Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

i think as observers we should stop calling them "incels" and validating their belief that this is their real problem

jesus this thread blew up

for what it's worth these guys get no sympathy from me, none of these people have any problems i haven't had, and if they choose to deal with it by pooping themselves and trying to give themselves theodore roosevelt neck that's their own damn fault

yeah i mean, i'm certainly not volunteering to befriend these people. but at the same time i do feel like some of these people are experiencing a deep inner circle of misery that i, for all of my bouts with depression, just haven't. i never turned to hatred for sustenance.

i also think the internet has a lot to answer for here. many of these guys could have been on a different path--they got recruited into a hate ideology

For sure. I give thanks regularly that the internet wasn’t a thing when I was an awkward depressed acne-ridden late teen with delusions of grandeur, low self-esteem, a chip on my shoulder and a need to please. I probably wouldn’t have ended up in an incel vortex but ... the possibility definitely exists I might have.

yeah there are a lot of things about how we live now that are not cool. theses types of communities are a symptom--an extreme one--but i regard them that way.

really want to hear more about Yerac’s relative with the wilderness rehab camp, how it was not voluntary but yet helpful? like I really hope it’s not the abduction-style scenario I have read about but...

jesus this thread blew up

more like droned on, with the exception of good hoos posts

no one should ever have to be faced with discussion of incels online or irl again. that's my 2020 platform.

That's kind of you map but good contributions all around imo

http://www.startribune.com/growing-men-s-shed-movement-gives-retirees-a-place-to-talk-give-back-and-feel-valued/502210701/

MEN'S SHEDS

FOR MEN

TO STAVE OFF DEPRESSION AND SUICIDE

WITH GLUE STICKS

― j., Wednesday, 12 December 2018 02:36 (three hours ago) Permalink

This actually seems very sweet and like a good thing and I kind of wish we didn't feel this impulse to mock anything like this. That feels very much like *part of the problem*.

yep

sorry, sorry, i'm trying to delete it

God bless them for not calling it a 'he shed.'

yeah i mean, i'm certainly not volunteering to befriend these people. but at the same time i do feel like some of these people are experiencing a deep inner circle of misery that i, for all of my bouts with depression, just haven't. i never turned to hatred for sustenance.

― Trϵϵship

I did. The Internet was a thing when I was an awkward depressed acne-ridden late teen with delusions of grandeur, low self-esteem, and a chip on my shoulder. I was absolutely an asshole troll in the '90s. You know, in hindsight I was wrong about a lot of things, but as miserable and fucked up as I was and as many mistakes as I made, I wouldn't have said or done the things they say and do. Depression takes a lot of away personal agency, sure, but these guys still have choices, and they're consistently making the worst possible choices.

Just to play devil's advocate, back in the 90s, the internet didn't provide as many opportunities to be an irredeemable troll.

Incel ideology is thorough & robust in the same way that other depressive thinking can be: it anticipates most challenges, it feeds off failed attempts to engage and it feels intuitive because it harnesses lots of ideas and attitudes that exist in the wider culture. If you’re disgusted by them, they feed off it. If you think they don’t ‘deserve’ to feel that bad and are being self-indulgent, they feed off it. If you think it would be easy for them not to be so hateful and there is no excusing their behaviour, they feed off it. Not that they need to be engaged; it’s primarily acquired passively. They at once feel anger from feeling excluded from the patriarchy and can draw on all anger directed at it & all attempts to shame sexist and toxic behaviour. That’s robust! The most secure, virtuous and well-adjusted can feel jaded & dejected reading social media, it’s impossible to empathise with everyone enough to read them all charitably. If you’re inclined to lean into that feeling you have a seemingly infinite source of self-destructive energy.

The Contrapoint about masochistic epistemology – ‘whatever hurts is true’ – was striking to me bc it’s become such a deeply ingrained part of how ppl in 2018 moralise more generally. It’s the intuitive appeal of what ppl deride as ‘victim culture’ or the ‘oppression olympics’, or a clip I just saw of Sarah Kendzior criticising the US media in which she said “what matters is who gets hurt”. Suffering becomes this unassailable foundation that you can build an identity on, and as suffering is subjective and sympathy is limited and unreliable, this will tend to drive division.

I agree w/ treesh and think pathologising is a bad idea because it reifies their bullshit and continues to mask the differences between them, and their humanity, which is their only way out. Individuals might benefit from exercising, buying jeans, reading self-help, becoming religious, or doing any of the other things that help ppl calm down and feel in control, but I don’t see why there would be one primary solution. Lots of ppl will have internet addictions but that’s not necessarily easily treated in a blanket manner either. Personally I think striving for an evolution of The Lads should be a worthwhile project and might help some of these guys, but that’s one of the toughest jobs going.

xpost, the wilderness camp was probably ten if not more years ago so I don't remember much. He was in high school, not going because of body image issues, bad skin, had hopes of being a white boy rapper...He actually did get taken in the middle of the night. I think the whole thing was very expensive. His dad got to visit once like 1-2 months into it and then when he went to pick him up ( I remember this because the camp was in NY and he stayed with us in NYC). I think they had therapists there to lead the group sessions but it was a lot of just having to live, work and talk with other people. I think he was there 3 months? I am sure that didn't solve everything but he finished high school, took awhile to finish college but finally did it, has a job, (lives by himself by the apt was paid for by a parent) works out A LOT (he is super cut) and he's a very very good mediator during conversations. Because I am also pretty troll-y in real life and he just rolls with it.

Just to play devil's advocate, back in the 90s, the internet didn't provide as many opportunities to be an irredeemable troll.

― pomenitul

True. I would've done a different set of terrible things as a late teen in 2016 than I actually did as a late teen in 1996. Even accounting for that, I can't see that I would have chosen that path, and it's not because I'm a "good person".

plenty of people behaved irredeemably in the 90s offline too and i'm not sure the market for devil's advocacy isn't what it used to be

oops *is* what it used to be (if there really ever was one)
big whoops there

Honestly I struggle to figure out why I didn't go the way they did even though I was and am fucked up in all the ways they are. I think the thing in me that detests them most is my pride in my ability to self-sabotage. Sure, you could completely destroy your entire life by deliberately constantly pooping yourself, but it's such a lazy and uninteresting way to self-sabotage. I like to flatter myself that my self-sabotage is of a higher standard.

Someone I know had her OWN KID nabbed out of his bed in the middle of the night and sent to wilderness camp across the country after he was found with pot in school. Apparently she used his whole college savings account to do it, so those places must be $$$.

I met him when he came back. He seemed fine, but still 100% uninterested in the upper middle class suburban life his mom wanted him to be grateful for.

good post ogmor

Maybe the market for devil's advocacy isn't what it used to be because of the internet.

Seriously, though, I do think it has changed our shitty behaviour. I don't know if it has made us better or worse, but certain types of irredeemable offline nastiness are indeed less prevalent nowadays, in part because they've been sublimated by online free speech. But the more time we spend online, the harder it becomes to construe the internet as a secondary, cathartic trash can for what we do IRL. Our virtual shittiness spills back into 'reality', so maybe the circuit is the only thing that has changed.

I finally watched that Contrapoints video on incels btw (everyone should see it), and I get what you mean, ogmor, but to my mind (and hers) therapy can help us move away from this masochistic epistemology, which I think we are all invested in to some extent. It just needs to do a better job of acknowledging the particulars of inceldom and not view them as wholly alien-like and abject, no matter how tempting that might be, especially in light of that guy who committed suicide after shitting his pants on camera.

Just to play devil's advocate, back in the 90s, the internet didn't provide as many opportunities to be an irredeemable troll.

being able to crosspost your trolling to any number of newgroups really saved time for going outside and doing things

i think the thing i don't get most about incels is that when i was an unfuckable 19 year old loser cishet white-passing man who played too much Counterstrike and struggled with anxiety disorder, depression and borderline alcoholism i attributed this to me being shitty and not anything else

i guess i was a bit of a red diaper baby and in my general milieu radical reactionary conservatism wasn't really an option

I mean, same (just sub in "white" for "white-passing") but I'm not exactly shocked that other ppl aren't content to settle with merely constant self-loathing xp

I mean, same (just sub in "white" for "white-passing") but I'm not exactly shocked that other ppl aren't content to settle with merely constant self-loathing xp

― resident hack (Simon H.), Wednesday, December 12, 2018 9:34 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im not really sure how we harness the really negative, (borderline) malevolence of the negative feelings in that kind of man/boy for good tho. obv a lot of the online anime "MLs"and stuff are basically incels who have found a different manichean viewpoint to vent their rage about. now even if they were venting their rage about the "correct" political line (anarcho-gramsco-illichian-syndicalism or whatever) it's a little hard to see how this kind of person with these kind of motivations can make a good comrade

I would think that's where effective mentorship comes in, but yeah, that's tough to do in volunteer orgs.

There is a mental health epidemic affecting men and women. These people are a symptom—problematic bc of the antisocial dimension of their coping mechanism—but in a good society people wouldn’t congratulate themselves for believing, as teens, that it was their fault alone that they hated themselves.

profound hopelessness and alienation should not be a universal adolescent experience

This is the bleakest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

i don't think of it as a universal experience

It’s too much though

We shouldn’t have a whole subculture of shut ins getting radicalized by a hate ideology with everyone looking around mystified about what can be done to reach them. What the fuck.

I can't speak for others, but while embracing personal responsibility went a long way towards getting me out of that particular rut in my late teens/early twenties, there were several exogenous, societal reasons for my despair (which was never as all-pervasive as that of an incel tbf) that haven't really changed in the interim and it would be cruel not to acknowledge it.

There's a lot of things we shouldn't have, Treeship!

In the same way as Simon cautioned upthread not to overestimate the influence of DSA, I think we should take care not to overestimate the influence or size of incel "culture." As bleak and tragic as their effect has been, I really don't think there are actually that many of these dudes out there.

I really hope not

I mean, the subreddit had 40k subscribers prior to being banned, but that actually doesn't seem huge. r/blackpeopletwitter has 1.4 million. r/twoxchromosomes has 11 million. even the chapo subreddit has 64,000.

However I think it's an extreme of the larger PUA/MRA/alt-right nexus.

FYI I peaked in the girls only thread and they were talking shit about this thread and I feel very much like I just overheard the conversation from the girls' bunk at camp

You’re not supposed to look in there.

and if you eavesdrop you can't be too upset about what you overhear
it wasn't abundant shit talking, more like steam release

i think the thing i don't get most about incels is that when i was an unfuckable 19 year old loser cishet white-passing man who played too much Counterstrike and struggled with anxiety disorder, depression and borderline alcoholism i attributed this to me being shitty and not anything else

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, December 12, 2018 11:32 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

anxiety is a hell of a time waster. the real way to get past life being difficult is to actually do things, and anxiety is more interesting in feeding itself than acting on anything. that's what felt the worst about the interview article linked this week -- the guy was just resigned to the idea that he was a person that therapy doesn't work on. La Lechera is right to say that some sort of inpatient program (or even retreat) is a way things might work. you have to actually do things. if you are at a place where they make you do things, even if it's getting out of bed, attending a group, doing activities, then you're at least getting the ball rolling

attending therapy and then going home and taking medication but not changing your routine does little on its own

repeating myself here, but the bottomless rumination on why and how you are the way you are is often just anxiety or an obsessive disorder churning

otm

and if you eavesdrop you can't be too upset about what you overhear
it wasn't abundant shit talking, more like steam release

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Wednesday, December 12, 2018 1:50 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm really not, I was sort of joking