Hacker News Reader

Comment by fromthestart | Hacker News Reader

So, one can not criticize the dating experience, and recognize that it is biased in favor of women, without being slandered as an incel?

Why do you think more men are turning to such extremism? You think they are perpetually frustrated and bitter by choice?

Remember when we used to call these men "geeks" and "nerds"? Why won't anyone acknowledge the validity of their involuntary suffering? These men are marginalized and exist on the outskirts of society for reasons beyond their choosing.

Attractiveness is a continuum, and there's only so much one can do to raise ones percieved value to meet the standards of others. It isn't a secret that apps like tinder tend to make women even more selective.

View on HN

> These men are marginalized and exist on the outskirts of society for reasons beyond their choosing.

I can assure you that the reason that most self professed incels are on the outskirts of society is that they’re fucking creepy. I mean have you read their subreddits. They make my skin crawl. And I have no idea what any of them look like.

Inceldom is an extremist manifestion of a growing epidemic of loneliness. Frankly, they have nothing to do with this actual discussion, and stifle discussions around male loneliness.

>is that they’re fucking creepy.

That's the point. They're different. What does creepy mean? Difficulty with social norms? Unusual interests? Physical unnatractiveness? You think these are choices? Incels are just especially self aware and bitter "geeks" and "nerds" of yore, back before those terms were coopted by the mainstream.

I think these men are bitter because they exist with the same needs for romance that you and I do, but have no realistic way of actualizing these desires. Their pain is involuntary and real. Look past the vileness of their rhetoric and understand that they are suffering.

Most of the incels discussion gives vibe of people who are completely socially isolated - not even really having friends or other regular social group which I would see as prerequisite to girlfriend. If there is no one the guy can get along with, it is unlikely he will be able to get along with a single girl. Additionally, quite a lot of them gives vibe of someone who is dangerous to be dated, plain as simple.

If this is how they act from not having partner frustration, what they will do when a girl disagree with them over something important, when she has simply bad mood, when there are serious money or sickness problems affecting relationships, when his and her career clash, when they are sleep deprived due to baby etc? Answer: likely badly.

I think he means creepy on scale that Elliot Rogers was creepy. Complaining about not dating hot girl while thinking about her mostly as status item to be admired by other guys. Finding it unfair throwing fit when ugly guy has a girlfriend. while not being able to hold conversation with anyone without becoming agressive for petty reasons. Seeing all the other guys as assholes.

Finding it unfair that nice cloths and money did not magically made him girlfriend. All the while he was talking about how he is supreme gentleman.

This isn't really a good faith argument - I'm sure there are plenty of regular users on this site that fit into the bucket of "bad at dating" but have a good career, at least a few decent friends, and aren't quoting serial killers or vocal visitors of some dark internet hole.

All the "incels are/worship serial killer weirdos" rhetoric does is politicize the subject into an unarguable tribal debate.

There is no bad faith in what I said. That is exactly my consulusion from reading it. Not killers really, but definitely vibe of people who tend to respond to interpersonal problems with abuse and retaliation. Also, they did not seemed to care about relationship with real person warts farts and compromises - they want girl in abstract with no effort to figure what would make real girl suitable partner for them personally except look.

I have no way to judge career and don't care. But their grasp of how human relationships work was off from how I see people behave irl - frankly with most focus on rating and social status supposed to be acquired from pairing.

It is also that part where dating is treated as game separate from other kind of relationships. It is not just how I see it work.

> Most of the incels discussion gives vibe of people who are completely socially isolated - not even really having friends or other regular social group which I would see as prerequisite to girlfriend.

You've stumbled on a circular dependency, but your proposed solution is the equivalent of "just fix it". (The joke in social-anxiety support circles is that all advice boils down to "just be yourself", which turns out to be... unwise.)

What makes these men creepy? Is their behavior innate, or acquired in response to other stimuli? If so, from whom? What have they gone through?

I have a quibble with the word creepy, similar to the word toxic: there are people who give off creepy vibes, there are people with toxic behaviors, but the words are used in place of more specific, clearer adjectives.

Card-carrying incels do exist, but the whole debate overvalues their political/ideological platform, completely ignoring men who go through loneliness, mental health issues, alienation and cultural disconnect but haven't made it into a political meme. Men and women experience all these problems, but they may experience it in different ways. When the subject of incels enters the conversation, everything is reduced to Elliot Rodgers.

I have no idea what made them who they are nor how they interact irl. I know that I always kept away from guys who talk and behave like those on forums, because I see that as red flag for potentially being hit or being insulted in argument or otherwise not being respected. Largely because that is how they they treat and talk abou other people in their lives. Ultimately, in the long term, girlfriend is going to be treated the same.

What I am saying here is that my safety and self respect beats his need to have girlfriend.

I was not trying to give advice here. I can't and abatract general advice is likely to not fit all that many people even if good.

Girlfriend won't and can't fix mental health issue, can't fix alienation nor cultural disconnect. She just can't, the same way boyfriend won't fox the above for a girl.

You're judging people based on a charicature. Your percieved red flags are nothing of the sort. And, in your continued obliviousness, you miss the fact that these people are alienated by shunning like yours.

People are cast off for being "creepy" when this really amounts o ften times to falling outside norms; then you retroactively rationalize your coldness with vague associations of physical danger.

If you want to go by stereotypes, people drawn toward inceldom typically don't have the build, coordination, or practice to be violent. And the scary part is how hard it is to shake such an image if you find yourself on the verges of society, exactly because of nonsensical fears like yours. This isn't any better than racism or sexism, except it is socially acceptable because we have recently come to view men as privileged in the west.

The bottom line is that you, like much of society, like many in "popular" social circles, are biased by an irrational aversion to otherness, except this particular form of tribalism is socially acceptable.

They were not having weird hobbies nor failed eye contact nor had odd phrasing nor are ugly.

The norm talked about here is hating most people, being overly angry over petty issues, crossing into abusive language easily and expecting other people to conform to overly detailed ideas of what exactly they should do. It is not talking about potential partners as about individuals.

Hitting other people does not require coordination or build. It requires belief that it is your right to punish partner or uncontrolled anger.

They were repeatedly banned by reddit for idolizing Eliot Rodgers and talking about murdering people. All it takes to be violent is a gun and hate, and they’re full of hate.

>I think he means creepy on scale that Elliot Rogers was creepy.

The guy that many 'incels' used to lionize, before that constant glorification of violence became a bit too blatant and inconvenient for them. Judging from these sorts of discussions, many among them are not just socially isolated-- rather, they actively hate the people around them to an extent that it's hard to even begin to make sense of. It's a thoroughly nihilistic ("blackpill") attitude to life that sometimes has very, very bad consequences. I suppose that many "pro-masculine" guys might like Jordan Peterson these days, so it might be especially worthwhile to link this (relatively short!) video where he strongly cautions against the "blackpill" thought pattern https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYua-3JmnT4

> What does creepy mean? Difficulty with social norms? Unusual interests? Physical unnatractiveness? You think these are choices?

Creepy when it comes to the incel label typically means one of two things: groundless desire on an individual level (i.e. "he wants me even though he doesn't know me at all") or issues with control or manipulative behavior (i.e. "I deserve for this girl to like me, how do I make her like me?"). Neither of these qualities indicate people who are willing or able to seek genuine emotional connection and neither have anything to do with social norms, interests or hobbies, or physical standards of attractiveness.

You're taking a bad-faith reading of OP's comments: they're not talking about the self-identified incels; they're talking about the majority of single men who are single involuntarily. The latter is the group of which the former are a part. They're not the same thing, and conflating them is disingenuous.

OP raises a valid point about the increasing numbers of single men and the possible long-term health and societal effects of having (say) 20% of men single for their entire 20s. A certain toxic percentage will become incels -- and probably always would have become something like that -- but the remaining 95% are a largely new phenomenon and one I don't think is being taken seriously. We're into new territory here and we'll only find out the results in 10 or 20 years time.

FWIW: I'm not an incel. I've been happily married for five years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com