Sympathy for the Incel
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
So there is a cost to polygamy, a cost to preferentially aborting female babies, a cost to women not needing men for survival, a cost to not sending men off to die in war, and so on. The result is a greater potential for violence and general mischief.
We tend to think of sex as low-priority compared to things like air and water and food. If we ignore the time scale though, and instead focus on what these things mean in an evolutionary sense, it is clear that they are equal. We need air... so that ultimately we can pass on our DNA. With a long-term perspective, it is clear that sex is on an equal footing with things like air and water and food.
When a good chunk of the population is being denied something so essential, we're facing serious trouble.
The incel phenomenon is not about the act itself. Especially not in an era of many forms of highly available internet-based sex work. No, it's about power and status. That is fundamentally harder to solve. A more egalitarian society just makes them angrier, as suddenly there's fewer people they can feel superior to.
(Remember that the word was coined by a queer woman; there are plenty of people who feel that they are unwanted sexually but aren't going to flip into mass murder because of it.)
To quote Houellebecq:
> “It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”
Not for the women. At what date in your society were women given the right to not be raped within marriage? (In the UK this was 1986, by the way)
Empathy is pretending to feel what its like as another person. It's not the same thing as sympathy. It is possible empathise with an angry hateful person as much as with a happy loving person. For me, it's a good tool to use to help understand what the other person wants, and how they are behaving.
How many times do you read something which says "I don't understand why they would do this thing / act this way / vote for that / like this thing"? How many times is that person you? Those statements are true statements about the giver - that person literally doesn't understand the other person. But the question they ask is not actually asking for understanding - they are telling you that their target is The Other - that it is impossible to understand. And they haven't tried empathy. Sometimes that person might be disgusted even thinking about using empathy on the other that they disagree with.
https://coed.com/2013/06/01/japanese-medical-hand-jobs-for-d...
Not saying incel folks are in need of this but it’s obviously beyond time we legalize sexual services as a profession.
- Belonging
- A Path
- Status
For most men in the past, family has provided both the path and belonging (in addition to career and hobbies etc).
As for status, it was a lot easier to be good at something in your small circles. Now with the internet it's almost impossible to be good at anything vs the rest of the world.
As for how we solve this, I'm not sure.
I've seen quite a few very lonely people turn to obscure cults, obscure philosophies, weird health communities, or smaller, sectarian movements within a bigger religious community. And from personal knowledge of some of these people, the underlying dynamic was always a kind of resentment towards and rejection of 'everyone else'.
One example that I found particularly painful to experience was a guy I met a few years ago. We got along well, but he had the extremely grating tendency to describe everyone as stupid ('sheeple'), unintelligent, inferior, etc. He was really taken with what I suppose you could call 'scientism' and gravitated towards the aspects of it that were mainly about belittling others. For example, he was a huge fan of some videos where Richard Dawkins would read semi-illiterate letters people had written to him, many of them religious obviously. All his colleagues were stupid too.
Over time I discovered that he'd had a shitty childhood (terrible family, school bullying), and this had just kind of continued on until his thirties. In the years he'd lived in our city he'd not made a single longer-term friend, and had never really had anything resembling a relationship. It seemed rather obvious that hating/rejecting the world because it never included him was more a defense-mechanism than anything.
What really hurt to see though, was that he was actually a pretty nice guy, he'd just never learned how to 'do' inter-human relationships! He was smart, funny, creative, sorta-caring and far from an 'inherent' asshole. He just truly never learned how friendship works. He never learned how to have a 'normal' conversation. And considering how much work and experience it takes to do social life right, it depressed me to think that he might never 'catch up'.
As an aside, I suspect this guy was on the autism spectrum. I think we often overlook how much effort, anxiety, and experience it takes for some people to even just pull off 'weirdo, but okay' socially.
This is a tough read, and I admire the author for tackling the subject, especially in the wake of the recent killings. To even suggest sympathy for a group that are so manifestly unsympathetic is brave. And the incels themselves, man, I just want to shake these guys and say, "It's not all about sex. It's not all about you. Get over yourself. Get a life."
No one deserves sex. But I don't think we're doing the world any favors by piling on to people who are clearly in pain, no matter how much it's of their own making.
There are most likely situations where prostitution is not exploitation, but I don't think they justify making it something normal. I'd rather live in a society in which we agree that some things are not for sale. Intimacy seems to me like a good candidate for something that is not for sale.
We want people to stop objectifying women, let's not have womens' bodies routinely sold and bought.
Perhaps it is the best way for her to get ahead and escape her current situation. People do it anyway and now they have almost no recourse when they are being manipulated. If it were legal, women would actually have more power in the situation.
Consider also according to studies, a majority of voluntary prostitutes have been victims of abuse as children.
It begins with years of bullying at school, well before puberty.
Making sex work legal doesn't seem like a solution that addresses anything about the actual root cause of this issue.
So I think as a palliative measure, legalizing sex work is long overdue. Some sex is better than none at all.
Also, incels are prepared to murder other people. Why do you think sex work laws are a deterrant?
And if you examine the community, you'll quickly find that they don't think sex work "counts". Because what they want isn't sex, it's the status they imagine it confers, and if you had to pay for it, you didn't "earn" that status.
Theres a consistent theme here in portraying culprits who are white as victims or sympathetic. Whether its contrasting breivik to jihadists, or incels to african american victims of police shootings or white nationalists to BLM protesters.
I think a bit more intellectual honesty might have a dramatic effect on the level of social engagement.
Personally I'd like it if we could just empathize with all of these 'culprits' and actually do something about the situation, even if just for one of these groups, rather than argue about who deserves more empathy or sympathy.