Should have added that it is quite possible that a spree killing by an incel should also be treated as an act of terrorism without holding that belonging to a misogynistic Internet forum means being a member of a terrorist organisation.
To be clear, is it being suggested that all spree killings are acts of terrorism ?
Or only those intended to bring about a change in the law ?
That "bringing about" could be by eliminating opponents of that change so that people fear to speak against it (which is where the terror comes in). Or by demonstrating the strength of their resolve so that opponents of that change come to believe that they can't win. Or by gaining publicity for the idea of that change. Or by any other method.
Because that ISTM is what we mean by politics when we talk of politically-motivated violence.
I'm willing to be convinced by evidence. But the descriptions of incel behaviour online that I've read so far are in terms of sharing their feelings of resentment and their revenge fantasies. Not in formulating a change in the law that they want to see enacted and planning a campaign to bring this about.
Seems to me entirely reasonable to say that spree killings are particularly horrific crimes and police resources should be redirected into doing more to head off those who might be travelling in that direction. (Spend less resources on speeding tickets and parking offences is something one hears occasionally).
There's an argument for allowing gun owners less privacy than other citizens. Motorists aren't allowed anonymity - they have to have a number plate on their vehicle so that they can be traced if anyone witnesses them misusing it by driving badly.
I realize USA doesn't have hate speech laws. Canada does. Does the UK?
Yes, although sex isn't one of the listed categories. It might actually be the only category which is a protected category for employment discrimination but isn't protected under hate crimes laws.
Well, yeah, you can't have human rights interfering with expressing rape culture.
Given the ubiquity of misogyny, I don't think it's useful to compare it to terrorism linked to a specific political movement. There are liberal and conservative misogynists, religious and atheist misogynists, white and BIMPOC misogynists. Misogyny has existed through all of human history in every culture. That may be another reason why it isn't considered terrorism.
Can we be careful with the "social interaction problems" and "can't get a girlfriend because they're too obnoxious" narratives? These can be problematic for a lot of austistic men who find social interaction difficult generally and the dating thing nearly impossible - there are a lot of us out there who've had a lot of rejection, partly because we often don't pick up on subtle cues, and partly because our slight but harmless weirdness is unattractive to a lot of people, especially where there's a potential romantic element. Sometimes the narrative around incels gets a little problematic.
For context, and this is far from unusual for autistic men, the only romantic relationship I have ever had is with the woman to whom I am now married. I met her when I was 25. By then I had however had hundreds of rejections.
So what I'm getting at here is be careful who you catch in your narrative.
Can we be careful with the "social interaction problems" and "can't get a girlfriend because they're too obnoxious" narratives? These can be problematic for a lot of austistic men who find social interaction difficult generally and the dating thing nearly impossible - there are a lot of us out there who've had a lot of rejection, partly because we often don't pick up on subtle cues, and partly because our slight but harmless weirdness is unattractive to a lot of people, especially where there's a potential romantic element. Sometimes the narrative around incels gets a little problematic.
For context, and this is far from unusual for autistic men, the only romantic relationship I have ever had is with the woman to whom I am now married. I met her when I was 25. By then I had however had hundreds of rejections.
So what I'm getting at here is be careful who you catch in your narrative.
Sorry. I realised that may be an issue when I was typing.
But at the same time it is part of the Incel make up isn't it? Just as being male is. Just as a pessimistic attitude toward life and life opportunity is.
Social interaction problems doesn't = Incel
Muslim doesn't = terrorist
But you have very few Mormon, Hindu or Evangelicals who commit acts of Islamic Terrorism and you have very few outgoing, social, had multiple sexual partners men commiting Incel mass killings.
It focuses on the wrong thing. You need to focus on the misogyny, not the social interaction and relationship difficulties. Otherwise you get a situation where people are suspected of being potential violent incels when they're nothing of the sort.
Hi Russ. Have a look at the Wikipedia page on 'Roosh V'. Unfortunately you can't look at his Return of Kings website, because he has gone all religious-monkish-style-anti-women now and taken down his get-as-much-sex-as-possible-chicks-are-just-meat former stuff, but a perusal of the article ought to serve to show that this guy, at least, did have a philosophy - he had an organised set of ideas about what was wrong with society, and where continuing to pursue the current course would lead, proposals for alternative ways of doing things (including proposals for law changes), and in addition he produced material intended to help men 'game' the system as far as getting sex with the minimum of investment goes.
Of course, whether this guy truly qualifies as an 'incel', which for some reason this thread seems to have become about, is questionable. He certainly claims to have been successful with (many) women. But notably, he turned out to be living in his mother's basement, aged 36, when the police needed a chat sometime: https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/roosh-v-lives-at-home-with-his-mom.html
***** ~Warning ~ the links below are not safe for work - Warning *****
According to the MGTOW site that I know about, Roosh V is/was a good example of a PUA - pick up artist - someone who demonstrates how to get sex from women without getting caught by traps laid by women (gaming). That site refers positively to Roosh V in their materials, as an example to be followed should someone want to go the PUA route. That's in the manifesto that newcomers are expected to sign up to, although the pages link to Roosh V's new site. I suspect that those pages are a compendia of various threads over the years and have not been updated to reflect Roosh V's conversion to the American Apostolic Church in March 2019.
The more damning page on Roosh V is from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, where they describe his ideology as male supremacy. Links are hidden to stop people inadvertently hitting them at work, because they quote explicit materials from male supremacists.
The police are clear that it was a "domestic incident" and not terrorism - on the basis (I presume) of the definition of terrorism that it must be motivated by a political agenda.
Thanks for starting this thread, @HelenEva. I think you've opened a fascinating can of worms here, and you've really made me think about the potential politics behind the use of the term 'domestic violence' (or 'family-harm related incident' as it is increasingly termed here). I think that you are absolutely right that pigeonholing events as 'domestic' violence serves to a.) reduce the focus on the 'violence' aspect, and b.) perpetuates the impression that these are a series of idiopathic incidents, rather than ongoing indicators of a systemic problem.
Wouldn't it be more honest - and more respectful of the worth of women in society - to allow violence motivated by a hatred of women to be defined as political and therefore terrorism?
For myself, I feel that it's possible to acknowledge that this is a systemic problem, fed by underlying ideologies, without necessarily deeming it 'terrorism'. But yes, I'm all for honesty, so, at the very least, let’s stop calling it ‘domestic violence’ and instead call it what it is, which is; assault, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, wounding with intent, grievous bodily harm, intimidation, coercion, blackmail, abduction, restraining somebody against their will, rape, and of course, murder.
And while we’re at it, let’s acknowledge that all of it is voluntary. It is a choice, and one that no amount of ‘anger management courses’ (which, I will note in passing, once again situate the aggressor in the role of victim) will solve. They are the wrong tool.
A man who hits his wife but manages not to hit the policeman who comes to his door in the wake of such an incident doesn’t have an ‘anger management problem’. A man who beats women and children but who is able to control himself when it comes to bosses, parking wardens, and idiots who pull out onto the road in front of him, doesn’t have an anger management problem. He has a perspective problem. An individual who can restrain himself when the consequences for not doing so are wide-ranging and severe is not somebody being carried along on an irresistible tsunami of passion. Rather, they are somebody who is performing a (possibly heuristic) cost-benefit analysis, coming to a decision, and acting on that decision.
Over time, societal views on rape have shifted, to the extent that the former view that rape arose directly, and pretty much inevitably, from a perfect storm of excess male sexual energy combined with certain predisposing factors such as the unfortunate tendency of females to exist, is now widely seen as the absolute bunkum it has always been. It'd be nice if we could make some progress in this direction wrt 'domestic' violence.
Over time, societal views on rape have shifted, to the extent that the former view that rape arose directly, and pretty much inevitably, from a perfect storm of excess male sexual energy combined with certain predisposing factors such as the unfortunate tendency of females to exist, is now widely seen as the absolute bunkum it has always been. It'd be nice if we could make some progress in this direction wrt 'domestic' violence.
"Certain predisposing factors such as the unfortunate tendency of females to exist" is going in my quotes file. And thanks for your kind words.
I suspect the police originally classified the Plymouth mass murder incident as domestic because the first victim was the murderer's mother. Sky (link to story) is reporting this morning that it may be reclassified as terrorism:
Jake Davison's links to the "incel" movement may lead to his shooting spree last week being reclassified as terrorism. Standing for involuntarily celibate, the "incel" ideology with its hatred of women has been linked to several mass murders.
There is still a wider issue with male violence and a reluctance to accept male supremacy as an ideology that can be pursued under the definition of terrorism, given above. The second question as to how to deal with terrorism is possibly a diversion from a thread where the main questions we have been arguing for are:
the acceptance of the classification of male violence against women as being a real issue so that it is even taken it seriously in the first place and
the acknowledgement that male supremacy is an ideology that poses a significant problem.
I would also suggest that boards that are encouraging rape of women as a way to getting the sex the board members think that they deserve maybe should be considered as criminal.
Encouraging or assisting crime is an offence under the Serious Crime Act 2007. The law has been used to prosecute the advertising of radar detectors (to help speeding drivers evade police speed traps). Advocating rape would seem to fall under the same law.
They suggest using prostitutes, or if that's not possible treating women as sex for hire, and how to avoid getting involved in any ways. I'm not sure any of that is something that should be encouraged. There is nothing nowhere about consent, all about these men deserving sex.
Wanting sex without an emotional connection is not illegal. I find it distasteful, and I'd argue sinful, but consensual sex is just that. Whether prostitution should be legal or not is a complicated question (and in general is made more complicated by the fact that a significant fraction of the women currently involved in prostitution are either trafficked, or otherwise not really making a free choice to be there) - but to the extent that sex work is work, then there shouldn't be a problem employing a sex worker, should there?
There is a difference between not mentioning that sex should be consensual and advocating rape. If two parties agree to have sex, then them having different hopes and intentions for a future relationship doesn't make it rape. A man leading a woman on with the implication that a relationship might be available is a story as old as the hills, and is a pretty sleazy act, but it's not an illegal one.
I think 99.9% of the mgtow "philosophy" is vile. They make one statement that is reasonable: "If you don't want to have a relationship with a woman, you don't have to have one", and surround it with enormous heaps of misogynistic hateful bullshit. But although I think it's vile, there's nothing de facto illegal about things like "how to get women at bars to have sex with you".
It focuses on the wrong thing. You need to focus on the misogyny, not the social interaction and relationship difficulties. Otherwise you get a situation where people are suspected of being potential violent incels when they're nothing of the sort.
An "incel" with social skills and likeability is probably a frat boy rapist. To me, the misogynistic attitude looks exactly the same.
(Dafyd) I note that the best predictor for radicalisation into violent Islamist movements is apparently a history of misogynistic violence against women
(Curiosity Killed )
Can you provide citations of that? .
Interesting, from reading both that article and the link that reviews the book, which is a couple of years old, the reviewer thinks that Joan Smith is promoting misogyny to the exclusion of all other factors.
It’s hard to fault the logic: treat what police used to call “domestics” as the serious crime it is and you considerably improve the chances of saving the lives not only of wives, partners and former girlfriends but also members of the public. And yet there is a conundrum at the heart of Home Grown. It reads like a letter from the recent past. And while domestic abuse is a red flag, it is only part of a much more complex challenge. Smith herself asks why “… siblings from the same families grow up in equally damaging circumstances but don’t become abusers let alone terrorists”. Misogyny and terrorism don’t have to be infectious.
and goes on to discuss the ten adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that are recognised as indicators of children who might grow up into abusers or terrorists. The presence of four of ACEs are a red flag suggesting a vulnerable child. Having bothered to look them up and found this list (link), mother treated badly is just one of the ACEs, physical abuse a second. This ties into the research I found that listed a number of factors, rather than a single factor as correlating to future risk.
It does suggest that misogyny and domestic violence should be taken seriously, far more seriously than it currently is, but not that misogyny is an accurate indicator of children becoming terrorists in future life. And that, that misogyny should be taken more seriously, is what we've been arguing on this thread.
And that, that misogyny should be taken more seriously, is what we've been arguing on this thread.
It is easily sufficient to argue that misogyny should be taken seriously because it is, in itself, a serious problem, rather than merely because it might be a precursor to something else.
And that, that misogyny should be taken more seriously, is what we've been arguing on this thread.
It is easily sufficient to argue that misogyny should be taken seriously because it is, in itself, a serious problem, rather than merely because it might be a precursor to something else.
Yes, I'm not too keen on the argument that the only two lens of viewing this are alternatively 'domestic violence' and 'terrorism'.
For myself, I feel that it's possible to acknowledge that this is a systemic problem, fed by underlying ideologies, without necessarily deeming it 'terrorism'.
Well said.
ISTM legitimate to distinguish - for the purpose of fighting crime - murder undertaken to further a political agenda from other types of murder.
Imagine there's a fringe group with an agenda and a shared view of the world that judges certain behaviour as evil, and one of their members commits a mass shooting that targets some such people.
It could be that they've conspired to commit the murders for the purpose of furthering their cause - one pulling the trigger on behalf of the group. In that case they're a terrorist organisation.
It could be that the rest of the members are a mix of harmless fantasists, lukewarm hangers-on and those who fully believe but are committed to peaceful persuasion as a means of furthering the cause. But one zealot takes it upon himself to murder some opponents as a way of sending a message to wider society that they're serious. He's a terrorist; they're not.
It could be that the "lone wolf" gunman murders some people because he's so caught up in the rhetoric, the group narrative, that he just thinks they deserve it. He's not a terrorist, just a man (and it's a male thing) who's full of anger.
Or it could be the classic "spree killing" scenario where a man, triggered by a conflict with someone close to him, kills them, revenges himself upon a few people who've in some way made him feel bad, and then commits suicide. And the group has very little to do with it.
Seems to me that all these are possible, and each holds a different place in the taxonomy of murder. And understanding which is part of the job for those charged with defending and protecting the public.
It focuses on the wrong thing. You need to focus on the misogyny, not the social interaction and relationship difficulties. Otherwise you get a situation where people are suspected of being potential violent incels when they're nothing of the sort.
An "incel" with social skills and likeability is probably a frat boy rapist. To me, the misogynistic attitude looks exactly the same.
But nobody would suggest that frat-boy rape should be classified as terrorism rather than rape?
It's the lack of social skills when combined with other things like misogyny and a sense of entitlement that seems to be a major problem contributing to incel related shootings.
Most incels are virgins. Stating that isn't going to make all the young teen and twenties "true love waits"-esq evos be suspected of being potential violent incels!
Something I've been musing on: incitement to hatred is already criminalised in relation to religion and race. It looks to me like parts of the manosphere are clearly inciting men to hate women. I wonder if expansion of these laws would be a more useful way forward than trying to shoehorn misogyny into terrorism.
It focuses on the wrong thing. You need to focus on the misogyny, not the social interaction and relationship difficulties. Otherwise you get a situation where people are suspected of being potential violent incels when they're nothing of the sort.
An "incel" with social skills and likeability is probably a frat boy rapist. To me, the misogynistic attitude looks exactly the same.
But nobody would suggest that frat-boy rape should be classified as terrorism rather than rape?
It's the lack of social skills when combined with other things like misogyny and a sense of entitlement that seems to be a major problem contributing to incel related shootings.
Most incels are virgins. Stating that isn't going to make all the young teen and twenties "true love waits"-esq evos be suspected of being potential violent incels!
all Incels are men. They are all misogynists. Why pick on another factor which they don't necessarily all share which risks further marginalising another much larger group, who, frankly, get enough shit from the ignorant bigoted attitudes of people outside their group as it is.
Fuck me, you get the shit beaten out of you for thirteen years at school for being "weird", you get the ostracised at work for being "weird" (if you can hold down a job at all), you struggle through life with a social group limited to other social outcasts and a few people not automatically repulsed by your weirdness, and now you're to be suspected of being a potential Incel misogynist as well.
No.
TLW evos are an irrelevance here as they have romantic rationships and their virginity is entirely voluntary.
Wanting sex without an emotional connection is not illegal. I find it distasteful, and I'd argue sinful, but consensual sex is just that. Whether prostitution should be legal or not is a complicated question (and in general is made more complicated by the fact that a significant fraction of the women currently involved in prostitution are either trafficked, or otherwise not really making a free choice to be there) - but to the extent that sex work is work, then there shouldn't be a problem employing a sex worker, should there?
There is a difference between not mentioning that sex should be consensual and advocating rape. If two parties agree to have sex, then them having different hopes and intentions for a future relationship doesn't make it rape. A man leading a woman on with the implication that a relationship might be available is a story as old as the hills, and is a pretty sleazy act, but it's not an illegal one.
I think 99.9% of the mgtow "philosophy" is vile. They make one statement that is reasonable: "If you don't want to have a relationship with a woman, you don't have to have one", and surround it with enormous heaps of misogynistic hateful bullshit. But although I think it's vile, there's nothing de facto illegal about things like "how to get women at bars to have sex with you".
I suggest you read the links I hid a few posts up to find quite how these ideas are suggested by some of the boards on line and endorsed by others. Consent should be seen as important, on those boards women are not required to give consent in any of these discussions, as it is all about the men's "needs", which is where I believe those boards move into illegality.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue, and I suspect by the police and law enforcement agencies.
An "incel" with social skills and likeability is probably a frat boy rapist.
Is he? Or would he just be a normal person who never developed the misogynistic attitude in the first place because he never suffered the multiple rejections, marginalisations and mockery that fostered it?
I mean, the whole point of incels is that they're involuntarily celibate - that is, they'd like to be in a relationship but nobody wants to be in one with them. And as I said before, instead of trying to work through what it is that they are doing wrong* and undergo some beneficial character development they just blame women and get all angry and misogynistic about it. Which, of course, in turn makes them less attractive and less likely to start a relationship. Vicious circle.
I'm not excusing their misogynistic attitudes at all, just saying that it's not reasonable to assume those attitudes have always been present, or would still have been present had their lives turned out differently. There are even examples of incels - and even MGTOWs - growing the fuck up and developing more balanced personalities as a result of finally finding someone who they can have a relationship with.
.
*= I guess for some of them what they're doing wrong could well be "being misogynist shits". But not all.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue, and I suspect by the police and law enforcement agencies.
Yes - recognising male supremacy as a set of beliefs which is causing problems in the world, rather than just "one of those things" would be very helpful.
And as I said before, instead of trying to work through what it is that they are doing wrong* and undergo some beneficial character developmen
This is the part of the narrative I'm finding problematic as an autistic man. Many people aren't "doing anything wrong" - unless "being autistic" is something wrong, and unless "beneficial character development" can mean "stop being autistic" it's not the issue.
We need to tread very carefully and be aware of the non-misogynistic, non-Incel but nevertheless hurt and lonely people who might appear fingered as potential problems by the narrative.
Can I also point out that I've known plenty of complete and utter arseholes who nevertheless seem to have no problems forming romantic and or sexual relationships. The narrative "can't form a romantic/sexual relationship == is an arsehole" is faulty.
And as I said before, instead of trying to work through what it is that they are doing wrong* and undergo some beneficial character developmen
This is the part of the narrative I'm finding problematic as an autistic man. Many people aren't "doing anything wrong" - unless "being autistic" is something wrong, and unless "beneficial character development" can mean "stop being autistic" it's not the issue.
We need to tread very carefully and be aware of the non-misogynistic, non-Incel but nevertheless hurt and lonely people who might appear fingered as potential problems by the narrative.
Can I also point out that I've known plenty of complete and utter arseholes who nevertheless seem to have no problems forming romantic and or sexual relationships. The narrative "can't form a romantic/sexual relationship == is an arsehole" is faulty.
As an autistic woman I'd like to 100% back up what @KarlLB says. There is nothing wrong with being a slightly weird autistic loner - I do it myself all the time. What there is that's wrong is deciding the world owes you sex and that you can and should achieve that by violence.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
There was a hostly ruling that things were going in that direction. Maybe that's what's meant.
Okay, this discussion is starting to generate too much heat. @Marvin the Martian, you are part of that. Please make it clear that you are discussing in good faith and make effort to be clear that you are not minimizing violence against any women or any minority group.
Is he? Or would he just be a normal person who never developed the misogynistic attitude in the first place because he never suffered the multiple rejections, marginalisations and mockery that fostered it?
The whole framing of your statement here is the entitlement-to-sex mentality. If a woman doesn't want to go out with a man, that's OK. If every woman who crosses his path over a period of several years turns him down, that's OK too.
As an autistic woman I'd like to 100% back up what @KarlLB says. There is nothing wrong with being a slightly weird autistic loner - I do it myself all the time. What there is that's wrong is deciding the world owes you sex and that you can and should achieve that by violence.
I was fortunate to meet Mrs C while we were both undergraduates. I met her completely by chance - she just happened to cross my path. Had I not met her, I assume I'd have lived in the same places, but been a bit more social ('cause I wouldn't have had anyone to go home to). I don't know that I'd have met another suitable possible spouse. I know that I could go through a list of all the women I've met over the last quarter century, and find precisely zero women who were unmarried and I could imagine having a relationship with were I not married.
There are even examples of incels - and even MGTOWs - growing the fuck up and developing more balanced personalities as a result of finally finding someone who they can have a relationship with.
And there are lots of examples of frat-boy rapists giving up rape. The typical frat-boy rapist doesn't become a middle-aged rapist: he becomes an ordinary middle-aged man with a somewhat misogynistic attitude. He probably makes jokes about buying shotguns to keep the boys away from his daughter.
I understand that if you want something, and you keep failing to get it, despondency can set in (whether that something is a relationship, or some casual sex, or a job, or whatever else it is that you want). Lots of people don't get what they want. (Count failed actors vs successful actors, or kids who want to play professional football vs kids that actually succeed, and so on.)
Failed footballer don't develop a hate of football, because they don't start with a core of hate of football to plaster their bitterness over. If "incels" didn't start with a misogynistic attitude, I don't see that they'd develop their hate of women either.
And as I said before, instead of trying to work through what it is that they are doing wrong* and undergo some beneficial character developmen
This is the part of the narrative I'm finding problematic as an autistic man. Many people aren't "doing anything wrong" - unless "being autistic" is something wrong, and unless "beneficial character development" can mean "stop being autistic" it's not the issue.
I never mentioned autism, nor was it ever my intent to suggest that autism is in any way a cause of the issues I'm describing.
I mean, the whole point of incels is that they're involuntarily celibate - that is, they'd like to be in a relationship but nobody wants to be in one with them. And as I said before, instead of trying to work through what it is that they are doing wrong* and undergo some beneficial character development they just blame women and get all angry and misogynistic about it.
What @KarlLB said was that "would like to be in a relationship but nobody wants to be in one with them" described him up to the point where he met Mrs LB. And "what he was doing wrong" - the reason he ascribes to the list of rejections he had, was "having autistic personality traits".
I don't think anyone thought you were saying that incels were autistic - we're just saying that focusing on the inability to get a date rather than the misogyny is the wrong focus.
I know someone who developed the belief at university that 'girls don't go for nice boys' after he had a bad break up with his first girlfriend. He didn't go any further down the rabbit hole, met a woman who didn't take any nonsense, left those misogynist attitudes behind, and is now happily married. That was before social media was a big thing.
I'm not sure where I'm going with that. I think incel attitudes are an intensification of low-grade misogyny that has hung around our society for a long time.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
Where did I say that this was being waved away on this thread? Just that there is a general tendency of men to downplay male supremacy as an issue and it's very difficult to get it recognised in a society that is still male dominated, see this paper from Psychology in Action (link) from 2019 discussing toxic masculinity, which says:
Boys who grow up in a society that grants them power and dominance learn to take certain things for granted, even though it may in fact be due to their male identity. One example of this is how men tend to downplay the effects of sexual harassment and bias against women. This is because many men do not experience sexual harassment or gender bias themselves due to being male. This ignorance is a result of what psychologists call privilege, which in this case refers to the experience of assuming that one’s lived experience applies to people in other demographic groups, such as women, even when it actually does not. Privilege can cause men to be unaware of how being a man and following masculine norms grants them power and advantages that are not granted to women, which in turn prevents men from seeing bias and discrimination.
and if men cannot see how disadvantaged women still are, they are less likely to be aware how much male supremacy is an issue, as the article continues:
Masculine power can also manifest in the form of sexism as men seek to reinforce their dominant status by asserting their superiority over women. Many men do this without even knowing they are reinforcing sexist ideas. Sexism can manifest in subtle ways, such as seemingly harmless “locker room conversations”. Some masculine norms encourage men to boast about how many women they’ve slept with, which they sometimes refer to as “body counts”. When men talk about women in this way, this dehumanizes them and reinforces the idea that women are objects to be conquered. While this may seem harmless, studies have shown that men who more strongly identify with traditional masculine norms are more likely to commit sexual violence against women
That whole article is reflecting on recently issued (2018) APA guidelines for treating men and boys, and how long those guidelines have taken to be produced, compared with those for other groups, e.g. LGBT+ in 2000, women and girls in 2007, transgender and gender non-conforming in 2015.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
Where did I say that this was being waved away on this thread? Just that there is a general tendency of men to downplay male supremacy as an issue and it's very difficult to get it recognised in a society that is still male dominated
Fair enough, I took you to mean this discussion. The problem, as you point, is that this issue isn't actually discussed enough in the wider world.
Filing in as another guy who had terrible social skills. All of my early attempts at dating turned into platonic friendships, which is generally a sign that you're not attractive to people and don't know how to communicate interest without crippling awkwardness.
I was also one of those "quiet loners" that people were freaking out about after Columbine.
Yet, even being a guy who understands the downside of being "friendzoned,"* I have the sense not to use that word unironically, turn into a violent douchebag, or cultivate resentment for several women who, in the end, turned out to be dear friends even if I never was granted the opportunity to have sex with them when I wanted to.
Being long-term single and horny is does not necessarily lead to a life of misogyny any more than being poor and white in a small town makes you turn into a Proud Boy.
That's just not how it works. There are other factors in the matrix that are more salient than sex.
*Understand that there aren't big enough scare quotes for that word. It's a detestable descriptor for an ordinary situation.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
Look, the men on those websites are almost certainly not very nice people. Hell, there’s a reason they can’t get a date in the first place. But if less than 95% of what’s posted to them is just teen frustration being vented without any serious intent - or even thought - behind it then I’ll be amazed.
Classic minimization. Claiming (without citation) that a whole bunch of people don't really mean what they repeated and emphatically say. This kind of borders on gaslighting, claiming that misogynists who advocate violence and suppression aren't really advocating violence and suppression, you're just imagining that their words have the plain meanings normally ascribed to them in idiomatic English. Followed like clockwork by whining that the most oppressed people in the world are wealthy white men and everyone else has it easy. It's kind of meta to argue that a bunch of entitled misogynists don't really mean what they say while recycling so much classic white male grievance.
I mean, the whole point of incels is that they're involuntarily celibate - that is, they'd like to be in a relationship...
I want, firstly, to acknowledge that you may have inadvertently hit on the heart of the matter here. It certainly seems plausible to me that the anger which emanates from incels stems largely from hurt, and that what they would like more than anything is somebody to love them.
However, that's not what they go about saying. What they go about saying is that they want somebody to fuck - and more specifically, that they want to be able to fuck the 'Staceys' that all the 'Chads' are hogging to themselves. They are not interested in Jenny-next-door who is only a 6.5 out of ten.
And here is where it gets really problematic for me... It's not merely the rating of females solely by looks, it's not only the automatic dismissal of anybody who doesn't measure up by these metrics - it's the inescapable fact that (at least according to what they say) they don't actually like 'Staceys'. They are deeply contemptuous of them. But they still want to fuck them. And if that doesn't give you the creeps, it should.
Not to mention that with this sort of twisted mind-set they're cutting off their own feet. They don't wanna have relationships with 'Staceys' because Staceys are untrustworthy feral bitches who will lay down for any 'Chad' who so much as looks in their direction, but they rule out regular women on the basis that they're not Staceys!
I suspect the real core of the incel problem is self-hate, rather than hate filtering in from the world at large.
Being long-term single and horny is does not necessarily lead to a life of misogyny any more than being poor and white in a small town makes you turn into a Proud Boy.
That's just not how it works. There are other factors in the matrix that are more salient than sex.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
Look, the men on those websites are almost certainly not very nice people. Hell, there’s a reason they can’t get a date in the first place. But if less than 95% of what’s posted to them is just teen frustration being vented without any serious intent - or even thought - behind it then I’ll be amazed.
Classic minimization. Claiming (without citation) that a whole bunch of people don't really mean what they repeated and emphatically say. This kind of borders on gaslighting, claiming that misogynists who advocate violence and suppression aren't really advocating violence and suppression, you're just imagining that their words have the plain meanings normally ascribed to them in idiomatic English. Followed like clockwork by whining that the most oppressed people in the world are wealthy white men and everyone else has it easy. It's kind of meta to argue that a bunch of entitled misogynists don't really mean what they say while recycling so much classic white male grievance.
If they're telling you who they are, believe them.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
This came to mind.
Yeah, I thought I'd check first, as @Curiosity killed hadn't directly addressed those afaict.
I was thinking generally and to a degree on the thread, but I chose not to name individuals on this thread when I knew, and could back up the assertion, that generally men are unaware of the amount of bias and discrimination there is still is against women. I hoped that rather than challenging individuals, pointing out that it was likely that all the men posting on the thread were posting with varying degrees of lack of awareness, it might make you all think, rather than pointing the finger at individuals.
It just occurred to me that the incels don't exactly believe they are entitled to sex. They believe they are entitled to FREE sex with certain women. There's nothing stopping any of them from hiring a prostitute and having the time of their life.
Which makes me think that they don't actually want sex; they want to dominate women. If they pay for sex, they're not "winning"; they're negotiating with an equal.
In so far as this is gendered issue, it is worth pointing out that there are women who tick all the boxes for “incel” - but I have never heard of any of them going on a killing spree. The ideology is definitely key to this sort of response to life’s disappointments.
Yet, even being a guy who understands the downside of being "friendzoned,"* I have the sense not to use that word unironically, turn into a violent douchebag, or cultivate resentment for several women who, in the end, turned out to be dear friends even if I never was granted the opportunity to have sex with them when I wanted to.
Others are not so strong. I can pity them for that, but I find it hard to hate them for it.
@la vie en rouge - I'm not sure that the male supremacist ideas need to be shoehorned into terrorism, it's just that male supremacy needs to be recognised as existing, rather than being hand-waved away by some of the men discussing this issue
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
Look, the men on those websites are almost certainly not very nice people. Hell, there’s a reason they can’t get a date in the first place. But if less than 95% of what’s posted to them is just teen frustration being vented without any serious intent - or even thought - behind it then I’ll be amazed.
Classic minimization. Claiming (without citation) that a whole bunch of people don't really mean what they repeated and emphatically say. This kind of borders on gaslighting, claiming that misogynists who advocate violence and suppression aren't really advocating violence and suppression, you're just imagining that their words have the plain meanings normally ascribed to them in idiomatic English.
Sometimes people say things they don’t really mean, especially when they’re lashing out in anger and frustration.
Followed like clockwork by whining that the most oppressed people in the world are wealthy white men and everyone else has it easy. It's kind of meta to argue that a bunch of entitled misogynists don't really mean what they say while recycling so much classic white male grievance.
The whole point of me mentioning those things was to point out the hypocrisy of insisting that everything an incel says should be taken at absolute face value while happily accepting that when others say similarly violent things they’re not really being serious.
Just treat all cases of people saying such things the same way and we’ll be cool. I don’t even mind which way that is.
Some posters seem to be using "incel" to mean something like "young men who are sexually frustrated due to their poor social skills with women". While others use it to mean something like "participants in an internet subculture of toxic masculinity that uses and has popularised the term "incel" "
All of the latter may be the former. But failure to distinguish may imply that all of the former are the latter, which ain't so.
Just to get back to women's perspectives on living with misogyny.
Women have the right to say no to men who ask them out. They don't owe them explanations. They're not responsible for men's crappy self-esteem or how neurodivergent men are treated in society. They shouldn't be made to feel they have to fix men's PTSD or depression or cheer them up by agreeing to date them.
That said, those rejections from women often have nothing to do with the men asking and that's another old hetero script to be debunked. Women who say no might be lesbian (women ask one another out all the time and women also say no to other women), bisexual, non-binary or asexual. Women who say no might be getting over a relationship or involved with somebody else. They might pick up red flags for danger rather than just thinking of the man asking as a sad case. Women who are rape survivors (and there are many of us) are wary of being gaslighted or tricked into staying late at work or accepting lifts from men who may or may not turn out to be violent.
There's a reason dating sites on the Internet have warnings about meeting male dates in public places, telling friends where you're going and figuring out a safe exit strategy. As women we live in predatory and misogynist societies. It is easier to say no right away than have to deal with a furious man late in the evening when he has insisted on paying for the meal and then reacts badly when you don't want to spend the night at his place or have a second date.
One thing has been bothering me right through this thread much as I agree with the need for incels online to be investigated more carefully by authorities for inciting violence against women.
The personable, charming, socially adroit man asking women out may also be misogynist and feel as entitled to free sex or submission as the unpopular social reject who identifies as incel. This is something @Soror Magna touched on earlier, that misogyny is ubiquitous and many of us live in rape cultures. Women are raised to wait to be asked, to be compliant, to make men feel good about themselves: it is harder for women to say no when there are no obvious red flags. Your best friend's brother you've crushed on for years invites you out. The newly divorced and popular colleague who suggests coffee. The pattern here is sometimes different: the woman goes out and has a great time, the man is fun and attractive and she feels lucky to have found someone like this. Then she says no to him. She doesn't want to have sex yet, she doesn't feel ready to get married, she doesn't want to do what he asks. This is a man who has no experience of being rejected, nobody says no to him and gets away with it.
When I began volunteering with shelters for battered or abused women, I talked with a male GP who said it took him years to believe his injured women patients and realise how dangerous and abusive certain men were. Because they were good-looking, successful, prominent figures in the town, he couldn't understand why they needed to beat up and rape their wives or girlfriends. They could get sex or desirable partners just by asking nicely. It wasn't about having sex, it was about an irrational fear and hatred of women. And all too often the failure to understand the spiral of worsening violence meant that not just wives but children would get beaten up or sexually abused -- and when women tried to leave the men they would kill themselves and their family members or shoot those trying to intervene.
There are different issues here, and they are getting conflated, with several things in common. Generally male privilege means men generally do not accept quite how careful women have to be navigating a safe way through dealing with men in general or quite how much discrimination and danger there is in just being a woman on the streets. There is often a tendency to regard rejection as a personal affront rather than a woman trying to keep herself safe, an unconscious misogyny, and an inherent belief that women owe men sex, see the APA article above. Seriously, I volunteer in youthwork, hear teenagers talk and that misogyny is there in teenage boys chatting among themselves and their attitudes to the girls and the continual abuse the girls face. This then can lead to a belief in male supremacy.
There is more than one group in the manosphere, and they have slightly different ideologies.
Incels are one version of toxic masculinity, the one implicated in the Plymouth case, particularly violent online communities, with known links to far right and other terrorist groups, and from where several mass murderers have originated. These are the involuntary celibate men who are building that situation into a reason to be aggressive against women.
PUAs - pick up artists - men who are choosing to have sex with women without involvement and/or consent, "gaming" the sex they think is their entitlement. The original Roosh V board is/was regularly cited as a good example of this "skill", picking up women and taking any sex they wanted without considering the woman as anything but a sex machine that can be picked up and discarded when the woman has served the man's needs.
MGTOW groups - men going their own way - also misogynist, can suggest the use of prostitutes or gaming sex by following the PUA route, or sublimating sexual desires into other activities. The board I am aware of has a thread suggesting that sex robots might solve many of their problems. They still have an ideology that is anti-women and a world view with a distorted description and view of women; the board I am aware of requires that new members sign up to their manifesto, which includes accepting the PUA agenda above Research I linked to above suggests that there is a gradual movement of the members of these groups into the more violent and aggressive incel groups - about 8% a year.
tl:dr Generally the manosphere is getting more violent. Different groups are building violence against women either as a rape culture (PUAs) or by encouraging the murderous rage of the incels. The MGTOW groups are also anti-women, although not directly encouraging violence, but creating a world view of women and an misogynistic ideology. Research is pointing to a shift from MGTOW groups to the more violent groups. And all this exists in a world where men are unconsciously misogynist.
@Curiosity killed yes, I'm conscious of coming from a much more violent society and conflating issues that may not belong together in other places. There are similarities though.
Every six hours in South Africa a woman is killed by her intimate partner (2018 stats). Studies here have shown that men's access to firearms increases the risk of women being killed fivefold. The availability and misuse of firearms is a major factor in intimate partner violence and men who kill their partners are often found to have criminal records for assault, carjacking, armed robbery and gangsterism.
Pumla Dineo Gqola's book Rape: a South Africa Nightmare pointed out that violence against women in the context of toxic hypermasculinity, male supremacist ideologies, anti-social misogynist attitudes, crime and the prevalence of a gun culture was in no way unique to South Africa.
Comments
To be clear, is it being suggested that all spree killings are acts of terrorism ?
Or only those intended to bring about a change in the law ?
That "bringing about" could be by eliminating opponents of that change so that people fear to speak against it (which is where the terror comes in). Or by demonstrating the strength of their resolve so that opponents of that change come to believe that they can't win. Or by gaining publicity for the idea of that change. Or by any other method.
Because that ISTM is what we mean by politics when we talk of politically-motivated violence.
I'm willing to be convinced by evidence. But the descriptions of incel behaviour online that I've read so far are in terms of sharing their feelings of resentment and their revenge fantasies. Not in formulating a change in the law that they want to see enacted and planning a campaign to bring this about.
Seems to me entirely reasonable to say that spree killings are particularly horrific crimes and police resources should be redirected into doing more to head off those who might be travelling in that direction. (Spend less resources on speeding tickets and parking offences is something one hears occasionally).
There's an argument for allowing gun owners less privacy than other citizens. Motorists aren't allowed anonymity - they have to have a number plate on their vehicle so that they can be traced if anyone witnesses them misusing it by driving badly.
Well, yeah, you can't have human rights interfering with expressing rape culture.
Given the ubiquity of misogyny, I don't think it's useful to compare it to terrorism linked to a specific political movement. There are liberal and conservative misogynists, religious and atheist misogynists, white and BIMPOC misogynists. Misogyny has existed through all of human history in every culture. That may be another reason why it isn't considered terrorism.
Nevertheless, women know it's terrorism.
For context, and this is far from unusual for autistic men, the only romantic relationship I have ever had is with the woman to whom I am now married. I met her when I was 25. By then I had however had hundreds of rejections.
So what I'm getting at here is be careful who you catch in your narrative.
Sorry. I realised that may be an issue when I was typing.
But at the same time it is part of the Incel make up isn't it? Just as being male is. Just as a pessimistic attitude toward life and life opportunity is.
Social interaction problems doesn't = Incel
Muslim doesn't = terrorist
But you have very few Mormon, Hindu or Evangelicals who commit acts of Islamic Terrorism and you have very few outgoing, social, had multiple sexual partners men commiting Incel mass killings.
Hi Russ. Have a look at the Wikipedia page on 'Roosh V'. Unfortunately you can't look at his Return of Kings website, because he has gone all religious-monkish-style-anti-women now and taken down his get-as-much-sex-as-possible-chicks-are-just-meat former stuff, but a perusal of the article ought to serve to show that this guy, at least, did have a philosophy - he had an organised set of ideas about what was wrong with society, and where continuing to pursue the current course would lead, proposals for alternative ways of doing things (including proposals for law changes), and in addition he produced material intended to help men 'game' the system as far as getting sex with the minimum of investment goes.
Of course, whether this guy truly qualifies as an 'incel', which for some reason this thread seems to have become about, is questionable. He certainly claims to have been successful with (many) women. But notably, he turned out to be living in his mother's basement, aged 36, when the police needed a chat sometime:
https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/roosh-v-lives-at-home-with-his-mom.html
According to the MGTOW site that I know about, Roosh V is/was a good example of a PUA - pick up artist - someone who demonstrates how to get sex from women without getting caught by traps laid by women (gaming). That site refers positively to Roosh V in their materials, as an example to be followed should someone want to go the PUA route. That's in the manifesto that newcomers are expected to sign up to, although the pages link to Roosh V's new site. I suspect that those pages are a compendia of various threads over the years and have not been updated to reflect Roosh V's conversion to the American Apostolic Church in March 2019.
The more damning page on Roosh V is from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, where they describe his ideology as male supremacy. Links are hidden to stop people inadvertently hitting them at work, because they quote explicit materials from male supremacists.
Apparently the original MGTOW.com site is now down and looks as if it is no longer.
For myself, I feel that it's possible to acknowledge that this is a systemic problem, fed by underlying ideologies, without necessarily deeming it 'terrorism'. But yes, I'm all for honesty, so, at the very least, let’s stop calling it ‘domestic violence’ and instead call it what it is, which is; assault, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, wounding with intent, grievous bodily harm, intimidation, coercion, blackmail, abduction, restraining somebody against their will, rape, and of course, murder.
And while we’re at it, let’s acknowledge that all of it is voluntary. It is a choice, and one that no amount of ‘anger management courses’ (which, I will note in passing, once again situate the aggressor in the role of victim) will solve. They are the wrong tool.
A man who hits his wife but manages not to hit the policeman who comes to his door in the wake of such an incident doesn’t have an ‘anger management problem’. A man who beats women and children but who is able to control himself when it comes to bosses, parking wardens, and idiots who pull out onto the road in front of him, doesn’t have an anger management problem. He has a perspective problem. An individual who can restrain himself when the consequences for not doing so are wide-ranging and severe is not somebody being carried along on an irresistible tsunami of passion. Rather, they are somebody who is performing a (possibly heuristic) cost-benefit analysis, coming to a decision, and acting on that decision.
Over time, societal views on rape have shifted, to the extent that the former view that rape arose directly, and pretty much inevitably, from a perfect storm of excess male sexual energy combined with certain predisposing factors such as the unfortunate tendency of females to exist, is now widely seen as the absolute bunkum it has always been. It'd be nice if we could make some progress in this direction wrt 'domestic' violence.
"Certain predisposing factors such as the unfortunate tendency of females to exist" is going in my quotes file. And thanks for your kind words.
There is still a wider issue with male violence and a reluctance to accept male supremacy as an ideology that can be pursued under the definition of terrorism, given above. The second question as to how to deal with terrorism is possibly a diversion from a thread where the main questions we have been arguing for are:
Encouraging or assisting crime is an offence under the Serious Crime Act 2007. The law has been used to prosecute the advertising of radar detectors (to help speeding drivers evade police speed traps). Advocating rape would seem to fall under the same law.
Wanting sex without an emotional connection is not illegal. I find it distasteful, and I'd argue sinful, but consensual sex is just that. Whether prostitution should be legal or not is a complicated question (and in general is made more complicated by the fact that a significant fraction of the women currently involved in prostitution are either trafficked, or otherwise not really making a free choice to be there) - but to the extent that sex work is work, then there shouldn't be a problem employing a sex worker, should there?
There is a difference between not mentioning that sex should be consensual and advocating rape. If two parties agree to have sex, then them having different hopes and intentions for a future relationship doesn't make it rape. A man leading a woman on with the implication that a relationship might be available is a story as old as the hills, and is a pretty sleazy act, but it's not an illegal one.
I think 99.9% of the mgtow "philosophy" is vile. They make one statement that is reasonable: "If you don't want to have a relationship with a woman, you don't have to have one", and surround it with enormous heaps of misogynistic hateful bullshit. But although I think it's vile, there's nothing de facto illegal about things like "how to get women at bars to have sex with you".
An "incel" with social skills and likeability is probably a frat boy rapist. To me, the misogynistic attitude looks exactly the same.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/05/many-terrorists-abuse-women-research-extremist-attackers-violent-misogyny
Joan Smith, writing in the Guardian. She is plugging a book in which I presume she makes the case in greater detail.
The 2019 Guardian review of the book (link) suggests the theory is flawed: and goes on to discuss the ten adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that are recognised as indicators of children who might grow up into abusers or terrorists. The presence of four of ACEs are a red flag suggesting a vulnerable child. Having bothered to look them up and found this list (link), mother treated badly is just one of the ACEs, physical abuse a second. This ties into the research I found that listed a number of factors, rather than a single factor as correlating to future risk.
It does suggest that misogyny and domestic violence should be taken seriously, far more seriously than it currently is, but not that misogyny is an accurate indicator of children becoming terrorists in future life. And that, that misogyny should be taken more seriously, is what we've been arguing on this thread.
It is easily sufficient to argue that misogyny should be taken seriously because it is, in itself, a serious problem, rather than merely because it might be a precursor to something else.
Yes, I'm not too keen on the argument that the only two lens of viewing this are alternatively 'domestic violence' and 'terrorism'.
Well said.
ISTM legitimate to distinguish - for the purpose of fighting crime - murder undertaken to further a political agenda from other types of murder.
Imagine there's a fringe group with an agenda and a shared view of the world that judges certain behaviour as evil, and one of their members commits a mass shooting that targets some such people.
It could be that they've conspired to commit the murders for the purpose of furthering their cause - one pulling the trigger on behalf of the group. In that case they're a terrorist organisation.
It could be that the rest of the members are a mix of harmless fantasists, lukewarm hangers-on and those who fully believe but are committed to peaceful persuasion as a means of furthering the cause. But one zealot takes it upon himself to murder some opponents as a way of sending a message to wider society that they're serious. He's a terrorist; they're not.
It could be that the "lone wolf" gunman murders some people because he's so caught up in the rhetoric, the group narrative, that he just thinks they deserve it. He's not a terrorist, just a man (and it's a male thing) who's full of anger.
Or it could be the classic "spree killing" scenario where a man, triggered by a conflict with someone close to him, kills them, revenges himself upon a few people who've in some way made him feel bad, and then commits suicide. And the group has very little to do with it.
Seems to me that all these are possible, and each holds a different place in the taxonomy of murder. And understanding which is part of the job for those charged with defending and protecting the public.
But nobody would suggest that frat-boy rape should be classified as terrorism rather than rape?
It's the lack of social skills when combined with other things like misogyny and a sense of entitlement that seems to be a major problem contributing to incel related shootings.
Most incels are virgins. Stating that isn't going to make all the young teen and twenties "true love waits"-esq evos be suspected of being potential violent incels!
all Incels are men. They are all misogynists. Why pick on another factor which they don't necessarily all share which risks further marginalising another much larger group, who, frankly, get enough shit from the ignorant bigoted attitudes of people outside their group as it is.
Fuck me, you get the shit beaten out of you for thirteen years at school for being "weird", you get the ostracised at work for being "weird" (if you can hold down a job at all), you struggle through life with a social group limited to other social outcasts and a few people not automatically repulsed by your weirdness, and now you're to be suspected of being a potential Incel misogynist as well.
No.
TLW evos are an irrelevance here as they have romantic rationships and their virginity is entirely voluntary.
I suggest you read the links I hid a few posts up to find quite how these ideas are suggested by some of the boards on line and endorsed by others. Consent should be seen as important, on those boards women are not required to give consent in any of these discussions, as it is all about the men's "needs", which is where I believe those boards move into illegality.
Is he? Or would he just be a normal person who never developed the misogynistic attitude in the first place because he never suffered the multiple rejections, marginalisations and mockery that fostered it?
I mean, the whole point of incels is that they're involuntarily celibate - that is, they'd like to be in a relationship but nobody wants to be in one with them. And as I said before, instead of trying to work through what it is that they are doing wrong* and undergo some beneficial character development they just blame women and get all angry and misogynistic about it. Which, of course, in turn makes them less attractive and less likely to start a relationship. Vicious circle.
I'm not excusing their misogynistic attitudes at all, just saying that it's not reasonable to assume those attitudes have always been present, or would still have been present had their lives turned out differently. There are even examples of incels - and even MGTOWs - growing the fuck up and developing more balanced personalities as a result of finally finding someone who they can have a relationship with.
.
*= I guess for some of them what they're doing wrong could well be "being misogynist shits". But not all.
Yes - recognising male supremacy as a set of beliefs which is causing problems in the world, rather than just "one of those things" would be very helpful.
This is the part of the narrative I'm finding problematic as an autistic man. Many people aren't "doing anything wrong" - unless "being autistic" is something wrong, and unless "beneficial character development" can mean "stop being autistic" it's not the issue.
We need to tread very carefully and be aware of the non-misogynistic, non-Incel but nevertheless hurt and lonely people who might appear fingered as potential problems by the narrative.
Can I also point out that I've known plenty of complete and utter arseholes who nevertheless seem to have no problems forming romantic and or sexual relationships. The narrative "can't form a romantic/sexual relationship == is an arsehole" is faulty.
As an autistic woman I'd like to 100% back up what @KarlLB says. There is nothing wrong with being a slightly weird autistic loner - I do it myself all the time. What there is that's wrong is deciding the world owes you sex and that you can and should achieve that by violence.
Can you point to posts in this thread which hand wave away this issue?
There was a hostly ruling that things were going in that direction. Maybe that's what's meant.
The whole framing of your statement here is the entitlement-to-sex mentality. If a woman doesn't want to go out with a man, that's OK. If every woman who crosses his path over a period of several years turns him down, that's OK too.
HelenEva has it right:
I was fortunate to meet Mrs C while we were both undergraduates. I met her completely by chance - she just happened to cross my path. Had I not met her, I assume I'd have lived in the same places, but been a bit more social ('cause I wouldn't have had anyone to go home to). I don't know that I'd have met another suitable possible spouse. I know that I could go through a list of all the women I've met over the last quarter century, and find precisely zero women who were unmarried and I could imagine having a relationship with were I not married.
And there are lots of examples of frat-boy rapists giving up rape. The typical frat-boy rapist doesn't become a middle-aged rapist: he becomes an ordinary middle-aged man with a somewhat misogynistic attitude. He probably makes jokes about buying shotguns to keep the boys away from his daughter.
I understand that if you want something, and you keep failing to get it, despondency can set in (whether that something is a relationship, or some casual sex, or a job, or whatever else it is that you want). Lots of people don't get what they want. (Count failed actors vs successful actors, or kids who want to play professional football vs kids that actually succeed, and so on.)
Failed footballer don't develop a hate of football, because they don't start with a core of hate of football to plaster their bitterness over. If "incels" didn't start with a misogynistic attitude, I don't see that they'd develop their hate of women either.
I never mentioned autism, nor was it ever my intent to suggest that autism is in any way a cause of the issues I'm describing.
What you said was:
What @KarlLB said was that "would like to be in a relationship but nobody wants to be in one with them" described him up to the point where he met Mrs LB. And "what he was doing wrong" - the reason he ascribes to the list of rejections he had, was "having autistic personality traits".
I don't think anyone thought you were saying that incels were autistic - we're just saying that focusing on the inability to get a date rather than the misogyny is the wrong focus.
I'm not sure where I'm going with that. I think incel attitudes are an intensification of low-grade misogyny that has hung around our society for a long time.
Where did I say that this was being waved away on this thread? Just that there is a general tendency of men to downplay male supremacy as an issue and it's very difficult to get it recognised in a society that is still male dominated, see this paper from Psychology in Action (link) from 2019 discussing toxic masculinity, which says:
and if men cannot see how disadvantaged women still are, they are less likely to be aware how much male supremacy is an issue, as the article continues:
That whole article is reflecting on recently issued (2018) APA guidelines for treating men and boys, and how long those guidelines have taken to be produced, compared with those for other groups, e.g. LGBT+ in 2000, women and girls in 2007, transgender and gender non-conforming in 2015.
Fair enough, I took you to mean this discussion. The problem, as you point, is that this issue isn't actually discussed enough in the wider world.
I was also one of those "quiet loners" that people were freaking out about after Columbine.
Yet, even being a guy who understands the downside of being "friendzoned,"* I have the sense not to use that word unironically, turn into a violent douchebag, or cultivate resentment for several women who, in the end, turned out to be dear friends even if I never was granted the opportunity to have sex with them when I wanted to.
Being long-term single and horny is does not necessarily lead to a life of misogyny any more than being poor and white in a small town makes you turn into a Proud Boy.
That's just not how it works. There are other factors in the matrix that are more salient than sex.
*Understand that there aren't big enough scare quotes for that word. It's a detestable descriptor for an ordinary situation.
This came to mind.
Classic minimization. Claiming (without citation) that a whole bunch of people don't really mean what they repeated and emphatically say. This kind of borders on gaslighting, claiming that misogynists who advocate violence and suppression aren't really advocating violence and suppression, you're just imagining that their words have the plain meanings normally ascribed to them in idiomatic English. Followed like clockwork by whining that the most oppressed people in the world are wealthy white men and everyone else has it easy. It's kind of meta to argue that a bunch of entitled misogynists don't really mean what they say while recycling so much classic white male grievance.
I want, firstly, to acknowledge that you may have inadvertently hit on the heart of the matter here. It certainly seems plausible to me that the anger which emanates from incels stems largely from hurt, and that what they would like more than anything is somebody to love them.
However, that's not what they go about saying. What they go about saying is that they want somebody to fuck - and more specifically, that they want to be able to fuck the 'Staceys' that all the 'Chads' are hogging to themselves. They are not interested in Jenny-next-door who is only a 6.5 out of ten.
And here is where it gets really problematic for me... It's not merely the rating of females solely by looks, it's not only the automatic dismissal of anybody who doesn't measure up by these metrics - it's the inescapable fact that (at least according to what they say) they don't actually like 'Staceys'. They are deeply contemptuous of them. But they still want to fuck them. And if that doesn't give you the creeps, it should.
Not to mention that with this sort of twisted mind-set they're cutting off their own feet. They don't wanna have relationships with 'Staceys' because Staceys are untrustworthy feral bitches who will lay down for any 'Chad' who so much as looks in their direction, but they rule out regular women on the basis that they're not Staceys!
I suspect the real core of the incel problem is self-hate, rather than hate filtering in from the world at large.
All the amens. All of them.
If they're telling you who they are, believe them.
Yeah, I thought I'd check first, as @Curiosity killed hadn't directly addressed those afaict.
Which makes me think that they don't actually want sex; they want to dominate women. If they pay for sex, they're not "winning"; they're negotiating with an equal.
Edit: typo
Others are not so strong. I can pity them for that, but I find it hard to hate them for it.
Sometimes people say things they don’t really mean, especially when they’re lashing out in anger and frustration.
The whole point of me mentioning those things was to point out the hypocrisy of insisting that everything an incel says should be taken at absolute face value while happily accepting that when others say similarly violent things they’re not really being serious.
Just treat all cases of people saying such things the same way and we’ll be cool. I don’t even mind which way that is.
Some posters seem to be using "incel" to mean something like "young men who are sexually frustrated due to their poor social skills with women". While others use it to mean something like "participants in an internet subculture of toxic masculinity that uses and has popularised the term "incel" "
All of the latter may be the former. But failure to distinguish may imply that all of the former are the latter, which ain't so.
Can we agree a usage and stick to it ?
Women have the right to say no to men who ask them out. They don't owe them explanations. They're not responsible for men's crappy self-esteem or how neurodivergent men are treated in society. They shouldn't be made to feel they have to fix men's PTSD or depression or cheer them up by agreeing to date them.
That said, those rejections from women often have nothing to do with the men asking and that's another old hetero script to be debunked. Women who say no might be lesbian (women ask one another out all the time and women also say no to other women), bisexual, non-binary or asexual. Women who say no might be getting over a relationship or involved with somebody else. They might pick up red flags for danger rather than just thinking of the man asking as a sad case. Women who are rape survivors (and there are many of us) are wary of being gaslighted or tricked into staying late at work or accepting lifts from men who may or may not turn out to be violent.
There's a reason dating sites on the Internet have warnings about meeting male dates in public places, telling friends where you're going and figuring out a safe exit strategy. As women we live in predatory and misogynist societies. It is easier to say no right away than have to deal with a furious man late in the evening when he has insisted on paying for the meal and then reacts badly when you don't want to spend the night at his place or have a second date.
One thing has been bothering me right through this thread much as I agree with the need for incels online to be investigated more carefully by authorities for inciting violence against women.
The personable, charming, socially adroit man asking women out may also be misogynist and feel as entitled to free sex or submission as the unpopular social reject who identifies as incel. This is something @Soror Magna touched on earlier, that misogyny is ubiquitous and many of us live in rape cultures. Women are raised to wait to be asked, to be compliant, to make men feel good about themselves: it is harder for women to say no when there are no obvious red flags. Your best friend's brother you've crushed on for years invites you out. The newly divorced and popular colleague who suggests coffee. The pattern here is sometimes different: the woman goes out and has a great time, the man is fun and attractive and she feels lucky to have found someone like this. Then she says no to him. She doesn't want to have sex yet, she doesn't feel ready to get married, she doesn't want to do what he asks. This is a man who has no experience of being rejected, nobody says no to him and gets away with it.
When I began volunteering with shelters for battered or abused women, I talked with a male GP who said it took him years to believe his injured women patients and realise how dangerous and abusive certain men were. Because they were good-looking, successful, prominent figures in the town, he couldn't understand why they needed to beat up and rape their wives or girlfriends. They could get sex or desirable partners just by asking nicely. It wasn't about having sex, it was about an irrational fear and hatred of women. And all too often the failure to understand the spiral of worsening violence meant that not just wives but children would get beaten up or sexually abused -- and when women tried to leave the men they would kill themselves and their family members or shoot those trying to intervene.
There are different issues here, and they are getting conflated, with several things in common. Generally male privilege means men generally do not accept quite how careful women have to be navigating a safe way through dealing with men in general or quite how much discrimination and danger there is in just being a woman on the streets. There is often a tendency to regard rejection as a personal affront rather than a woman trying to keep herself safe, an unconscious misogyny, and an inherent belief that women owe men sex, see the APA article above. Seriously, I volunteer in youthwork, hear teenagers talk and that misogyny is there in teenage boys chatting among themselves and their attitudes to the girls and the continual abuse the girls face. This then can lead to a belief in male supremacy.
There is more than one group in the manosphere, and they have slightly different ideologies.
Incels are one version of toxic masculinity, the one implicated in the Plymouth case, particularly violent online communities, with known links to far right and other terrorist groups, and from where several mass murderers have originated. These are the involuntary celibate men who are building that situation into a reason to be aggressive against women.
PUAs - pick up artists - men who are choosing to have sex with women without involvement and/or consent, "gaming" the sex they think is their entitlement. The original Roosh V board is/was regularly cited as a good example of this "skill", picking up women and taking any sex they wanted without considering the woman as anything but a sex machine that can be picked up and discarded when the woman has served the man's needs.
MGTOW groups - men going their own way - also misogynist, can suggest the use of prostitutes or gaming sex by following the PUA route, or sublimating sexual desires into other activities. The board I am aware of has a thread suggesting that sex robots might solve many of their problems. They still have an ideology that is anti-women and a world view with a distorted description and view of women; the board I am aware of requires that new members sign up to their manifesto, which includes accepting the PUA agenda above Research I linked to above suggests that there is a gradual movement of the members of these groups into the more violent and aggressive incel groups - about 8% a year.
tl:dr Generally the manosphere is getting more violent. Different groups are building violence against women either as a rape culture (PUAs) or by encouraging the murderous rage of the incels. The MGTOW groups are also anti-women, although not directly encouraging violence, but creating a world view of women and an misogynistic ideology. Research is pointing to a shift from MGTOW groups to the more violent groups. And all this exists in a world where men are unconsciously misogynist.
Every six hours in South Africa a woman is killed by her intimate partner (2018 stats). Studies here have shown that men's access to firearms increases the risk of women being killed fivefold. The availability and misuse of firearms is a major factor in intimate partner violence and men who kill their partners are often found to have criminal records for assault, carjacking, armed robbery and gangsterism.
Pumla Dineo Gqola's book Rape: a South Africa Nightmare pointed out that violence against women in the context of toxic hypermasculinity, male supremacist ideologies, anti-social misogynist attitudes, crime and the prevalence of a gun culture was in no way unique to South Africa.