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>But as a quick aside, “incel” is a funny moniker for a group whose core belief is that sex carries a moral taint and it would be better if no one did it. Monastic orders of men preaching total abstinence have been around for centuries, but I don’t think Tibetan bhikkhus call their celibacy “involuntary”.

>In the incel tweets, we see the difference between resentment and mere envy. These guys don’t talk about wishing they had had a promiscuous phase. They don’t even argue that a man should be able to sleep around in his 40s if he marries a former “hedonist”, to balance the fucking ledger. Their desire is to deprive the woman, whether of her past enjoyment or of a future relationship.

Incels don't think sex has a moral taint, they think women having sex has a moral taint. They'd love to be having tons of sex partners themselves. They talk about "chads", those men who do have sex with a lot of women. They feel jealous of chads, but they don't hate chads like they do women. There's no fantasizing of murdering chads to make the world more fair, because they want to be a chad.

That is of course blatantly hypocritical, that a woman who has sex with many men is an evil degenerate, but that a man who has sex with many women is just fulfilling his natural purpose. Incels aren't smart people and they just don't think about how innately hypocritical their ideology is.

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Sympathetic Opposition has a couple novel takes on these ideas here that I'd be surprised if you hadn't seen already:

how and why to be ladylike (for women with autism) (https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/how-and-why-to-be-ladylike-for-women) has some what-were-extremely-novel-to-me insights on misogyny-as-wrenching-back-attention (that I comment much more on here: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/on-being-attracted)

and she had another banger on casual misandry as the sort of gender-inverted flip side of that called "misandry as cope" but she seems to have taken it down at some point

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That's a great post by SympOpp!

My sense is that the reaction to hijacked attention would be more active hostility, not the resentful resignation of the incel. Like the "trad" misogynist ranting about locking up sluts or the PUA saying "oh you think you're manipulating me I'll show you what manipulation is". And what SympOpp is talking about is basically women broadcasting sexual availability while being unavailable, where it seems that incels are more mad at the women who are, indeed, very sexually available (but not to them).

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Hmmm, I agree those are technically distinct but I also think it's not over-abstracting to suggest that they're in the same category. Like I think active hostility versus passive resentment is merely cope-in-the-moment versus preparatory cope. Perceived sexual availability is such a strong attention-hijacker that now the incel has to try to get ahead of it instead of just ignoring it and getting on with their lives.

My extrapolation on that idea was to wonder how much of reactionary negativity in general can be broadly classed as "something has (+/- unfairly) hijacked my attention [in a way I couldn't control] (and being mad about it is the [remedy and/or way I can justify continuing to let it hijack my attention voluntarily])".

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A bit tangential but it’s hard not to see typical mind fallacy in… almost everything. People take their own experience, assume that it’s roughly standard, then project it onto others (like the entire opposite sex, as you describe here) as a way to try to understand preferences and motivations. And it just fails so badly in situations like you’re talking about. Of course there are some areas where humans often have shared similar experiences, but learning to know which areas this is generally true and which it isn’t, is the real trick.

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