Angry Thoughts on "Incels"

Second post of the day. If you want to read a page of happy childhood, skip this and go down a post. If you have been hankering for some "Seraphic Singles" type thoughts, today is your happy day.

Or maybe not. I have been reading this article about the Incel movement, and now I feel nauseous. (Read the article and let me know if you feel the same.)

It doesn't help that I have discovered that at least two of the victims of the man apparently inspired by the Incel movement were graduates of my own all-girls high-school.

First of all, "incel" or "involuntarily celibate" is a misnomer. These men aren't complaining because they aren't married. They are complaining because they aren't having sexual relations with women. Thus, they are involuntarily continent. To, I imagine, only a certain extent, given the prevalence of internet porn.

Second, one reason an "incel" (or "incon") might not find women interested in him, if he even bothers to try to befriend women, is because he is the kind of man who thinks women "owe" men sex. Women are not exactly mind-readers, but we are much, much better at men-in-general at picking up unspoken clues to personality.

Third, apparently prostitution is not working for them. If continence is such the outrageous burden upon men they say it is, and they have no fear of God and little respect for women, then why do they not avail themselves of the world's oldest profession? I can only conclude that they have tried it and found it wanting. Either that or they don't have any expendable income or cannot look even a sex-worker in the eye.

Incidentally, the crumbs who say that if some woman had consented to sleep with the perpetrator of the Toronto Massacre, ten people would still be alive have clearly not considered that possibility. This is not to condone the sex trade, but why don't they factor it in? There is, and has always been, a class of woman available to just about anyone with a fistful of money. Why do some young men expect all women to be whores?

Fourth, whinging that some men get all the girls, and others get none is not new. Even before the internet was born I read complaints in print from men who deeply resented their lack of popularity. To a certain extent, I sympathised. I was not popular myself as a child, and it took me forever to understand how to talk to boys. I did not enjoy being a real "incel" myself in adult life, but I learned very quickly that resenting men for my unmarried state was A) insane and B) counter-productive.
Anyway, one of the first "incon" complaints I read was by a man writing to a newspaper columnist about how he didn't have a car for moral reasons, but how women cared only for men with cars.

Nota bene: my husband does not have a car. Now that I think about it, none of the men in my Edinburgh social circle has a car. One is driven everywhere by his wife.

Five, men and women are not the same, and even the Pill hasn't transformed women into gay men. Lonely women don't deal with unanswered sexual longings by going for a walk to the park at midnight and waiting for someone to turn up. It is probably true that most women under, say 60, could find a bedmate merely by going to a local bar at closing-time, but we generally don't. We don't because that's not how we roll. Even if we literally can't get pregnant, we can still have our feelings very badly hurt through an unwise sexual encounter. We are also much more easily killed.

This brings me to point six, which is that female social loneliness strikes me as just as serious as male sexual loneliness. If anyone twits a man for his inability to get girls, he can at least cover up by snarling "I do all right" or "Those who don't, talk about it most." A woman who is loudly pitied by her female friends and relations because she hasn't got "a proper man" can't.

When Benedict Ambrose and I went to marriage prep class replacement, we had to write a compatibility exam, for which BA got a higher mark. I lost marks for circling Y on a statement like "I believe marriage will solve many problems in my life."  This necessitated a conversation in which I explained to the archdiocesan marriage prep lady that marriage would give thirty-something me companionship, a proper home, social leverage, possibly children, and the feeling that my parents no longer had to worry about me. Not being married can be a cause of great suffering. (I will have to look online and see if there is a community of unmarried women who work themselves up into a murderous rage about it.)

Reading now about "incels" ("incons"), I am staggered by their weird theories, junk mathematics and insane sense of entitlement. Some weirdo actually seriously suggested that single mothers should be forced by the state to have sex with unattractive "incels"---presumably believing that single mothers have no value in the marriage market. Newsflash: lots of single mothers get married or remarried. It's about who you are, and who you meet, not what you are. Sociology is an inexact science at the best of times, so good luck piecing together reality with PUA-type game theory.

On a better day,  I would feel deeply sorry for these men and puzzle out a post of advice on how to become the sort of man women are actually interested in. Today, however, I think about how their public whining has apparently inspired one of their number, who they will doubtlessly enshrine as a martyr, to kill my former neighbours, and I am just disgusted. There are thousands of lonely people in the world, men without sex and women without loving husbands, and the vast majority strive to get on with life and manage not to kill people.