“when you have no friends and are getting bullied + humiliated by women constantly & are told to both ‘man up’ and renounce your masculinity - it’s like the one bright light you see is this community.”
@mandystadt’s essay is nuanced and insightful, bravo!https://www.thedailybeast.com/sympathy-for-the-incel …
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But taking on, "I would like sex, but I can't get it" as a personal identity is... strange. It would've been completely inconceivable fifty years ago. Sexual identities (of lots of stripes) are I think replacing our dissolved community-based identities. Incel is one of these.
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I think we gays are to blame for this reorganization, but communities were already being dissolved - people can move away, the loss of community hubs - and something had to step in to fill the void. It seems clear to me that what's replaced all this is sexuality-based identity.
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How many people are just now discovering what "incel" is and saying, "Oh, I see myself there, these are my people"? I don't think we should gloss past that as a natural response. It can only seem that way because of how identity/community has shifted in the past 30 years.
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Yeah l also think taking it as an exclusively sex oriented phenomena is a mistake. It’s massively about loneliness, alienation, atomisation. And as you suggest, broader structural, cultural, material changes have occurred making young men more vulnerable in very real ways.
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Oh for sure it's also about loneliness. Communities exist to solve the loneliness problem. But the name they have taken on is "involuntarily celibate." Sex (or lack thereof) is the title card for community membership. That seems significant to me.
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I think......I think the sex is secondary b/c of how the phenomenon mainfests. Take the example in the first article. The guy isn't a virgin. He's had sex, it just was an incredibly (seems to be) fucked up relationship & he was left scarred by the experience. It's the isolation.
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If you go (against all wisdom) to an incel forum, I think the sexual aspect is much more pronounced there than in the article. I think there is an attitude that sex is the most important part of life, and that those who long for a sexual desire are owed satisfaction.
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Not to say the alienation is unimportant, but I don't think this is describable by alienation alone.
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