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.
Indeed. And it may, in some cases, have been about the fear they were able to instill, the confusion and the ability to intimidate. I am a lucky woman, in that I'm married to a decent man, who is the son of a decent man, and I'm the daughter of a decent man (who was the son of an indecent man*), and I greatly appreciate both my good fortune and the very existence of all these decent men, but (and here comes my point)...there's a lot of calls for these good blokes to be better allies of women, but for all my efforts, I've never been successful in communicating to any of the decent men in my life that the actions of the indecent men are not accidental. That they haven't unfortunately hurt somebody because they failed to control their desires. That, in fact, their desires lie in the direction of doing things to people against their will. That scaring people and hurting people is what it's about. It gives them a rush, a feeling of invincibility, and in the process creates a powerful biological feedback loop leading to an appetite for more of the same.
You see, even though I'm certainly a fortunate women, I've happened across some of these men...
*He bashed my biological grandmother until she left, and then bashed her replacement. Of course, I wasn't told this until after he died...
This may not be quite right - it's a new thought for me but the incel stuff sounds very like some of the key attitudes behind intimate partner violence against women but writ large - because there is no one 'partner' all women are treated as imagined (and supposedly 'defective') sexual partners to be subjugated or punished or attacked or raped in whatever fucked up way occurs to a man who thinks they deserve it and that's where it crosses into a terrorist-style ideology as mass violent punishment fantasies of women as a class emerge.
I think some are coming too close to accepting the rationales these folk give for violence at face value - there's always an invented justification (reversing victim and offender) why a violent man is right and justified and 'poor wee him, the real victim' in his own eyes to attack or rape his partner and it sounds much the same with its mass manifestation.
...That they haven't unfortunately hurt somebody because they failed to control their desires.
Are you saying that this never happens ?
That, in fact, their desires lie in the direction of doing things to people against their will. That scaring people and hurting people is what it's about. It gives them a rush, a feeling of invincibility, and in the process creates a powerful biological feedback loop leading to an appetite for more of the same.
Sounds like you're talking about the intoxication of power.
Popular culture would have it that powerful men are more attractive to women. Biology has a lot to answer for. But there are acts which it doesn't excuse.
... and popular culture continues to promulgate misogynistic myths, like the ones you've just regurgitated above, @Russ. Another male poster handwaving away quite how serious an issue toxic masculinity is.
Unfortunately, much of what passes as current media/film/story output is also promulgating misogynistic myths, which continue to unhelpfully feed and reinforce this culture of toxic masculinity. Our culture is embedded in this unhelpful way of thinking.
As I have been trying not to say quite as forcefully as I'm about to say it: many of the posts from the male posters on this thread continue to be oblivious as to quite how much they've absorbed the misogynistic mindset and quite how blind they are, through their male privilege, as to how this makes the world a very unfriendly place for women. They do not seem to realise that they are paddling in the shallows of the same pool that becomes the MGTOW and incel cultures the deeper they go.
This may not be quite right - it's a new thought for me but the incel stuff sounds very like some of the key attitudes behind intimate partner violence against women but writ large - because there is no one 'partner' all women are treated as imagined (and supposedly 'defective') sexual partners to be subjugated or punished or attacked or raped in whatever fucked up way occurs to a man who thinks they deserve it and that's where it crosses into a terrorist-style ideology as mass violent punishment fantasies of women as a class emerge.
I think this is mostly right. Incels, frat boy rapists, lots of domestic violence: all of it, at root, seems to start with the idea that women aren't actual people - or at least, not people in the same sense that men are people.
If women are people, you can't get to incel "logic", because it's always OK for a person to choose to say no. If women are people, then they are not interchangeable ambulant sex toys. And I claim again that frat boy rapists and their ilk are using exactly the same logic.
I'm less certain that "domestic violence" is always the same. I'm entertaining the idea that there might be different kinds of domestic violence: some is rooted in the same kind of misogynistic women-aren't-really-people attitudes we're talking about with incels etc., and some is just angry violent people lashing out at the person they live with.
(After all, gay couples have domestic violence, and women occasionally abuse their husbands: although it's most often a man-on-woman problem, it's not always a man-on-woman problem. And it rather stands to reason that whatever drives woman-on-man domestic violence, or man-on-man or woman-on-woman domestic violence, could also drive man-on-woman domestic violence at a similar sort or level.)
I recently worked with a historian of domestic abuse against women - and one of the themes that came out of her work was how society and its institutions so often upheld a man's 'right' to punish 'his' wife, children and dependents and the feeling of entitlement to do so that went with it - note that not just women suffer from these kind of patriarchal understandings, even if they are about upholding male supremacy overall.
Another thing that came out from working with a different historian in a slightly earlier period (who was looking at female violence against men and other women) was that women could internalise patriarchal norms about what a man was supposed to be - and attack a man who they saw as not upholding his end of the gendered bargain and even get societal approval for that but this was a much much rarer scenario.
So I think the role of patriarchy and its norms and roles in intimate partner violence is a bit more complicated - if one partner in a same sex relationship has internalised toxic gender role stuff that makes them feel socially entitled to punish their partner that will fuel intimate partner violence. It's not as simple as saying that there's such a thing as man on man or woman on man abuse and therefore something different must be at work there - most people have unconsciously internalised to some extent patriarchal models of how to do relationships. Maybe some of the LGBTQ+ folk round here could comment more on this - I'm aware I'm no expert?
And when you look at the figures they're highly gendered - domestic abuse and even more so coercive control is overwhelmingly a male problem against women, so we absolutely need to reckon with that.
Again I'd like to come back to Kate Manne's concept of entitlement 'the widespread perception that a privileged man is owed something” - I think we are seeing that entitlement being turned against women as a class, now with violent mass punishment being envisaged for women because they are not giving the men in question what they think they are owed. The violent mass punishment stuff is where common or garden extreme misogyny intersects with terrorism.
I think part of the gender difference is because most men are both biologically male and heterosexual, and therefore most men are stronger than their partners; which makes a fundamental difference to the risks in resorting to violence. Though obviously that is not a universal truth.
No, I am not saying that. You will remember I was discussing indecent men. A man who unfortunately hurts somebody through a failure to properly control his desire is not necessarily indecent, in my view. The manner in which he reacts if confronted about his behaviour after the fact would reveal much about his decency or otherwise (again, in my opinion). However, what my post was about was the actions of 'indecent' men, and it was these that I was asserting are voluntary, decision-based, non accidental. And I stand by this.
Popular culture would have it that powerful men are more attractive to women. Biology has a lot to answer for. But there are acts which it doesn't excuse.
I would rather say that a.) it is popular culture which has a lot to answer for, and b.) biology ought not to be used as an excuse for anything.
I'm less certain that "domestic violence" is always the same. I'm entertaining the idea that there might be different kinds of domestic violence: some is rooted in the same kind of misogynistic women-aren't-really-people attitudes we're talking about with incels etc., and some is just angry violent people lashing out at the person they live with.
I want to be clear that I don't, on the whole, have a beef with what you've been saying on this thread, but your use of the word 'just' in the last phrase above really set my teeth on edge. Beating your family members isn't 'just' anything, as I have been trying to say. It as at least as offensive, indecent, and wholly unacceptable as beating your boss or your pharmacist or anybody else who may on occasion cause you annoyance or refuse to supply you with something. It's unacceptable to hit people, period. I feel confident that you would agree with me on this at face-value, and yet the way the word 'just' slipped in there makes me concerned that your worldview may still be a little...slanted.
(After all, gay couples have domestic violence, and women occasionally abuse their husbands: although it's most often a man-on-woman problem, it's not always a man-on-woman problem. And it rather stands to reason that whatever drives woman-on-man domestic violence, or man-on-man or woman-on-woman domestic violence, could also drive man-on-woman domestic violence at a similar sort or level.)
So I think the role of patriarchy and its norms and roles in intimate partner violence is a bit more complicated - if one partner in a same sex relationship has internalised toxic gender role stuff that makes them feel socially entitled to punish their partner that will fuel intimate partner violence. It's not as simple as saying that there's such a thing as man on man or woman on man abuse and therefore something different must be at work there - most people have unconsciously internalised to some extent patriarchal models of how to do relationships. Maybe some of the LGBTQ+ folk round here could comment more on this - I'm aware I'm no expert?
@Louise, am I correct in thinking that what you are saying here is effectively the reverse of what @Leorning Cniht has proposed? That rather than there being different drivers for man-on-man violence, woman-on-man violence, and woman-on-woman violence, which might also explain some man-on-woman violence, it's more likely that the factors which underlie man-on-woman violence are sufficiently culturally ingrained that they make their way into LGBT relationships also?
...most people have unconsciously internalised to some extent patriarchal models of how to do relationships. Maybe some of the LGBTQ+ folk round here could comment more on this - I'm aware I'm no expert?
Not LGBT and thus also not an expert, but I recall reading a diatribe a few years ago by a self-identified older gay man who was super-annoyed by the contemporary mainstreaming of gay porn. He was claiming, basically, that heteros had shouldered their way into the genre and that gay porn was increasingly saturated with heteronormative ideas, and effectively saying that in the past, when gay culture was, necessarily, underground, at least they got to make and live by their own rules...
but your use of the word 'just' in the last phrase above really set my teeth on edge.
Fair enough. "Just" wasn't meant to minimize the severity of the domestic violence in any way, but distinguish between violence that had some external misogynistic root cause and more stand-alone violence. So my intent was "this, and no other thing" rather than "this rather trivial thing", although I can see how you could read it that way.
Yes that's what I was pondering having seen violence from a wife to a husband (she hit him with a bunch of keys) treated leniently because he was seen as not performing his expected gender role properly (eg. not providing for her and the children) and also having seen how male perpetrators of that same Victorian era justified their violence in terms of the wife not performing her gender roles as they felt they had a right to from her. The latter was much more normal and usually much more severe, much as these things are today, but gender roles were important in either case.
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.
I tend to think that it takes considerable strength to force yourself on someone else, physically or emotionally. That's not "weakness."
And I don't hate people. I'm not sure I even pity them. I find it relatively easy to imagine or reverse-engineer the decision-making that drives disgusting behavior.
I just think that the way that some men act is problematic and ought to be addressed without making excuses for it.
I would rather say that a.) it is popular culture which has a lot to answer for, and b.) biology ought not to be used as an excuse for anything.
I think Louise is right to suggest that upper-class Victorian gender roles are a significant influence on popular culture.
But it was two other aspects of popular culture that sprang to mind in response to your comment. One is James Bond - an attractive violent male character who fights with men and sleeps with all the good-looking women. And the other is the sort of young female celebrity who is famous for being sexually attractive and nothing else.
What I'm struggling with at the moment is the relationship between understanding and excusing, and how that connects to what is common to all instances of male-on-female violence as against what is particular to each case.
I can see how one can think that there is a common contributing factor to all such violence and that's testosterone. And that there are also common contributing factors that are cultural, such as Bond-as-archetype-of-masculinity. (And nature and nurture interact; testosterone is part of why Bond is popular).
Does explanation diminish culpability ? "My hormones made me do it, guv" seems like an overstatement rather than an outright lie. In much the same way as "I come from a broken home" is seen as a mitigating factor but not a complete excuse.
So there seems if not a contradiction then at least a tension in the viewpoint of those who want to strongly say that all instances of such violence are aspects of the same thing (i.e. assert a common cause) whilst denying that such a cause is a mitigating factor.
No-one should have to live in fear of violence. Each of us has an individual moral responsibility not to use our power to hurt. But the more that the act is not an individual choice, the less the individual responsibility.
I hope that clarifies the considerable extent to which I agree with you and with others who've posted here, and my reservations.
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.
I tend to think that it takes considerable strength to force yourself on someone else, physically or emotionally. That's not "weakness."
It's psychological weakness rather than physical - a moral, spiritual and/or emotional weakness that, when things don't go the way they want them to, leads them to take the easy way of just hating others and railing at the world in general rather than the more difficult way of learning to accept things as they are.
@anoesis I want to go back to something you said because it made me think about another aspect here. You wrote "...but for all my efforts, I've never been successful in communicating to any of the decent men in my life that the actions of the indecent men are not accidental."
I've spent time in recent years thinking about hidden or invisible dynamics in society that operate without being named or understood because they are not easily observed. Often events or crisis are seen as isolated incidents, or natural and unforeseeable rather than as structural violence arising in a context of how groups of men encourage or tolerate sexist behaviour in one another, how misogyny is perpetuated.
If we put aside the incel community for the moment, we might talk about young men who feel ugly or pitiful going to body-building gyms hoping to make themselves more attractive to women by looking more manly (what @Louise said earlier about men complying or not complying with expected gender roles is pertinent here). That hope of masculine self-transformation is what the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant refers to as 'cruel optimism' because body shame cannot be overcome by simply getting muscular definition: it has to do with toxic masculinity that forces all men to compete with an imagined fantasy Alpha He-Man and dehumanise women as a category. The shamed inferiority of the wounded white male may be eased by acquiring shamelessness ( I deserve to have sex on my terms regardless of what I look like) or by shaming others (she is a slut, she'll sleep with anyone, even me). But shame isn't acknowledged here; to admit to sharing shame is unmanly. Hence blaming women or pleading a false victimised status as 'cancelled' or 'hated'.
If we were to define shaming as a structural social relation that produces subjects organised by shame, the angry grandiose thinking of young men might be exposed as delusional and a bullying mechanism by which men avoid feeling the shame. The connection with how girls and women grow up shamed by male violence would be clearer. And revealing that patriarchal structure and logic of internalised shame would make the hidden visible.
If we put aside the incel community for the moment, we might talk about young men who feel ugly or pitiful going to body-building gyms hoping to make themselves more attractive to women by looking more manly
Is that what young men are doing? I've never had much of an interest in gyms, but in general, I wouldn't have said that the men who go to gyms begin by feeling "ugly or pitiful".
There are certainly a lot of men who exercise in various ways in order to look more attractive - I've numbered several such men amongst my friends over the years - but I wouldn't have said that any of them felt particularly ugly or ashamed of themselves to start with.
If I was going to generalize at all, I'd say that the men who felt ugly and ashamed of their body didn't go to gyms at all, because they don't want to put themselves on display.
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.
I tend to think that it takes considerable strength to force yourself on someone else, physically or emotionally. That's not "weakness."
It's psychological weakness rather than physical - a moral, spiritual and/or emotional weakness that, when things don't go the way they want them to, leads them to take the easy way of just hating others and railing at the world in general rather than the more difficult way of learning to accept things as they are.
I thought this was a conversation about committing acts of violence like rape and murder, or cultivating a general attitude of misogynistic entitlement. If "being generally ticked off and angry at the world" is the bar, sure. I've been that. Adolescent angst is a common experience. Living in America, I often find myself generally raging at the wrongness of the world.
But I still couldn't imagine, realistically, descending to acts of violence against women.
But I still couldn't imagine, realistically, descending to acts of violence against women.
Theoretically? I've never hit anyone, of any gender (well, perhaps I did as a toddler: I can't really remember), but I can imagine that it's theoretically possible that if someone was screaming in my face, getting all in my space, and not letting me leave, then I might hit them. And in those circumstances, I can't imagine the gender of the person making all that much difference. I'd think shoving them out of the way was more likely than hitting them, though.
I've hit things on a few occasions - walls, cushions, etc. - and slammed my share of doors.
@Curiosity killed has posted about "men generally" and 'men on this thread' re misogyny. With generalization. Do you mean this as 'man therefore misogynist' and it always being true? that it's only a matter of degree?
If we put aside the incel community for the moment, we might talk about young men who feel ugly or pitiful going to body-building gyms hoping to make themselves more attractive to women by looking more manly
Is that what young men are doing? I've never had much of an interest in gyms, but in general, I wouldn't have said that the men who go to gyms begin by feeling "ugly or pitiful".
There are certainly a lot of men who exercise in various ways in order to look more attractive - I've numbered several such men amongst my friends over the years - but I wouldn't have said that any of them felt particularly ugly or ashamed of themselves to start with.
If I was going to generalize at all, I'd say that the men who felt ugly and ashamed of their body didn't go to gyms at all, because they don't want to put themselves on display.
I was only thinking about the minority mentioned earlier who do feel ugly and rejected, stigmatised. Some may not go to gym, some may feel self-improvement is beyond them. Then they find others who feel the same way and there's a shared perception of unfairness. Why don't they turn their anger on those men who are successful and goodlooking and able to form relationships with women? Instead, many focus on blaming women for withholding sex. That's the process that is key to deciding if incel support groups online are inherently dangerous in their misogyny.
@Curiosity killed has posted about "men generally" and 'men on this thread' re misogyny. With generalization. Do you mean this as 'man therefore misogynist' and it always being true? that it's only a matter of degree?
My personal experience is that attending a state school is to be constantly surrounded by misogyny, homophobia and general callousness. It seeps into you, and unless you are particularly strong (I, to my shame, was not) you end up imitating it out of self-preservation. It has been a work of many years for me to unpick the residues of it in my psyche.
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.
I tend to think that it takes considerable strength to force yourself on someone else, physically or emotionally. That's not "weakness."
And I don't hate people. I'm not sure I even pity them. I find it relatively easy to imagine or reverse-engineer the decision-making that drives disgusting behavior.
I just think that the way that some men act is problematic and ought to be addressed without making excuses for it.
@Bullfrog interesting -- as you note, this is another kind of framing that raises questions. If incel groups of men are viewed as 'weak', 'sad', 'to be pitied' does that mean their aggression is harmless because it isn't directed at other men or at the public in general?
You're right that forcing oneself on another person is an act of aggression, but I'm not sure 'strength' is the right term. If the woman believes a man has a gun on him, he doesn't need to point it at her. The threat of killing a woman may not be overt, but for the woman trapped alone with a rapist, physical combat is usually not an option. Rape involves an abuse of power that isn't always a show of physical force, especially if the woman submits out of fear and doesn't resist. What terrorises women who face rape is the awareness that this man is ready to kill them if he doesn't get his way. The reason anyone studying misogyny focuses on rape is that rape reveals the violence aimed at women and children in most societies. Rape isn't inappropriate sex by men who are larger and stronger than women or girls, it is a life-threatening violation often perpetrated by men who may be physically unassuming.
The notion that men demanding sex from unwilling women are weak-willed and lack the ability to resist their own sexual urges or control themselves is one of the most common fallacies about rape. If we took hate speech against women on social media seriously, that trajectory from blaming women and complaining about women to threatening, assaulting or raping women might be made clearer.
@Curiosity killed has posted about "men generally" and 'men on this thread' re misogyny. With generalization. Do you mean this as 'man therefore misogynist' and it always being true? that it's only a matter of degree?
I am not going through this thread pointing to all the handwaving away of misogynism, or the unconscious use of language that show how embedded misogynistic memes are, but there are a significant number of those on this thread, even from people who are trying hard to be aware of the issues. However, I was going to point you back to a post I made on a previous page linking to an article from the APA earlier which points out how embedded misogyny is, here, but @Arethosemyfeet has said it from his own experiences.
@Curiosity killed has posted about "men generally" and 'men on this thread' re misogyny. With generalization. Do you mean this as 'man therefore misogynist' and it always being true? that it's only a matter of degree?
My personal experience is that attending a state school is to be constantly surrounded by misogyny, homophobia and general callousness. It seeps into you, and unless you are particularly strong (I, to my shame, was not) you end up imitating it out of self-preservation. It has been a work of many years for me to unpick the residues of it in my psyche.
This is really important. When we did seminars on 'unlearning sexism,' it was striking how many men talked about growing up in homes where their mothers were verbally abused, hit or beaten up, and how as small boys they felt terrified of being hit themselves, helpless to intervene and just pretended it was normal to have a father or step-father behave this way. Many thought this was what happened in all households.
I should mention that it's not hard for me to imagine getting to at least the fringes of the incel movement. I was extremely lucky to meet my wife and that she is willing to put up with me. Had that not been the case I could easily have stayed single and become more and more obsessed and depressed about the reasons why. The step from there to seizing on a single, external, exculpatory reason would have been a small and deeply tempting one. There, but for the grace of God...
I should mention that it's not hard for me to imagine getting to at least the fringes of the incel movement. I was extremely lucky to meet my wife and that she is willing to put up with me. Had that not been the case I could easily have stayed single and become more and more obsessed and depressed about the reasons why. The step from there to seizing on a single, external, exculpatory reason would have been a small and deeply tempting one. There, but for the grace of God...
@Bullfrog interesting -- as you note, this is another kind of framing that raises questions. If incel groups of men are viewed as 'weak', 'sad', 'to be pitied' does that mean their aggression is harmless because it isn't directed at other men or at the public in general?
No, but it does affect how we should deal with it. It may also go some way to explaining why I don’t think they deserve to be categorised alongside Daesh or the IRA.
I have a lot of sympathy for peaceful Irish nationalists - the more I read about the history the more I shudder - but the folk who advocated violence in the pubs and meetings and by pamphlet and the internet when it arrived were the IRA and its supporters (and INLA etc). Advocating terrorism is advocating terrorism, just because you can understand some of what drives people it doesn't bring back to life the people they murdered, undo the torturing and maiming and expunge the experience of living in fear for those they threatened.
Groups which are advocating murdering women or keeping them in rape camps as an output of their misogyny are no better at all than Daesh or the IRA or neo-nazis.
I have a lot of sympathy for peaceful Irish nationalists - the more I read about the history the more I shudder - but the folk who advocated violence in the pubs and meetings and by pamphlet and the internet when it arrived were the IRA and its supporters (and INLA etc). Advocating terrorism is advocating terrorism, just because you can understand some of what drives people it doesn't bring back to life the people they murdered, undo the torturing and maiming and expunge the experience of living in fear for those they threatened.
Groups which are advocating murdering women or keeping them in rape camps as an output of their misogyny are no better at all than Daesh or the IRA or neo-nazis.
Aye, and I think here lies the rub. Like @Arethosemyfeet and @Marvin the Martian, thirty years ago I could have swallowed some of the Incel kool-aid - I was involuntarily - well, single rather than celibate specifically. It did feel like a cosmic injustice*. I could have swallowed talk of women liking bastards**.
But it seems one *hell* of a jump from there to violent acts against women. There's got to be a massive sense of entitlement there combined with a total failure to see other people as people, which needs another source, another trigger.
*not in the sense that any individual woman was acting unjustly by turning me down, any more than a lottery you never win is manifestly crooked. Just a more general sense of unfairness, in the 'well, life isn't fair' category.
**an illusion with two sources I think; firstly there are some bastards who nevertheless can turn on the charm, sometimes long term; they're the ones indulging in domestic violence down the line. And secondly, and speaking personally, as an autistic youth a lot of people who aren't bastards seem like bastards because of the way they react to your weirdness making them feel uncomfortable. And also it's hard for us to distinguish the intent between banter and verbal abuse.
But it seems one *hell* of a jump from there to violent acts against women. There's got to be a massive sense of entitlement there combined with a total failure to see other people as people, which needs another source, another trigger.
In our societies there are a lot of things that tell us that women are in fact not people in the ways that men are. The Catholic Church does not ordain women because we are not people in the way that men are. Women's sexuality is used to advertise and sell so many things, thus objectifying women's bodies and making us out to be less human than men. The ubiquitous unfair and unequal treatment of girls and women that @Dafyd called "low-grade misogyny" affects all girls' and womens' lives at every turn. In workplaces women are ignored in meetings where men are present, are not mentored and promoted at the same rate, and our appearance affects how we are treated and how much we are paid when it is irrelevant. And in and on. The men here could, most of you, recite these things yourselves, you know these things to be true, but has it sunk in that this is a constant in women's lives and what that means?
I can vote and drive and support myself with my own job, but still every important aspect of my life has been shaped, deformed, by misogyny -- my upbringing, my education, my jobs, my relationships with men, what I do in my spare time. Maybe my friendships with women would be an exception, except that who we are, how we live our lives, everything is affected; that my closest friendships with other women are in part havens from misogyny still means they are affected by it.
That some men can completely fail to see women as people at all is not surprising; they didn't have to take a huge leap, because they got a big push from the culture we all live in.
The whole Incel concept was new to me until Plymouth. This thread has been fascinating.
SO - I just had a peek on an Incel forum and OMG, you do at your own risk as I'm not going back again! Brief impressions only, open to further enlightenment ...
Yes they are as mysogynistic as hell but this seems to me - at an individual level - to be a symptom of that deeper and complete inability to properly relate to people of any gender, projected through a distorted, sterotyped incel lense of the world i.e. supremacy of white heterosexual males and coupled with huge insecurity and shame.
So yes it's taken out on objectification of women mainly. But as a coping mechanism they have to invent a complete emotionless universe full of hatred and/or objectification of EVERYONE as far as I can see?
- They hate and are unable to relate to women, so they objectify
- They are basically extremely jealous of an idealized male image which for me feels more about a desire for power. Sublimating to desire for sex, and sexual power. Translating to extreme insecurity, frustration, hatred and shame.
- Anyone not heterosexual or cisgender i.e. LBGT+ disturbs their view of the universe, so are hated and objectified too
But above all it seems to me
- They hate themselves
I'm struggling to see them as terrorists due to the lack of a coherent agenda (or I suspect any ability to coordinate anything). More a set of deranged, angry individuals, some of whom could be dangerous, most of whom are probably not.
You're welcome to do your own reading ;-) Scary and weird.
@Curiosity killed has posted about "men generally" and 'men on this thread' re misogyny. With generalization. Do you mean this as 'man therefore misogynist' and it always being true? that it's only a matter of degree?
I am not going through this thread pointing to all the handwaving away of misogynism, or the unconscious use of language that show how embedded misogynistic memes are, but there are a significant number of those on this thread, even from people who are trying hard to be aware of the issues. However, I was going to point you back to a post I made on a previous page linking to an article from the APA earlier which points out how embedded misogyny is, here, but @Arethosemyfeet has said it from his own experiences.
TL:DR the article. Because that's not exactly what I posted about. Your comments seemed to suggest a form of essentialism: that if you're male your misogyny exists, it's only a matter of degree. Did I read this into what you meant? This is a v specific point, and isn't spoken to by self aware posts of men.
I will note, that as this is in epiphanies, such that personal experiences are part of it, that my direct, life threatening experience of what misogynist violence is, have me objecting to the essentialist premise if this was your intent to convey: man ergo misogynist, it's merely a matter of degree.
I may be too sensitive about it for which I'll make no excuses nor apologies. I've had this discussion before: it is possible to understand it if you're male.
I think the point is that men are taught subtle forms of misogyny early in life, just from absorbing what goes on in wider culture. It's the same sort of unconscious bias produced by white privilege.
I'm struggling to see them as terrorists due to the lack of a coherent agenda (or I suspect any ability to coordinate anything). More a set of deranged, angry individuals, some of whom could be dangerous, most of whom are probably not.
@NOprophet_NØprofit - I have nowhere said all men are misogynistic, but as @Arethosemyfeet has now explained twice, that I don't think any of us can say we have not absorbed some forms of misogynism, it is so embedded in society, literature, current society and the way men are portrayed, the whole way we've been brought up. What I hear from teenagers working in youthwork does little to convince me to that there is much if any movement on the beliefs that women exist as sexual gratification for men. It is so hard to challenge.
Male privilege makes it harder for men to understand what that means.
I did also say in the post you've challenged, that:
there are a significant number of those [misogynistic tropes and memes] on this thread, even from people who are trying hard to be aware of the issues.
Nowhere did I say that you personally have posted anything misogynistic. I could point to posts from others, but I don't want to get personal when it is such a universal problem. I do not want to get into an individual blame game, but am rather hoping that those posting on the thread choose to reflect on these themes, rather than get defensive.
@JuanaCruz and @Marvin the Martian - I don't think either of you are seeing the difference between the individuals who you see as sad and lonely and the groups that have formed online that are self-reinforcing in those views, building them into a male supremacist ideology, which is then radicalised into violence and murder. There have been too many examples of this happening for us not to take it seriously.
Since 2014, according to Wikipedia (link) there have been 8 mass murders killing 61 people linked to the incel movement. The Incel ideology has been recognised as terrorism since 2018, as the researchers recognise their boards as radicalising their members and encouraging violence.
I guess handwaving away the research investigating the incel movement that highlights how violent these groups is just an extension of handwaving away male privilege and misogyny.
I think the point is that men are taught subtle forms of misogyny early in life, just from absorbing what goes on in wider culture. It's the same sort of unconscious bias produced by white privilege.
Some examples don't even look misogynist on the surface.
Genre fiction often has a love triangle between a heroic and selfless male protagonist, the female lead, and a less altruistic more self-centred male secondary character. A lot of series do try to complicate this to justify the woman's attraction to the secondary character: the secondary lead is more sensitive than he appears, the male lead is not as selfless as he appears, etc (or Leia is Luke's sister). But the fundamental pattern implies at least if you identify with the main protagonist, firstly, that nice guys are entitled to have women love them, and secondly, that women perversely prefer the bad guys who don't deserve them as much.
I guess handwaving away the research investigating the incel movement that highlights how violent these groups is just an extension of handwaving away male privilege and misogyny.
Who is handwaving? Or said "sad and lonely". I see their potential to be dangerous. "Scary" was the word I used and I have zero doubt some of them are dangerous.
I am learning a lot from this discussion, a quick visit, to an Incel board to see for myself. This is new to some of us, please bear that in mind.
I found myself questionning why I found it easier to see online muslim radicalisation as more "terrorist" than incel radicalisation. I admit I cannot see a huge difference. Perhaps there is an element of (my own) racial self-blinding in this.
The real danger seems more to me that group(s) with a political/racial/power agenda, funding, influence and money develop the incel view into an incel terrorist organisation. So extreme right-wing I guess.
Perhaps this is happening now? ... as I say, I am learning. I need to re-read this thread.
I hope security forces have an eye on theses folks for sure.
The real danger seems more to me that group(s) with a political/racial/power agenda, funding, influence and money develop the incel view into an incel terrorist organisation. So extreme right-wing I guess.
From reading the history of the term from @Curiosity killed 's link above, this seems to have been exactly what has and is occurring.
There seem to be three ingredients here:
Involuntarily celibate men;
Far-Right groups who hate everyone who isn't a straight male WASP, or at least have very firm views of the roles of such people in their ideal society (Gilead anyone?);
General societal misogyny that bridges the gap between the two.
Yes, this is the kind of terrorist risk I had in mind, i.e. progessively carried forward with the backing of power, money, agenda => organization and ideology
Or at a more local UK level - https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/there-s-more-to-the-men-s-movement-than-incels
"For committed MGTOWs like Phil, romantic relationships pose too much of a risk both emotionally and financially. Like many true believers, he is convinced that there is a 'covert move against men' and that society has chosen to shift inexorably towards a 'gynocracy'"
No apologies, I'm doing my Incel learning out loud on this forum. Incelism even as a self-identity had bypassed my until now.
I would exercise a certain amount of caution in believing what any of these actors say. Bannon has gone from being at the heart of government, to being chucked out of the White House, to presently only having the MyPillow guy and various fringe InfoWars people as an audience.
And that Spectator article is written to someone who seems to have very little in the way of qualification and who has written one book pushing a return to a traditional view of masculinity, just the kinds of credentials that would lead him to push the idea of masculinity being in 'crisis'.
Despite the seriousness of the situation I can't help but note the parallels between Red Dwarf making Rimmer a follower of the "love celibacy society", and it being pointed out by Lister that it was only because he couldn't get a date. Life imitating art?
While its great you're looking into this, can I second chrisstiles on being careful with sources? I wouldn't go to either of these myself, especially not the Spectator.
People are starting to do academic research on the phenomenon though and here's a short summary of some of that research
If you spell it out it makes them sound like their parents vowed them to a convent without their consent, which makes their situation sound rather more dramatic than it is.
Unfortunately, much of what passes as current media/film/story output is also promulgating misogynistic myths, which continue to unhelpfully feed and reinforce this culture of toxic masculinity. Our culture is embedded in this unhelpful way of thinking.
As I have been trying not to say quite as forcefully as I'm about to say it: many of the posts from the male posters on this thread continue to be oblivious as to quite how much they've absorbed the misogynistic mindset and quite how blind they are, through their male privilege, as to how this makes the world a very unfriendly place for women. They do not seem to realise that they are paddling in the shallows of the same pool that becomes the MGTOW and incel cultures the deeper they go.
Re-reading the whole thread, this is the key post for me. Incels are the extreme edge.
As a non-binary trans, I have experienced both "sides" of that mindset personally in my life. The "paddling in the shallows" societal attitudes you mention are very real and have strong undercurrents.
Think about history. Change of societal attitudes that by equalisation threaten male domination and power is fought over not years but decades and indeed centuries
- Women's equality (1850+?)
- Attitudes to non-heterosexuality (1960+?)
- Attitudes to those who are transgender or gender-nonconforming (2010+?)
I get it. Incel ideology (separate from the individuals) is one of male domination and suppression - primarily women, but as we contradict their worldview, also anyone LBGTQ+
Comments
You see, even though I'm certainly a fortunate women, I've happened across some of these men...
*He bashed my biological grandmother until she left, and then bashed her replacement. Of course, I wasn't told this until after he died...
I think some are coming too close to accepting the rationales these folk give for violence at face value - there's always an invented justification (reversing victim and offender) why a violent man is right and justified and 'poor wee him, the real victim' in his own eyes to attack or rape his partner and it sounds much the same with its mass manifestation.
Sounds like you're talking about the intoxication of power.
Popular culture would have it that powerful men are more attractive to women. Biology has a lot to answer for. But there are acts which it doesn't excuse.
Unfortunately, much of what passes as current media/film/story output is also promulgating misogynistic myths, which continue to unhelpfully feed and reinforce this culture of toxic masculinity. Our culture is embedded in this unhelpful way of thinking.
As I have been trying not to say quite as forcefully as I'm about to say it: many of the posts from the male posters on this thread continue to be oblivious as to quite how much they've absorbed the misogynistic mindset and quite how blind they are, through their male privilege, as to how this makes the world a very unfriendly place for women. They do not seem to realise that they are paddling in the shallows of the same pool that becomes the MGTOW and incel cultures the deeper they go.
I think this is mostly right. Incels, frat boy rapists, lots of domestic violence: all of it, at root, seems to start with the idea that women aren't actual people - or at least, not people in the same sense that men are people.
If women are people, you can't get to incel "logic", because it's always OK for a person to choose to say no. If women are people, then they are not interchangeable ambulant sex toys. And I claim again that frat boy rapists and their ilk are using exactly the same logic.
I'm less certain that "domestic violence" is always the same. I'm entertaining the idea that there might be different kinds of domestic violence: some is rooted in the same kind of misogynistic women-aren't-really-people attitudes we're talking about with incels etc., and some is just angry violent people lashing out at the person they live with.
(After all, gay couples have domestic violence, and women occasionally abuse their husbands: although it's most often a man-on-woman problem, it's not always a man-on-woman problem. And it rather stands to reason that whatever drives woman-on-man domestic violence, or man-on-man or woman-on-woman domestic violence, could also drive man-on-woman domestic violence at a similar sort or level.)
Another thing that came out from working with a different historian in a slightly earlier period (who was looking at female violence against men and other women) was that women could internalise patriarchal norms about what a man was supposed to be - and attack a man who they saw as not upholding his end of the gendered bargain and even get societal approval for that but this was a much much rarer scenario.
So I think the role of patriarchy and its norms and roles in intimate partner violence is a bit more complicated - if one partner in a same sex relationship has internalised toxic gender role stuff that makes them feel socially entitled to punish their partner that will fuel intimate partner violence. It's not as simple as saying that there's such a thing as man on man or woman on man abuse and therefore something different must be at work there - most people have unconsciously internalised to some extent patriarchal models of how to do relationships. Maybe some of the LGBTQ+ folk round here could comment more on this - I'm aware I'm no expert?
And when you look at the figures they're highly gendered - domestic abuse and even more so coercive control is overwhelmingly a male problem against women, so we absolutely need to reckon with that.
https://www.womensaid.org.uk/womens-aid-responds-to-the-latest-ons-stats-on-domestic-abuse/
https://www.womensaid.org.uk/why-data-matters-when-talking-about-domestic-abuse/
https://www.womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/domestic-abuse-is-a-gendered-crime/
Again I'd like to come back to Kate Manne's concept of entitlement 'the widespread perception that a privileged man is owed something” - I think we are seeing that entitlement being turned against women as a class, now with violent mass punishment being envisaged for women because they are not giving the men in question what they think they are owed. The violent mass punishment stuff is where common or garden extreme misogyny intersects with terrorism.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/entitled-how-male-privilege-hurts-women-kate-manne
I would rather say that a.) it is popular culture which has a lot to answer for, and b.) biology ought not to be used as an excuse for anything.
@Louise, am I correct in thinking that what you are saying here is effectively the reverse of what @Leorning Cniht has proposed? That rather than there being different drivers for man-on-man violence, woman-on-man violence, and woman-on-woman violence, which might also explain some man-on-woman violence, it's more likely that the factors which underlie man-on-woman violence are sufficiently culturally ingrained that they make their way into LGBT relationships also?
Not LGBT and thus also not an expert, but I recall reading a diatribe a few years ago by a self-identified older gay man who was super-annoyed by the contemporary mainstreaming of gay porn. He was claiming, basically, that heteros had shouldered their way into the genre and that gay porn was increasingly saturated with heteronormative ideas, and effectively saying that in the past, when gay culture was, necessarily, underground, at least they got to make and live by their own rules...
I tend to think that it takes considerable strength to force yourself on someone else, physically or emotionally. That's not "weakness."
And I don't hate people. I'm not sure I even pity them. I find it relatively easy to imagine or reverse-engineer the decision-making that drives disgusting behavior.
I just think that the way that some men act is problematic and ought to be addressed without making excuses for it.
I think Louise is right to suggest that upper-class Victorian gender roles are a significant influence on popular culture.
But it was two other aspects of popular culture that sprang to mind in response to your comment. One is James Bond - an attractive violent male character who fights with men and sleeps with all the good-looking women. And the other is the sort of young female celebrity who is famous for being sexually attractive and nothing else.
What I'm struggling with at the moment is the relationship between understanding and excusing, and how that connects to what is common to all instances of male-on-female violence as against what is particular to each case.
I can see how one can think that there is a common contributing factor to all such violence and that's testosterone. And that there are also common contributing factors that are cultural, such as Bond-as-archetype-of-masculinity. (And nature and nurture interact; testosterone is part of why Bond is popular).
Does explanation diminish culpability ? "My hormones made me do it, guv" seems like an overstatement rather than an outright lie. In much the same way as "I come from a broken home" is seen as a mitigating factor but not a complete excuse.
So there seems if not a contradiction then at least a tension in the viewpoint of those who want to strongly say that all instances of such violence are aspects of the same thing (i.e. assert a common cause) whilst denying that such a cause is a mitigating factor.
No-one should have to live in fear of violence. Each of us has an individual moral responsibility not to use our power to hurt. But the more that the act is not an individual choice, the less the individual responsibility.
I hope that clarifies the considerable extent to which I agree with you and with others who've posted here, and my reservations.
It's psychological weakness rather than physical - a moral, spiritual and/or emotional weakness that, when things don't go the way they want them to, leads them to take the easy way of just hating others and railing at the world in general rather than the more difficult way of learning to accept things as they are.
I've spent time in recent years thinking about hidden or invisible dynamics in society that operate without being named or understood because they are not easily observed. Often events or crisis are seen as isolated incidents, or natural and unforeseeable rather than as structural violence arising in a context of how groups of men encourage or tolerate sexist behaviour in one another, how misogyny is perpetuated.
If we put aside the incel community for the moment, we might talk about young men who feel ugly or pitiful going to body-building gyms hoping to make themselves more attractive to women by looking more manly (what @Louise said earlier about men complying or not complying with expected gender roles is pertinent here). That hope of masculine self-transformation is what the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant refers to as 'cruel optimism' because body shame cannot be overcome by simply getting muscular definition: it has to do with toxic masculinity that forces all men to compete with an imagined fantasy Alpha He-Man and dehumanise women as a category. The shamed inferiority of the wounded white male may be eased by acquiring shamelessness ( I deserve to have sex on my terms regardless of what I look like) or by shaming others (she is a slut, she'll sleep with anyone, even me). But shame isn't acknowledged here; to admit to sharing shame is unmanly. Hence blaming women or pleading a false victimised status as 'cancelled' or 'hated'.
If we were to define shaming as a structural social relation that produces subjects organised by shame, the angry grandiose thinking of young men might be exposed as delusional and a bullying mechanism by which men avoid feeling the shame. The connection with how girls and women grow up shamed by male violence would be clearer. And revealing that patriarchal structure and logic of internalised shame would make the hidden visible.
Is that what young men are doing? I've never had much of an interest in gyms, but in general, I wouldn't have said that the men who go to gyms begin by feeling "ugly or pitiful".
There are certainly a lot of men who exercise in various ways in order to look more attractive - I've numbered several such men amongst my friends over the years - but I wouldn't have said that any of them felt particularly ugly or ashamed of themselves to start with.
If I was going to generalize at all, I'd say that the men who felt ugly and ashamed of their body didn't go to gyms at all, because they don't want to put themselves on display.
I thought this was a conversation about committing acts of violence like rape and murder, or cultivating a general attitude of misogynistic entitlement. If "being generally ticked off and angry at the world" is the bar, sure. I've been that. Adolescent angst is a common experience. Living in America, I often find myself generally raging at the wrongness of the world.
But I still couldn't imagine, realistically, descending to acts of violence against women.
Theoretically? I've never hit anyone, of any gender (well, perhaps I did as a toddler: I can't really remember), but I can imagine that it's theoretically possible that if someone was screaming in my face, getting all in my space, and not letting me leave, then I might hit them. And in those circumstances, I can't imagine the gender of the person making all that much difference. I'd think shoving them out of the way was more likely than hitting them, though.
I've hit things on a few occasions - walls, cushions, etc. - and slammed my share of doors.
I was only thinking about the minority mentioned earlier who do feel ugly and rejected, stigmatised. Some may not go to gym, some may feel self-improvement is beyond them. Then they find others who feel the same way and there's a shared perception of unfairness. Why don't they turn their anger on those men who are successful and goodlooking and able to form relationships with women? Instead, many focus on blaming women for withholding sex. That's the process that is key to deciding if incel support groups online are inherently dangerous in their misogyny.
My personal experience is that attending a state school is to be constantly surrounded by misogyny, homophobia and general callousness. It seeps into you, and unless you are particularly strong (I, to my shame, was not) you end up imitating it out of self-preservation. It has been a work of many years for me to unpick the residues of it in my psyche.
@Bullfrog interesting -- as you note, this is another kind of framing that raises questions. If incel groups of men are viewed as 'weak', 'sad', 'to be pitied' does that mean their aggression is harmless because it isn't directed at other men or at the public in general?
You're right that forcing oneself on another person is an act of aggression, but I'm not sure 'strength' is the right term. If the woman believes a man has a gun on him, he doesn't need to point it at her. The threat of killing a woman may not be overt, but for the woman trapped alone with a rapist, physical combat is usually not an option. Rape involves an abuse of power that isn't always a show of physical force, especially if the woman submits out of fear and doesn't resist. What terrorises women who face rape is the awareness that this man is ready to kill them if he doesn't get his way. The reason anyone studying misogyny focuses on rape is that rape reveals the violence aimed at women and children in most societies. Rape isn't inappropriate sex by men who are larger and stronger than women or girls, it is a life-threatening violation often perpetrated by men who may be physically unassuming.
The notion that men demanding sex from unwilling women are weak-willed and lack the ability to resist their own sexual urges or control themselves is one of the most common fallacies about rape. If we took hate speech against women on social media seriously, that trajectory from blaming women and complaining about women to threatening, assaulting or raping women might be made clearer.
I am not going through this thread pointing to all the handwaving away of misogynism, or the unconscious use of language that show how embedded misogynistic memes are, but there are a significant number of those on this thread, even from people who are trying hard to be aware of the issues. However, I was going to point you back to a post I made on a previous page linking to an article from the APA earlier which points out how embedded misogyny is, here, but @Arethosemyfeet has said it from his own experiences.
This is really important. When we did seminars on 'unlearning sexism,' it was striking how many men talked about growing up in homes where their mothers were verbally abused, hit or beaten up, and how as small boys they felt terrified of being hit themselves, helpless to intervene and just pretended it was normal to have a father or step-father behave this way. Many thought this was what happened in all households.
This describes me too.
No, but it does affect how we should deal with it. It may also go some way to explaining why I don’t think they deserve to be categorised alongside Daesh or the IRA.
Groups which are advocating murdering women or keeping them in rape camps as an output of their misogyny are no better at all than Daesh or the IRA or neo-nazis.
Aye, and I think here lies the rub. Like @Arethosemyfeet and @Marvin the Martian, thirty years ago I could have swallowed some of the Incel kool-aid - I was involuntarily - well, single rather than celibate specifically. It did feel like a cosmic injustice*. I could have swallowed talk of women liking bastards**.
But it seems one *hell* of a jump from there to violent acts against women. There's got to be a massive sense of entitlement there combined with a total failure to see other people as people, which needs another source, another trigger.
*not in the sense that any individual woman was acting unjustly by turning me down, any more than a lottery you never win is manifestly crooked. Just a more general sense of unfairness, in the 'well, life isn't fair' category.
**an illusion with two sources I think; firstly there are some bastards who nevertheless can turn on the charm, sometimes long term; they're the ones indulging in domestic violence down the line. And secondly, and speaking personally, as an autistic youth a lot of people who aren't bastards seem like bastards because of the way they react to your weirdness making them feel uncomfortable. And also it's hard for us to distinguish the intent between banter and verbal abuse.
In our societies there are a lot of things that tell us that women are in fact not people in the ways that men are. The Catholic Church does not ordain women because we are not people in the way that men are. Women's sexuality is used to advertise and sell so many things, thus objectifying women's bodies and making us out to be less human than men. The ubiquitous unfair and unequal treatment of girls and women that @Dafyd called "low-grade misogyny" affects all girls' and womens' lives at every turn. In workplaces women are ignored in meetings where men are present, are not mentored and promoted at the same rate, and our appearance affects how we are treated and how much we are paid when it is irrelevant. And in and on. The men here could, most of you, recite these things yourselves, you know these things to be true, but has it sunk in that this is a constant in women's lives and what that means?
I can vote and drive and support myself with my own job, but still every important aspect of my life has been shaped, deformed, by misogyny -- my upbringing, my education, my jobs, my relationships with men, what I do in my spare time. Maybe my friendships with women would be an exception, except that who we are, how we live our lives, everything is affected; that my closest friendships with other women are in part havens from misogyny still means they are affected by it.
That some men can completely fail to see women as people at all is not surprising; they didn't have to take a huge leap, because they got a big push from the culture we all live in.
SO - I just had a peek on an Incel forum and OMG, you do at your own risk as I'm not going back again! Brief impressions only, open to further enlightenment ...
Yes they are as mysogynistic as hell but this seems to me - at an individual level - to be a symptom of that deeper and complete inability to properly relate to people of any gender, projected through a distorted, sterotyped incel lense of the world i.e. supremacy of white heterosexual males and coupled with huge insecurity and shame.
So yes it's taken out on objectification of women mainly. But as a coping mechanism they have to invent a complete emotionless universe full of hatred and/or objectification of EVERYONE as far as I can see?
- They hate and are unable to relate to women, so they objectify
- They are basically extremely jealous of an idealized male image which for me feels more about a desire for power. Sublimating to desire for sex, and sexual power. Translating to extreme insecurity, frustration, hatred and shame.
- Anyone not heterosexual or cisgender i.e. LBGT+ disturbs their view of the universe, so are hated and objectified too
But above all it seems to me
- They hate themselves
I'm struggling to see them as terrorists due to the lack of a coherent agenda (or I suspect any ability to coordinate anything). More a set of deranged, angry individuals, some of whom could be dangerous, most of whom are probably not.
You're welcome to do your own reading ;-) Scary and weird.
TL:DR the article. Because that's not exactly what I posted about. Your comments seemed to suggest a form of essentialism: that if you're male your misogyny exists, it's only a matter of degree. Did I read this into what you meant? This is a v specific point, and isn't spoken to by self aware posts of men.
I will note, that as this is in epiphanies, such that personal experiences are part of it, that my direct, life threatening experience of what misogynist violence is, have me objecting to the essentialist premise if this was your intent to convey: man ergo misogynist, it's merely a matter of degree.
I may be too sensitive about it for which I'll make no excuses nor apologies. I've had this discussion before: it is possible to understand it if you're male.
I agree.
Male privilege makes it harder for men to understand what that means.
I did also say in the post you've challenged, that:
Nowhere did I say that you personally have posted anything misogynistic. I could point to posts from others, but I don't want to get personal when it is such a universal problem. I do not want to get into an individual blame game, but am rather hoping that those posting on the thread choose to reflect on these themes, rather than get defensive.
Since 2014, according to Wikipedia (link) there have been 8 mass murders killing 61 people linked to the incel movement. The Incel ideology has been recognised as terrorism since 2018, as the researchers recognise their boards as radicalising their members and encouraging violence.
I guess handwaving away the research investigating the incel movement that highlights how violent these groups is just an extension of handwaving away male privilege and misogyny.
Genre fiction often has a love triangle between a heroic and selfless male protagonist, the female lead, and a less altruistic more self-centred male secondary character. A lot of series do try to complicate this to justify the woman's attraction to the secondary character: the secondary lead is more sensitive than he appears, the male lead is not as selfless as he appears, etc (or Leia is Luke's sister). But the fundamental pattern implies at least if you identify with the main protagonist, firstly, that nice guys are entitled to have women love them, and secondly, that women perversely prefer the bad guys who don't deserve them as much.
Who is handwaving? Or said "sad and lonely". I see their potential to be dangerous. "Scary" was the word I used and I have zero doubt some of them are dangerous.
I am learning a lot from this discussion, a quick visit, to an Incel board to see for myself. This is new to some of us, please bear that in mind.
I found myself questionning why I found it easier to see online muslim radicalisation as more "terrorist" than incel radicalisation. I admit I cannot see a huge difference. Perhaps there is an element of (my own) racial self-blinding in this.
The real danger seems more to me that group(s) with a political/racial/power agenda, funding, influence and money develop the incel view into an incel terrorist organisation. So extreme right-wing I guess.
Perhaps this is happening now? ... as I say, I am learning. I need to re-read this thread.
I hope security forces have an eye on theses folks for sure.
From reading the history of the term from @Curiosity killed 's link above, this seems to have been exactly what has and is occurring.
There seem to be three ingredients here:
Involuntarily celibate men;
Far-Right groups who hate everyone who isn't a straight male WASP, or at least have very firm views of the roles of such people in their ideal society (Gilead anyone?);
General societal misogyny that bridges the gap between the two.
"Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon targeted "incels"—supposedly involuntarily celibate men—because they were easier to manipulate with conspiratorial thinking, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie has said" (my bold)
Yes, this is the kind of terrorist risk I had in mind, i.e. progessively carried forward with the backing of power, money, agenda => organization and ideology
Or at a more local UK level -
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/there-s-more-to-the-men-s-movement-than-incels
"For committed MGTOWs like Phil, romantic relationships pose too much of a risk both emotionally and financially. Like many true believers, he is convinced that there is a 'covert move against men' and that society has chosen to shift inexorably towards a 'gynocracy'"
No apologies, I'm doing my Incel learning out loud on this forum. Incelism even as a self-identity had bypassed my until now.
I would exercise a certain amount of caution in believing what any of these actors say. Bannon has gone from being at the heart of government, to being chucked out of the White House, to presently only having the MyPillow guy and various fringe InfoWars people as an audience.
And that Spectator article is written to someone who seems to have very little in the way of qualification and who has written one book pushing a return to a traditional view of masculinity, just the kinds of credentials that would lead him to push the idea of masculinity being in 'crisis'.
People are starting to do academic research on the phenomenon though and here's a short summary of some of that research
https://theconversation.com/incels-are-surprisingly-diverse-but-united-by-hate-163414
What they are is unhappily single.
Re-reading the whole thread, this is the key post for me. Incels are the extreme edge.
As a non-binary trans, I have experienced both "sides" of that mindset personally in my life. The "paddling in the shallows" societal attitudes you mention are very real and have strong undercurrents.
Think about history. Change of societal attitudes that by equalisation threaten male domination and power is fought over not years but decades and indeed centuries
- Women's equality (1850+?)
- Attitudes to non-heterosexuality (1960+?)
- Attitudes to those who are transgender or gender-nonconforming (2010+?)
I get it. Incel ideology (separate from the individuals) is one of male domination and suppression - primarily women, but as we contradict their worldview, also anyone LBGTQ+
Which illustrates a positive direction of travel, but I think we knew that.