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All right, let's see if I can write a short thread restating the argument of yesterday's column in ways that are less amenable to misinterpretation. Here we go.
1. American society presents an interesting combination: Our cultural norms and prevailing messages have dramatically elevated the importance of sex to the good life; at the same time, we are increasingly failing to successfully pair people off.
2. This means the "incel" phenomenon isn't just reducible to its toxic violent misogynistic form; there's a large sexless population (not just young and male but female, older, gay, etc.) caught in a psychic vice btw the culture's obsession w/sex and its absence from their lives.
3. How might the culture respond? One possibility is conservative and tacitly religious: Re-emphasis on chastity, monogamy, value of celibacy, etc., plus desexualization of pop culture.
4. But few people seem to want that, organized religion is in decline, public Christian leadership is captured by partisanship, social cons haven't figured out how to assimilate feminist insights. So odds of that response happening are low.
5. Another possibility: A left-feminist-egalitarian response which uses politics and education and other levers to gradually remake the socio-sexual landscape so that beauty standards and attraction itself become more egalitarian, more people are attracted to more people.
6. More people, esp. more young people, are attracted to this option than to the conservative one. I think it has an admirable idealism in certain respects. I also think it's much too utopian, cuts against essential grains of human sexual nature.
7. Instead I think the likely response will be commercial-technical approach dressed in the language of social justice and libertarianism. The left pushes for normalizing sex work, the techno-futurist right for virtual sex, and this combination presents as a tacit "right to sex."
8. I THINK THIS APPROACH IS BAD. Worse than my own conservative ideas, worse than the feminist-egalitarian-utopian alternative. Frankly dystopian, in fact. But also the most likely near-future "fix" for the problem of sexlessness.
9. And of course sexlessness is part of a larger story about loneliness, lost interpersonal contact, etc., that will also conjure up attempted market solutions, like the actors you can hire to play family members in Japan.
10. But the column was trying to just focus on sex, not the bigger picture. And it was arguing that to better understand this future you should read "creepy" libertarians and strange essays by idealistic left-academics.
11. Which you should, even if you still hate my piece. Thanks for reading.
12. And here's the LRB essay, again, because nobody seemed to read it.https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex …
13. Plus an interesting follow-up by Hanson on why economics should be creepy. Okay, now I'm really done. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/05/why-economics-is-and-should-be-creepy.html …
what you should do instead is donate every dollar of your salary for this month to a women's shelter while begging for forgiveness
^^ underrated tweet
Fascinating thread.
I'm sure incels suffer without sex but don't make others suffer, too. Use suffering to improve yourself. Stop using porn, get physical exercise, contemplate something noble or holy daily, find a hobby that requires you to be outside, and die to the self: serve others.
God damn it Ross you still think "they're not getting sex" is The Problem and that's so hilariously and obviously wrong. Getting every self-identified "incel" laid won't change a thing. These garbage people will just find a new flagship grievance.
Yup. The difference between an incel and a domestic abuser is whether they're in a relationship.
His piece is more about lonely sexually frustrated people in general than the Incels. Of course society should have an interest in helping people with both economic and sexual opportunity.
He does a very bad job of establishing that that is a new phenomenon and that its cause is what he claims (the "sexual revolution"). The whole thing reads like someone molding a phenomenon to validate his unpopular worldview.
The more of these things I read, too, the more convinced I become that the lack of clarity and direction and and the prevalence of what my high school English teachers called "fluff" is in itself a signifier that I am reading something that is at its heart quite awful.
I mean it just felt very Kevin Williams-y.
Frankly I'm fine if he's fired from the NYT, but fire him for an exploitative title not something he never said. To me Hanson s is more Kevin Williams ish, his thought experiment about cuckoldry being worse than rape was in that ballpark.
It's hard to pick who'd win the Awful Blue Ribbon here, but conflating incels (a self-chosen label) with the disabled and other groups who have less sex than they want is a pretty stinky take. He's also wrong about the newness of this issue. All that under a blanket of fluff.
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