Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

xp wrt whether a particular person is “actually” unattractive, I'd say that's determined by whether people are (sexually/romantically) attracted to them or not? that's the sense in which I was talking about attractiveness

Soref I’m saying that there are people in this world who’ve done the work to not give others perceptions so much power over them and their sense of self worth. Why just accept the measure of desirability as if it were external, static and unchanging, determined solely by others? Or why accept the most limited and brutal standard of desirability and internalize it?

There's quite honestly no such thing as being 'involuntarily celibate'.

eh this is bullshit. you can be dealt a bad hand in so many ways by being born into bad circumstances or not lucking out in the gene pool.

i mean let's say you are born with perpetual sadface and parents are abusive towards each other, you might have some problems connecting to others when you grow up

sciatica otm, there are lots of "jolie laide" examples out there (the reason we don't have a masculine term for that quality is probably because that is like half of all dudes) - the truly unattractive quality in all the incel types is their egocentric view of the world and complete disinterest in everybody else.

Adam's also right though but these self-appointed "incel" cats are on a different tip

add to that inheriting depression, if you have low self esteem it's far more difficult, or addictive tendencies, alcholism, etc. these can be things beyond our control that drastically effect our lives.

uh no resting sad face and mean parents and a tendency towards addicition is not what I meant. I thought you were talking about, like, certain types of dysplasia and such.

Soref I’m saying that there are people in this world who’ve done the work to not give others perceptions so much power over them and their sense of self worth. Why just accept the measure of desirability as if it were external, static and unchanging, determined solely by others? Or why accept the most limited and brutal standard of desirability and internalize it?

I mean, I guess a person can declare that by their own subjective standards they are most desirable person in the world, even if no one actually desires them, but this seems like it would be fairly meaningless? and even demonstrate the 'egocentric view of the world and complete disinterest in everybody else' that Tombot sees in incels?

I think you have completely misunderstood what sciatica and I are getting at. there are ways to live in your own skin and project attractiveness without being a narcissist.

uh no resting sad face and mean parents and a tendency towards addicition is not what I meant. I thought you were talking about, like, certain types of dysplasia and such.

― El Tomboto, Saturday, April 28, 2018 3:38 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark

these are all genetic things you can inherent. anyways relationships aren't just based on looks, they are based on social behavior, attitude, subtler visual cues, etc. my point was there are things beyond our control that go past "attractive y/n" that factor into getting (and especially maintaining) relationships.

Thanks Adam. I guess I consider most of those to be generally surmountable, though yes, they can be inherited and they suck.

Just for example, though, how many of the incel community would expect us to look up their word for themselves, and find them worthy of sympathy, but wouldn't be remotely interested in googling what "jolie laide" means, much less give the time of day to any woman who might be labeled as such?

I've wasted enough time on this topic. These fucking schmucks can all go self-immolate in one of those forests where regular fires are necessary for renewal and the overall health of the ecosystem.

Soref go watch a John Waters movie or two and then we can continue this conversation.

Adam: Even if you're depressive, alcoholic, etc, you can see a prostitute. I feel for people who are having trouble maintaining relationships - I have too, and have been celibate for long periods at a time - but with the way society is organized, everyone gets to have sex if they choose. But we don't get to have exactly the sex life that we want, which is extremely frustrating. But also, we've JUST gotten to a point where women are allowed to enjoy sex at all, and it's not as if it's just 100% acceptance and loads of orgasms all the time for them too, to put it mildly.

this is another big problem with the incels, "go see a prostitute" is not useful for a lot of them because they're looking for meaningful emotional connections, and, crucially, they can't differentiate between that and sex. there's this like raw inchoate terror of being "friendzoned", like the worst thing in the world for them is having a female friend. i do sometimes have difficulty wrapping my head around how fucked up that is, and i understand many different varieties of fucked up.

https://media2.fdncms.com/stranger/imager/u/large/26093556/1524664300-1524664273_tmp_sexworkerwomenfagen.jpg

That has nothing to do with what I wrote.

Elliot Rodger not really physically unattractive from what I've seen.

'violent men' need to go to jail, I hope we're not discussing how to help violent men get laid easier.

What are the stats on the % of Americans who solicit sex workers? (IRL encounters only.) Personally, as someone who often goes long stretches without sex, I can't imagine ever getting to the point where I feel the need to pay for sex, but that might just be the ol' catholic guilt acting up

BTW, many xps, but I think most people you ask would not consider masturbation as constituting a "sex life" on its own.

idk if that was in response to me but that was not at all what I was saying, I was just replying to the posts upthread about how incels are just hopelessly unattractive dudes

i know that growing up i received a lot of fucked up messages (from like everywhere) about the things that men are supposed to want and supposed to do and supposed to be w.r.t. women. I was raised under the assumption that normal people fall in love and get married and that they do it young. i was also a weird kid who got teased a lot. and i also spent a lot of nights as a preteen obsessing over how much i hated myself because girls didn't like me. and i played a lot of video games that were full of heroic male protagonists who were rewarded with beautiful ingenues falling at their feet e.g. final fantasy. and i posted on message boards with a lot of video game nerds like me. so this whole thing feels very "there but for the grace of god" to me. I don't give a fuck about whether or not these dudes get laid but there needs to be someone who can step in and somehow reverse all this damaged/damaging thinking. and i think saying they're beyond any possibility of help is cowardly.

xposts to fred

soref and ogmor deserve a better board

no, crüt, I was responding to the tweet about 'violent men' :)

I guess a person can declare that by their own subjective standards they are most desirable person in the world, even if no one actually desires them, but this seems like it would be fairly meaningless?

This seems like such incel logic to me: desire is not particular, idiosyncratic and relational but rather generalized, immutable and, most importantly, dominant. Either everyone desires me, or no one does. Regardless, my point in responding to soref in the first place was that “desirability” or the lack of it isn’t a useful indicator for whether men go down this road (a point others have also made today); more often it seems like a post-hoc justification—often a dysmorphic or just bizarre one—for attitudes of entitlement, inheritance and generally seeing others as property. Many people not born male, straight, tall and lithe have found ways around conventional notions of attractiveness and desirability in order to have successful, grownup, satisfying relationships. If you really want to ask the question, in good faith, well then what do we do with all the ugly dudes? maybe we can look to other constructive examples rather than fretting over yet another excuse for self-absorbed men to be antisocial and violent.

Frederik how much do you imagine sex workers charge

Not as much as they deserve

Trying to imagine how you think this relates to the discussion, and it's honestly creeping me out.

Well yr theory of universal sex access is idiotic, was my point.

Hesitating about posting this because it feels way too personal, but going to go for it.

It seems odd that anyone is having trouble understanding incels, it seems like such an inevitable thing to happen, but I guess it's just that I have personal experience in this area.

I was a virgin until the age of 23. By that point I'd spent four years going out clubbing, taking all manner of drugs, doing lots of very social stuff. I couldn't get laid simply because I had extremely low self-esteem, could not fathom anyone ever being attracted to me, and had no idea whatsoever how to do flirting. It felt like everyone else understood how to play this game and the universe had decided, unfairly, to make me the one person who would always try and fail. Actually (mainly due to the drugs) I didn't have much of a sex drive anyway, but wow was I lonely, perhaps that's what scared everyone off, I was only really looking for a serious relationship, sex was still a complete mystery then. So yeah, I was frustrated and, just generally miserable, and it fed into a self-destructive nihilism, a feeling of being short-changed by the world, just having a relationship seemed like the whole point of being alive and every attempt I made at it ended in failure.

And yet I never ended up as one of these assholes, I guess because my parents managed to instill in me basic respect for women and I only really encountered mysoginistic attitudes from the lad culture of the time, which I found totally repellant. But not everyone has that headstart, my family is unusual and my friends were never sexists, plus there wasn't such a body of fucked up stuff out there for me to find.

I truly believe that these guys are involuntarily celibate - not sure why we should bother questioning that. The point is that they are an easy target to feed mysoginistic hate and be shaped by it, and what if anything can be done about that? Everyone needs love and understanding in their life, not just nice people. The empathy failure here doesn't begin and end with the incels themselves.

(BTW I also agree that these people, simply through being white cis-het men, are expecting and getting way too much attention, but their not understanding this is kind of the point anyway)

i agree that there is a larger problem and that we should address it. i just don't think addressing the larger problem needs to start with these shithead babies, particularly given that they will personally fight any attempt to address the larger problem.

this kind of tweet keeps popping up

let's not start using the term 'poor' as if it's a valid concept. it isn't. no one is owed money. we already *have* a word for those who call themselves 'poor': 'thief' pic.twitter.com/ljmdKgzzaW

— St. Rev ☯️🏴😻 (@St_Rev) April 26, 2018

it's a provocative thought, even interesting, but simply wrong. wealth and sex/love are simply not equivalent. an incel who longs for genuine sexual attraction is not equivalent to a poor person longing for wealth. sexual attraction, romantic attachment etc are so immediate, uncontrollable, fixed—they are not things that can be "redistributed," in any real sense. some things are not supposed to be "democratic," they just dont work that way

even if we must take the incel predicament seriously (and, like, should we? should we take their words at face value?), I just can't find much consolation for them: life is difficult and love is not for everyone. most people have many unfulfilled desires, physical or psychological attributes they don't like about themselves and can't change, etc, but they dont lash out by killing people and blaming women. many of these guys have easy, if sexless, lives going for them & they should seek fulfillment in other spheres of life.

sciatica has been way otm itt

i feel like a lot of people just ... stop growing at a certain point. there's only so much energy an outsider can spare to try to kickstart new growth in a person when that person has decided they're done.

yep

I truly believe that these guys are involuntarily celibate - not sure why we should bother questioning that.

yeah i mean the problem is that this isn't a useful way to define anything. are they this way because they don't view seeing a sex worker as a solution (nb i'm not advocating for that as a "solution," just using an exampe)? because they want a real emotional/romantic connection in addition to sex? because no one who they see as an 8/10 or better will fuck them?

there are lots of reasons why people don't get laid. it's only when some of them self-organize into a "community" that we start to see this term being used, and it's irreconcilably tied together with violent misogynist beliefs, so i disagree with any attempt to legitimize it.

they need a new word because the definition of celibicacy includes a voluntary abstention from the pursuit of sex

the word choice is deliberate, though, because claiming their celibacy was “forced” would imply specific entities were in control. it’s kept pretty nebulous because seeing the whole situation as a culmination of societal forces divorces them from admitting any flaw in their personal sense of agency

xpost — seen a bit of chatter from female sex workers on the twitter about how they *really* would rather not have the asshole women hating incels come to them because they are assholes that’d treat them like shit and that is of course an absolutely frightening position to be in

(as opposed to the shy/awkward/anxious/low social skills incels that genuinely want connection with a lady)

the only solution for the dangerous asshole incels is proper counselling and exposure to polite society but just cannot see that happening

the word choice is deliberate, though, because claiming their celibacy was “forced” would imply specific entities were in control. it’s kept pretty nebulous because seeing the whole situation as a culmination of societal forces divorces them from admitting any flaw in their personal sense of agency

this argument - that 'incels' blame women for their inability to get laid and/or form romantic relationships to avoid blaming the real culprit, i.e. themselves - both of these worldviews seem to take it for granted that there must be *someone* to blame, that there's some kind of moral dimension to whether you can get laid or not - if you can't get laid it's either because you are morally lacking or if you don't think you're morally lacking then an injustice has been done to you. But I think the fact that some people will be rejects in terms of sex and relationships is just an unfortunate, unfixable fact, no one is necessarily to blame for that.

the word choice is deliberate, though, because claiming their celibacy was “forced” would imply specific entities were in control.

I don't think this follows? even if their celibacy is involuntary that doesn't require specific entities to be in control, just impersonal amoral forces. like epigone says you can't redistribute sex like you redistribute money, there's no unfair authority that incels can legitimately target their rage and resentment at for denying them what they want, but I don't think that means (as a lot of ppl suggest) that they should therefore target that rage at themselves instead - for one thing it seems like they already do target rage and resentment towards themselves, but also there doesn't have to be anyone to blame, their inability to get laid can just be a morally neutral fact

when ppl make the argument that the problem isn't these guys inability to get laid, it's that they are entitled enough to feel they *deserve* to get laid - I mean this is true, but in the sense that no-one 'deserves' sex or love, and whether you get those things has nothing to do with how 'deserving' you are - but I feel like a lot of ppl saying the problem is entitlement frame it in a way that suggests that the incels are not sufficiently deserving compared to the ppl who do get sex and romantic relationships, that they haven't earned the right to sex, unlike the deserving sex-havers - that some ppl deserve sex, just not you.

I think most people who aren't consumed by self-hatred feel at some level like they deserve to be loved and desired, or at least feeling you deserve this is necessary to feel good about yourself, the validation of being desired by someone else. How can you not be bummed out by the realisation that no-one desires you, that you have been assessed and found wanting in this fundamental measure of human worth? I think it's ok to feel unhappy about being in that predicament, and I don't think it helps to say "the problem isn't that you are an unloved reject, the problem is that you are arrogant enough to think that you should be anything more than an unloved reject, that you should have the kind of romantic/sexual relationships that the overwhelming majority of your peers have". The problem is when these 'incels' construct some imaginary authority that is denying them what they want, because that authority doesn't exist

Yes, agree with that very much, but would add that while there isn't an authority to blame, there is a (patriarchal) society which fails to equip them with the required skills to get by in life, which is an obvious point of course, but one which is apparently ignored by incels and incel-haters alike.

Soref go watch a John Waters movie or two and then we can continue this conversation.

― sciatica, Saturday, April 28, 2018 9:02 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel oddly wounded by this because I love John Waters movies and I'm worried that I've betrayed the spirit of John Waters

There is a pretty frustrating thing happening here, which is that some pf us are trying to explain what 'incels' are saying, and why it doesn't make sense, and then people like soref are pointing out what we say does not make sense, but blaming us. It's so facile to conclude that something is 'ignored by incels and incel-haters alike.' Let me assure you, it's not. But these misogynist women-killers ARE A PART of the patriarchy, so we don't see them as victims.

I've been writing and reading about PUAhaters for more than a year at this point, and them finding women at fault for is a central part of the ideology. One guy wrote about his hatred that a 'deal' was broken, because he was working to help the environment, he was a good guy, and therefore women should want him. That was the agreement, so that he still got rejected must mean that feminism was a lie and had to be fought.

It's not about a lack of sex, as much as it's about a loss of sexual status that has come with modern sexual mores, where women are allowed to act on their own attraction.

Of course they are a part of the patriarchy, but of course the patriarchy has created their problems in the first place, in that sense they are some of its victims - not its worst victims obviously, but the patriarchy has certainly not worked out well for them. Their ridiculous 'ideology' is beside the point - these are fundamentally damaged people who are lashing out.
There seems to be a thread of almost libertarian "personal responsibility for actions" stuff going on in this discussion which I think we would be uncomfortable with if talking about more obviously sympathetic people.

Contrary, if people were complaining that Dylann Roof should also be seen as a victim of white supremacy, we would be upset. 'Obviously sympathetic', we're talking about a mass murder comitted a few days ago.

Agreed. Teasing out the sociopolitical climate and speculating on the personal circumstances which produce incels, is entirely beside the point. Other people live in the same society under similar conditions and react differently to their lot in life. These people are simply ugly misogynists and should be treated as such. Trying to "understand" is like explaining racism on the basis of poor treatment by people of other races, or a society in which inequities are reinforced. IT DOESN'T MATTER. Misogyny is WRONG, I don't give a fuck how you justify it to yourself or how you got there.

Yes, all of these things cannot be addressed simply on a level of personal responsibility, is that a controversial view?

I kind of think it does matter, at least on a psychological/sociological level, why some people go this way and others don't, not just incels but other misogynist (or racist/homophobic) groups or individuals. If there is anything to be learned about how to stop this. Although it's probably fair to say a bunch of ilxors aren't necessarily going to be ones who come up with the magic solution.

fwiw the term "involuntarily celibate" wasn't invented by these people, it predates the internet, I remember seeing it in NME or Melody Maker in the early 90s as an insult to heavy metal and unfashionable indie fans.