able to have a happy relationship with her, or otherwise you already would. Sorry.”
“My friends probably don’t want to help raise two or three children that are not genetically related to them, and they certainly don’t want to raise children with someone who thinks not spanking is neglectful. They probably don’t want to devote a significant fraction of their income to helping their wife’s poor relatives fix their cars and pay the rent.”
Here, Ozy is really equivocating between two completely different concepts to try to force the notion of balance. Rounding both the positions of incels and these women to “Can’t find a partner” is such egregious conceptual gerrymandering that it strains belief.
One side’s “Can’t find a partner” involves having someone to talk to and have sex with occasionally. The other side’s involves having someone make a long term commitment, devote large amounts of monetary resources to raising these other men’s children and the partner’s relatives, take on significant amounts of risk in the case of marriage or commonlaw relationships that courts could later require them to continue paying large amounts of resources at the woman’s whim, not to mention taking on the risks of dealing with the other baby-daddies when they get out of prison. The personality traits Ozy lists as problems, like disagreeing on the validity of spanking, doesn’t read enough blogs, or believing in religion or homeopathy, are such “Let them eat cake” examples that I’d be blown away if these were actually incel dealbreakers.
Labeling these two things “Can’t find a partner” and pretending that they’re on equal footing is a demonstration of the author having such a lack of awareness of the privilege of their own situation, that this backfires and emphasizes the original point of Radicalizing the Romanceless rather than detracting from it. This is on par with walking into a local homeless shelter and saying “Hello, fellow Poors! I know you’re upset about not having enough money to live, but I also have insufficient money, and you don’t see me carrying on like this. For instance, sometimes when I come home from vacations to Maui, my hot tub is cold because It’s too expensive to heat it while I’m away! See, I understand where you’re coming from. If you could be less troublesome, I’d appreciate it.”
The advice comes from a very strange, incredibly entitled hetronormative place (Which is the opposite of what I’d expect from this blog), where the solutions seem to revolve around “They should just give lots of money to women! Don’t they know that there are a lot of women that can’t find partners to give them lots of money?”. Gender norms die hard when they’re in your favor.
LikeLike
I’m a woman married to a man. I come from a (slightly) higher income bracket than him, and I was recently in a situation where we had to contribute some money to help his extended family. I had some feelings about it, it would be a dealbreaker for some people, but I kind of resent the idea that expensive extended family (or kids or annoying-to-dangerous exes) falls into the category of “men giving money to women”.
They are traits that that particular population of women has but I don’t consider them female traits (and their male counterparts are considered similarly unattractive as dating partners, that was kind of the point).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Poor women from working class neighborhoods are, obviously, not holding out for men making 100k/year. (They are holding out for “has a job” and “is not felon.”) However, if you make $100k/year, and your spouse’s relatives are all on food stamps, it is a perfectly predictable consequence of this situation that you’re going to be the first person your spouse’s relatives call when the electricity gets turned off, and your wife is going to want to help them. It is a perfectly reasonable objection (which I said in the post!) to not want to date someone if this might happen.
I really think it’s a bad idea to raise children with someone if you disagree with them about basic aspects of child-rearing!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Very true. It also has absolutely nothing to do with these women being involuntarily celibate, of which I can think of few data points against that are stronger than “having several children with different men”. (How many incels out there have kids with multiple women, do you think?)
This is very much Not Even Wrong.
LikeLike
They are very obviously involuntarily aromantic, though, and part of Ozy’s point in the OP was that a lot of “incels” are more relevantly involuntarily aromantics.
LikeLike
Lots of thoughts about this, as I went through this for longer than most guys (though never was part of an incel subculture, unless you count Christianity…) In no particular order:
1. As a general rule, it gets better over time for men. Women are often warned that it gets worse — that they need to find a husband while they’re still young or be prepared to die single — but maybe we should also reassure young single men that it gets better? Women in general are more open to dating men older than them than younger than them. If you avoid a downward spiral of bitterness, even without learning a whole lot of social skills if you otherwise become more mature and get your life together, younger women may look up to you and find you desirable. This is hard to believe when you’re young and rejection is all you’ve known and it seems like the main complaint that women have is how irritating it is to have to push guys away all the time, but as you get older eventually the remaining single women will be more desperate than you are, as they find themselves increasingly in competition with younger women.
This I think is the main answer to the “Where are the incel women?” puzzle. They are older, often divorced or widowed, and they don’t find it easy at all to find love. De-stigmatizing the “cougar” might help here, but generally they don’t see younger men as serious relationship partners. They don’t want a long term relationship with someone they find immature, that makes them feel as much like a mom as a girlfriend.
2. All the “maybe women would want more casual sex if…” speculation is just that, and probably wishful thinking as well. What we know is that women are much less interested in casual sex; the difference is about as large as any behavior difference between the genders that has been measured, and to the extent that they are interested they are far pickier about who with: http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/3/15/wanna-go-to-bed-with-me-aka-get-away-from-me-creep-vs-where.html (see studies mentioned in comment as well). Yes, both women and men vary in their desire for casual sex, but in aggregate the casual sex women want from men is substantially less than the amount of casual sex men want from women. While getting rid of slut shaming should help, there’s no reason to believe this is solely a product of culture, and in fact there is evidence that this mismatch shapes our culture. http://discovermagazine.com/2012/oct/21-sex-ratio-women-men-affects-attitudes-facial-hair-politics covers a lot of the ways the culture changes both locally and also over time depending on which gender has the upper hand in the heterosexual dating market, and while some of the claims in that article strike me as a bit speculative, the fact that unbalance M/F ratios affect the culture around dating and sex in asymmetric ways, with women having more casual sex when it’s hard to find a boyfriend even as their opinion of men is lower.
This is part of why MIT guys have difficulty — currently it is 60% male and I believe that was higher in 2001 when the study was done. Women have less casual sex and are more likely to be in a long-term relationship in this sort of environment (which makes the gender skew of the single population even higher). If your social circle tends to be people who share your interests and your interests are typical male nerd interests the gender balance of your social circle is likely to be skewed. And I don’t want to overgeneralize from my experience at a similar school, but as hard as it can be to find a girlfriend in that environment, there is also at least some fraction of those MIT virgins who did have a girlfriend or two while they were in college. You would be surprised how long many women will delay sex not because they can’t find a boyfriend they like but just because they never feel ready for it and no one tells them that’s a dealbreaker. When I finally mentioned I had been a virgin to the woman I had lost it to, she could not fathom why I didn’t just dump my college girlfriends if they wouldn’t sleep with me. Because a few months of serious, committed, long-term celibacy is actually a nice break from the casual, no-strings-attached celibacy I had for most of my college years? Incidentally, this is another big piece of the incel women puzzle — for single MIT men, the corresponding single women are disproportionately at other schools, have different interests, and aren’t necessarily celibate, just frustrated that they can’t find a boyfriend and that the single guys they meet don’t seem to want a relationship, just sex.
On the oral sex/orgasm mismatch issue, the anecdotal evidence I have seen points more to this being a result of women accommodating the disparate levels of interest in casual sex rather than a cause of this difference. For example one incel-except-this-one-experience guy I knew was bewildered that the date who gave him a hand job wouldn’t let him return the favor. But I can understand why some women would feel more vulnerable exposing themselves than they do giving a blow job while keeping their own clothes on. See Peggy Orenstein for more anecdata, though this is quite open to interpretation. In any case even if I’m wrong about this this information is of little help to incels. In general women who aren’t interested in casually making out with you aren’t going to let you anywhere near their vagina either. If any woman had told me they wanted oral sex provided I expected nothing in return, I’d have gladly taken them up on it just to have some hands-on experience with a vagina, and I suspect many incels are in the same boat.
I don’t expect you to be 100% convinced that this mismatch is entirely natural, but I hope you are at least open to the possibility that this isn’t just culture, that changing culture wouldn’t fix this without being oppressive in new ways, by either pressuring women into more casual sex than they want or with different people than they want or by pressuring men who are able to find casual sex they want into turning it down. I don’t have a solution for this. I think incel guys need to accept that casual sex is largely (not entirely) a myth used to sell guys movies. The good news is that there is less divergence in what men and women want when it comes to relationships.
3. I was only a little bit joking about Christianity being an incel culture — if you find the right sex-negative church/youth group it can be. And these spaces have their problems, but they generally aren’t nearly as bad as r/incels. I was religious for part of my incel phase, and that was part of why I wanted to be in that community. It’s not that I was against sex; I was prepared to ignore everything I heard preached if the opportunity came up, but as long as I wasn’t getting any anyway, it was nice to have a place to go where, far from being shameful, there was a sense that being a virgin was something noble that someone in my situation might reasonably choose. It was a breath of fresh air, an escape from a world where everyone talked about sex like it was the one thing most worth doing. And I don’t see how sex positivity can offer this. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s the right way to go in spite of this, but we should be able to talk about the downsides of sex positivity and I think there is one here. For non-asexual incels, there’s no pretending to be voluntarily celibate, because why? Even in a world where everyone agreed not to shame virgin men, I would have been quite reluctant to share that I was one, because what would others conclude from that? Would they be impressed with my self-control? Why would I apply it to that? No, they would get the impression that I didn’t want sex (which is not an impression I wanted to spread!) or they would conclude that no woman would have me (and may be reluctant to question the unanimous judgement of the rest of womankind.) It would still feel shameful; it would still feel like failure because it was. And, yeah, a certain amount of self-delusion was involved in using religion to cope, but as Christianity has both waned in influence (among the young) and become more sex-positive, I have to pity (a little bit, not a lot) the r/incels participant who can’t come up with any upside to their situation other than the self-delusion that women are all just awful and at least they don’t have to deal with them.
LikeLiked by 5 people
The studies in that first link are astonishing.
If an attractive woman introduced herself to me and proposed that we have casual sex, I’d assume the most likely outcome is that I’d go some place and get robbed, and that the chances that I’d end up happy and disease free are about equal to the chance that I’d wake up without a kidney.
Are there enough men out there getting propositioned on first meeting that it’s a reasonable gamble, or are men really that hopeful.
LikeLike
In general how risk tolerant are you? Furthermore, what is your prior that a random women (who is otherwise seeking casual sex) would be interested in you? If these things are low, then you’ll likely refuse. If they are higher, then you’ll accept. Now, how do you think you might differ from the “typical” man?
LikeLike
There’s also a question of context – a rando in a club or at a party is not a rando on the street.
LikeLike
On the “why not just hire a sex worker” “do they even want casual sex” question… There’s a certain pattern of thought here that deserves to have a name like “isolated demand for rigor”, though obviously rigor is the wrong word. The pattern is, let’s treat some feature of group X that is not at all unique to group X as uniquely puzzling or requiring a unique explanation or having special explanatory value in the context of group X when there is no reason to do so. So incels don’t hire sex workers. There are far more guys who aren’t incels but would like to have more casual sex than they are having yet don’t hire sex workers. Is the latter behavior puzzling? Is a special explanation really necessary for the former? How about starting from the assumption that they want something somewhat conventional, such as they’d like to be able to meet someone at a party and hook up with them, as their more attractive/socially adept peers apparently do from time to time/as movies commonly depict? Is there something puzzling here, because I’m not seeing it?
LikeLiked by 2 people
To be blunt, the other guys don’t act like it’s a crime against humanity or the end of the world when that doesn’t happen for them. The idea is, if having casual sex is such an important thing that you’re wasting hours typing up multi-thousands word treatises about the end of society because you can’t get laid, spend the time and/or money to either improve yourself or buy yourself some casual sex.
To make a non-dating comparison, it’s the difference between somebody who half heatedly mentions, “yeah homeless sucks, something should change” when homelessness is brought up, but does nothing, as opposed to the person who talks all the time about how terrible it is that we have homelessness, but has never volunteered or even been to any kind of homeless shelter or charity that helps homeless folks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This exchange is good, and you’re both right.
I think Jesse has a major point there that if a group is willing to passionately advocate for change, especially if that change entails other people doing the changing to accommodate the advocate’s needs, then it’s absolutely reasonable to hold them to a higher standard. (Strangely, every group I say this to agrees in general, but thinks that their particular group should be the exception).
That said, Eric is also right in that visiting escorts doesn’t fulfill the need for reasons that get washed out when outsiders to the relevant culture don’t understand the nuance of what they’re asking for, so they round the need off to ‘casual sex’ and call it a day. You hit the nail on the head with the segment “spend the time and/or money to either improve yourself…”, which is what a lot of incels end up doing when they turn to PUA shenanigans. This also helps cause the current situation though, because the ones who can figure out a way to rise above their problems end up leaving to these other groups that I’d imagine this crew considers ‘highly problematic’ at best, distilling the remaining incel population down to the ones so wracked with learned helplessness and PTSD from their experiences that they think there’s no hope.
This post in and of itself serves to help the situation a little, but probably not for reasons satisfying to this audience. I say this because these kinds of posts make pua teachers’ recruiting jobs entirely too easy by giving them something to point to and say (And I mean this as a genuine compliment) “Look at this. Ozy is about as reasonable as feminists get. This is the ceiling of reasonability that you can expect. If even *they* aren’t interested in giving you a fair shake, what hope do you have of getting decent treatment from the rest of them? Come join team Dark Triad, we have (hot girls making us) cookies.”. This at very least helps to pull the marginal incels back into the groove of trying to make life better, and gets them one step closer to better advice than ‘go solicit yet another woman who hates your guts but wants your money’.
LikeLike
Right. The sex working thing completely misses the point. Yes, incels often say things such as, “Imagine how hard it is to go ten years and without any intimate touches, not even a hug.” However, if you listen further, it is clear they are saying this to emphasize their difficulty, to perhaps trigger some empathy. It is not the entirety of their problem. If you listen further, it is clear that many wish for normalcy, to feel loved the way most people feel loved. A sex working cannot give them that.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s exactly what I said in the first place, Veronica.
LikeLike
@Jesse
This depends on how broadly you define “incels.” Ozy was using a fairly broad definition, as was I, and given that I don’t think it’s correct to say that your typical incel is writing treatises about the societal problems preventing them from getting laid. (I’m also skeptical about the claim that non-incels don’t. Mick Jagger wrote “Satisfaction” when he could have just hired a sex worker and shut up about it. Anecdotally it seems to me that in casual conversation non-incel men talk more about wanting sex than incels do, and in fact an inability to talk about what they want is a big part of the problem for many incels.) But you probably have a narrower definition in mind, and for that I would just caution you not to draw the line between “unlucky guy I can feel some sympathy for” and “problematic guy who should just take care of their own shit” at “talks openly about their problem.” Because if you can only feel sympathy with those who don’t talk about their situation and how it sucks, you can’t actually sympathize.
@Verionica/Ozy
I agree that this is what most want, but this isn’t necessarily the same as not wanting casual sex. Consider the casual sex scenario I mentioned as more typical — if you could meet someone at a bar or similar situation and hook up with them after getting to know them a little, that could be very validating of your desirability/loveability in a way that hiring a sex worker wouldn’t be. It’s probably better in most cases to seek a girlfriend, not to mention more realistic, but incel guys I’ve talked to have said they’d happily take either.
And I don’t think this is something that only incel guys are seeking in sex either; lots of guys want this buy any want seems less acute to those who can satisfy it. Women are less likely to seek this in casual sex because they are less likely to find it validating in that way, though they seek this sort of validation in other ways.
LikeLiked by 2 people
For me, anyway, a gauge-maxing extrovert and pretty good flirt, the main reason I tend to have a girlfriend for maybe 4-6 months every couple of years and be celibate in-between, seems to be that my “mind” (like everyone’s) doesn’t have a single set of preferences, isn’t a single economic actor. The module that wants sex with a diversity of attractive young women is in charge of the flirting, much of the dates and such, but the module that wants a stable, compatible life partner is in charge a lot of the time, too. And the more they’ve lived together, the more they both appreciate that they’re not two value sets in the same system, which can thereby be averaged. No, they’re much more like two political parties, which gain control of Congress at different times.
Somebody may come along who wows and is wowed by both parties. If she doesn’t… well, Socrates and the pig, examined life, yadda yadda…
LikeLike
So, pretty late to the party here — apologies if what I have to say here is duplicative of other comments; there’s nearly 200 of them by now so I’m not really about to go back and read them all.
(What I have to say here definitely *will* be duplicative of things I’ve said before. But since the topic has come up once more, well, may as well say them again.)
I think the grouping here into one big “incels” bin, rather than smaller bins with rather distinct problems that look kind of similar if you squint, is a mistake.
Let’s take the bin I’m most familiar with, the one that Scott Alexander, Hugh Ristik, Scott Aaronson, etc., have written about. I think this post misrepresents their problem a bit. (Note that the problem is kind of… horribly multifaceted and I am deliberately focusing on only one or two aspects of it. What I write here should not be taken as a remotely complete description.)
The problem isn’t one of no sex/romance. It’s a problem of a particular trap, which includes, among other things, being unfairly locked out of sex/romance. (That’s not a fully accurate description — a big part of it is a sort of doublethink, of recognizing the unfairness while also being convinced it’s completely fair — but I’m going to skip that aspect for now.) This isn’t the same thing, no matter how often people might confuse them.
Like, speaking for myself — I finally made it out of the trap… about 2 years ago, say? Hard to pinpoint an exact date, but that sounds about right. And since then, have I had any sexual/romantic success? Uhh well actually yes but we will pretend I am writing this as of several months ago when the answer was still “no”; I think a few months less does not change what I am saying substantially. Whereas, before having escaped, I occasionally did! (The relation here is not causal, I’m pretty sure. One of these periods of time is much longer than the other. Also other extenral conditions. But this is getting off the point.)
So if that’s the comparison you were to look at, you’d conclude that, sexually/romantically, I was better in a better state before. And that’s exactly backwards because it’s the wrong comparison to be making. Because before I was in a constant state of fear about such things. (Your reference to “shyness” above, applied to this group, is quite the euphemism. “Shyness”? We’re talking about terror!) Things happened, yes, but I can only attribute them to luck. Whereas now, I actually, like, start a conversation with a woman I don’t know and ask her on a date. The answer’s always “no”, sure — but I can ask without being terrified, and that means a lot. If I’m failing, I’m failing on my own merits; that’s important! It’s very different from being unfairly locked out.
(More visibly to all of you here, before I couldn’t resist getting into arguments about this here and over on SSC and in such places. 😛 Whereas now this is the first time I’ve bothered to say anything about this in quite some time, because… this just isn’t my problem anymore; I mostly just haven’t cared enough to say anything more about it.)
To put it a different way: This “shyness” is not a component of the problem; it is the problem. Does curing this necessarily lead to sexual/romantic success? No. But that wasn’t the problem we were complaining about in the first place; this “shyness” (i.e., terror and related phenomenona) was.
Rather than go into more detail — I mean, holy crap, I’m pretty sure I’ve gone into ridiculous level of detail on the many aspects of the problem elsewhere, often on this very blog — I’ll just conclude and say, I think this is a good place to practice the virtue of narrowness. If you go back and read Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, etc., there’s a meta-problem they keep complaining about, and that’s that people keep rounding off their problem to a different, more familiar one. I think you’re making that mistake here. I think this is a bad generalization. It’s time instead to get out the tweezers and start dissecting.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think we can discuss this without getting far into the weeds regarding the intersubjective nature of “fairness.” Which is to say, humans seem to have an innate notion of fair play. However, we also have widely varying notions regarding specifics.
To this I call a yellow card for strategic passive voice. “Unfairly locked out” by what or whom? What is the mechanism here?
If you try to build a model of how women ought to distribute their affection and intimacy, well, you may find that women object. If instead you request clearly defined rules of social interaction, you’ll be making an unrealistic assumption of society-wide good faith. After all, people are not hive-mind. We’ll never agree on a common standard. Nor will everyone “play by the spirit of the rules.” In other words, adversarial courtship feels kinda baked in. You can try to build a subculture that works according to better principles, but you won’t be the first to try. Both the BDSM and poly communities have tried to build non-adversarial structures. They almost kinda work. A little bit. Somewhat.
You’ll need to attract a sufficient number of women to your subculture. Do you think STEM-nerd-etc. culture does a good job attracting women?
Nothing seems to eliminate the value of attractiveness, status, and social grace. Do we want to eliminate those values?
LikeLike
[cn swearing]*
Unfairly locked out by memes about how their sexuality is naturally/inherently harmful or intrusive, triggering a scrupulosity mechanism that results in a self-lockout with (usually) no specific person at fault. Another big part is the set of memes claiming that a request for a date is automatically the end of a friendship (which either transitions into a romantic relationship or is simply destroyed by awkwardness), which adds to the fear and paralysis but doesn’t have anything to do with scrupulosity. The lockout is reinforced by memes that call it a sin to complain about the lockout, and by a general erasure of the issues behind it (or at least the first issue).
The best way for women to help solve the first problem, I think, would be for them to change how they talk about dating and being asked out. There are tons of stories about unwanted pickup lines from sketchy dudes in bus stops, about getting thousands of “ur kut lets fuk” messages on OKC, about people treating women like coin-operated fleshlights, and so on and so forth. I’ve seen very little, though, about, say, how some woman got into leatherworking because of a guy she met on OKC and turned down for a second date, or about the absurdly melodramatic way her best friend asked her out, which they laughed about for the next three years, or even just how her current (or one of her former) boyfriends almost fainted asking her out and she calmed him down enough to get an actual plan for the date out of him. Positive stories, basically, to compliment the negative ones and build a fuller picture of how things actually work. It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to tell these stories as “dating stories” or whatever, but they work as general lifeposts and such. A goofy, happy story to contrast with venting about that dipshit who though opening three doors over two days would somehow result in a relationship.
The second problem is most likely not fixable by women, except in a very general “promote media where people get turned down and it’s not a big deal”** sort of way. Probably the biggest thing that stopped me from being afraid of or unhappy about “friendzoning” was a blog post where a guy talked about how the “friend zone”, should it exist, is not actually a bad place to be. This fairly straightforward point is very easy to miss in a culture that emphasizes all-or-nothing romantic relationships over almost any other kind of human interaction. Unfortunately for women who want to help, that idea is going to sound really condescending coming from them. This one’s going to have to be spread by guys who have figured it out.***
On the reinforcement-by-ban-of-complaints issue, women aren’t really any worse than men on this front. Maybe try to avoid contributing to an environment where any sort of complaint results in groans, hostility, or massive quantities of infantilizing pity? But it’s hard to convey “it is safe to complain here / to me”, so these memes are hard to fight and I don’t think anyone in particular is really to blame for their persistence.
* There’s someone here who doesn’t like swearing, right? Am I misremembering?
** Mort, from Discworld, is a very good example of this sort of thing. Mort kicks the main plot off by doing an absurdly, excessively kind thing for a girl he likes, and as things proceed, it becomes increasingly clear that she’s just not into him. So he goes and dates someone else, where the attraction is mutual, and the two couples remain good friends. Contrast with, say, A Tale of Two Cities, where Not Getting the Girl means you should sacrifice your life so she can marry the man she wants, or something.
*** To which end: if you just want to sleep with her, why are you spending all of this extra effort to pretend to be her friend? And if not … you’re still friends after she turns you down, as long as she’s not weird about it (which, I guess, ladies, please don’t be weird about it). Assuming you ask people on dates for reasons other than “looks fuckable from across the room; would probably earn Man Points”, you’ve still got a good friend or potential friend. If anything, the friendship will probably improve once you’re not constantly trying to divine her actual feelings towards you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
tldr / don’t want to deal with me rambling:
The lockout that sniffnoy is talking about is caused by a fear of being justly attacked for expressing attraction, which is almost certainly unfounded. The problem comes from lots of discussions about cases where the expression of attraction is in fact so awful as to justify a (verbal) attack (or at least some complaints later), with lots of disclaimers but few or no actual examples of expressions which are acceptable. Subjective standards are hard to meet; negative standards are easy to fail. The men in question see a standard both negative and subjective, and feel it is impossible to reach.
LikeLike
Veronica:
I don’t think we can discuss this without getting far into the weeds regarding the intersubjective nature of “fairness.” Which is to say, humans seem to have an innate notion of fair play. However, we also have widely varying notions regarding specifics.
Indeed. I had originally intended here to write a long tangent on this point but am going to skip it.
To this I call a yellow card for strategic passive voice. “Unfairly locked out” by what or whom? What is the mechanism here?
…is… is this a rhetorical question? Are you asking for yourself or for the benefit of other readers? I mean, you are correct that I did not in fact address that question in my comment above; but given how much I’ve discussed this here in the past I’d be surprised if you do not know precisely what mechanism I am talking about.
I do not want to take the time here to go into detail about it as I feel it’s been detailed sufficiently elsewhere, but, in brief, it consists of convincing people that making any concrete advance, expression of interest, or etc., makes them an evil creepy misogynistic rapey sexual harrasser who deserves to, and will, be ostracised by all decent people; and that any attempt to question this or suggest that this might be wrong or just get more information on what might be OK or not makes them the same.
(Why do I specify “concrete”? See point #1 under this older comment of mine. Roughly speaking, it’s the difference between being able to prove ∀x P(x), and, for each x, being able to prove P(x) — the latter’s what I’m talking about, not the former.)
If you try to build a model of how women ought to distribute their affection and intimacy, well, you may find that women object.
Indeed, which is, once again, why I’m not doing that.
(OK, brief summary of the tangent I skipped earlier: I think the people who complain about e.g. the “friend zone” or “ladders” are mostly being read uncharitably, and there’s a more charitable way to read their complaints, under which they are more reasonable. But even with this more reasonable reading… well, what can you do? You can’t redistribute love, as you and Ozy have pointed out. That’s just the way it is. But that complaint is not the one I am making; it’s only tangentially related.)
Rather I am complaining about a fairly specific harm, one whose solution doesn’t require any sort of redistribution, or actively giving us things; it just requires people to, y’know, stop doing the harmful thing.
It’s like we keep asking people to just, y’know, stop hitting us with baseball bats, and they keep replying, “Hey, I’m not responsible for your health; and anyway, I’m not a doctor, I have no idea what to do about bruises.” And we say, “OK, but you could stop actively making the problem worse in a way that benefits nobody“, and they just say, “Like I said, man, not a doctor.” (Or, “Hey, you can’t redistribute health.”)
You’ll need to attract a sufficient number of women to your subculture. Do you think STEM-nerd-etc. culture does a good job attracting women?
Nothing seems to eliminate the value of attractiveness, status, and social grace. Do we want to eliminate those values?
These questions are irrelevant to the point I’m making.
If instead you request clearly defined rules of social interaction, you’ll be making an unrealistic assumption of society-wide good faith.
I’m not asking for clearly defined rules! I’m asking for accurate statements about the lack of clearly-defined rules. That is to say, if there are not in fact clearly defined rules, don’t go making it sound like there in fact are; that only terribly evil people would ever violate these clearly defined rules, even though taken literally they prohibit things that sure don’t sound so evil; that only terribly evil people would ask for clarification regarding these clearly defined rules and why they seem to prohibit pretty ordinary non-evil-sounding things; etc.
If you go around making universal statements, guess what, people will attempt to make deductions with them (and these deductions will be wrong, because the original statements were). If you appropriately hedge your generalizations and explicitly say things like “it’s kind of hard to say, you just have to use your common sense / try to read the situation / etc.”, then while you may be saying less, you’ll be conveying a substantially more accurate picture! (And encouraging people to actually look in the right direction for answers, i.e., not to clearly defined rules but to just getting a feel for things through experience. Which, OK, I guess is something that people already tell people like me-as-of-several-years-ago to do; but those clearly defined rules that we keep hearing about, and the heavy penalties for violating them that we keep hearing about, prevent us from actually doing so.)
In other words, adversarial courtship feels kinda baked in.
I’m not really very clear on what you mean here, but I’d be interested to hear you expand on this.
LikeLike
Actually, sorry, one bit I think I should be clearer on: It’s really much more the shouting at people who dare question that’s the problem than the inaccurate statements. You can’t demand that people not going around saying inaccurate things. Of course people will go around saying inaccurate things. It’s when nobody’s allowed to question these inaccurate statements that you have a problem.
(It’s funny, because originally the reason I went around talking about this problem was not because of the problem itself, but just as an object-level example to illustrate the meta-level point that feminism has terrible epistemic practices, this example just being a concrete example of something it led them to get wrong. But instead I found that there were few people who didn’t already know about this particular problem who, on hearing about it, agreed that it was a problem at all, so we never even got to the point I originally wanted to make! And yet that is really the solution to the particular problem; the only way to flush wrong statements from the system is to allow people to actually question them and point out counterexamples. Which, reminder, is what I’m saying needs to happen — not an establishment of correct clear principles, but a flushing out of incorrect clear principles.)
LikeLike
@Veronica d
Sorry for dog-piling, but:
I object to the bad faith assumption that guys like sniffjoy are asking women to sacrifice their happiness for men.
If society is sending shitty messages to men and women that cause compatible men and women to not end up together, then improving this situation is not going to end up making women worse off.
Scott Aaronson’s wife is not worse off for him realizing that the anti-‘male sexuality’ messages he got were wrong, nor would she be worse off if he had been spared the self-hatred that resulted from it. She is better off for them ending up together.
—
I could frame criticism of trans activism in the same way:
“If you try to build a model of how cis people ought to distribute their affection and intimacy, well, you may find that cis people object.”
Ultimately, most trans activism resolves around a claim of being unfairly locked out of pleasant interactions with people who would not be harmed for treating trans people better, but who have been taught bad ideas that harm both trans people and (to a lesser extent) themselves.
What I would ask you is to apply this empathy that you have for people like yourself, to men who are not blamed for their desire to be a woman, but are blamed for their desire to be with a woman.
LikeLike
@sniffnoy — On adversarial courtship, I mean that some harmonious dating utopia is not available, and thus people entering the dating scene are going to have to play the game as they find it. Of course, some will respond by being rotten little shits. Others will respond with a fair degree of emotional maturity. Most will land somewhere in the middle. In any case, if you are a str8 man, you will encounter women across this spectrum. If you are a str8 woman, you will likewise encounter a variety of men. Thus it will feel like you’re constantly juggling some level of adversity, even if you’d rather not.
Swipe left a lot. Read the “gender war” articles if you enjoy them, but maintain some perspective.
When you write about being “blocked,” of course you’re not literally blocked, in the sense this is “inside your brain” stuff. If you say, “I cannot help but think this way cuz discourse,” well then develop better tools for engaging discourse. For example, STEM-style “hyper logic” doesn’t actually work here.
“But oh yes it works! Rationalist superpowers! Why am lonely?”
Figure it out.
Sorry to be mean, but honestly, I’m as beepy-boopy as anyone here. However, at some point I figured out how limited formal reasoning is when engaging with social stuff. Now, you can argue that feminists should be better about this, but most feminists aren’t really that beepy-boopy (because most people aren’t), so they don’t really have the perspective to engage.
Do you want us to be honest about “no rules”?
Okay, there are no rules.
But actually, there are no rules that you can jot down in clear language on a single sheet of paper. It doesn’t work that way, cuz brains are super complex with a ton of neural structure that seems dedicated to doing “social stuff.” You cannot write that down on one sheet of paper any more than the Deep Mind engineers can summarize their system’s “how to beat Go” strategy in a short, comprehensible “rules language.”
But you know this already.
We learn social stuff by example and narrative. However, these lessons often contradict, so we also learn by dialectic, by pattern matching, and so on. We learn to be flexible, to evaluate risk versus reward. We learn sensitivity to context, etc.
Most feminists cannot explain this because they lack a cogsci background. They can, however, explain what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominated space that tolerates creeps.
Women (including feminists) will continue to write about “nice guys,” because men keep complaining that “nice guys finish last.” (Although I think it’s better to just link to what has already been written because no one has anything new to say.) Likewise we will write about “creeps” and other things, because those guys exist. Social systems that support them exist.
And the hapless nerd riddled with insecurity — will women write about him?
Well, we do, but you don’t like what we say. Men respond, some in terrible ways. Women respond. A bad discourse develops. You demand that women fix this, but say little about the men.
But honestly, I’ve tried talking openly to “incel guys” before. Sometimes it goes well. However, just as often it turns out that the guy is a bitter little shit swimming in his obsessions and insecurities, all of this barely concealed until some women indicates she might be willing to listen. Then it all comes out.
Yeesh. This is not fun. The dude is trapped, just fucking trapped. It’s depressing.
The thing is, if I talk to the guy long enough (for example, over several months), I can usually sense why he has so much trouble with women. However, it’s not something I can easily articulate. It’s certainly not something I know how to fix.
LikeLike
If you say, “I cannot help but think this way in a male-dominated space,” well then develop better tools for interacting in a male-dominated space.
Has a woman ever actually written anything about “nice guys”? I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of words on guys finishing last, but very little on guys who are nice. If you want men to stop “complaining that nice guys finish last”, perhaps you should consider giving examples that prove the statement wrong. (Not creating them! Jesus fuck, I do not want anyone to have to “reallocate their affections” or whatever. But these examples do exist and people don’t fucking talk about them.)
LikeLike
Veronica:
I’m mostly just going to skip the parts of your reply that seem to be irrelevant or restatements of things we both already agree on.
On adversarial courtship, I mean that some harmonious dating utopia is not available, and thus people entering the dating scene are going to have to play the game as they find it. Of course, some will respond by being rotten little shits. Others will respond with a fair degree of emotional maturity. Most will land somewhere in the middle. In any case, if you are a str8 man, you will encounter women across this spectrum. If you are a str8 woman, you will likewise encounter a variety of men. Thus it will feel like you’re constantly juggling some level of adversity, even if you’d rather not.
I see. Not sure that’s really “adversarial” but whatever, I think I get your point.
When you write about being “blocked,” of course you’re not literally blocked, in the sense this is “inside your brain” stuff. If you say, “I cannot help but think this way cuz discourse,” well then develop better tools for engaging discourse.
Depending on what exactly you mean here, I potentially find your suggestion objectionable.
That is to say: If you mean that we should all develop better tools for engaging with people who use warped norms of discourse to keep out any ideas they don’t like, and label as evil anyone who espouses them or even questions the consensus (or even asks just what the consensus is) — then all I can say is hell fucking no.
I mean, if someone wants to do that, great! It’s a good thing, to try to fix up places with terrible epistemic practices. But I sure as hell am taking no responsibility for such a thing. On a personal level, so far as I’m concerned, the appropriate response here is exit, not voice, because trying to use voice in such a situation would be a big project. The thing to do is notice that the situation’s fucked up and get the hell out. I am not going back into the swamp of popular feminism and trying to fix things any more than I’d go on /r/the_donald and try to fix things.
But the real thing to do of course is to never end up in there in the first place. Such places should be marked and quarantined, their illiberalism laid bare. Instead what do we have? “No, no, it’s not illiberalism, in fact it’s better liberalism. Giving people a chance to speak who usually don’t get to.” That’s how things seem at first, anyway…
If by better tools for dealing with discourse, you mean “Better tools for recognizing fucked up discourse and staying away / running away”, well, then I guess I agree with you.
I mean, “staying away” doesn’t have to mean literally not reading any of it — it just means, y’know, recognizing it as untrustworthy; something to be examined, not something to be taken at face value (let alone executed). Maybe that’s what you mean, and I agree that that’s a good thing. But it’s pretty fricking hard to develop that while you’re inside! (And I did not make it out on my own.)
Now, you can argue that feminists should be better about this, but most feminists aren’t really that beepy-boopy (because most people aren’t), so they don’t really have the perspective to engage.
Right, and I agree that you can’t really change that. Which is why I say the solution is to promote better norms of discourse, and let better discussion bubble up, and censure people for trying to shout down as immoral attempts to discuss such things in detail, rather than for, you know, attempting to discuss such things in detail.
Women (including feminists) will continue to write about “nice guys,” because men keep complaining that “nice guys finish last.” (Although I think it’s better to just link to what has already been written because no one has anything new to say.)
I’m not sure that it’s true that “nobody has anything new to say”, given how often some of the common sides in this discussion round off the positions of other sides of this discussion to positions that are substantially different, resulting in arguments where people just talk past each other. If people actually argued with each other rather than past each other something new might actually be produced…
Women respond. A bad discourse develops. You demand that women fix this, but say little about the men.
The “men” here are people everyone is warned to stay away from, clearly they’re really just sexists and misogynists, right? The “women” will shout at you to “SHUT UP AND LISTEN” until you do (or have the sense to escape).
Remember, the problem I’m complaining about is a Blue-Tribe-internal one! I’m sure redpillers and such shout at people too, but… they’re redpillers. Nobody cares who they disapprove of, for Blue Tribe versions of “nobody”. (I sure don’t!)
As for the last few paragraphs… like I’m saying, man, tweezers. This gets back to what I was saying above, about “nobody has anything new to say”. I think if you look at the popular discussion, there’s a lot of rounding off going on, a lot of completely misunderstanding the other person’s position. Taking different groups that are saying different things and treating them as the same. I think this is a mistake. I just don’t think that “incel” in the sense used here is a useful grouping, too heterogeneous, too many different positions.
(“Incel” as in “the people who call themselves incel” is probably a useful grouping, but that’s not what Ozy’s talking about.)
I mean, frequently things kind of flow together and get blurred, that’s true. No matter how much different branches of feminism disagree with one another, the most prominent sort seems to be the one that just disregards from this and pulls principles from any of them as convenient. But this is one case where that seems to really not happen — if your problems are because you are trying to be a good feminist, because you’re terrified that it’s the feminists that are going to label you a bad person… you’re not exactly going to deliberately associate yourself with those who are “the other side” from the feminists, you know? You’re going to do as much as you can to disassociate yourself from them. And yet though we don’t come from the same background as them and we’re not making the same complaint as them, people lump us in with them anyway.
IDK. Maybe we have a common outflow with them, and me insisting on our difference from them is like the SJ feminist insisting on their difference from the liberal feminist — important to the source groups, but unimportant to the outflow groups that draw indiscriminately from both branches, and most of all unimportant to the people who have to deal with these outflow groups. Maybe that’s what you’re seeing, in which case… ick, yikes.
But for those of us who are in fact expressing coherent positions rather than just jumbling shit together, I would like to request the tweezers. 😛
LikeLike
I’ll jump in on this:
It’s obviously possible to have fruitful conversations from this place. However, the reason women keep swerving back to the “no one owes you sex” thing is because that is the actual underlying issue, and thus the underlying psychological drive. This has an effect. Even if you are super smart and have mastered a dozen different ways manipulate Fregian syntax (or whatever), the fact remains that men and women are sexual beings. This discourse is driven by sub-rational forces.
Even if you’ve read the sequences.
The issue is not that this man and this woman on that day might have a thoughtful conversation — cuz people do have thoughtful conversations — it’s that there is an actual power struggle going on. There are real stakes. People “round off” because there are dozens of messages coming at them, cuz in nerd space women are outnumbered by lonely men.
Women are impatient with this topic because “logic” is often a thin veneer atop what is driven by resentment and insecurity. In other words, the topic keeps coming up. In fact, it’s obvious that a big drive of “redpill” and “incel” style thinking is men who feel cheated by liberated women. These drives, of course, are exposed in manosphere discourse, but they exist across nerd-space. How could they not? The gender ratio pretty much forces it, even absent feminist thought.
We should certainly raise discourse norms, but if your temptation is to rigidly “shout down” those with different norms — well good luck with that. After all, isn’t that the same game “they” are playing, except they are better at social games? I suspect that, at best, you’ll end up in a walled garden with 80% men and way too many borderline neoreactionaries (who nevertheless can play by your discourse rules).
(Evidence: rationalism, LW, SCC…)
I would suggest at least looking at (people such as) Laurie Penny, Katherine Cross, Julia Serano, etc.
LikeLike
I think everyone here is talking past each other. Can we all take a minute to step back and just state our goals? No arguing or justifying, just say the thing you want to convince people to do or believe. I am at this point not sure what people (especially Veronica, but also to an extent Sniffnoy) are actually arguing for or against.
What I would like is for feminists discussing nerdy, romantically unsuccessful men to expand the picture of the world that they show, in order to include cases where the man is neither permanently shunned for his sins, nor asked to fundamentally change who he is or who / how he desires. That is, show some examples of crush resolution where the results for the man are neither what he wants nor what he (typically) fears.
LikeLike
Veronica:
Uh… the complaint I’m making, that others have made, sure look to me like they are in fact driven by the thing being complained about.
I mean, seriously… scrupulosity ain’t fun. Here I am, saying, as others have said — hey, I spent a hell of a lot of my life walking on eggshells, constantly worried that by doing slightly wrong things (including in contexts that were not necessarily sexual) I’d be committing some horrible offense (and an offense against someone, someone would be harmed, can’t just write it off as a victimless offense) and would be justly ostracized for it. That is, y’know, not a good thing. And the claim, moreover, is not just that we happened to be like this, but that this was done to us, by people who told us repeatedly things that implied this and then shouted at us and threatened us when we tried to even so much as ask for clarification. Like… that is a wrong thing to do, that has resulted in actual concrete harms, and people should stop.
So when you say the “actual underlying issue” is something other than this complaint, something that while related is distinct from this complaint, I don’t know what to make of that. Underlying what? For me, at least, the issue was the particular issue I stated here, and that seems to be the case for the others who have made this same complaint. This was part of why I used myself as an example above. If that’s the “underlying issue”, then that would seem to imply that I’d consider myself better off in a world where I am occasionally kissing people but also constantly in fear about such matters, which is a fair description of the state of things a few years ago, rather than one where I haven’t had any luck there but am no longer afraid. Of course I don’t hold that opinion, because, seriously, scrupulosity ain’t fun. (Hugh Ristik titled his blog post on it well — “When You Have Feminist Guilt, You Don’t Need Catholic Guilt.” Seriously, it’s bad.) I’m much better off now. The complaint is the complaint.
Once again, you seem to just be addressing a different issue than what I’m talking about. A real issue, quite possibly, but since it’s not the one I’m talking about I just don’t really care at the moment.
Like, let’s take this:
Women are impatient with this topic
I ask: What topic? The complaint that’s made here, that’s been made by Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson? I would say instead, women are impatient with a different topic which they keep mistaking this one for! It’s like saying you’re impatient with all these goddamn horses, and then someone shows you a cow, and you say “What did I say about horses?!”. The complaint is pretty fricking specific, and the people who have stated it have done a lot of work to try to make sure it doesn’t get interpreted as the sort of thing you’re talking about instead, and yet it almost always is regardless. (And very few people have stated it independently, because they can anticipate the reaction. Remember: A huge part of the entire issue is about the fear of being kicked out of the garden of good civilized feminists because you’re seen as an evil barbaric misogynist.) If people go around saying they’re impatient with this horse, even after we’ve gone to the work and said, “No, look, observe the horns and spots”, then, well, they’re making a mistake.
I really don’t think this complaint is actually a commonly-raised one; rather it is confused for commonly-raised ones. I used to collect links related to this, and many a piece that seemed initially like it might be talking about this soon veered off in another direction. I could find very little discusing this in particular. Which should not be surprising, when you consider the obvious selection bias! Like I said above… when you’re in the trap, you can’t talk about it! Only a few particularly brave people have done so independently! Of course most of the talk about related matters is going to be things other than this, because it will be by people who don’t feel that they are required not to speak about such things, which basically excludes people with this particular complaint! Any complaint being made who is neither bending over backwards to make it clear they’re a feminist, nor referencing some previous writer who did so that inspired them, is almost certainly not this complaint.
And you may say, OK but the underlying issue is the same. To which I say:
1. Once again, if that were true, it would seem that my preferences would then be the reverse of what they actually are;
2. Who cares? That’s not relevant. This particular complaint is legitimate and should be addressed. If this same “underlying issue” has also given rise to many illegitimate complaints, then those should not be addressed. Find the right thing and do it, you know? Ideally that would happen without people complaining, but as we know in reality people are bad at noticing when they’re doing something wrong unless someone complains. But whether a complaint is legitimate is independent of whether it’s actually being made.
Actually, I keep forgetting that some of the best, most unambiguous writing about this is by The Unit of Caring. Which, like, illustrates my point — here’s someone with the same complaint for whom I don’t think you can attribute that same “underlying issue” (at least if I’m understanding your statement of it correctly). And yet they still have that same complaint. Might your “underlying issue” explain the majority of cases? It’s possible, though I’m doubtful. But it’s just irrelevant even if so. The complaint stands on its own merits.
LikeLike
Gazeboist: What you’re saying doesn’t really address the real issue, I’m afraid, which is bad stated principles. You can have any number of positive examples, but as long as you keep stating bad principles and threatening anyone who questions them, the problem will continue. Like, we already have positive examples coming from real life; it doesn’t help because, once again, see point #1 here.
LikeLike
Veronica:
Actually, let me go a bit further — looking for an underlying psychological issue is basically a mistake. Are people getting it correct when they do? Maybe. But it’s the wrong thing to do in an argument; it’s a distraction. I mean, it’s Bulverism. It might be a true statement, but it has no bearing on the correctness of the argument.
Not saying it’s never helpful to do such a thing, but man, people are way too eager to resort to it. Saying “never do this” isn’t entirely correct (I could detail the exceptions, but I’m not really sure they’re so relevant as to be worth taking up the space), but there’s a lot of people whose arguments would improve if they followed that advice, on the basis that they might have to actually start making actual arguments.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@sniffnoy & Veronica
I also think that it is wrong to absolve the environment from blame just because there is a psychological issue. To use an example that may appeal to Veronica: imagine that a person has a psychological issue where they experience gender dysphoria. Now imagine that they live in an environment where transitioning is severely discouraged and people who talk about this or do it get shamed and/or beaten up. When the gender dysphoric person suffers from mental pain, this can equally well be argued to come from their psychological issue, as from the lack of consideration by society. After all, a person without gender dysphoria doesn’t suffer from not being able to transition or from being shamed/beaten up, just like a man who doesn’t have a tendency towards scrupulosity doesn’t suffer (much) from negative messages about male sexuality and the pursuer role.
If you accept that the effects of gender dysphoria can be much worse due to the environment, then why not the same kind of consideration for men? As far as I can tell, the only reason why men don’t get the same consideration as trans people is the narrative that ascribes everything bad that happens to men as the fault of men, while other groups get to put (some) blame on society and demand that society changes.
Now, I do agree with Veronica that people are not just passive beings and that it is quite plausible that many incels could solve their problem with a different strategy. However, if society is pushing a large number of men into self-destructive spirals, where they start hating many other people, instead of towards these solutions, then isn’t that a societal problem? After all, a large part of what we call ‘culture’ is teaching people to behave in certain ways. When a large group of people all experience the same failure mode, it’s clearly not something that is specific to each of these men, but rather is caused by an interaction with the culture.
To her credit, Veronica has tried to help these people, yet she usually failed. However, it seems to me that these men have had past experiences that explains why they are not open to help. IMO, there is very strong evidence that the dating market for men is the worst during their puberty, when they are most emotionally needy and have their highest libido. Society has strong stigma against men meeting these needs outside of an intimate relationship. This makes young men desperate, which makes them less attractive. Furthermore, the way that men get pushed into successful dating behavior is extremely abusive, by being mostly build around punishment of failure. Basically, they rarely get positive feedback until they have already achieved their goal.
It’s hardly surprising that you see men give up and refuse to open themselves up to more abuse, when none of the things they tried seems to have worked and none of it results in meaningful positive feedback that tells them that perfecting that solution may work. Furthermore, much of the advice they get is really, really bad. I mean, we live in a world where Reddit Red Pill advice is relatively good, because the other advice is mostly so very, very bad, for men who are not naturals.
LikeLike
@sniffnoy — Okay, so the reason I keep skirting around the issue of scrupulosity is, basically, the conversation quickly becomes ahistorical and decontextualized. In other words, it erases why women say the things they say. Likewise, it lays the blame on feminism when, bluntly, this is not our fault.
Some history. I’ll try to be brief. I was a teen in the 80’s. More specifically, I was a nerdy teen in the 80’s. Plus, back then I thought I was a boy.
Okay, so “feminism” certainly existed in the 80’s, but not like it does today. There was no internet. There was no large body of easily found and discussed feminist discourse. Young nerd girls knew, perhaps, the feminism their parents taught them, but not much more. All the same, they found themselves at the RPG conventions dealing with nerdy guys.
Absolutely nothing found in -chan culture, “manosphere” culture, etc., is at all new. The vocabulary is new. The degree of “Internet echo chamber” bullshit is new. The degree that men construct towering theories of nonsense is new. But the base impulses, the “nice guy” stuff, the “puzzle box” stuff, the “creepiness” stuff, the “she wouldn’t fuck me anyway” stuff, that was thick on the ground. Like, OMG.
It is hard to blame feminism for stuff that predates any significant influence from feminism.
Of course, there were maybe ten of us in high school grousing about this stuff, and in our social circles some guys figured it out, others didn’t. But the point is, there were never enough of us to form a -channer or “manosphere” style echo chambers. If such things had existed — I shudder. Would I have avoided the trap?
If figured my shit out senior year, when I started lifting weights, dyed my hair a cool color, and let girls put mascara on me. It was fun.
At least, it was fun for a while, until the trans stuff caught up with me. Then I retreated back into my shell, for a very long time.
Anyway, enough about me.
The stuff feminists say about “nice guys” is dead-on correct and needs to be said. The stuff we say about “creeps” is dead-on correct and needs to be said.
And “scrupulosity guy” — I don’t have an answer. But that’s not my fault.
Nice guys really do demand that women solve their problem. They are bitter, unhappy, and confrontational. Normally no one will listen to their bullshit, cuz of course not. But as soon as they find a friendly ear, they dump. Or else, they cling, which isn’t as bad, but it’s bad enough.
A big part of Scott Alexander’s “meditations of privilege” is asking for clear rules. There are no clear rules. That’s the problem. It doesn’t work that way.
When is it okay to hit on the pretty cosplay girl?
If you demand a straight answer, I’m going to say “Don’t do it. It’s not okay.”
I mean, you wanted a simple rule.
After all, if every lonely weird guy at the anime con starts hitting on the pretty cosplay girls, they’ll hate it and leave, and then the convention will be a poorer place.
And trust me, women avoiding nerdspace because creeps, jerks, and cheap come-ons is older than the internet.
When women are confronted by a lonely guy, they often won’t tell him the whole truth. But then, be careful what you ask for. Do you really want us to dump the whole truth? Sometimes we do.
“You’re weird and unpleasant,” isn’t a nice thing to say. It’s far easier to say, “Be yourself,” while we construct elaborate social ruses to avoid you.
I’ve been on both sides of this. Both sides suck.
Scott complains that if you ask a woman out, you might lose her as a friend. You might be “literally Hitler.”
Well, that’s catastrophizing a bit. On the hand, Scott says it happened to him. I’ll take his word for it. That sucks. On other hand, even in the best circumstances, if you ask someone out it might ruin your friendship. It really might. It might become awkward and strange and the new chemistry might suck. That’s life.
Of course, she might call you “Hitler.” She probably won’t, though. If she does, she’s a ninny. If you live your life in terror of this — well that won’t work out.
At this point let me clarify, I AM NOT SAYING that “don’t hit on pretty girls” is an actual rule. That’s not my point. (I hope that’s clear.)
My point is, feminism didn’t do this to you because it was never about you. You are not the “center.” Your one person trapped in a bad corner of a shitty game, but it doesn’t revolve around you.
I don’t have an easy answer for “scrupulosity guy” any more than I have an easy answer for my fiancee, who struggles with BPD. I do my best for her. It’s hard.
I invest effort into her because I love her. I don’t invest similar effort into “random lonely guy” because I don’t have an easy fix and it’s not my job to fix him. But moreover, I’m not going to facilitate his “nice guy” complaints. Nor am I going to accept blame for his condition. Nor am I going to make excuses for creepy dudes who know damn well what they’re doing.
I suppose it would be nice if nerd-women had perfectly calibrated “creep-dar” and never misconstrued a decent come-on from an awful one, never “rounded off” the complains from lonely guy #13383922 as the same as lonely guy #544993. It would be great if we all had hearts of gold and endless patience, but we don’t. Some of us are surly and fed up.
In the end the real answer is “develop social skills.” Really that’s it. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. As long as you have crap social skills, you’ll have a crap time dealing with women. That’s a bitter pill that’s hard to swallow. So it goes.
It’s easier said than done, of course. You know this. Women can’t really do much to teach you social skills. We have other things to do.
All this said, if I had an easy answer, I’d give it. I’m not cruel.
#####
Short version:
Guy: Stop hurting me.
Feminist: How are we hurting you?
Guy: By telling me I’m Hitler for liking girls.
Feminist: Huh? I don’t think I did that. Example?
Guy: {link to article about creeps}
Feminist: Well actually that seems reasonable. That guy was out of line. Don’t act that way.
Guy: {link to some crappy nerd-shaming site}
Feminist: Yeah that stuff sucks. Sorry. [feeling honest] On the other hand, that third image was kinda hilarious. Honestly, swords are cool, but that guy looks ridiculous. Try not to look like him.
Guy: {another creep scenario}
Feminist: Oh gawd! I’d run screaming from the room. Can’t you see how awful that guy is?
Guy: But I do that.
Feminist: Well stop.
Guy: But that means I can’t talk to women?
Feminist: You can talk to women.
Guy: When? How? {article written by pretty cosplay girl about creepy dudes} What do I do?
Feminist: I don’t know. Maybe you can’t talk to women.
Guy: I asked Jenny out and she hates me.
Feminist: Yeah, I heard about that. She says you were following her around and staring at her.
Guy: Arrrrrrr! What do I do?
Feminist: Don’t stare.
Guy: I can’t look at girls? Do you expect me to die alone?
Feminist [frustrated]: I hope not. Maybe. Just be yourself and be patient. Avoid women on elevators.
Guy: Grrrrrrrrrrr! How do I talk to women?
Feminist: Be yourself.
#####
Anyway
LikeLike
It doesn’t sound like anybody’s arguing much, except on the margins about how to interpret a big pile of largely agreed ideas.
1) There are definitely people whose advances make other people uncomfortable. For a variety of reasons, the first group is mostly men and the second group is mostly women. (I’d say those reasons are (a) men are disproportionately more interested in hookups; (b) men are more likely to make an unwelcome advance; (c) women are disproportionately more likely to be uncomfortable hurting someone’s feelings by rejecting them; and (d) women are more likely to feel unsafe when subject to or rejecting creepy advances.
1.1) Making people uncomfortable is sub-optimal.
1.2) Having a group of people who feel left out of romance because of social clumsiness or scrupulosity is sub-optimal.
2) So what are some solutions?
2.1) Nice guys and girls can try to up their game in ethical ways. Veronica and Ozy have both recommended “Models: Attract Women Through Honesty,” and that’s a pretty good start.
2.2) In some cases, we might be able to limit the initial approach to a medium that reduces discomfort on the approachee and rejection for the approacher, like left-swiping, being matched by a human matchmaker, making the first pitch on OK Cupid, etc. This isn’t a great solution, since a lot of those environments are dominated by “f-funnel” creeps and also probably over-reward guys with badges of datability.
2.3) I think that some approachees should work on being a little more empathetic about creep and nice guy shaming. I know, some of it is justified, and some of it is a defense mechanism, but if you’re making sure no one you know is alone with Bob because he gives you a weird vibe, which is totally reasonable, then it would be ideal to also remember that Bob might well be just a weird guy – that doesn’t mean don’t take protective steps, but it might be good to avoid hating Bob so you feel better about what really is a probability judgment.
LikeLike
Yeah Models is pretty great, with the caveat that Mark Manson is a pretty normal/mainstream guy with normal/mainstream guy challenges. He overcame them. He (evidently) does well — although his sales pitch requires he claim to do well. But all the same, I’ll take his word for it. But still, nerds are playing at a higher difficulty setting.
He does suggest “cold approach,” which fine, but like I said, if every dude at the anime con thinks he’s gonna cold approach the pretty cosplay girls, well that won’t work out. It will suck hard for the girls. They will use the small amount of social power they have to adjust the environment so that it doesn’t happen. Their social power, it turns out, largely rests on a mix of shaming tactics along with the power of other men. (Love it or hate it, that is how the world works.)
We all know how this plays out. Actually, we can see it play out. That’s what is happening.
#####
I submit that much of the “nerd gender wars” are not between feminists (as such) shaming men for being weird, but more women using their available social power to make their social environments more comfortable.
I submit further that expecting women to always be kind, always nurture, always let each guy down easy, always spend whatever needed time and attention to ensure there are no hurts feelings, etc. — well fuck that. It’s deeply sexist. If women feel pestered they’ll learn to be blunt.
Which plays into what I said above, to a certain degree the adversarial nature of this is baked in.
#####
I think men need to teach men how to navigate this space. Which look, in gender utopia it wouldn’t work this way. In an ideal space, people would teach people how to handle this stuff. But we’re not in gender utopia. Most people are not fully bisexual. Plus, sexist dynamics exist at both the object and meta levels. It’s hard.
(And honestly, most of the dudes struggling with this are not bisexual genderqueer folks. They may be a bit outside the central gender norm, but they remain straight men dealing with straight women and all that implies.)
That said, when I was young, women made it very clear what they thought of my advances, no feminist discourse required. It sucked. I had to learn. The guys at work offered advice. They told me I needed to “grab them and throw them against the wall and lock lips. That’s how you get a girl.”
No really, that’s what the guys at work told me. Literally. Even after all these years I remember those exact words. I didn’t need to point my then-not-existing web browser to some “redpill” forum to get shitty advice on how to be a sexual abuser. There was no “manosphere,” just men.
I did try to be more sexually aggressive — although not to a criminal degree (thank the stars). It didn’t work. It turns out that being a pathetic nerdling pretending to be “badass guy” doesn’t work well at all.
Feminists will tell you this. Sometimes we’re blunt.
In any case, there is a metric fuckton of dating advice out there. Most of it is annoyingly obvious. Shower. Dress well. Put yourself “out there.” Be patient. Be “yourself.” Etc, etc, etc. I have nothing to add. The point is, it’s not as if we’re not trying to help.
#####
So when is it okay to ask out a girl?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Veronica: Sorry for going off like that. (Also, now that I’m clear-headed, blargh, the bit about “actually people don’t talk about this much” seems like… not really correct. But not going to take the time to fix that now.) But, OK, seems like this might be getting somewhere.
Absolutely nothing found in -chan culture, “manosphere” culture, etc., is at all new. The vocabulary is new. The degree of “Internet echo chamber” bullshit is new. The degree that men construct towering theories of nonsense is new. But the base impulses, the “nice guy” stuff, the “puzzle box” stuff, the “creepiness” stuff, the “she wouldn’t fuck me anyway” stuff, that was thick on the ground. Like, OMG.
It is hard to blame feminism for stuff that predates any significant influence from feminism.
OK. But once again that’s not what I’m complaining about. The part I am complaining about is… well, it’s certainly not due *only* to current feminism — there’s a fair bit of it based on straight-up pre-feminist ideas of propriety, but A. but the feminist part is a large part of it (and some of the worst parts of it), and B. without that part of it falls apart — like, feminists are unintentionally pushing people to incorporate these pre-feminist ideas of propriety into their precautions (because everything has to be incorporated, you can’t question any of it). (The Unit of Caring wrote about that here, actually, sort of.) I’m sure some people might pick up those old ideas anyway and fall into scrupulosity over it but… that would be a different group of people. Those would be preople from a pretty different background. I don’t know those people. Their problem just isn’t what I’m talking about.
And “scrupulosity guy” — I don’t have an answer. But that’s not my fault.
Pre-post edit: Just realized that the following section is based on a misreading of what you said. Oops. Well, I’m leaving it in anyways…
Well, I’m not blaming you in particular. 😛 But I claim that it is in fact somebody’s fault.
This is actually another problem I have with what Gazeboist said above — I could probably think of more 😛 — is that, what he describes, whose responsibility is that? Like, OK, it might be nice if someone did what he suggested, but is someone doing something wrong? Is it somebody’s fault that nobody has done this? No. Nobody’s obligated to do that.
Whereas, the things I’m complaining about, I’m complaining that people are doing things that are harmful, and saying that they should stop; and moreover, I’m saying that these things fall into well-recognized categories of harm. I’m not trying to put any new obligations on anyone. Just trying to remind people that when you shout down dissenters instead of arguing with them, then your group beliefs become unmoored from reality, and this has nasty effects when people try to put them into practice. As I’ve said before — this particular problem is just one example. The stranglehold of illiberal feminism (meaning, feminism that is illiberal in its practices, not meaning, branches of feminism other than liberal feminism; liberal feminism seems to be pretty complicit in illiberal feminism, unfortunately) on the environs that I consider home is something that needs to be broken one way or another; this is just one of its negative effects.
Like, I’m not talking about subtle psychological effects like Gazeboist is. I’m talking about propagating information that is actually just straight-up incorrect. That’s a bad thing. Of course you can’t necessarily blame people for that. You can’t expect people to be right all the time. But you can blame them for setting up a terrible epistemic environment. You can blame them for setting up conditions that will consistently result in wrongness; and you can blame them for setting up conditions that will convince a lot of people that anything these people say has to be right and that they’re not allowed to question it.
I mean, you wanted a simple rule.
I actually didn’t!
I’ll grant you that Scott certainly asked for simple rules. But as for me, if you go back and read what I’ve written… where did I ever ask for simple rules? 🙂
What’s actually going on is complex. You want to understand it, you’re going to need to understand that complexity. But, people can figure out complexity. You start with simple but wrong statements. Then people present counterexamples. So you refine the statements. Then people present more counterexamples. And you refine and refine and eventually you approach something like correctness (and have something that looks terribly ugly but hey it works a lot better than what you started with).
The thing is that that requires allowing people to contradict you. It requires taking counterexamples seriously. (And it requires being able to take things literally instead of always filtering everything through common sense.) Right now that basically never happens because illiberal feminism demands unquestioning obedience.
As I said before at this point I’m not really convinced that one can usefully state any rules. But once again the implication of that is that one can’t usefully state any rules. That is to say, there’d be a lot less wrongness out there if feminists stopped constantly stating simple but incorrect rules! (Or, y’know, just learned to fricking hedge, instead of making things so goddamn absolute.)
But, to repeat myself for about the 3rd time in this comment, I don’t think anyone can really be held responsible for that; people will say wrong things, including terribly wrong things. The problem comes when we’re not allowed to question these simple-but-wrong rules. Allow that, and maybe people will learn to hedge, and maybe those more willing will actually learn to refine statements and anticipate counterexamples.
I mean, I’ve actually had interesting conversations here with Nita about this sort of thing, you know? I mean, I think all I learned from them can be summed up as, wow, certain things varied more than I realized and I guess that’s yet more things I need to learn to get a contextual sense of — that is to say, destroying rules rather than building them — but that’s pretty useful, you know? Like, this isn’t impossible. It just requires people to be willing to actually argue, to learn the practice of refining statements as counterexamples are presented, or to just hedge if you don’t have the energy for that, and not to assume the worst of anyone who questions.
My point is, feminism didn’t do this to you because it was never about you. You are not the “center.” Your one person trapped in a bad corner of a shitty game, but it doesn’t revolve around you.
So some of this seems to be responding to… claims I didn’t make? The other part appears to just not follow. Like, I’m not claiming any centrality? Huh?
I mean — I sure as hell don’t dispute “it was never about you”. That’s what I’m saying! Our complaint isn’t even recognized, it just gets bingo-carded away, being replaced with something different but more familiar. I’d hope that if it were somehow “about” us we could at least be characterized correctly. 😛 But it’s precisely the unfamiliarity of our complaint that contributes to its mischaracterization.
(I wonder if we need, like, some existing salient example that is less wrong but we can be rounded off instead to. 😛 Simon Tam, if we allow fictional characters? It’s not exactly the same but it’s a fairly close match that gets a lot of the essentials right. But whatever. I mostly don’t bother talking about this sort of thing these days.)
But that doesn’t imply “feminism didn’t do this to you”. Hm, things developed for one population having terrible effects on a population its developers didn’t think about (or in this case, realize existed)… where have we heard that one before? 😛 Like, I’m certainly not claiming that anyone did this intentionally. (Well — I’d bet that setting up such a terrible epistemic environment was at least partly intentional on the part of many of those who have contributed to it. Whitecloaks and crocodiles, etc. But the particular mistakes that resulted can’t said to be.)
And so I say: This is bad, and the people who are doing it should stop. It doesn’t matter whether things revolve around me or not. This is wrong. What you’re saying sounds more like a criticism of what Gazeboist said, not what I said.
Short version:
<snipped>
OK, so what do I notice reading this?
1. The “guy” is actually attempting to argue back! The people I’m talking about don’t dare. I mean — OK maybe eventually they stumble across the Scott Aaronson post or something and begin to make it out of the trap and question what they’ve been told (or maybe they have the strength of will to break free themselves). But even then… I mean, hell, I’d consider myself out of the trap at this point, you think I’m just going to go talking about this in arbitrary places? Hell no! Probably just here — I don’t exactly expect a lot out of the SSC comments these days — or maybe with one or two specific trusted people. The grip of illiberal feminism is real, and I continue to expect that so much as mentioning such things to most people I know would get me cast into the outer darkness.
2. The discussion depicted basically fails to get anywhere — and I agree, conditional on the “guy” actually attempting to argue back, that’s basically what we should probably expect to usually happen. Why doesn’t get anywhere? Well, because both people depicted are pretty terrible at arguing. The “guy” presents examples, but fails to use them to usefully probe for distinctions. The “feminist” just goes around making simple absolute statements without even an attempt to so much as hedge.
But some people are better at this. Like I said, my discussions here with Nita actually produced interesting results. I would hope that, when this can happen on a larger scale, any insight produced this way can, y’know, trickle out to other people, who can just read about it without having to participate in its production. And if that doesn’t happen… oh well. Still better than the current situation.
LikeLike
Sorry, one bit I forgot to include — actually this isn’t something new, this is just an expansion on point “1.” in my observations on the short version. Imagine it’s inserted before the “2.”
Also, the fact that the “guy” is OK with arguing back indicates that he doesn’t believe he has to just unquestioningly accept whatever the “feminist” tells him. The “feminist” may be providing him with bad advice — but that’s all. He’s not actually trapped, because he recognizes that it might be unreliable and he can disregard it if it seems unlikely to be true. So, once again that is suggesting that the “guy” here is just not the sort of person I’m talking about. He may be frustrated, but he’s not trapped, at least not in that way.
(Or as I said above, he just might be in the initial stages of making it out of the trap, where e.g. he’s stumbled across the Scott Aaronson post or something but still hasn’t fully made it out. But in that case, the “feminist” here isn’t actually making his situation worse. She’d just be repeating things he’d heard before and that he knows to disregard.)
LikeLike
@Veronica
You are not actually responding to what people are saying. You have a model in your head and pattern match that to what people say and go from there, not actually addressing the beliefs of the people here.
In these types of debates, I’ve only ever seen feminists claim that they are blamed for most of the things that you claim that they are blamed for. So you are just taking down a straw man.
The problem is that we only ever see half of the story and the other half is left unsaid. And not just unsaid, but suppressed. Feminists don’t get to suppress and then turn around and claim that they don’t have answers.
Look at what happened to Scott Aaronson. He didn’t publish his words on a major news site. He didn’t even publish it as a blog post. It was a comment directed at one specific commenter on his blog. Yet it was so important to suppress the wrongthink that this comment just had to be attacked by feminists with major audiences. Aaronson could not be allowed to say these things. His words had to distorted and used to smear him as a misogynist to teach him a lesson. If feminists would just ignore Aaronson or Scott Alexander, your remarks would make sense, but that’s not what happens.
When major voices in a movement throw themselves up as arbiters of right and wrong, attacking people for wrongthink, the attacked people can justifiably blame that movement for their actions. When the wrongthink is actually an important issue that needs to be discussed and not addressing it allows a bad situation to persist, then that movement is guilty of helping the bad situation persist.
Many blame society in general, not women specifically. Recently you linked some posts here by that moetics guy who talked about his issues and you said:
However, when reading his statements, he was very nasty about neurotypical men as well, something that you completely ignored. Based on that and many other posts by you where you show a similar bias (only recognizing misogyny and not misandry), I cannot take your claim seriously, as IMO, you have a strong tendency to interpret attacks and demands on (neurotypical) society as a whole, as attacks and demands on women.
Isn’t real social justice about society helping people when they have problems with maximizing their potential? A major reason why I am anti-SJ is because of this tendency to make extreme demands to help favored groups and then dismiss disfavored groups who make demands, usually based on lies about what their demands actually are (the misreadings usually seem to come from bad faith assumptions).
In other words, women will use the power of traditional gender roles to get their way and you are OK with that, because when women can take advantage of traditionalism, it helps you. When men take advantage of traditional gender roles, they are patriarchal oppressors. When men figure out that many/most feminists are not actually opposed to the parts of patriarchy that help women and hurt men, just the parts that help men and hurt women, what do you think their response is going to be?
– Women don’t reach top positions as much as men, do you think that the entire solution is to have women teach women how to navigate this space?
– It can be hard for women to get abortions in some places due to restrictive laws, do you think that the entire solution is to have women teach women how to navigate this space?
– Shall we do away with harassment laws? After all, women can just teach women how to deal with harassment.
When women have trouble navigating a space, feminists usually demand that the space be made friendlier to women by society. When men have trouble navigating a space, feminists usually suggest that men can just fix these problems themselves. Social Justice for you, ‘just deal with it’ for me.
LikeLiked by 2 people
My goal is for nice guys to understand what women who complain about “nice guys” or “creeps” mean, and for those women to understand how the nice guys see themselves. As a nice guy myself, I do think that a lot of nice guy behavior is at best counterproductive and at worst threatening, but I’m not sure if shaming is the right response. (Or if it’s not).
To be fair, my first approximation of how everyone would feel when they have a better understanding is how I personally feel about both questions, but if my understanding is off, then my goal includes improving my understanding as well.
LikeLike
Actually for every married woman, there is only one man who is the same and for every single man, there is only one woman who is unmarried but in a steady relationship since women get married earlier because they are encouraged to by society. It’s no wonder single men will often want to have relationships with married women. New studies show that most women are married while most men are single and there are more lesbian women compared to gay men.
LikeLike
“But then again, what is a woman? A rather weak creature that is beneath the man. Equipped with less intellectual gifts, not as beatiful or well formed as the human male, repulsive actually. A creature that is 3/4 of its life sick and isnt even possible to satisfy her man at all times. Because nature doesn’t allow it. It’s common knowledge that females are lesser beings”
This quote sounds very familiar…
“What is a woman? and how has this contemptible sex been viewed in ancient times and in our own by seventy-five per cent of the peoples of this earth?
“Now, what do I observe upon coolly proceeding to this investigation? A puny creature, always inferior to man, infinitely less attractive than he, less ingenious, less wise, constructed in a disgusting manner entirely opposite to what is capable of pleasing a man, to what is able to delight him… a being three-quarters of her life untouchable, unwholesome, unable to satisfy
her mate throughout the entire period Nature constrains her to childbearing, of a sharp turn of humor, shrill, shrewish, bitter, and thwart; a tyrant if you allow her privileges, mean, vile, and a sneak in bondage; always false, forever mischievous, constantly dangerous; in short, a being so perverse that during several convocations the question was very soberly agitated at the Council of Macon whether or not this peculiar creature, as distinct from man as is man from the ape, had any reasonably legitimate pretensions to classification as a human…”
–Marquis de Sade
LikeLiked by 1 person