On incels, dead bedrooms and the hard problems of loneliness

My pet theory is that the developed or post-industrialized world is becoming increasingly two-classed. I have had the privilege of having a decent job (being so-called "economically desirable") and decent education and was able to find someone who I think loves me for who I am, for some definition of "I am".

That being said, the "incel" problem concerns me. I think the existence of this entire class of individuals shows that the ideals of equity in gender relations, just like the ideal of equity in relations across economic classes (i.e., being equal before the law, regardless of how much money you have) is obviously a grand ideal that we cannot live up to.

I once tried talking to my girlfriend about it when the topic came up. I brought up the usual statistics that show that men graduate from college at a lesser rate than women, nowawdays. That they are more likely to die in violence or from drugs. That this compounds with the fact that the status of women in the world has generally raised (a _good_ thing!) and that the average woman wants someone who is above them on the social or economic ladder. Her response was that they had so much "male privilege" and that they have no excuse for underperforming. That, thus, they should still be _ahead_ of women, presumably, despite the goal being that they... shouldn't be. They need to pull themselves up from their bootstraps, and "man up", but we also must remember that "man up" is a problematic term that is part of "toxic masculinity".

Of course, all of this was foreseen by French novelist Houellebecq. Economic liberalization has lead to social/sexual liberation. After a period of free love things settle down and here we are. Just as most of the new income generated by later periods of economic liberalization go to the top 20%, so it is with the sexual market.

I've tried to stop moralizing it for my own mental health. Like the author, I just try to look at it with a degree of sympathy. It's complex, and it's kinda fucked up. For myself, these hard statistical realities have increasingly robbed me of the romantic impulse. Marriage to me now seems absurd. An empty, pyrrhic victory.

Are you equating reasonableness of the *average* person that self-identifies as feminist and the *average* men's-rights-advocate?

>Lonely? Make strong friendships! Spend your time with other men who like you and enjoy your company and validate you.

The author has a great followup comment that should really be part of the original article that addresses this line of thinking exactly. Pasted below:

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I want to have a dialogue about this, because I think it's important in a couple ways. To start, I agree in sort of generic terms that a lot of the Incels must be whining without doing anything to fix it; that's just necessary.

But your scenario here for them, parsed, seems to be making a lot of assumptions I'm not sure are true. One thing I get told a lot when I talk about dieting/obesity is that everyone WANTS to be thin; if it were possible/doable/easy then we'd expect to see a bunch of obese people losing weight, and we don't, so it would be wrong to treat all obese people as lazy fat slobs. Basically that they deserve sympathy and the assumption should be that even if they aren't trying real hard at the moment, that what they would have to try is real hard, and it's more complex than just writing them off as voluntarily broken.

In this case I'm not sure what you are doing is the same, but it feels similar. It's something like "Yes, there's a problem - why don't they just change their personality, looks, and conversational abilities?". If that's easy, great; if that's even something someone can do, fine. But I'm not sure it's that simple; I don't know that many people who have drastically upgraded their personality successfully (read: I don't know any people who have done this) and I don't know many people who have ever made themselves more than marginally better looking (read: I've known some people who have done this, but not many). There's probably some dudes out there who are romance-marketable if they just start showering more, dress a little better and make some token effort at not being rancid assholes, but it's relevant that we think about whether those guys are the norm, or outliers.

I say this because, like, the solutions you propose besides that are A. Something that's expensive, stands a good chance of getting them sent to jail and only solves a small part of the problem most of them have B. Something that's expensive, slow and that we'd only expect to fix the underlying problem if the underlying problem is entirely them - i.e. if the stats I posted above are completely the un-loved faults, with no "market" problems they are getting screwed by.

If you are a guy who isn't a capital-I Incel seeing those suggestions, I'm suspicious that it's not that unlike seeing someone complain about their obesity and how society treats the obese and saying "Well, stop whining, bucko - it's hard to have any sympathy for you when "eat less, exercise more" is an option - do you even have a gym membership?".

If it's anything like that, it gets really easy to imagine this lower-case-i not-yet-toxic incel turning to some community somewhere that will give him some level of sympathy. What I'm saying is, we have an option to have sympathy for the generic condition without having sympathy for the bad behavior, something like "Hey, I get that it's hard out there and that this might not feel like or even be something that you can just 'fix' in that way. I feel for you, that's terrible" so they have some other option at all besides "listen, man, I'm going to explain 100 ways women are whores and this isn't your fault at all".

And the normal stuff with escalating problems applies - this is a problem that got almost twice as bad over the last couple decades. Right now, nobody is paying any real attention to it; some people acknowledge that those stats above exist, but nobody is seriously looking into why or what societal trends are pushing it. If we get down the road another 20 years and suddenly 50% of everybody in a certain high-energy-high-rage age range is relationship-less and the only people who have been sympathetic to them at all are terrible people, we can't act surprised when there's suddenly a much larger terrible-person cohort on the ground instead of the much larger sad-but-not-ruined group we might have had.

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https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-incels-dead-bed...

What a fascinating article! I came away with a very bold “misery loves company” feeling. Misery amongst a group begets misery. I wonder how feeling the psychological need to blame someone, some thing for failure, plays in relationships?