Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Incels?

[Toth]

Eh... to be fair, during my online dating attempt quite a while ago I ended up mentioning on Reddit that I felt it was an extremely soul-crushing experience where as a guy you seem to get dropped like a hot potato at the slightest hint of not being absolutely perfect because of the impression that an infinite number of better options is just a swipe of the finger away. And was accused of being an incel because only an incel would ooze that much negativity about the thing that only made me feel miserable and self-conscious... So it does happen to be used in an accusatory manner. In a space where I myself saw some other posts that were even more venomous, self-hating and misogynistic that made me wonder whether those were indeed incels.

... and I also can't deny that I ended up wondering because of that whether incels' only ever (non-)interaction with women happens on dating platforms because those are a world where the almighty algorithm creates the impression of one that works almost like they think how the world works in real life.

Other then that, I can only say that I think Liffguard above already pretty much hit the nail on the head in regards to the root causes. That society or at least the media sells you that you have to be sexually active to be considered normal is something I just can't deny. Heck, I'm asexual myself and still feel those expectations tugging at me. Thus I am to a high degree sympathetic to those who are threatened to fall down the rabbit hole, but it's also pretty clear that the incel community itself is just the typical internet echo chamber radicalization at its work where those guys get addicted to their own misery and their circle-jerking pulls them into ever more horrific mindsets.

[HoodedCrow]

The imperfect should unite, and then there would be nobody left to argue. 

[Maithanet]

37 minutes ago, Toth said:

... and I also can't deny that I ended up wondering because of that whether incels' only ever (non-)interaction with women happens on dating platforms because those are a world where the almighty algorithm creates the impression of one that works almost like they think how the world works in real life.

This is a good point, and I'd never made that connection before.  I could absolutely see dating (and particularly hookup) apps contributing to and fitting very well with the incel worldview.

[Gorn]

With the societal advances in sexual liberation and technological advances in communication methods, the present-day Western society probably has the smallest percentage of people who are actually involuntarily celibate in human history.

The problem with many self-identified incels is that they don't want to have sex with a woman. They want to have sex exclusively with someone who is a perfect 10 on their personal taste scale, who would worship them and cater to their every whim without requiring any effort or sacrifice on their part, while rejecting all other women, and also the option of simply hiring a sex worker. At that point, their celibacy is not really involuntary.

[Liffguard]

So, this video by Innuendo Studios is talking about how some people get sucked into the alt-right online, and how they might be pulled out of it. The alt-right and incels are not strictly the same phenomenon, but they have some pretty heavy overlap, both in membership and in the way people get radicalised into them.

 

Anyway, in the conclusion, there's one concept brought up that I thought would be pertinent to the "how to deradicalise incels" question.

"In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him, to use a therapy term, a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings. Where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged."

I think the key point here is "people who care about Gabe [the hypothetical incel/alt-righter]." It is definitely not on people at risk of harm to be doing the outreach work. In the absence of immediate loved ones who might be able to do this, men need to be working to build safe social spaces for other men where these kinds of conversations might happen.

 

[Inkdaub]

20 hours ago, HoodedCrow said:

The imperfect should unite, and then there would be nobody left to argue. 

I'll orate.

[IFR]

20 hours ago, Maithanet said:

This is a good point, and I'd never made that connection before.  I could absolutely see dating (and particularly hookup) apps contributing to and fitting very well with the incel worldview.

Online dating is probably really unhealthy for everyone.

I'll relate an anecdote. I personally have zero interest in online dating. This is a personal thing, and so I'm not offering any judgment for those who find appeal in it.

But I have a guy friend who was complaining about how hard it was, and I told him he probably just was using bad pictures and had an off-putting profile. So of course we ended up making a game of it. I would set up his profile for him and he would set up a profile for me. I agreed, but only for a week. I honestly do not like being part of online dating, even for a social experiment.

My friend is a pretty decent looking guy. So I figured this wouldn't be too much of a problem. I took a lot of care in selecting his pictures, and writing out a short profile that had a spin that would interest me if I had randomly seen it.

Then I looked at the profile he set up for me. Age 35. The profile read "Divorced mother of three. Two months pregnant." And there was only one picture, of a rose. He deliberately set up a profile he thought would be less of a draw.

I was curious how this would play out, and then shocked. After a week, my friend had 5 matches. I had several dozen.

Now obviously these guys who were matched with me were only looking for a warm body to sleep with. But even still, some of them left me fairly creative messages. I responded, again out of curiosity, and they led to some entertaining conversations. I stopped it there, because I felt bad for giving them the impression that we might meet when this was only a social experiment.

My friend let me try to converse with his matches and it was a nightmare. I tried to be the amazing conversationalitst, and in return I got...dullness. I gave up very quickly.

So I feel very sorry for anyone dealing with online dating. The problems women generally experience are well known, but guys have to deal with their own set of problems. It must be absolutely depressing and leave them with the impression that they are not desired by anyone. (Which I reiterate - I believe that it's a problem that our social structure encourages the idea that men need the approval/desire of women to be validated). And I think it's very unhelpful to try to do a one-upmanship of which gender has it worse here. If there's a problem, it deserves attention regardless of gender.

Like so much of social media, I cannot see online dating having a positive contribution to emotional health. 

[HoodedCrow]

Some woman that I know is dating her ex who cheated on her and embezzled her money. She has a great job, two fledged kids, in good shape, but she is over 50. I could go on with this.

The joke is that there are very few 10 ‘s and even if you are Heidi Klum,, or J. Lo, you will get old. Actresses don’t get called after 40. Men have a much longer shelf life.

Men have a lot of pressures, but not to have make up so that their eyes are big, ( and the shadows compliment their outfits, their lashes are long, their eyebrows are tweezed, their legs will be bare with high heels, they will not have an once excess fat, they will have no wrinkles, stretch marks, tan or panty lines. Hopefully that changes. And then, it can be flat out dangerous for a woman not to be cautious.

 

 

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Re: online dating-

I could see it being bad for your emotional health if it's the only dating venue you're experiencing.  

I know it's just an anecdote, and while I've certainly never been shy about complaining about the vagaries of online dating, I've had some very good experiences there.  

I met an ex on OKcupid back in 2013 and we were together for a few years, she's still a really good friend and I never would have met her "in real life"- we lived 2.5 hours away from each other, and that connection led me to all sorts of great improvements and opportunities.  

I think the swiping dating apps are too easy to forget about, I've met plenty of cool people on there but it's also incredibly easy to let a conversation disappear with all the other distractions on a phone, and it for me at least, it's difficult to extend the same care and attention to someone I haven't actually met as I would to a friend or even a work aquaintance.  It's too easy to not check in for a couple days and then feelings get hurt or people move on.

TLDR - I don't think online dating is any better or worse or more healthy or unhealthy than regular dating.  But if it's the only vehicle you're allowing yourself for meeting people you are sexually attracted to it's going to be a let down.  

[Heartofice]

Surely online dating really is the only vehicle a lot of people have access to when it comes to dating? 
 

Even outside of pandemics everyone is leading more isolated lives, there are a larger number of young men spending far longer locked away on their own. 
 

And we shouldn’t be under any illusions about online dating. It’s a harsh world, it’s much more brutally honest than the real world. If someone doesn’t find you attractive you are going to learn about it pretty quickly ( and if you pay attention to the OKCupid stat that women rated 80% of men below average attractiveness then you are going to face a lot of rejection  as a man) where in real life you might get friendzoned politely and never really clock onto it. 
 

Also online dating has moved towards a much more ‘swipe right’ system and there is less stigma around it. When you see the endless number of people on these apps but you can barely get a single person to even say hello to you, that can be really dispiriting. At least in real life you can create a false illusion about your own attractiveness ( I didn’t like her anyway kinda thing), but online dating really creates a real Darwinian dynamic that can be quite crushing for a lot of people. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

( and if you pay attention to the OKCupid stat that women rated 80% of men below average attractiveness then you are going to face a lot of rejection  as a man)

Yeah that’s a meme constantly trotted out in the manosphere(Mras, PUAs, incels and other groups of misogynistic assholes in the west) for the shallowness of women and the need to pressure them into getting into relationships with men they may not find desireble.

The other findings of the OKcupid study to which it was picked are omitted .

For example plenty women being willing to give a guy a chance even if they think he’s below average.

Quote

”As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with 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, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.”

https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

The manosphere omits how men tend to also hyper focus on the most attractive women over average looking women.

Quote

The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme.

But there are a few interesting phenomena. For one, men on the site tend to be more generous than women when it comes to rating attractiveness, leading to a nice bell curve with the bulk of ratings falling around ‘average’. But despite their fair ratings, they tend to ignore many of the women they find reasonably attractive and primarily target the most attractive females.

Incels aren’t created by okcupid.

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

It’s a harsh world, it’s much more brutally honest than the real world.

It does elevate the pressure on women and girls when they don’t worry as much about offending a guy by saying they don’t want to sleep with them or date them.

The real world has many men acting much more destructive in the face of rejection than they could online—especially if there isn’t an apparently justified reason for the refusal—usually another man. 
You know get physical, not lay off when shown disinterest(she’s just playing hard to get), slut shame the women to her social group out of spite etc etc.

 

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

where in real life you might get friendzoned politely and never really clock onto it. 

Real life women may have to act friendly or polite when refusing a guy because they worry about the guy becoming aggressive. And at times men and boys do become so when the people they have an attraction don’t reciprocate they’re feelings even after they’ve been so nice and friendly.

In my experience the biggest assholes are those who think they’re the nicest guys.

[Heartofice]

The article mentions that women are potentially more interested in a guys personality than his looks ( something incels would dismiss given their obsession with bone structure) but even if women are willing to ‘give a guy a shot’, not clear as to whether that translates into anything more than responding to one message.

Either way I don’t think there is any denying that women filter men out a lot more than the other way round at the start. The reasons you mentioned above contribute a lot to that, given the dangers women face during dating that are one sided, it makes sense to be a lot more careful about who you even talk to, but that’s one of a number of reasons.
 

Dating apps only tend to accelerate this tendency, and dating apps give much less opportunity for anyone to demonstrate their personality than in real life. Being able to shop through an almost infinite number of dating candidates and judging them on a couple of photos and maybe a tag line ( a first message if you are lucky) means that evaluations are made very quickly. My own experience from these apps with myself and my friends is that men will cast their nets wide hoping anyone will respond, where women will be a lot more selective. Apps like Bumble also put women in control ( for good reason, the levels of spam and offensive messages for women online dating it off the chart)

The other point is, in response to some of the above, there is no denying that dating is quite shit for women, that there are dangers men don’t face. But it’s also shit for a lot of guys in other ways, and given this is a thread about incels it’s worth trying to understand what those problems are. There is already a lot written about dating from a female perspective, but very little from a male one, especially for those who really struggle with it. 
 

Online dating isn’t creating incels, it’s just one of many signals that incels are getting which they are interpreting in the most extreme and narrow way, and when they already have a very narrow and reinforcing worldview and experience it just amplifies many of their assumptions.

[HoodedCrow]

My best dates were below par. I was attracted to brains, education, talent, humor, good attiude. I ended a relationship with someone who looked like RFK, because he was personally cold, and I could only do so much. He complained that I left oil on his sheets. ( he was difficult)But did send me red roses( not my favorite but I took the compliment), but then he told me how much it cost. It was a try.

[Heartofice]

www.wsj.com/amp/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233

A Generation of American Men Give Up on College

Quote

 

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse

Interesting to see how this trend will affect the dating market. 

[TrackerNeil]

On 9/14/2021 at 2:19 PM, Heartofice said:

www.wsj.com/amp/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233

A Generation of American Men Give Up on College

Interesting to see how this trend will affect the dating market. 

You know, a real men's rights movement would address stuff like this, and not waste time getting angry at feminists for whatever it is they think feminists are doing wrong.

[Heartofice]

55 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

You know, a real men's rights movement would address stuff like this, and not waste time getting angry at feminists for whatever it is they think feminists are doing wrong.

How would you address it?

[TrackerNeil]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

How would you address it?

Good question. I guess I'd start with trying to figure out why men seem to be dropping out of college. Are there structural factors inside the university making it more difficult for men than for women? Or social pressures, doing the same? Are men having more difficulty affording tuition? Questions that might, with study, actually be answered, and not a bunch of grievances against women. 

[Heartofice]

3 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Good question. I guess I'd start with trying to figure out why men seem to be dropping out of college. Are there structural factors inside the university making it more difficult for men than for women? Or social pressures, doing the same? Are men having more difficulty affording tuition? Questions that might, with study, actually be answered, and not a bunch of grievances against women. 

Another question is whether men see less value in college education than women. 

[Hereward]

My guess would be the current insanity which vilifies expertise and even education as ideologically unsound. I obviously can’t prove that, but as an outside observer, that seems to be a working class Republican mindset.*

* Full disclosure, that was my father’s view in the 80s. He opposed providing any assistance or even cooperation in sending me to, as he put it, learn how to become a communist.

[Fury Resurrected]

On 8/28/2021 at 1:20 AM, Heartofice said:in real life you might get friendzoned politely and never really clock onto it. 
 

 

There is no such thing as the friendzone. I cannot stress enough how much perpetuating this concept is dehumanizing to women and normalizes male entitlement to the type of female attention they want.