Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller once wrote a book called Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. For him, perversion was an unconscious revenge-taking for traumas going way back into childhood, in which the Oedipal conflict was a focal concern. Few these days would see this Freudian theme as the single key to unlocking the psyche’s secrets, profoundly important as a child’s early relationships with its parents surely are; but Stoller’s attention to sexual hatred was well placed and should engage us too.
Discussion here recently has rightly taken misogyny very seriously. Several commentators have pointed out that women constantly face sexual provocations of a clearly hostile nature: this is true harassment, intended to humiliate and degrade. Well-intentioned minor-attracted people can easily become heartily sick of hearing the truth of this harassment because it feels as though harping on about it plays into the hands of those who wish to play up the dangers of sex to the exclusion of its connection to more positive feelings: affection, rapture, adoration.
While sharing our common longing for a more positive discourse, I believe there is a nettle that must be grasped. So, here goes. First of all, I think we should make a distinction between real misogyny – the hatred that can lead to girls being gang-raped and hanged from a mango tree, as happened in India recently – and merely giving way to a temptation to take sexual favours that have not been offered. Lord Rennard may have been guilty of the latter, but it would be grotesquely unjust to impute to him any secret wish to commit real atrocities.
Secondly, having made this distinction, there is an urgent need to understand where all the misogyny is coming from: How does it take root? In what circumstances does it flourish? Feminists have tended to think in terms of power structures, contrasting patriarchy with mythically imagined matriarchal golden ages somewhere near the dawn of time. They may be right, but we know too little about our prehistoric background to be sure, and modern remnants of hunter-gatherer societies are not a reliable guide.
The recent terrible case of mass murderer Elliot Rodger reminds us, also, that the individual psyche is as important as social structures: Rodger was violently misogynistic and also a classic troubled loner. Gang rapes and lynchings, to be sure, are the work of mobs, not individuals; but arguably it still takes psychos of one stripe or another to set the tone and lead the action in the more concerted forms of hostility: violently minded types should not be seen as ordinary guys (or not the majority of them) but as birds of a feather who gravitate towards each other, pooling their hatred and conspiring to act upon it.
This brings us back to Stoller: perversion as the erotic form of hatred. Elliot Rodger, so angered over still being a virgin at 22 that that he went on a murderous rampage, looks a classic case. We have his own very extensive account of what lay behind the killing spree that left seven people dead, including Roger himself, and thirteen injured. The 137-page document this son of a Hollywood film director wrote in the weeks before the killings discloses that his early childhood (including the Oedipal phase) was not at all troubled in terms of his family upbringing. It was at school, especially on the sports field, where he did not perform well, that he began to feel like an outsider and began to have “the first inkling of my shortcomings”. Only later would he develop a hatred of women when he believed they had slighted and ignored him. His parents’ divorce, when he was seven, is remembered as a deep wound in his own life. By 13, he was the “weird kid” at his school. He saw all girls as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures” who took pleasure in his suffering. From that point on his misogyny became more entrenched and his personality emerges as self-centred and grandiose. He appears to have been an extreme example of narcissism. Narcissistic Personality Disorder, in the psychiatric terminology, is a condition characterised by finding it difficult to care about other people, who are valued only for what benefits they can give to the narcissist, which tends to mean indulging a wish to be uncritically admired.
Rodger fitted the bill. He could easily have afforded to pay prostitutes but that would have offended his vanity. So sex was not the problem in his case, or not the biggest one. He was good-looking and had a glamorous life. Getting laid should have been easy, but it seems he was regarded as a shallow jerk. He expected to be admired for his expensive Armani sunglasses and BMW car, but instead was despised as a self-important nonentity.
Rodger was newsworthy because his actions were so extreme. There is evidence that at a lesser level, though, his misogyny is widely shared by others who in some degree have a similar personality profile. The Rodger case opened my eyes, for instance, to misogyny expressed through “the incel community” online, “incels” being “involuntary celibates”. There was a whole lot about them in this recent Salon article by Tracy Clark-Flory. My inspection of these websites has so far been very limited but I should say at once that Clark-Flory’s piece is not the place to find a deeper understanding. To my mind her woefully superficial, one-sided effort is a hatchet job almost as nasty as the people she attacks. It’s the sort of journalism that gives feminism a bad name among reasonable people who try to put truth and humanity above crushing their enemies. For a corrective, see this alternative view, more balanced, view of incels.
For the moment, though, we need to stick with the sensational side, as per Clark-Flory. What are we to make of this, for example, from That Incel Blogger:
My mother, the murderous whore, is refusing to have sex with me when that could alleviate my sexual frustration.
Irony? Doesn’t look that way. And it would be perverse in this case to rule out the Oedipus Complex! There’s a whole lot more floridly desperate stuff on the same site, such as this:
It is over. I will stop looking for women. There is no longer any chance for me to escape loneliness and I must embrace hatred, destruction and punishment now. The girl from my previous post has rejected me. My last chance came later today when another girl answered my ad but she was just another airhead moron who wanted to talk to me on a cellphone and said I’m too quiet because I couldn’t giggle at everything like an idiot the way she did.
At another site, I see this:
Why don’t girls talk to me? Why did I not do this, because I was too NICE (big mistake), and yes, there was actually a time when I did not hate women. Women made me hate them… I would like to see which woman would not hate men if she approached 15,000 men and got rejected each time.
Wow! What this reminds me of (apart from the uncomfortable suspicion that this last guy has a point in his final sentence) is that we minor-attracted folks are not the only ones with problems. And neither, for that matter, are women who receive unwanted and sometimes hostile attention.
All these troubles and tensions are important. Sticking with harassment, which is where we began, the perspective gained by looking at the mental abnormality of individual perpetrators (relevant conditions probably include autism, schizophrenia and much else, as well as narcissism) simply has to be significant bearing in mind the potentially murderous consequences of ignoring it. But psychiatry isn’t going to fix everything, especially as some of the heartless “psychos” who commit acts of sexual aggression are in a sense normal. Yes, they may be psychopathic to the extent that they show a callous lack of empathy, but unlike the rejected narcissist they are not themselves necessarily suffering. On the contrary, the classic building site wolf-whistler may be a very confident and contented sort of bully, not in the slightest need of medical help.
Which brings us full circle back to power structures and societal solutions – with, I hope, a bit more useful stuff in our heads than when we started. This little detour into mental health has raised empathy issues beyond our own concerns as MAPs. We can deplore the selfishness of a narcissist like Rodger, who thought his problems justified slaying random strangers; but we can also notice, can we not, that a lot of the misogyny out there is more than merely gratuitous? It appears to be fed by a real sense of pain and injustice among those who are left out, especially in a culture such as ours where sexual gratification seems to be “in yer face” everywhere, from popular music videos to films, TV, etc.
Life, unfortunately, is always going to be unfair: we cannot turn every unpopular person into a socially successful one. But I do think we can soften the blow in some ways. To start with, while acknowledging the realities of sexual harassment and misogyny and the need to address them, we need a more sympathetic feminist narrative, not just endless ball-crushing. Also, while some mental conditions, such as autism, may be inborn, others are probably not. I doubt Elliot Rodger was born a narcissist, for instance: circumstances contributed – especially perhaps his parents’ divorce. Emotional security is hugely important in childhood: children’s interests are handled very badly in our culture when it comes to adult partners splitting up. Shouldn’t we be doing something about this?
I intended in this piece to go further, to look at particular social values and structures in our society with reference to children’s sexual socialisation, and how these might be improved in ways that could take the sting out of the gender wars. As so often, though, I have reached the point where I will have to leave off, and hope I will be able to pick up the threads another time.
a new phylosophic text against incels:
a new study on stalking: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/bsl.2592
a new text on “academical harassment”:
There are some good films about incels. The worst of them is Marty (1955, telling incels must have sex with ugly women), the best one is the Ukrainian cartoon Історія кохання (1992, https://multik.usemind.org/1834-istoriya-lyubvi). The Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016) is also a good film, how a fat and a blue-stocking women having problems in prefessional and personal lives fight against an incel occultist trying to free all the sex fiend ghosts.
Tom wrote that harassment is “giving way to a temptation to take sexual favours that have not been offered.” In fact, offering sexual favours is said to be harassment too.
Tom used to offer sexual favours to Kevin and considers it as harassment. “Inviting the little boys to pee against a wall” by a 12-years-old girl is also considered as harassment by the UK government.
The incels’ problem is not “approaching… and getting rejected each time”, the problem is that approaching is forbidden. If nobody is allowed to approach then sex life in the Earth will stop.
What do nudity, sensuality, eroticism and sexuality mean to me? That is what I want to show in my blog – I will use more than just words.
Good luck with that! as they say. There are plenty such blogs, I would think, but not as applied to child nudity etc. They wouldn’t last long in the present legal climate worldwide and neither would the blogger.
I have to admit that the whole concept of being ‘incel’ is a new one to me – it seems axiomatic to me that virtually everyone would like to be having more sex than they are having (all men, anyway!) and probably more people than are willing to admit it are not having any sex at all. Unlike some of the posters here, I’m not disposed to blame anti-sexual harassment laws, feminists, or women generally for the condition of ‘incel’ people, though I’m also inclined to be more sympathetic to them than Tracy Clark-Flory is. There was a burst of comment in the Guardian and elsewhere after the UCSB shootings blaming this misogyny on a culture that tolerates sexual violence and hatred of women, but in fact I think the opposite is true: these are refuges for people who are often socially marginalised in other ways and find a culture that empowers women a convenient target for their resentment.TCF sees the disturbing comments on ‘incel’ forums as “an ideology that you encounter everywhere,” but in fact it is a feeling of marginalisation and impotence (in every sense) that is really at the heart of this violent frustration. It seems to me that many corners of the internet where genuine and sometimes violent misogyny flourishes are full of alienated people looking for someone to pin their problems on.
Then there is the debate that briefly raged over whether Elliot Rodger was mentally ill or the product of a diseased culture – a false dichotomy if ever there was one, because, as any psychiatrist will tell you, mental illness doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. I think most of the commentators have been looking in the wrong place to attribute responsibility for Rodger’s madness, however – most have been talking about our culture’s supposed attitudes towards women, whereas I think the problem is much more with our attitudes towards men. Specifically, there is an expectation of masculine sexual super-fulfillment, an abundance of short-term and uncommitted sexual conquests that are supposed to mark the transition to manhood.
I don’t want to downplay the positive aspects of sex – the “affection, rapture, adoration” that it can entail – but I don’t think these are the aspects of sexual encounters that our culture tends to emphasise. In the words of Kingsley Amis, sex in our culture (and perhaps even more in the US) is “the scratching of an itch” – an opportunity for a man to carve a notch on his bedpost, but often with no adoration involved and frequently with very little affection. I’m hardly the first to observe that there is a trivialisation and a cheapening of sex in contemporary Western culture, but I wonder if a society that valued less sex and better sex would produce so many sad and alienated misfits like Rodger. In a more compassionate sexual culture, ‘incels’ would not be inadequate loners or frustrated cavemen, but just guys who haven’t yet met the right man/woman.
I’m aware that this is starting to sound rather morally conservative, and perhaps affronting both to feminists’ critique of male-dominated relationship structures (such as marriage) and to TOC’s idealisation of sex as something inherently good. But maybe MAPs are in a position to stand up against the prevailing conception of sex and love in our culture; being expected to remain celibate ourselves (for the time being, at least), we may be able to point out that celibacy is not necessarily worse than the glut of joyless, meaningless erotic adventures that young men (gay and straight) – and increasingly young women too – are expected to embark upon to prove their sexual adequacy.
Will McBride gives the best argument for inter-generational homo sex there is: No War!
http://www.will-mcbride-art.com/nowar.php
The argument is between the lines.
Linca
Here is an interesting take on incel from a sociological perspective.
ww.youtube.com/watch?v=0KzaB0ut3xg
not a bad video there,check out this one by karen straugham,she was one of the speakers at a MRA event,where they canceled the hotel due to threats
from well you know…
ww.youtube.com/watch?v=BBYfnuuS_Us
For those in the UK who missed it, the Channel 4 documentary about Elliot Rodger called The Virgin Killer is repeated tonight (Monday 16th) at 10.00pm on 4seven.
“If women like that like men like those…”
He comes across as a loser with serious mental health problems, but it’s noteworthy that, in my experience, unless you do something pretty serious to yourself or others, no-one will take any notice of you and your problems.
It will be interesting to see what his parents say about him, if they ever do.
It’s quite interesting to compare Rodger to George Sodini, the incel man who murdered three women and injured nine other people, then killed himself, at a Pennsylvania gym in 2009. Sodini was more than twice Rodger’s age and had been profoundly lonely for years: not only did he have no girlfriends, he also had no real friends, and he didn’t get along with his family. Unlike Rodger, he clearly wasn’t narcissistic: on his personal website, he posted that he felt sure there must be something wrong with him since nobody seemed to want to spend time with him. However, like Rodger he seemed irked by black men having sex with white women. Sodini also gave women’s looks very precise ratings — an ex-girlfriend was “about a 7.25” — and had apparently tried to help himself using the advice of one R. Don Steele, author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. That may be one of the many reasons why women tend to think men who consult such books are creepy.
For me I think the idea of stopping ‘sexual harassment’ and helping incels are fundamentally at odds with one another. Any law aimed at preventing sexual harassment results in introverted high anxiety ‘beta’ males being forced into involuntary celibacy because they know that should they approach women they will be the first to be arrested for sexual harrassment. It seems to me that our feminist culture has created a reality such that if you are someone who tries their hardest to obey the insane anti-sex laws that have been created then you will be permanently stuck as a virgin.
On the otherhand, unthinking alpha males just say ‘to hell with the law!’ and do what they like, sometimes they get put away, sometimes they don’t. Most of the time they probably don’t (because alpha behaviour is not seen as suspicious).
I noticed the other day this article ‘The Value of Virginity’ in The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/08/value-of-virginity) and one thing that particularly stood out was mention of research that 27% of 15-24 year old men had never had sexual contact whatsoever in 2011 as opposed to 22% in 2002. I don’t personally agree with the general jist of the article as it comes across as radical anti-sex christian feminist bullshit to me (pardon my french), however, in my view it highlights that more and more people are ending up as incels and I’m inclined to place blame on all the feminist inspired anti-sex laws and anti-sex culture for that.
As such I’m also inclined to think that a lot of today’s ‘misogyny’ is a consequence of the feminist misandry we see in the media. Men love women, but dogma dictates that loving women is rape, especially when loved by timid beta males, so such men choose to hate women instead.
Or perhaps my comment is just the ravings of yet another insane misogynist…!
I think you made an excellent point. Rodger was not, as I mentioned earlier, a provocative loud-mouth grinning pervert who went around sexually harassing women. He was someone who feared women so much that he hid himself away in isolation and that isolation is what created his bitterness. Laws against sexual harassment aren’t going to do anything to make people like Rodger go away but they do have the potential of making such a person more common if, like you mentioned, those laws create more fear.
Hello. I don’t think you’re an insane misogynist. Most people aren’t, and I don’t know you from Adam. I think we look at the world differently, that’s all.
For instance, you say that men love women, but I’m inclined to think it’s a bit more complicated than that. People and their circumstances are, after all, very varied. Most of us love some people and not others. Some men hate women. Some men don’t love anybody. Some men love boys and couldn’t care less about women. Some men adore young, beautiful, feminine-presenting women who put a lot of effort into their appearance, but are indifferent to or disdainful of all other women. Some men love prepubescent girls but think that adolescent girls are obnoxious and women are close-minded manipulative harpy sluts who wear too much makeup. Some men feel a great deal of tenderness for their girlfriends but don’t respect them or take them seriously. Some men love their wives and their female relatives but feel a much closer connection with their male friends. Some gay men worship divas but jeer at lesbians, or love their female friends deeply but fall in romantic love with men. And on and on. I have also never heard or read any reasonable person, feminist or not, say or, in my view, imply that men loving women is rape. I have, however, heard and read plenty of (otherwise) reasonable people imply that adults expressing sexual love for children is rape.
The data you cite from the Guardian article may be skewed by the inclusion of all those teenagers and young twenty-somethings. For instance, STI rates also rose among young people during that period, and some may have been put right off sex for a while when their friends got genital warts, or the schools and the NHS may have become better at warning them about STIs, so that they perhaps stuck to ‘outercourse’ and didn’t count that as sex.
As for your contentions that shy, introverted ‘beta’ males will be the first to be accused of sexual harassment, and that ‘alpha’ male behaviour is not seen as offensive — I just don’t know if you are right. It seems that nobody else does, either: searching the internet for ‘characteristics of men accused of sexual harassment’ yields nothing specific enough to my question. Certainly there have been many high-profile cases of famous, rich, powerful men being accused of sexual harassment, but obviously we hear so much about these cases because the men in question are famous. They may be very unrepresentative. My hunch is that while a nervous nerd making a clumsy pass at the prom queen is likely to be cruelly rejected and laughed at, he’s not likely to be accused of sexual harassment, because he just does not present enough of a threat for that. But I could be wrong. I don’t have any data to back up my hunch.
I do know that sometimes an awkward ‘cold call’ approach to a woman brings down undeserved suspicion on a man, but while this sucks for the men in question, I don’t feel guilty about it. It is the knowledge that there are rapists and murderers out there that makes women nervous around men who don’t seem to be following basic social norms.
The book Stalkers and their Victims by Paul E. Mullen, Michele Pathé and Rosemary Purcell contains a very interesting piece that describes how the concept of stalking has arisen, how what we would now call stalking was once accepted behaviour in some contexts, why stalking is now illegal and how difficult it can be to draw the line between a persistent suitor and a stalker. I recommend it to anyone interested in these questions.
I certainly feel very sorry for those people, almost all of them men, whose sexual orientation is such that they have trouble satisfying it without running afoul of the sexual harassment laws: exhibitionists, voyeurs, telephone scatologists, etc. When I, on foot, was followed in a car by a man who was masturbating and moaning, of course I was frightened. But even as I turned down this street and that trying to throw him off, while part of me was thinking “OK, in the unlikely event that he grabs me I can probably get out at least one good scream and there must be somebody in these houses to hear me” another part was thinking “Poor guy, probably just a harmless exhibitionist”.
Clearly, with most such people a humane and supportive, rather than punitive, approach is best. This article https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/98-053r_fog_eng.htm by Agner Fog describes his experience counselling several sexual minority groups. In one Danish exhibitionists’ group, the flashers started flashing each other, then enjoying masturbation together, and this gave some the confidence and self-esteem they needed to seek out prosocial sexual outlets such as nudist beaches, sex clubs and nude modelling. Fog mentions a study of a Dutch exhibitionists’ group which found that “the main effect of the group on the participants was to make their exhibitionism ego-syntonic. As a consequence of this, their exhibitionistic behaviour became less obsessive and egocentric, and more adjusted to the onlooker.” Which is a great result for all concerned, and current attitudes, largely pushed by feminists, which dismiss such a gentle and sensible approach and demonise flashers are certainly both misguided and cruel.
“A” is a mine of fascinating and important information as this quote shows, although I could have pointed to numerous others. I would like to emphasise this one, though, because “A” has sourced her info in this case to the Ipce website, which is also a great mine of information and I would like to take this opportunity to commend it.
A, I think the point I was trying to make is that for *incel* ‘misogynists’ they love women but they see love being portrayed as rape by feminists in the mainstream media and political spheres. I’m sure there are all kinds of other loves, but I’m talking about what I’d guess (maybe wrongly) is the most common type of angry incel.
I really do think that love is often portrayed as rape. For instance many have paraphrased radical feminist Andrea Dworkin’s writings as ‘All sex is rape’. Take for instance the following passage:
“Intercourse is not necessary to existence anymore. Existence does not depend on female compliance, nor on the violation of female boundaries, nor on lesser female privacy, nor on the physical occupation of the female body. But the hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the expression of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires no passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating the arrogance of those who do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography. So freedom from intercourse, or a social structure that reflects the low value of intercourse in women’s sexual pleasure, or intercourse becoming one sex act among many entered into by (hypothetical) equals as part of other, deeper, longer, perhaps more sensual lovemaking, or an end to women’s inferior status because we need not be forced to reproduce (forced flicking frequently justified by some implicit biological necessity to reproduce)”
Views expressed by her and those like her is what underpins a lot of contemporary feminist thought and 21st century law making. Propaganda like ‘no means no’, putting out flyers telling men not to rape and stating that they must ‘ask’ for consent before having sex. These all create the idea in the minds of men – particularly high anxiety ones – that they are potential rapists. Having sex without consent is not, and I believe was not considered to be in many places, rape. Forceful intercourse or serious threats are rape. It’s a crucial distinction because under the narrower definition no reasonable man can consider himself a rapist. Under the more expansive 21st century definition I suspect few men have got explicit approval and thus, should they be ‘caught’, they are undoubtedly rapists. This of course is still ignoring the reality that, facts aside, an accusation is sufficient to convict.
As you allude to, there is also a strong idea that having sex with underage girls or boys is rape. I think it’s a little erroneous to say that paedophilia is a clear-cut sexual orientation and that there are ‘norms’ and ‘paedos’ as age limits are so arbitrary they tend to blur into one. As a result, even for men attracted to women well into their 20s and beyond they see all the crazy laws that allow them to be jailed for life if they have sex with someone who turns out to be underage. And why the hell should one check or care if someone is underage anyway? I also think that one thing thatincelblogger seems to point out is that many incels would be much happier if they’d been ‘sexually abused’ (as the feminists call it) when they were underage.
As for all the talk of women being frightened by certain behaviours I think that could well be part of our cultural conditioning, since the 1980s we’ve had endless hysteria about potential rapists and crime in general. I do think the ‘nerdy’ rapist hiding behind his computer screen has also been a large part of that culture hence leading to the demonisation of the ‘beta’ male. I can’t say for certain whether this is entirely social conditioning or at least in part innate, though. Perhaps the book ‘Stalkers and their Victims’ you mention provides some answers to this?
good last point about kids being introduced to sex early,infants do nothing for me,im more of a hebephile also hetro,I think insect is the biggest taboo that needs to be smashed,check this out korper,liebe,doktorspiele(love,body and playing doctor)is the german government publication that caused a stir for it’s
incestuous content.
I get mixed messeges from the german government,first this,then it’s heavy handed crack down,it’s hitler youth all over again to me.
http://www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t239600.html
sorry i just said insect,that would be a strange one-) INCEST lol
I wouldn’t consider Andrea Dworkin one of those reasonable people I mentioned. Intelligent yes, and she had guts, but she was kind of off her rocker, not to say vicious. I do know feminists who regard her work as…sort of metaphorically rather than literally true, the way some Christians regard Genesis, but I can’t agree with them.
Here is why I think Dworkin’s book Intercourse struck a chord with women when they were published:
Intercourse is a fraught thing. Typically, men enjoy it a lot and orgasm relatively easily from it, but while some women are also built that way, most women usually cannot orgasm from intercourse alone, nor for many women is it even all that enjoyable on a purely physical level. This by the way is one reason why many women are less keen on casual sex than many men: the ‘orgasm gap’ tends to shrink in committed relationships, as some men are more willing to e.g. give oral sex to a girlfriend than to a casual sex partner. In casual hookups, women are likely to give oral sex but not receive it. (See for instance ‘Orgasm in College Hookups and Relationships’ by Elizabeth Armstrong, Paula England and Alison Fogarty.)
By itself, women’s lesser physical enjoyment of intercourse need not be a problem, since there are plenty of other kinds of sex to add into the mix. The problem is with the way intercourse is framed: as the best kind of sex, as the obligatory kind of sex, as the only real kind of sex. There’s this thing that is supposedly the One Sex to Rule Them All, and it’s less fun for most women than for most men. On top of that, if a woman isn’t aroused enough, it can cause her discomfort, even pain and bleeding. Some rather inconsiderate men will give a woman just enough of the kinds of sex she really enjoys to get her aroused, then go ahead and have intercourse, and then call it a day, leaving the woman frustrated. Sure, she can masturbate, but after a while she may start feeling that she could just as well cut out the middleman and masturbate alone. Matters aren’t helped by the widespread attitude that all other kinds of sex are ‘foreplay’, the stuff you only do so you can get to the intercourse.
On top of that, intercourse poses more physical risks for women than it does for men, ranging from the usually only a bit painful, such as urinary tract infections, through the rather more problematic, such as tooth decay during pregnancy, to the stuff that can kill you, such as eclampsia and cervical cancer. The odds are against developing any one of these, but if you do get unlucky it’s no picnic. And on top of that, the burden of contraception tends to fall disproportionately on women. It’s one more thing to worry about and, often, pay for, and while all contraceptive methods are generally well tolerated, they certainly can cause side effects: bladder infections from the spermicide used with diaphragms, cervical caps and contraceptive sponges, or a whole host of side effects from hormonal contraception, including low mood, irritability, loss of libido, loss of vaginal lubrication, and headaches — often problems that develop gradually, so that it takes the woman in question a long time to realise they are due to her contraception.
So, when a woman coping with all that hears some bigheaded young men referring to intercourse with violent words such as ‘banging’, ‘pounding’, ‘nailing’, she may well get annoyed. Also, many women are convinced that something is wrong with them if they can’t orgasm from intercourse, and being told otherwise in no uncertain terms can be a massive relief.
Intercourse was published in 1987, and back then things were worse. Sure, these days the proliferation of porn has made many young women feel that they must have multiple screaming orgasms with every intercourse session or they’re uptight and no fun. But in those days, condoms were thicker, contraceptive pills were ‘stronger’ and thus the side effects were worse, there were fewer kinds of contraceptive pills and so a woman didn’t have as many options if the first kind(s) she tried disagreed with her, men were less likely to be able to locate the clitoral glans, and a residual Freudianism declared that only vaginal orgasms were true mature female orgasms. So Intercourse found a welcoming audience.
I totally agree with you that there is no sharp line between ‘paedos’ and ‘normals’, and that it’s terrible that perfectly typical men are increasingly being made to feel bad, not to mention punished and ostracised, over their attraction to young women. And it seems that there are indeed exceptions made for certain high-status men, such as Jerry Seinfeld, who dated the 17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein when he was 38 — though he has gone on to marry a woman only three years his junior.
I don’t think ‘no means no’ is propaganda, I think it’s a simple statement of fact. The point of telling men not to rape is to reverse the setup under which for ages women have been told what we should do to avoid being raped, while nobody has pointed out that rape is the fault of rapists, not of their victims who did or didn’t do this, that or the other.
I also can’t agree with you that sex without consent is not rape. That’s basically the definition of rape. If you get drunk and pass out and a close male friend of yours has anal sex with you and you wake up naked, bleeding and in considerable pain, what is that? If he does the same thing when you are conscious, but too frozen in fear and shock to say anything or to struggle, what is that? Asking before having sex tends to be a good idea: that way, you make sure that everyone is on the same page, is feeling relaxed, is having fun — which is after all the goal of the exercise! It doesn’t mean we all have to get a contract drawn up by a lawyer every time we want to kiss somebody: nonverbal expressions of consent, such as genuine smiles or active participation or what have you, can work just fine too, especially if partners know each other well already. Some people like rough sex where nobody asks permission ever, and there isn’t a thing wrong with that, but I feel the only responsible thing to do is direct those people to some BDSM resources and strongly advise them to choose a ‘safeword’.
At least when it comes to rape of adults, an accusation is not sufficient for a conviction (nor should it be). Most rapes are not reported, most reported rapes are not prosecuted, and most rape prosecutions do not result in conviction.
There is an unfortunate culture of fear in our society these days but some fears are legitimate, and given the statistics my fear of being raped is one of them. Chronic fear that children will be kidnapped and murdered by a stranger is harder to justify, since such events are much, much rarer.
As an aside, I think that while feminism of the type that is currently most accepted is certainly a sufficient condition for a sexual witchhunt, it’s not a necessary condition. In the book Censoring Sex Research, which Tom here put me on to, David Greenberg points out that the Boise, Idaho scandal, in which men were hounded over sex with teenage boys, took place in 1955-1957. That was well before second-wave feminism got off the ground, and yet the language used was much the same as it is today: the men were described as ‘preying on’ the boys, who must be ‘protected’.
“…struck a chord with women when it was published”, rather.
“I don’t think ‘no means no’ is propaganda, I think it’s a simple statement of fact. The point of telling men not to rape is to reverse the setup under which for ages women have been told what we should do to avoid being raped, while nobody has pointed out that rape is the fault of rapists, not of their victims who did or didn’t do this, that or the other.”
I don’t understand why women get offended by being told how to avoid rape. I read websites on how to avoid false accusations. I think it’s good advice and things all men should know. And I don’t get mad when someone tells me I should lock my doors because of burglaries.
I can only see it being offensive if it’s done in hindsight. For instance if a woman is raped and then someone says directly “Well you shouldn’t have been walking alone at night dressed like that and maybe it wouldn’t have happened.” But if you’re telling a woman who hasn’t been raped that it’s not a good idea to walk alone in a certain part of the neighborhood then why would that be offensive?
I know it’s not the woman’s fault but there’s nothing you can really do about the rapist if he hasn’t been caught. In most instances you can’t tell a rapist “Hey don’t rape. It’s wrong” and expect him to listen because they already know that what they are doing is wrong and that’s what’s so dumb about the “teach men not to rape” campaign.
A, limiting your set to what you consider ‘reasonable’ people is a little biased! I think that while Andrea Dworkin may have been one of the more outspoken ones her views have underpinned a lot of feminist thought. She’s a well known character precisely because she was liked perhaps for the reasons you mention. However, Hitler was also liked because a lot of Germans were frustrated with the Jews, and whilst the actual views of a lot of Germans might have been more moderate, that allowed him to do what he did. Thus, the popularity of Andrea Dworkin and those like her with women is also allowing the feminists to do what they are doing.
I still believe that ‘no means no’ is propaganda. Being nice to people is fairly obvious, thus the only reason for making such a statement is as a violent threat to men that should they dare to seek out a relationship they can expect to be beaten in prison for the rest of their days. That’s certainly the message I got from it as a young man growing up in a feminist world. The fact is women who are paranoid of being raped can do things to lower the risk. It might help women be less paranoid if feminists didn’t portray rape as being ‘worse than death’, though. In any case I’m not aware of any evidence that rapists actually listen to ‘no means no’ propaganda but it certainly seems to bring into existence virgin killers.
If I’m honest I’m a little dubious of some of your statistics about rape being so widespread, if much of the female population have been raped and it is a heinous crime then this surely means that much of the male population are rapists. As a consequence it leads to the feminist idea that men are all perpetrators and women are all victims, which seems distorted. It’s why MRAs talk about ‘gynocentrism’ where everything is seen from the female point of view. But what about from the male point of view? If all men are rapists then surely the rapists should have a voice, yet it is never heard. And in any case, if rape is so widespread then criminalising it is surely a waste of time, might as well legalise it as that would make no difference to its frequency.
Sex without consent is a feminist definition of rape, it is not the definition of rape. Funnily enough the first example you cite would probably come under the definition of forceful rape as you mention bleeding and such. The second example would also come under that definition if the rapist was threatening, if the woman just went along with it because she views herself as a weak timid feminist who suffers from androphobia then quite frankly, she bears some of the blame for that. The final example involving ‘body language’ that you suggest is not rape, does, however, not have an explicit and enthusiastic yes thus, under radical feminist definitions of rape, it is rape.
With regards to conviction rates. many cases may not reach court for a variety of reasons ranging from victims withdrawing accusations to probably the main reason which is limited incarceration capacity. As a result the CPS will be selective in the cases they pursue, obviously if there is some evidence that helps, though I suspect it is rare for there to be any real evidence, usually it would be unrelated things like the suspect possessed extreme pornography or child pornography or committed adultery even though that’s not a crime etc etc. Mostly it will depend on the victim looking like a victim, the perpetrator looking like a perpetrator and a few co-accusers are always good. With up to £50,000 compensation handed out to victims, accusing men of rape has never been more profitable!
The 1950s were also a puritanical time, homosexual witch hunting was rife and hatred of homosexuals in those days were, I believe, a feminist cause. It was feminists, afterall, who criminalised all homosexual activity in the same bill in which they raised the age of consent.
Do you mean the Labouchere amendment? I don’t think that was actually a feminist effort.
Tom was kind enough to guest post a contribution of mine under the title ‘Silence does not betoken consent’. In that post I discussed research into the proportion of men who are rapists. It looks like about 6%. Most of the men in that 6% rape multiple people. Important research on this subject has been done by David Lisak, who has developed a ‘predator theory’ of rape: the idea, supported by solid evidence, that rape is committed by a distinct minority of men, rather than being inherent to the structure of male-female relations.
I think we do hear from these men sometimes. Linda Mahood and Barbara Littlewood have noted the case of a Canadian university where, in response to a ‘no means no’ poster campaign, other posters appeared: “No means on your knees bitch”, “No means kick her in the teeth”, etc. Those slogans sound rather similar to some of the things that have been said to me by various men.
Freezing up in a frightening situation is a common response displayed by all kinds of people. It doesn’t necessarily mean weakness, androphobia or just letting something happen. Here are the first couple of research papers I could find on the subject: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2489204/ ; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15337864/ .
There are, and always have been, many feminisms, not one, and feminism is a varied but overlapping set of beliefs, not a political party you can leave if you dislike the actions of the leadership. Unfortunately, I belong to my own one-woman subset of pro-paedophile feminism! My own personal moral definition of rape is sex without consent where A knows or strongly suspects that B is not consenting and carries on anyway. An explicit and enthusiastic verbal yes is not necessarily required; however, just carrying on when your partner has gone totally still and silent simply will not do. I have talked over my ideas about consent with a fair few people from varied backgrounds and was heartened to find that we all broadly agreed.
There’s a study by Theo Sandfort called Boys on their Contacts with Men (https://www.ipce.info/host/sandfort_87/), in which 25 boys aged 10-16 discussed their then-ongoing relationships with men aged 26-66. I keep referring to that study in my posts here because I think many of the things the boys are reporting are great examples of what is called ‘good consent’ being put into practice in simple, common-sense ways. Likewise, the boy- and girl-lovers interviewed for Rüdiger Lautmann’s book Attraction to Children (http://www.shfri.net/trans/lautmann/lautmann.pdf) described how they kept an eye out for their child partners’ reactions and adjusted their behaviour accordingly, as part of the natural flow of their encounters. Practicing good consent doesn’t have to be a hassle, nor does it have to be something imposed on people from the outside, by feminists or anybody else: as sexually active child-lovers in a hostile society, these men were finding their own way.
If a man is worried about false rape allegations (the current consensus is that these make up about 2-8% of all rape allegations) then there are things he can do to protect himself: for instance, he should avoid sex with tipsy women, with women who seem upset about something else, with women whom he knows or suspects are cheating on a boyfriend or struggling with the effects of a sexually repressive upbringing. Sound unreasonable? Of course it does. But it’s no more unreasonable than telling women that the onus is on them to prevent rape by not going out alone after dark, not drinking, not wearing certain clothes, not flirting, not saying yes to a certain kind of sex unless they are OK with having all the other kinds too. Not that you said those things: they’re just things that have been and still are said to women all the time.
I’m afraid this’ll be my last post for a while as I’m about to go away for a couple-three months. (I know you’re all heartbroken.) Thanks to everybody for the interesting and civil discussions and especially to Tom our host. I’ll be back…
…or rather, I meant to say, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, to which Labouchere tacked on his amendment. It seems from my admittedly cursory reading that while many feminists of the time supported and helped push for the Act, so did many men. Benjamin Scott got the ball rolling; Benjamin Waugh was then head of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and he lobbied hard for the Act; and the whole propaganda stunt virgin-buying business was cooked up by Scott and W. T. Stead. And of course, every last Member of Parliament at that time was male.
Yes, we are! At least, I will certainly miss your stupendous input and I am sure many others will too. Have a great time. Look forward to your return in due course.
Yes it was A. that got me out of the woodwork with her fantastic no nonsense almost surreal description of what is enjoyable and healthy for little girls. You can so easily assume you’re loosing both your head and your memory, the dominant narrative is so massively stacked up against you. So her comments will be greatly missed, and her return eagerly awaited, but the main thing is Tom that your blog lives on and provides us with so much food for thought and helps keep us all reasonably sane 🙂 [TOC adds: Thanks, Gantier!]
In 1885 parliament may have been male but the impression I have got is that the bill was infact largely resisted by parliament. However, the puritanical reformers created such an outcry that parliament, fearing being lynched by a puritanical mob, were forced to pass the law. It is true that the puritanical groups were not only feminists, but also other groups who sympathised with the feminist cause. These of course included church goers and what not who are always good bed fellows with the feminists and love banning anything sexual if they get the chance.
Regarding freezing up I’m sure it’s a common response to something truly threatening but my whole point is that your definition of rape goes beyond that. Serious threats (as in my definition of rape) would cause someone to freeze up, anything else would not. Civil liberties lawyers have always regarded ‘criminal intent’ as an important part of the law, something which has been done away with in 21st century rape legislation.
Even if the number of rapists is 6% that’s still very high. That means in Britain alone there are about 3.6 million rapists. If you were to catch all of them that would mean that the size of Britain’s prison population would make America look like the land of the free (!!!). Something about that seems wrong to me. I’d be very interested in more contextualisation though (possibly I should research it more myself…)
I don’t think posters like ‘No means on your knees, bitch’ is necessarily written by a rapist – it could be just a man taking the piss out of posters that are, in my opinion, offensive to men.
As for the number of false rape allegations I don’t think there is anyway to know. My understanding is that the 2-8% figure are cases that are shown to be false, however, the vast majority fall into a ‘grey area’. As such, for all we know, false allegations of rape could account for 80% of cases!
You are probably right that there are many variations of feminism, however, what they do all share in common is gynocentrism. The men are all irrelevant third parties in feminism’s ‘gender equality’. Now, I’m afraid that just ain’t equality.
In any case, have a good holiday and probably just as well since I think we’re about to run into that text getting super squashed bug 🙁
The feminists, they are thinking/acting as sharks killing without any regard/respect. We are in their sights. Ever try to reason with a shark? Maybe all that swim with them now are not sharks, but they might be.
How do you defend yourself from sharks?
Linca
It is not that shy, introverted males are more likely to be accused of sexual harassment. Just the opposite is true. If you don’t hang around women then the chances of you being accused of something bad goes down, obviously. But I don’t think that was the point Holocaust was making.
As a pedophile I always have to be cautious and paranoid about how people view my relationships with children even though I’m not doing anything wrong and there have been times when that paranoia has forced me to be alone because I didn’t want to be seen the wrong way. For some pedophiles, they avoid children altogether and while that certainly is safer, it can also create more loneliness and unhappiness. Could it be that rape hysteria, much like the pedophile hysteria, could cause men to avoid women and thus lead to more incel men?
true girloverboy-)with sexual harassment becoming more and more ambiguous
thanks to these femi zealots,we will be in a more sanitised society,having to ask permission to kiss instead of following your feelings,where humor and flirting
will be put to the dustbin of history,ahh equality!
“HOW DIFFICULT IT CAN BE TO DRAW THE LINE BETWEEN A PERSISTENT SUITOR AND A STALKER.”
“THEIR EXHIBITIONISTIC BEHAVIOUR BECAME LESS OBSESSIVE AND EGOCENTRIC, AND MORE ADJUSTED TO THE ONLOOKER.”
Just double standards! There is no difference between stalking and suiting, there is no difference between flashing and undressing before one’s girl-/boyfriend, there is no difference between rape and sex — because there is no difference between sexual harassment and asking for permission.
>there is no difference between sexual harassment and asking for permission
There is insufficient clarity, for sure, and things are getting less clear by the day as the definition of harassment keeps on becoming more and more extended.
Well, the only thing I can say is that this blog’s author doesn’t know a thing about me. I have no incestous desires whatsoever. I asked my mother that because I was depressed and desperate but would had never been able to go through it. Nor am I attracted to my mother.
Thatincelblogger,
Watch Louis Malle’s “Murmur of The Heart”. He tells us after having sex with your mom get up in the morning, have a good breakfast and go on with your life. And, for darn sure stay away from psychologists/psychiatrists.
When Candice Bergen was asked about the subjects of her husband’s movies she simply answered, “Louie was Louie.”
Linca
PS: We are human beings with hundreds of thousands of years of experience in us by far and I mean by far we were having sex with everyone no matter age or sex. We are gentle, egalitarian, cooperative beings to the core no matter what our recent histories since agriculture of endless wars and murders and corruption makes us think we are. L
Linca, I have seen that film before I asked my mother that and I think it’s… a weird film.
Anyway, why are you telling me all this? Haven’t you read my post. You’re making assumptions that are not only not true but have been debunked in the very post you’re replying to. I am not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, I’m just saying it wasn’t what I wanted.
Just came to my mind is all. I was actually speaking to others. Louis Malle is one of my heroes. When I think of how awful psychology and psychiatry are I think of him and how well in story form he criticizes them.
We need more and more and more and more Louis Malle’s. There is actually one in this group.
Now it seems the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury have gone off the rails. They do not seem to remember the story of the boy in the loin cloth in Mark 14, vs 51. The only person to stick with Jesus when everyone else had abandoned him. That little passage in the bible is significant way beyond its size. Some recently published writings of Jeremy Bentham talk about how significant it was.
Pier Palo Pasolini even showed it in his film “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”.
We need storytellers … good ones.
Linca
Hmmm… Dunno what to say except that this blog seems to attract some cool people. Keep on fighting the mainstream fools.
thatincelblogger,
What a GREAT Encouraging comment for all of us here: Thank You. You bring us joy! Cool Joy.
Onward and Upward as we bring sense to the world, i.e., bring it back to its senses. Humanity now is like the adult who has forgot all he knew as a child. Have you ever watched the movie “A Good Year”. That is what it is about. Max had forgotten what he knew as a child. By the end of the movie he had recovered. Makes me smile remembering it.
Best always … Take care,
Linca
A few years ago I was trying to figure out if I could write a novel we need. I came across Robert McKee a master teacher of master film makers, read his book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting” even got the audio version so I could work on truly understanding what he was saying. Haven’t gone to one of his seminars but I get his weekly news letter. This one contained a video that right on speaks to us. It is about telling a story that gets people to change their mind on something they believe in their hearts because of the culture they live in and have been warped by.
http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=49542690&msgid=268208&act=QSRN&c=709185&
[Link split]
destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mckeestory.com%2Fsb-gateway.html%3Futm_source%3Dmckee%26utm_medium%3Dnewsletter-jun-17-2014%26utm_campaign%3Dsummer%26utm_content%3Dvideo-button
If this link does not work this on that goes directly to the video on YouTube will:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNm2Hw9FF2M
4 minutes.
Does that sound familiar? Does it not feel like what we are living in: A Warped Culture that needs changing, desperately needs changing? Hope there are participants here who might take up the challenge to write stories: GOOD STORIES that will get people to shaking their heads in the affirmative to what we know in the depths of our souls the world needs. McKee says over and over he is hunting for such persons.
Linca
With all the open-mindedness I can muster, I’ve had a look round on We Hunted the Mammoth for references to paedophilia, figuring that anti-feminists may be less anti-paedophile than your average Joe. And indeed, David Futrelle mentions Reddit commenters who compare viewing child porn to smoking marijuana and playing Grand Theft Auto. Looks promising enough. Then Futrelle mentions a girl who complained about Redditors masturbating to photos of herself she put in a private Internet album when she was 14. One Redditor said “She is an attention whore. She is really dumb.” and another “Shes much hotter when shes quiet.”
A men’s rights activist named Tom Martin apparently argues (to David Futrelle’s horror) that if children are paid for sex then it isn’t rape, because the child understands the nature of the contract. But turns out Martin also says “Even a 10 year old knows, if someone is paying you for sex, that makes you a whore.” Turns out Martin further says that “repeat offender” child sex workers should be prosecuted for “preying on the mentally ill paedo population”, while paedophiles themselves should be “removed from society and given compassionate treatment”. Oh.
Due to anti-paedo hysteria, there is a serious shortage of men volunteering for Big Brothers Big Sisters, a programme which matches disadvantaged children aged 4-18 with same-sex mentors aged 21 and up. Their screening process has apparently become awful: they require an interview with a current or previous sexual partner of the volunteer. Futrelle quotes one man describing hopeful male volunteers as “beta chumps hoping for brownie points” who “have a bleeding heart for abandoned bastards”.
So, not exactly allies, but I think we all knew that already.
When discussing these things I always think of Tony Duvert, who was an award-winning novelist and a lover of prepubescent boys. I really liked his Quand mourut Jonathan (When Jonathan Died), on which Robert Rockwood over at NAMBLA has written an excellent essay: http://www.nambla.org/duvert.html . Duvert had a vendetta against mothers and female primary-school teachers, etc.: any woman whom he perceived – probably correctly in large part – as restricting paedophiles’ access to kids. He declared “war” on mothers, which I think we can agree is going a bit too far, even though it was only rhetoric. When I investigated his life, however, I found out that at 12 he was expelled from school and sent to a psychiatrist for having sex with another boy, and that he described the psychiatrist’s methods as “brutal and humiliating”. On top of social repression of his paedophile sexuality, he had been through some serious sex-related trauma in childhood, and that makes me look at the ‘war on mothers’ with a gentler eye.
Its name may annoy some, but the US’s National Violence Against Women Survey (https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/172837.pdf) uses a definition of rape most people would agree with: vaginal, anal or oral sex obtained by force or by threat of harm to the victim or some other person. 14.8% of women surveyed said they had suffered a completed rape, with 2.8% having suffered an attempted rape (the corresponding figures for men were 2.1% and 0.9%). Of the women who had been raped, 22% were under 12 at the time and 32% were 12-17. There are a lot of women out there who, like Duvert, have been through some serious sex-related trauma.
These people, then, perhaps get cut some slack. If they advocate for pernicious things such as sex offenders’ registries, then they should certainly be resisted. It would also be downright insulting to assume them incapable of rationality because of what they have been through. But still, we can try to understand that they are not necessarily just being gratuitously vicious, that they may be reacting to something awful in their past.
I find it difficult to cut the ‘men going their own way’ et al. the same amount of slack, because I find it difficult to understand what they have been through that might be comparably bad. To me they seem rather like so many Andreas Dworkins and Stephen Brownmillers, only most of them – there are a few exceptions, such as Warren Farrell — aren’t so intelligent.
I hereby nominate A. for the Nobel Peace Prize! And good for you for using public transportation after dark btw.
Thanks!
More on the transportation theme, and an egalitarian, secure infrastructure. So much transport infrastructure in our patriarchal society is based round the car and moving towards a more human, forgiving infrastructure is one of my passions as an engineer in the transit industry. Fortunately the idea of conurbations built around the needs of the “less strong” is not too difficult to get on the radar. Even in the USA I’ve heard the expression “complete street” (basically a street with a pavement/walkway!) and most people will buy the health, environmental and safety arguments even if the practice of moving pre-built towns and cities in this direction is difficult. One of the important factors is “critical mass”, it being difficult to reap benefits if take-up is only a few percent.
The emancipation not least of children (as I know from my own experience as a parent) is enormously facilitated if there are good safe bikeways, accessible and secure feeling buses and other transit… and not least a secure walking environment to and from terminals.
My other passion is for little girl tomboys (platonically of course!) The woefully inadequate human “infrastructure” available makes secure navigation of a relationship with one of these angels from heaven a complete nightmare. It is the equivalent of finding a short stretch of beautifully planned and exhilarating bikeway only to find it ending suddenly with no choice but to negotiate a very dangerous six-lane highway. Or riding that wonderful smooth-running train, only to have to face a walk along dark unsafe feeling streets with danger lurking behind every corner. If only the gross shortcomings of this “infrastructure” could be addressed as easily and if only there was a critical mass of take-up! But no rational thinking here of course; we are still firmly in the dark ages where human relations are concerned.
But I’m glad there’s transit available where you and I hope there are plenty of guardian angels to keep you safe.
I have happy memories of bike-riding during my own tomboy childhood, and I feel sad that many of today’s children don’t get to have the same experience. I’ve certainly been in US cities where you pretty much can’t get anywhere if you don’t have a car, which leaves the under-16s well and truly stuck.
A,
Interesting comment on Duvert. ” Duvert had a vendetta against mothers and female primary-school teachers, etc.” Maybe that is why I liked him so very much. He had the right to me passion, the right to me edge.
Linca
Despite what I said below, I think it may indeed be extra painful sometimes for men to be rejected by women. The proportion of stay-at-home dads and custodial single dads has been increasing, but women are still overwhelmingly seen as the nurturant sex, the dispensers of cuddles, warmth, understanding and emotional support. Male friendships are often constrained by homophobia; women and girls are much freer than are men and boys to be openly affectionate with their same-sex friends. Thus many men end up relying on opposite-sex relationships, whether with female friends or with girlfriends, for many important kinds of nonsexual intimacy, so that being rejected by a girl or woman may be a particularly heavy blow for a boy or man.
I read another blog post somewhere in which a young man said that he’d grown up thinking that girls were dressing up all fancy-like exclusively to attract boys, and had become bitter and angry when they didn’t seem interested in him. He was beginning to realise that he had been wrong about the clothes. Indeed he had been. Some girls and women dress up to be sexy, to attract males sexually, even to tease and tantalise and enjoy their sexual power. Some dress up because their jobs require it. Many dress up because they’re interested in fashion. Many adolescent girls dress up because they want to fit in with their friends, to annoy their parents and teachers, to emulate a star, to gain status, to look tough. For exactly the same reasons, many adolescent boys spend ages in front of the mirror gelling their hair just right, or queue for hours to get the latest must-have shoes. It’s just that boys’ fashions are designed to obscure their bodies, whereas with girls’ clothes, if it’s stylish it’s going to be body-hugging, and what’s a girl to do, look frumpy and get laughed at? But it’s certainly understandable that a boy might get the wrong end of the stick, especially since there are airbrushed women in bikinis gyrating all over the teevee and that rapper in the music video seems to have more than his fair share.
A fascinating read is David Futrelle’s blog We Hunted the Mammoth. He collects examples of misogyny from all over the internet. There is a lot of truly egregious stuff out there. Women are cum-rags, women stink, women are herd beasts, women have no morals, women are incapable of love, women are incapable of logical thought, women shit out womb-turds, women who fail to submit to male authority must be disciplined and punished as an example, laws against domestic violence prevent women from bonding with strong protectors and providers, any broad can spread her legs but my sperm is liquid gold and I don’t give it away like tap water. It’s so heavy-duty that the temptation is to assume these men must have been provoked by something. Yet the guy who said that teaching a woman to read would be like giving extra poison to a dangerous snake was from … ancient Greece. In that same notoriously matriarchal society, some men got all hysterical (ahem) about the voracious, barely-controllable power of the female sex drive. Sometimes hatred just is.
I want to point out really quick that no woman actually rejected Elliot. He didn’t give them the chance. The entire time he was at college he did not speak to a single female except his mother and counselor. He mentioned he had social anxiety and he assumed he was going to be rejected without ever trying. He was relying solely on a woman to approach him. He didn’t want to be the one doing the cat calling. Elliot was, in essence, the opposite of the sexual provocateur /harasser type guy that aggressively tries to get women to go out with him. He was a very passive, meek person who didn’t have the guts to even say hello to a woman. He could only do something brave, it seemed, if he was drunk or, in the last case, it followed death.
While women are expected to be passive, men are expected and in a way forced into the role of the aggressor because if you’re like Elliot and you just sit there waiting for a woman to approach you then usually nothing happens. Had Elliot been gay he could have walked into any gay bar and had plenty of men hitting on him I bet.
It could be that since modern humans have been around about 200,000 years and only recently have we (certainly in the west) been looked after by the state
and when women have the same resources,they refer back to the alfa type male they’ve been attracted to for thousands of years,provider/protector etc.
I wouldn’t call Rodger a beta, he was just mentally and emotionally ill. Most guys can get girls, even nerdy types. He had plenty of opportunity and plenty of resources. He could have followed his dad in becoming a photographer or film director but he showed no interest in learning anything. He had so much open up to him. His parents paid for his car, living expenses and college. His dad had connections with hollywood directors and screenwriters, but he was so damaged internally that none of it mattered.
About the gay bar idea: one study of Americans aged 25-45 — article http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/06/who-is-the-40-year-old-virgin.html and abstract http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/jsm/2009/00000006/00000008/art00013 — found, very surprisingly, that male homosexuals were 11 times more likely to be virgins than were male heterosexuals! Female homosexuals were only 6 times more likely to be virgins than were female heterosexuals.
4 percent more males than females (13.9 percent versus 8.9 percent) were virgins, which supports the contention that it is rather easier for females to get sex than it is for males, but not the more exaggerated contention that even the plainest woman can get sex with a snap of her fingers — especially if we account for rape, which happens to perhaps one woman in seven. There must surely be many incel women out there, too.
Men and women who attended church at least once a week were respectively 5 and 3.9 times more likely to be virgins than those who didn’t, and abstaining from alcohol was also slightly correlated with never having had sex, which means, probably, that quite a few of the younger virgins will have been waiting for marriage, rather than being involuntarily celibate.
Having been in prison or in the military were correlated with having had sex, which *may* provide some support for the ‘alpha male’ theory; however, the correlation was only slight. (And what about prison rape?) Health, income and weight were *not* correlated with virginity in either sex. However, women with a university degree were 5.4 times more likely to be virgins than those without.
The sample size was pretty small, so this study shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
…in fact, I’ve just fished up this much bigger study http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad362.pdf, which found that among Americans 25-44, 97 percent of males and 98 percent of females had had penis-in-vagina sex, 90 percent of males and 88 percent of females have had oral sex with an opposite-sex partner, and 40 percent of males and 35 percent of females have had anal sex with an opposite-sex partner. That sounds more like what I’d expect.
And I see that the first study only includes never-married people. Now it all makes sense. That’ll teach me to read things in a hurry.
I’m not that comfortable with blaming Rodger’s violent misogyny on the ‘incel’ online community, as some bloggers are doing elsewhere. That seems too close to blaming NAMBLA for the murder of Jeffrey Curley. Blaming it on feminism likewise gets us nowhere fast. The Dunblane shooter was a BL kicked out of scoutmastering and subjected to hostile suspicion because of his sexuality, and he was understandably hurt and bitter about that, but the overwhelming majority of BLs don’t express their similar feelings through slaughter. Come to that, the overwhelming majority of the many sexually frustrated, socially rejected MAPs who must be out there somehow manage to refrain from raping children, let alone murdering anybody.
I wonder what Rodger would have made of Alice Eagly and Wendy Wood’s work on mate selection. Comparing 37 countries, they found that while women in all of them tended, as evolutionary psychology predicts, to prefer men with lots of resources, this tendency was weaker in societies rated as more gender-equal by the United Nations: societies, that is, in which women had greater access to and control over resources of their own.
But in any case, Rodger was not short of money, nor was he ugly. You are right, I think, that sex was not the main problem for him: it was more about status. In his ‘manifesto’, he wrote that he was sure girls would reject him if he ever asked them out, and yet it seems he never tried, preferring instead to throw drinks over happy couples who reminded him of what he felt so shut out of. Rodger’s racism also supports the notion that he was chiefly concerned with status. When a black boy bragged in Rodger’s hearing that he had first had sex, at thirteen, with a white, blonde girl, Rodger cried and cried over the idea of girls “giving themselves” to “this ugly black filth” while rejecting the wonderful Rodger.
The New York Post, by the way, ran bikini photos of the terrible ice queen of a young woman who “spurned” Rodger and thus drove him to murder — failing to mention that she was ten years old the last time she saw him!
I am a bit uneasy myself with the way that some young women reject shy, socially awkward guys. Some of it is caution: a person who violates minor social norms may be more ready to violate major ones, such as the one that says Don’t Rape People. But that caution too easily tips over into scorn, scorn on which pick-up artists may be basing their theories about alpha and beta males. Are these young women any worse, though, than the young men who loudly ‘rate’ a shy, awkward female colleague on her looks and say things like “Well, I’d hit it…with a stick maybe”?
Rejection and involuntary celibacy can be problems for women too, but I think we may tend to react to them differently. I had a long talk about this once with a close male friend. He had grown up playing with a little girl who lost interest in him during adolescence, preferring the ‘bad boy’ types, while he was the unathletic boy whom girls would pretend to ask out for a joke. For a while he became quite bitter and resentful towards girls. Much the same thing happened to me: I had a male childhood pal who tacitly rejected me as we grew older in favour of more feminine girls, I was the bookworm girl boys would pretend to ask out for a joke. But those experiences didn’t make me angry at boys. I got angry at myself instead.
In 1988 the distinguished French filmmaker Agnès Varda made a film called Kung-fu Master, about a romance between a forty-year-old woman and a fourteen-year-old boy. The boy (played by Varda’s son) is teased at school about his small size and the braces on his teeth and spends much of his time absorbed in a video game called Kung-fu Master, in which the result of making it through all the levels is saving a damsel in distress who’s trapped somewhere or other — just like Princess Toadstool in Super Mario. The girl is the prize. Do things right and you’re owed a pretty girl as a gift from the universe, If the universe fails to pay up, well, maybe you get angry, because you’ve been cheated out of what’s due to you.
These guys are a lot like the people mentioned in the book, “The Game” by Neil Strauss. The book is about pick up artists based on Neil’s true story of a successful nerd who couldn’t get laid until he learned how. Most of the pick up artists weren’t successful with women, or even with people in general until they set out to learn the basics of human interaction.
Some get stuck at the basic level, picking up and screwing women, happy with that alone, but then they cannot get past a few weeks of interaction. Others use what they learned to become happy, successful mates and partners. I suspect many of these celibate types would benefit from some coaching and real world interactions with women. I went to one seminar after my divorce put on by Pickup 101 in Chicago and found it very instructive.
I’m not a “pickup artist” but I’m not lonely, either. It seems that education would benefit many, but society finds this kind of education lacking. Notice the negative connotations of the pickup. We all need to make some kind of introduction to our eventual mate, be they male or female, yet the folks who try and learn how that works are thought less of.
Those seeking sexual pleasure are not what society views as positive, even as it identifies hot women as desirable. Mixed messages and lack of knowledge will produce those who get frustrated and angry and I don’t really know how that will change.
True, feminists will usually deride pick up artists as misogyny, but as you point out it’s just coaching people to have better social interactive skills with dating; something Elliot could have greatly benefited from. He did not seem to even try though, he was very self-defeating. Why didn’t he try a dating site? His only attempt to fit in socially was to get really drunk and then go to a club where he ended up trying to push people off a ledge and ends up getting pushed himself and then cried that it didn’t work. How the Hell was he expecting it to work? He was complete social idiot lost in his own little world
There’s PUA and PUA. David DeAngelo’s not so bad. Some other PUA stuff is much less benign.
Interesting texts, btw.
Hello. Does this blog allow free speech?
yes just watch out for the usual swearing.
Don’t you think that the MAA incel might have found a ‘solution’ in that his preference is one that society doesn’t expect him to satisfy?
Do you mean that the MAA incel doesn’t get looked down on for not ‘scoring’? I guess you’re right that that relieves a certain kind of stress.
As far as rape in concerned,I remember back in the late nineties the four of us
in my car,me my girlfriend and two other lads,It was late,i think i missed my turn
the friend of my girlfriend in the back said,where the hell are we going,one of the lads just said oh we’r just gonna rape you haah,I didn’t take kindly to that
i said what you say!just a mutter and the conversation changed,this kid would never rape a fly,so when women/girls are asked about this sort of stuff,maybe
this kind of mendacity gets incorporated into the statistics.
I was only a year younger then elliot when i lost my virginity,looks was not a problem,I remember about 15 teenage girls went passed me on a horses, they all gave me that look,great for the ego.of course i was at a boys school,there were sexual things that went on,but to me i ain’t had intercourse with a girl so i’m a virgin,looking back as a hardened MAP virginity means sweet FA,but after that relationship broke up it took 5 years to meet someone else,I was forever
trying to get back what i had,I remember walking passed a couple in town she
kissed her boyfriend just as i passed on purpose,I felt bitter,what does she see in that freak!though i like company iv’e always been introverted.
If elliot was a misogynist we must remember that he hated men just as much,he
killed more men,i know that’s irrelevant because i don’t think he was checking at the time of the killing.many feminists are using this to highlight rape culture
this guy never raped anyone!he was far from the kinda guys that harass etc
he never even touched a girl,there is some truth when a girl labels you that’s
your lot done,call it A crowd,group think whatever.in this video the guy highlights how malign many feminists are, but in this video he destroy’s their
cheep shots with their pseudo science.
http://www.youtube.
[TOC: link split to avoid image]
com/watch?v=54otQzqfAMs