Sex

Well, this conversation about a program in gender studies and sexuality sure took a hard turn...

I fail to see the logic in arguing that dating sites not being able to produce meaningful data. They have a wealth of information in their systems that includes not just user input but also engagement. OKCupid can, with a few clicks of a mouse, tell exactly which type of profiles are more likely to engage another person versus either lay fallow or send unrequited messages into the ether. Personally, I think that if it hasn't been done yet, it would be really interesting to see scholarly work lean heavily on this data. It's going to be more accurate than a survey. I think it could really provide insight into, if nothing else, the target demographic of online dating.

Consider I never utilized online dating, though it was arguably more in its infancy when I was single. Though my father, who still refuses to have a smartphone, was a regular user of online dating before his present long term relationship with a woman whom he met online. The only flaw I can see immediately is that it is hard to tell if poor performance (in the online dating world) is due to certain demographics being disadvantaged versus there simply being a much smaller sample size. If online dating appeals mostly to Group A and members of Group B are in the minority there, it would be interesting to dig in a bit to see why Group B may not see the results they might hope for.

Perhaps members of Group A don't tend to find members of Group B attractive. Or, perhaps Group B is more likely to include those with social anxieties than Group A, or maybe members of Group B have interests (outside of dating) that simply don't resonate as well with members of Group A. It's an area that has some really interesting data around it that, even with everything currently available, could make for some very interesting research and warrant even more in depth studies.

 

That one shocked everybody. Even with his troubles he was always upbeat and always doing something cool. Never seemed to let anything get him down. He had so many friends. His funeral had so many people it was packed like a concert for a popular rock band. Buses came in, people lined up all the way around the corner. It was a wild scene. You would've thought they were about to bury a President.

All of that just flies in the face of the stereotype of an incel being a social reject. People base their perception of incels on the extremists on Reddit because it's easier to just reference a link than to consider that it's much larger than Reddit and came way before Reddit even existed. It would shock people if they knew how many people around them are actually incels and that some of them are also women.

 

Well here's one definition. They don't sound too good to me.

to search
For other uses, see Incel (disambiguation).

Incels, a portmanteau of "involuntary celibates", are members of an online subculture[1][2] who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom.[3]

Discussions in incel forums are often characterized by resentment, misogyny,[4] misanthropy,[1] self-pity,[5] self-loathing,[6] racism,[4] a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against sexually active people.[4][7][8][9][10] The American nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center described the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups.[11][12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incel

 

Can't disagree with any of that. All of these things are logical positions. What's made me admit defeat is that these are the kinds of things I've told my friends and others who are having trouble and they tell me about how they tried these types of things and how it went horribly wrong. Not all of my friends are in this position, I have friends who are married and in committed relationships, but the number of them that aren't has become troubling in recent years.

I've personally never had trouble attracting a lady. If anything, I had trouble wading through all the offers and before anyone snickers (lol), I should point out that I don't consider myself to have ever been anything but average, so I never really understood why I attracted so many women, but that's precisely what made me think differently about the existence of a problem. I figured, if an average guy can get lots of attention, there must be an opposite side to it where guys get none. I still don't understand either spot, but I've seen it enough to believe there is something going wrong.

 

Since women care less about physical attraction than men do, a lot of average men do get married.

There are multiple reasons why a man might have difficulty finding a partner: poor social skills, bad hygiene, low IQ, financial struggles, mental health problems, history of mistreating women, bad location, criminal record, having unrealistic expectations, etc.

The most common reasons I've seen:

1. Bad hygiene and not caring about physical appearance. Women may not be as picky as men when it comes to looks, but women do want clean men who care about their appearance. I've come across many men who seemed to be unaware that they have bad breath and body odor.

2. Unrealistic expectations. I've come across many men who are less than a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10, they ignore women who are on their level of attractiveness, get turned down by much more attractive women, and then start spewing hate toward women.

3. Financial problems. I came across an article about how there's a growing number of people still living at home with their parents after the age of 25. Most of these people are men. These men are not economically attractive, and partnerships that aren't financially secure are doomed to fail these days since divorce is socially acceptable.

4. History of mistreating women. There are men who think they are good guys when they aren't. There are also women who are delusional about how good of a partner they are, but this conversation has been focusing men who can't find partners.

There's a reason why so many of these incel communities promote multiple forms of hatred. (They're not just on Reddit. They're on every social media platform, extremist forums, and the dark web.) They don't just hate women; they hate everyone. These are all around bad people. Xenophobia, racism, and misogyny are turnoffs for a lot of women, and they can't accept that. There are white supremacists who don't identify as incels, but they also complain about the difficulty of finding a partner who accepts their beliefs.

Less extreme are those who think they are good men because they do the bare minimum. They have a job, and they've never physically abused a woman. They don't realize that abuse takes many forms. These men might have a history of psychologically, emotionally, and/or verbally abusing women. Since women in the West no longer have to depend on a man for financial security, many are not going to endure the abuse and infidelity women in the past tolerated. It wasn't too long ago that women couldn't get credit or loans on their own.

 

This is where Wikipedia troubles me. It's going along with a narrative that seeks to paint all incels as terrible human beings, and struggling because they are terrible human beings. It's an overly-simplistic, entirely one-sided account that looks at the worst of what's on the internet and does the dangerous and dismissive thing I talked about earlier: looking at the person standing at the end of the result rather than looking at the events that led the person there. I can't stress enough how important that is, because if we deal with this that way, we're opening the door to dealing with every social problem the same way and that is going to be a disaster. It won't work and lots of people will get hurt behind it. Of course, I think people generally understand that this wouldn't work if we applied it to all other social problems, but with this that understanding seems to be cast aside. Why?

Would the narrative be different if it weren't identified as a majority male issue? Hard for me to believe otherwise, just for the simple fact that I remember the origins of involuntary celibacy as an identifiable issue heavily including women (and while these subjects were not attractive women by any general standard, they weren't on the worst end of that standard) and during that time it was handled with compassion, albeit by a much smaller audience.

I just want people to for a moment consider that of the millions of men who are living as incels, whether they identify as one or not, their situation is not new. That means they have been living around us and with us as friends (even if we didn't know it), family (even if we didn't know it) and passing acquaintances (even if we didn't know it) for generations, the world has only become smaller and more open to us because of the increase in communication methods, so the problem has a bigger spotlight now. Unfortunately, narrative 2.0 (speaking of it exclusively as a male issue) of inceldom is different from 1.0 (which was spoken of as a general issue among the sexes). Nothing has really changed with what inceldom is from its public inception. So if for all of that time we weren't quick to label all incels with these negatives, there is no reason to do it now other than misandry. No? Think about it: there are lots of terrible people in every group. There are terrible Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, Whites, Blacks, Gays, Straights, and lots of them, and they ALL have people in their groups that have done countless heinous acts since time immemorial, yet every single one of us would immediately deem a person ignorant if they were to call the entirety of the people of any of those groups I mentioned "terrible people". However, with incels, it appears to have been unanimously decided that they can all be dismissed entirely as terrible people. That alone should tell us the major mistake that's being made with how it's being handled.

 

That's the thing. There's a difference between having difficulty finding a sexual partner and identifying with a hate group such as the incels. The online incel community is not really about involuntarily celibate people; it's about a bunch of people with an anti-social personality disorder who hate everyone who is not like them.

 

There has always been a segment of male society that wants to beat up women. Sometimes they're celibate, sometimes not. Sex and violence mix in different combinations. The online incel community is remarkably violent and if a person participates in that then they deserve whatever mud comes to be smeared on them.

https://www.thejournal.ie/incel-3979342-Apr2018/

 

Why would you blame the victims of a hate group for the hate group's irrational and unsubstantiated beliefs? That's like blaming Jews for anti-Semitism or black people for the KKK. You're also helping to spread unsupported, misogynistic beliefs about women in this thread. You have yet to provide a reference for this shallowness that is apparently running rampant on the female side of dating. The consensus among the research is that men are more visual than women and, therefore, care more about physical attractiveness. A lot of women prefer tall men just like a lot of men prefer youthful-looking, curvy women.

Just because someone is Muslim doesn't mean that he or she is going to join ISIS. Just because someone is white doesn't mean that he or she is going to join the Aryan Brotherhood. Just because someone is an activist for minorities doesn't mean that he or she is going to join the New Black Panther Party. When you choose to associate with the incel community, you're choosing to associate with a hate group. It's just like those "very fine people" who were marching next to men chanting, "The Jews will not replace us."

If these incels were really that desperate, they could find unattractive women willing to date them. But, they don't want unattractive and/or obese women. They have a right to choose not to date these women just like women have a right to choose not to date them.

 

To clear up some other misleading information in this thread, women attempt suicide more than men do; men choose more fatal methods. If a suicidal man has access to a gun, then there's a good chance he's going to use it.

Involuntary celibacy doesn't even come close to one of the top reasons why people attempt suicide. People usually attempt suicide because of mental health problems, loss or trauma, financial problems, physical health problems, social isolation, and/or chemical dependency. Benzodiazepines are being prescribed more and more, typically for depression, anxiety, and sleep problems. These drugs can make people suicidal, they're addictive, and they're hard to wean off of.

 

I think the larger problem is identifying an incel as being part of a "hate" group and focusing on some posts from some extremists online as the definitive take. To be fully accurate, it's not even really a group, there is no real organization, it's simply a problem of not being able to find a sexual partner, it in itself has nothing to do with hate. To call it a group you would have to buy that these internet posts from some extremists qualifies it as that, but it doesn't. I can find feminist forums and videos with hatred and violent leanings toward men, should we conclude that feminism is a violent hate group based on those posts? And isn't it interesting that those things by some feminists get completely ignored but the same types of things from some male incels get a very bright spotlight? Hmmmmm.

Quote the exact line where I did that.

I've done nothing of the sort.

I'm not saying that you are a misandrist, I don't want to believe that to be the case. But I can't help but consider your positions on men as misandrous because you've pretty much gone over every unsupported negative stereotype of men who have trouble dating with the crescendo being the abuse angle. The telling part is when you went into the "good guys are really bad guys in disguise" territory which I've never heard from any other women besides ones who are either misandrists, or have just been badly hurt by men... men they chose... repeatedly, btw. It's easy to take up a worldview that the majority of people from a specific group are bad when one chooses poorly from that group and gets burned a number of times, but at some point a person has to take responsibility for their own choices and the outcomes that occur from those choices. There is usually a pattern and people in those situations usually don't see it or just refuse to accept it because then they'd have to accept responsibility for their role in their own unhappiness and very few people are prepared or ever will be prepared to do that.

Where did I say that "shallowness is running rampant on the female side of dating?" I've talked about the many experiences that I've had with other guys over the years, and the many accounts I read of other guys. Those things are what they are, but what they're not is uncommon. If they were, all of the male movements, terms and identifications that have popped up over the past decade wouldn't exist, nor would they continue to thrive as they are. Besides, I doubt all of these men are exaggerating about how bad their love lives are going. Men tend to do the opposite of that because it's more socially acceptable for a man to display sexual success rather than failure, and that failure is almost always followed by ridicule from both men and women, this is why men have traditionally been unlikely to discuss it. So for men to do this as openly as they are now suggests at least some level of comfortability through prevalence.

To be clear, I was never here to prove anything. But, speaking of the shallowness... you referenced OKCupid, so I'll do the same:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171224231722/https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e?gi=9040465d9ddf

"Women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium." - 80%!?!?!?!?! How much success do you think that 80% of men is getting after being deemed below average by those women?

"the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her." - Gee, didn't I just say something similar a page back? I also hear this from men today, daily. Are they wrong? Well, the data suggests they're not.

"Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex." - NO WAY!!! All of these men are just lying about their unsuccessful experiences! Women are way more forgiving of looks than men are! Just ignore all of the accounts men are posting daily online, and ignore the data, too! It's all a lie! Men LOVE to look unsuccessful with women that's why they're posting all of these lies!

You cannot choose to be involuntarily celibate, otherwise you're not involuntarily celibate. You can choose to identify or not identify as involuntarily celibate, but if you are celibate for reasons that you've found to be beyond the reach of your best efforts to be sexually active, it doesn't matter whether you call yourself an incel or not, you're still living the life of one.

There is no community. There are some forums online like there are for many things, there is no formality. There is nothing to join, nothing to sign up to, no official symbol, saying, or section to settle into. To reiterate, it's an issue not a group. It's no more forming of an actual community than people who have any other unofficial social issue/disorder that people discuss. Millions upon millions of people would fall under the incel category, probably not even 0.01% of them post in those forums and maybe even less ever tell others about it in their daily lives just so they can avoid being shamed, judged or ridiculed.

Those are not incels. By the meaning alone, you cannot choose to be involuntarily celibate. That's a perfect example of why it's important to separate what people call themselves from what they actually are.

A male incel IS that desperate and less attractive women won't date them either, they tried that route and it didn't yield positive results, that's why they're incels. If that's unbelievable, let's refer back to this quote:

"the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her."

 

Kizmet posted an article on the origins of the movement. A woman started a community for people who are involuntarily celibate. She was disappointed to see that the name was shortened to "incel," and now the community is dominated by men who hate women.

Your quotes from OkCupid don't prove what you think they prove. All it says is that many women are dating and getting married to men they think are average or below average in looks.

Earlier in the thread, you implied that women only want men who look like Brad or Chad. Of course, you're regurgitating the unsupported hate messages that come out of the incel community. Chad is code for a good-looking man who is abusive, and incels believe that women are idiots who only date good-looking, violent men. That is a very distorted view of reality.

 

You've implied that these men aren't inherently terrible human beings; that they are a product of what they've endured. This is victim-blaming. Billions of people on this planet have gone through worse than "involuntary celibacy," and they don't promote hate speech toward any particular group. Women are not responsible for the existence of these misogynists. Remember that men control society, and they have molded the gender norms. Historically, certain mental health problems were said to only be had by women because females were characterized as being weak-minded. Men are expected to push through their problems and not seek help because this is a cultural element created by other men. Most of our politicians are men; most company leaders are men. You cannot solely blame women for the way society is. If you believe that misandry is the problem, then you must believe that a lot of men are misandrists because they're the ones with the political, economic, and social power to make changes.

I had to pull out my laptop and isolate this part because it doesn't make sense. Where did I say that the majority of men are abusive? I said that there are some men and some women who think they are good partners when they aren't. There's no way you can refute this. People like this exist. They are unaware that their behaviors are abusive, and they can't understand why people don't want to be around them.

 

https://www.fox4now.com/news/state/florida-man-arrested-after-pulling-machete-on-woman-who-refused-to-date-him

 

Where on earth do you live where it’s like that?

 

America

 

Earth?