Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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

sry

profound hopelessness and alienation should not be a universal adolescent experience

I don't know about "universal", but in the USA, most of the slightly-older adolescents who have passed the age of puberty (which is its own horrible thing) have a good understanding that apart from exploiting them at every opportunity, society has no place for them or interest in them at all. Even the really bright ones who are constantly told they are the future leaders of the country know the best they can realistically hope for is being highly paid servants of the oligarchy. Humans are not well-designed for living in vast impersonal herds.

really? we seem to be doing a p bang-up job of it what with however many billions of us there are now

you call this doing a bang-up job?

You’re not supposed to look in there.

― Trϵϵship, Wednesday, December 12, 2018 1:48 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

will not again, promise. I just saw the revive and wondered if it was in response to this thread and it was.

ha you are allowed to look but not to post. it's a public thread iirc

you are allowed to peek, but not to peak

can't remember who the ilx man was that posted in there before. was very classic "well, actually"

purportedly we have been mansplaining about incels. Can't we just have this be our safe space to mansplain?

By "this" do you mean all of ilx?

lol

we have a male only thread its mainly for powerwasher talk

its good tho

mansplaining about incels is like dancing about architecture

good if we kept toxic/aggressive sexist terms like the splaining word off the masculinity thread feel like the tendency to sneer is already unhelpful enough on the topic around here nest pas

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 hope that people read that Ijeoma Oluo essay that inorbit posted. There is so much truth in there.

man alive, do you have a kid into that Frozen movie? because threads that are not for you, you’ve just got to ponder their comments a moment and then... there’s a song for that

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)

it was a little... solipsistic for me. it's a variety of self-hatred where one is simultaneously better and worse than everybody else, and you hate everybody else for being better than you and not as good as you at the same time.

i don't know if i'd necessarily identify these incels as "cishet". there's a tortured relationship to gender and masculinity present that's certainly not queer, but addresses gender more specifically than any of the "default male" types do.