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Totally agree on the toxic masculinity angle. I made my sexual debut very late and I felt like shit about that for many years, despite no one really knowing but me. The sense of missing out on something great - which of course, in hindsight, was much exaggerated - isn’t a nice feeling to have, but it’s manageable. I had the fortune of having non-prying family and friends, but I can imagine it’s horrible for those who lives with everyone else’s expectations. But it goes beyond what everyone thinks of you, it’s what you think about yourself. Having sex is perceived as the very essence of manliness, the measure of success. The shame of not being able to achieve that - you feel like less of a man, or at least I did - and that’s a horrible feeling for a young man to feel for no other reason that society has taught him so.

Unsurprisingly I got much more successful once I decided not to bother so much anymore, to stop focusing so hard on trying to pick up every girl I met, and just generally being a nicer person instead. But I can totally see how blaming someone else can a very comforting alternative to the self-contempt and wallowing in misery that I did. Or some combination thereof, as the incels seem to be doing. (That said I NEVER thought the girls owed me something. The entitlement the incels are feeling is completely alien to me and would have been back then too.)

I think a lot of things would be immensely better if we could just get rid of the idea that being sexually inactive is something deeply shameful. (In men, that is. As we all know women are supposed to remain virgins until their wedding night yet somehow put out whenever a guy wants to sleep with her.)

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35 minutes ago, Erik of Hazelfield said:

Totally agree on the toxic masculinity angle. I made my sexual debut very late and I felt like shit about that for many years, despite no one really knowing but me. The sense of missing out on something great - which of course, in hindsight, was much exaggerated - isn’t a nice feeling to have, but it’s manageable. I had the fortune of having non-prying family and friends, but I can imagine it’s horrible for those who lives with everyone else’s expectations. But it goes beyond what everyone thinks of you, it’s what you think about yourself. Having sex is perceived as the very essence of manliness, the measure of success. The shame of not being able to achieve that - you feel like less of a man, or at least I did - and that’s a horrible feeling for a young man to feel for no other reason that society has taught him so.

Unsurprisingly I got much more successful once I decided not to bother so much anymore, to stop focusing so hard on trying to pick up every girl I met, and just generally being a nicer person instead. But I can totally see how blaming someone else can a very comforting alternative to the self-contempt and wallowing in misery that I did. Or some combination thereof, as the incels seem to be doing. (That said I NEVER thought the girls owed me something. The entitlement the incels are feeling is completely alien to me and would have been back then too.)

I think a lot of things would be immensely better if we could just get rid of the idea that being sexually inactive is something deeply shameful. (In men, that is. As we all know women are supposed to remain virgins until their wedding night yet somehow put out whenever a guy wants to sleep with her.)

I was in a similar position to you, and I'm not sure I really feel that way in hindsight. Sex is great. Sure, it can cause a lot of related issues, but when you have that chemistry with someone, there's very few things in life quite like that. I think that attitude is a little dismissive. I would not be happy if I had to spend years as a sexually mature person without getting laid again. Sex has always been one of the main drivers of human behaviour, for good and bad. I don't think it's helpful to tell someone who is incel that sex just isn't a big deal. I don't think the pressure comes purely from society- this is something most people have a very strong biological urge to do. 

There's a media trope called "a man is not a virgin", and I think that sums it up well. I've always looked young for my age, and I felt like woman always viewed me as a boy, not a man. I was the opposite to you- I didn't really try to pick up any girls, because I was scared of rejection. 

I didn't feel like I was owed anything either. I mean, I was always interested in girls I found attractive, who tended to be the same girls other guys found attractive. Beauty is subjective, but it isn't that subjective. I wasn't getting much attention when I was 17/18 because I looked 14/15. What girl that age wants to get with a guy who looks like a kid? Sometimes in life you've just got to wait things out. 

Where you live, do people still actually support that? In England, no one really says that, you'd be considered weirdly religious if you actually thought that. There's definitely still a double standard on this, but girls are not expected to be virgins, they're just expected not to have sex outside relationships. 

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Good points both!

As for sex not being that important - yes, I agree with you, it really is. I was hesitating whether or not to include those words in my post. What I meant, I guess, is that you can get hung up on that one thing so much it sort of defines how you think about yourself. You attribute to it magical powers that aren’t really there, for better or worse. When I finally started getting lucky on that front it did feel great and I felt very relieved, but it didn’t solve all my problems - it was the other way around. Making positive changes in my life made me more successful, whereas in my youthful mind all that was wrong in my life was the fact that I didn’t have sex. That singular focus made me blind for all the other things I needed to do to grow as a human being.

I realize now that this was very much not what I wrote. Oh well. I take that back. Yes, sex is important for most of us and it’s probably a bad idea to try to downplay that to someone who struggles with it. What I believe would help though is to try to shift focus away from it and see if there are other things that person might improve in his life. In the case of incels it’s probably not a very difficult task to find such opportunities for improvement.

Regarding the virgin before marriage thing, that was a sarcastic remark and is definitely not the case here in Sweden. What does still exist though is a sort of double standards, where promiscuity is seen as positive for men and negative for women.

When you ask men and women how many they have slept with you tend to get a higher number for men (excluding homosexual relationships). This is logically impossible. If you think about it, it should be exactly the same number, it cannot be any other way. The only explanation is that men tend to exaggerate their number and women tend to lower it when answering. 

I think this mindset is slowly disappearing, but it’s not completely gone even in this most liberal of countries.

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8 hours ago, Toth said:

I'm not sure privilege is the right term to use here. For me it certainly seems more that a culture of Toxic Masculinity, as usual, puts men into a situation where they can't handle not fulfilling society's expectations... and end up in a spiral of contempt for everyone they deem responsible for it.

 

Thank for the well thought out response. I want to think about this idea of toxic masculinity versus privilege for a moment because some important distinctions begin to occur here. Toxic masculinity is a manifestation of narrow traits assigned what it means to be "male." Sex, violence, status, and authority. Because we are pointing out that toxic masculinity is an ideology accepted by culture, we hope to see men (boys as well) realize that masculinity does not have to be narrowly defined. 

Privilege is a tricky term too in that it brings to mind overtly bias and negative associations. Privilege is that unrestricted access to social power because you are part of a specific group. In this context, I think it's fair to say privilege and toxic masculinity are intertwined. Because toxic masculinity defines a narrow, acceptable (problematic) way of being male, and privilege for a number of men is a blind spot (we don't always know we're participating in a system that allows us more access to social power), the toxic masculinity can become symptomatic in dangerous ways.

Privilege is imparted to our boys and young men under such subtextual terms that they don't realize it is happening. Take movies about boy/young men and their quests to conquer their dormant sexuality. These stories are, on the surface, not mean spirited, but fun adventures had with friends. American Pie, for example, centers on the premise that the right to sex is so guaranteed, that by simply making a "pact" to not be a virgin by the end of high school guarantees your sexual conquest fulfilled. This is one example (among many) that has profound impact on how boys and young men understand the world. Sex is guaranteed, it is a right, it is something to be conquered, and all men will conquer it, even those who get caught sexually interacting with pastry. Deviance, in some ways, is rewarded.

It's only been fairly recent that some of these comedic takes on sex were reevaluated for the problems they represent: paying for dinner guarantees some form of sexual compensation, even if the compensation is merely an agreement for future dates. Labeling women as sex workers, and professional scammers, who do not fulfill their implicit part of the bargain has long been a lament of men who "paid for dinner and got nothing in return." Many men, then, believe subconsciously that they are owed something by society. A sexual partner. If they do the right things, then that unrestricted access should only increase: "I have a good job, I got a haircut and I work out, and I started dressing better. By doing these things, I will be more successful with women." 

The problem is when these concepts of privilege are never explored. "She doesn't owe me anything for buying dinner. Why on earth would I think she owed me a thing for that?" That's a hard place to get to if you can't examine your own biases about what you're "owed" in the world. Toxic masculinity seems too tied up with privilege to say one is mutually exclusive of the other. But, I suppose, privilege seems the place to start because even if you widen the cultural perception of "being man" into something less toxic, does that inherently remove a sense of privilege? 

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2 hours ago, Erik of Hazelfield said:

I realize now that this was very much not what I wrote. Oh well. I take that back. Yes, sex is important for most of us and it’s probably a bad idea to try to downplay that to someone who struggles with it. What I believe would help though is to try to shift focus away from it and see if there are other things that person might improve in his life. In the case of incels it’s probably not a very difficult task to find such opportunities for improvement.

Mmh... I don't know whether you should immediately roll back on your words like that. At least they rang true to me. Because it is at least just as unhelpful to say to an incel 'what a great thing' sex is. Whether you like it or not the issue at hand, after all. It is the socialization aspect and the connection with cultural manliness like you mentioned. If everyone in your close family is of the opinion that not getting laid in your teens makes you strange and a loser, you expect everyone else to think so as well... you think potential partners think so... and you immediately start dealing with a truckload of unnecessary self-doubts that have nothing at all to do whether you are going to like it or not. The drive to find a partner may be partly biological, but the stigma of male virginity is entirely a social issue and one we can tackle as a society. Double standards and all.

Also: It's a weird thing that I always hear those calls of improving yourself. I don't think that's going to make any incel reconsider his view on society. Granted, stopping to be an asshole might be helpful when opening up to social interactions, but the idea that you have to improve yourself and then get 'rewarded' with sex as if unlocking an achievement in a videogame plays right into their world view that getting laid is a game and that they just started out on the highest difficulty level. I personally believe that for our culture to evolve, it would be far more helpful to just regard relationships and sex as just another aspect of life that really isn't supposed to dominate your sense of self.

24 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

The problem is when these concepts of privilege are never explored. "She doesn't owe me anything for buying dinner. Why on earth would I think she owed me a thing for that?" That's a hard place to get to if you can't examine your own biases about what you're "owed" in the world. Toxic masculinity seems too tied up with privilege to say one is mutually exclusive of the other. But, I suppose, privilege seems the place to start because even if you widen the cultural perception of "being man" into something less toxic, does that inherently remove a sense of privilege? 

I still think we have somewhat differing ideas what privilege means. As far as I understand, privilege in the feminist sense is used as a generic term for all forms of subtle ways your race, gender or status makes life easier for you and prevents you from seeing problems that you can't grasp without putting yourself into the shoes of someone who doesn't have that privilege. It's not about your own perception of what society owes you, but where society actually is being warped into your favor while being more difficult to others who don't share that privilege.

The problem at hand may exist because people 'feel' that they are owed sex as some kind of weird reward because they are the protagonists of their own story and in those story the hero always gets the girl. But this just means that they have wrong assumptions about how life actually works, a dissonance caused by the factors that socialized them. And those factors... are in the end just a more insidious form toxic masculinity in the sense you mentioned: That men have to be sexually promiscuous and if you are not, your whole manhood is put to question. And then you have to listen to your grandma's angry rant that you being gay is the only possible explanation. :rolleyes:

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Thanks, very good posts.

I think much of it boils down to the fact that you have no control over who wants to have sex with you. You can’t buy it. You can’t work your way to it. You can’t wait in line for it. You can’t get it as some privilege depending on the group you belong to. Because that power lies solely with the other part, and they can refuse it for any reason no matter how much you think you deserve it. 

This is a deeply unsatisfactory thought to many people. In everything else we are taught that if we work hard enough, we’ll get what we deserve eventually. But in this we have to accept that even if we do everything exactly right, there are still no guarantees of anything.

Come to think of it, that’s true for a lot of other areas too - landing the dream job, having success as a writer/artist/actor, even sport events... it’s not all up to you. But when you read about successful people they often attribute their success to hard work, even if that same hard work was put in by 100 or even 1000 other people that didn’t win that gold medal - maybe they lacked talent, or didn’t have the best coach or whatever. 

So in part I think the nihilistic nature of inceldom may be a sort of backlash to the false but common idea that you can get anything you want as long as you work hard enough for it. When that doesn’t work out it’s easy to either become disillusioned and bitter, or think that the world should work this way, which is when you get into the entitlement crap. The incel community seems to have combined the worst of both those views in a truly appalling cesspool of hate, self-loathing and misogyny.

I think the best thing you can do to vaccinate youths from falling for those ideologies is to get them to accept two basic facts in life:

1) You cannot affect the outcome of everything - some stuff is just down to luck, genetics or other factors out of your control

2) You can, however, almost always tilt the odds in your favour by working hard, asking for help, spending money, being persistent and so on.

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4 hours ago, Erik of Hazelfield said:

 

When you ask men and women how many they have slept with you tend to get a higher number for men (excluding homosexual relationships). This is logically impossible. If you think about it, it should be exactly the same number, it cannot be any other way. The only explanation is that men tend to exaggerate their number and women tend to lower it when answering. 

I think this mindset is slowly disappearing, but it’s not completely gone even in this most liberal of countries.

that is not how it works. say 4 women each slept with 1 guy, the same guy.  The women truthfully say they only slept with 1 person, while the guy slept with 4.

Yes, there is lying and exaggerating on all sides, but the numbers don't have to match.

****************************

After reading all the stories above I decided to talk to my 15 (almost 16) yr old son last night. His reaction was kind of funny, even if politically incorrect (which I also spoke to him about).  I was reading the article about the incels to him and he said "why are you telling me all this stuff? those guys are retarded." Anyway, he might be a shy, award, basement dweller who had spent 2 yrs crushing on a girl who put him in the friend zone, but he knows and understands what is wrong with the way those guys treat women and what they expect from them. (I worried a little, he does spend a lot of time on-line)

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8 hours ago, Lany Freelove Cassandra said:

that is not how it works. say 4 women each slept with 1 guy, the same guy.  The women truthfully say they only slept with 1 person, while the guy slept with 4.

Yes, there is lying and exaggerating on all sides, but the numbers don't have to match.

****************************

I see now that I forgot to mention a key factor: it was the average of the number of sexual partners among all participants that was compared.

Say you have 8 people, 4 of each sex, and as you say 1 guy sleeps with all 4 girls while the rest of the guys don’t sleep with anyone.

That’ll give an average of 1 sexual partner for each guy and 1 sexual partner for each girl. Try it with any other configuration and it always works out like this. 

 

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16 hours ago, Erik of Hazelfield said:

Good points both!

As for sex not being that important - yes, I agree with you, it really is. I was hesitating whether or not to include those words in my post. What I meant, I guess, is that you can get hung up on that one thing so much it sort of defines how you think about yourself. You attribute to it magical powers that aren’t really there, for better or worse. When I finally started getting lucky on that front it did feel great and I felt very relieved, but it didn’t solve all my problems - it was the other way around. Making positive changes in my life made me more successful, whereas in my youthful mind all that was wrong in my life was the fact that I didn’t have sex. That singular focus made me blind for all the other things I needed to do to grow as a human being.

I realize now that this was very much not what I wrote. Oh well. I take that back. Yes, sex is important for most of us and it’s probably a bad idea to try to downplay that to someone who struggles with it. What I believe would help though is to try to shift focus away from it and see if there are other things that person might improve in his life. In the case of incels it’s probably not a very difficult task to find such opportunities for improvement.

Regarding the virgin before marriage thing, that was a sarcastic remark and is definitely not the case here in Sweden. What does still exist though is a sort of double standards, where promiscuity is seen as positive for men and negative for women.

When you ask men and women how many they have slept with you tend to get a higher number for men (excluding homosexual relationships). This is logically impossible. If you think about it, it should be exactly the same number, it cannot be any other way. The only explanation is that men tend to exaggerate their number and women tend to lower it when answering. 

I think this mindset is slowly disappearing, but it’s not completely gone even in this most liberal of countries.

Oh, I agree with that, it’s easy to feel like all your problems are wrapped up in your virginity.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to make positive changes to your life to be more successful in sex and relationships. 

It drives me mad how the media report that statistic as if it makes sense. It would be fascinating to know who is lying more. My female friends have informed me that “foreign guys don’t count” when calculating your number, I don’t know how common that attitude is...

I always find it funny how guys who can’t get laid are often the worst for slut shaming. Talk about self sabotage.

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On 5/4/2018 at 4:56 AM, Theda Baratheon said:

YES. I agree 100% with this article and it sums up nicely why I've been geting so agitated with a lot of the media surrounding incels recently. Written by people who really dont have a clue. 

I HATE the idea that sex workers should be used to placate violent men and I see it ALL THE TIME. In various different circumstances there' this legit image belief that sex workers should be used as some kind of placating tool or that they should deal with sexual violent men because "that's their job" and it's really awful - like these women aren't just human beings, performing a service for a fee. I sell dvds - I sholder be expected to sell dvds to some jerk shouting at me and chucking things around the store. Why should sex workers be expected to work with violence? I hate that. I see that sentiment all the time - women dehumanised again and again when it comes to sex.

But not only that - but the idea that we even need to appease incels like they're some angry gods we haven't left enough votive offerings to. Fuck that. 

Like the article says; most of these dudes want to have sex with someone the is incredibly attractive, like movie star levels and it' their own misogyny that often holds them back. 

Women who haven't had sex in a long time/have never had sex don't seem to act this way 

yeah, also incels fucking hate sex workers. they hate the fact these women may have multiple sexual partners, that they have to pay for what they believe they are entitled to, etc. as has been mentioned before, the sex is a best incidental; it’s about power and domination, and that usually expresses itself in the form of violence and abuse. leaving aside the fact that these shitty takes (like theda said) try to take away the agency of actual human beings in how they, and with whom, the associate, but puts people in very real physical danger 

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On 02/05/2018 at 6:55 AM, Rippounet said:

I guess this question is really directed at me.

Taking a look at incel.me last night I was surprised to find that the primary theme was more guys lamenting their bad looks/fortune than anything else. There was hatred there of course, but it seemed more a consequence of the misery than the primary element of their ideology.
Also, while the hatred is directed primarily at women, it is not exclusively directed at them. The fact that these guys have derogatory terms for both normal men and women ("chads" and "stacys"), and the fact that the Toronto incel terrorist killed men and women indiscriminately seem to point out that this movement (or whatever you want to call it) isn't *only* about hating women.
Most importantly I did not find any thread (nor even a message IIRC) advocating or even condoning violence towards women, and I even found one strongly condemning one type of perversion, and several demanding that a poster "take accountability for themselves." I guess this is why I'm bringing a bit of nuance to the discussion: I was expecting mainly stuff like @Theda Baratheon posted and didn't really find any. Also, there is even a thread there that pretty much says that the two known incel terrorists were not true incels, but "mentalcels" or "fakecels" and that a true incel is unlikely to be violent. Generally speaking, while their ideology is dark, cynical and nihilistic at times, I have my doubts as to whether violence is an essential component of it. Or maybe incel.me is a moderate group?

Now, feeling that the vast majority of these guys are sad and pathetic doesn't mean one doesn't despise their ideology as a whole. Nor does explaining the source of their adherence to such a twisted ideology means condoning it in any way.

The thing with Incel types, especially if you were paying attention to them years ago back when r/Incel was still a thing and they mostly weren't noticed unless you were reading shit about the "Men's Rights" movement (ie - basically the alt-right's misogyny wing), is that yeah, they are mostly kinda sadsack types. Especially at the start. They are guys who, while they probably have some sexist ideas already to one degree to another, are mostly just lonely or feel inadequate because they can't live up to how they perceive their life should be. And so like a ton of people out there, they find an online community that speaks to those needs and takes them in.

The problem is that said groups in this case turn real nasty and most importantly here, serve as a vector for radicalization. They take these lonely bastards in and they help slowly shape their ideology and it can go anywhere from just regular old horrible sexism to terrorist violence.

And of course if Incel isn't your preferred flavour, there's several other options for being indoctrinated into some real nasty misogyny. All of them have or had Reddits too!

 

PS - the guy in Toronto seems to have very likely been targeting women at this point

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On 04/05/2018 at 7:24 PM, mankytoes said:

Right, I know this stuff, I was on puahate pre Elliot Rodgers. I know they say all this stuff and it's super fucked up, I think we all agree on that.

PUA and incels are not the same thing. I feel like this is another instance of the media getting internet issues confused. They are both mysogynistic and I'm defending either, but they're clearly very different. PUA are saying you can go out and get laid, whoever you are. Just buy my book and learn. Incels are saying you probably can't get laid, unless you are genetically lucky, so you should probably kill yourself or other people or whatever. 

I'm talking specifically about grooming. Just making a horrible website that people join isn't grooming. Grooming involves directly and deliberately attracting vulnerable people to your organisation. Like when we talk about Nazis grooming, they actually go out in poor, white communities and look for white kids that look pissed off and alienated and try to lure them into their ideology. 

I'm trying to be careful with my language, because I'm conscious that people might think I'm defending these groups. What I'm trying to do is to clear up confusion on this, because you can't ever tackle an issue without properly understanding it. 

I've still seen no evidence incels are doing what would normally be considered grooming. 

PUAs are absolutely misogynistic as fuck and their entire schtick is "we'll get you laid" while they teach you to dehumanize women.

And making a horrible website is more then enough. It's how people get involved in this shit. You create a community and you bring people into it and then you teach them how to view the world, both overtly and through social pressure.

It's why and how the PUAs are very much part of this whole sphere. They teach men the same kind of worldview and sometimes lead them into crazier corners of the whole movement.

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  • 7 months later...
On 5/13/2018 at 11:08 PM, mankytoes said:

https://news.sky.com/story/academic-refuses-to-apologise-for-lame-lingerie-joke-11368097

I have a conspiracy theory that right wing media pays these people to make these complaints, thus fuelling the outrage cycle. 

You don't need to pay anyone to do anything, just look for stupid anecdotes and use them to make hasty generalisations. A few cases *are* manufactured but they are very rare imho.

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17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

You don't need to pay anyone to do anything, just look for stupid anecdotes and use them to make hasty generalisations. A few cases *are* manufactured but they are very rare imho.

Agree. You only need a couple of these little incidents and the internet can blow them up to look like a terrifying trend. Though that is probably in some peoples interests to make it appear that way.

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  • 3 weeks later...

What To Do?

I've been working at a prestigious concert hall with the lighting.  Last week there was a guest artist (a vocalist) who was playing with the house band.  I don't know the details of the financial transaction--was the artist hired to front the band or was the band hired to back up the singer? etc.

A couple days before the performance, I fell into conversation with an usher who declared that she had a fantastic voice but he didn't care for the way she was selling her sexuality.  The sexuality was pretty minimal.  The promotional materials showed her in an extravagant ball gown with spaghetti straps and referred to the event as 'an intimate evening. '

My objections to the usher's objections are threefold.  Why not ask why, with a fantastic voice, she stills feels the need to 'sex it up'?  Are there promoters/managers pushing her in this direction or is she including her sexuality in her artistic expression?  Whether she has agency over the presentation or not, I can't help but backtrack to the usher--Who the hell are you to judge her?

I can feel compassion for her as a woman whose talent is somehow not enough, with people pushing her to 'show some skin.'  I can feel compassion for her if she wants to make her concert a sensual experience.  I can't feel compassion for the usher who feels entitled to be the arbiter of what is in good taste and what is not.

It would be nice to assume that this guy isn't sexist.  Maybe he has objections to cello players who he thinks are unworthy of fronting the house band, I don't know.  Maybe his disapproval would be better directed at the machinery rather than the artist.  Maybe the artist is an opportunistic gold digger, looking to cash in on a little cleavage.  Who knows?

From my experience, my response is along the lines of "Really?  Spaghetti straps are all it takes to turn her into a harlot?  Fuck you."

So what does that make me?  Am I prejudiced against the older white male usher?  If he is wronging her, am I wronging him?

There's no way to know.  I wish I had a ready sound bite quip to make him ask himself these questions but I didn't.  I did the typical, 'mmm, ahh, yeah I see what you are saying' nonsense and missed a teachable moment.

Oh well, maybe I will have better wisdom by the time I am his age.

 

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Well I pray to our good lord Jesus Christ this god-fearing Usher does not wear t-shirts or shirts that reveal his...*whisper* elbows. For that is the garb of the tempter, as the spaghetti strap ball gown is the garb of the temptress.

 

Its clearly his issue and this isn’t you being prejudiced against older white men. 

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