I wouldn't really know since I've only ever had "traditional" relationships, but I'm pretty sure they still exist. Most of the people I know (which is now mid twenties at the youngest up to near 40) are in romantic relationships or want to be, it's not just hook-ups out there. Like, don't get me wrong, thinking about how to find a way to get into a romantic relationship again makes me want to CW, but that's partly because it was already really difficult for someone like me and it's getting more difficult as I get older . . . Anyway, of all the things we can blame them for, I think not wanting to fuck men and now wanting to, idk, whip and step on people? is really it. Incidentally, one of the veins of discourse in the incel community is basically doing conversion therapy to become gay because they believe that it's way easier on average for a dude to get laid if he's gay. I've never seen someone report that the converted themselves, though.

The other side of this is that they're so misogynistic how the fuck do they expect to get that romantically close to someone before they realise how awful they are?

Well, they didn't become such sickos until after they already had their negative experiences, at which point they've usually given up and made sexual frustration their religion. There's no contradiction in this specific point, even if there's a lot of short-sightedness, dehumanization, reaction, etc.

Edit:

The level of intimacy they yearn for is created over months, the sex is usually much earlier. So perhaps part of the problem is that they mentally have the cart before the horse, the order of things that are supposed to happen is incorrect in their heads and therefore they fail the whole dating thing because it doesn't match with the material reality and issues occur interacting with others over this.

Not to keep playing reverse "Spot the Contradiction," but you need to remember that these are people who generally have never had a girlfriend. Period. They might get a first date or two and then get ghosted. In the context of a first date, do you think that for a het woman, a man more interested in emotionality than sex is somehow a red flag? Like yeah, if he's trauma dumping to you while you're at the diner and you don't even really know him, that's probably not gonna fly, but if anything I would think emotionality that is somewhat in check and deprioritizing sex would be considered substantial positives for these guys as candidates. Unfortunately for them, most of them never even got that far and the other ones found some other way (probably prioritizing sex in many cases) to fuck it up.

[–] bigboopballs@hexbear.net 2 points 50 minutes ago

and it's getting more difficult as I get older

like how old? I guess it's never easier than like early 20's

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 4 points 2 hours ago

I wouldn't really know since I've only ever had "traditional" relationships, but I'm pretty sure they still exist. Most of the people I know (which is now mid twenties at the youngest up to near 40) are in romantic relationships or want to be, it's not just hook-ups out there. Like, don't get me wrong, thinking about how to find a way to get into a romantic relationship again makes me want to CW, but that's partly because it was already really difficult for someone like me and it's getting more difficult as I get older . . .

I think you've misunderstood me. When I say "traditional" I mean like, this fairytail of many weeks/months of dating before sexy time. It just isn't how it actually works in the real world anymore. People are making out and rubbing bits together within the first few days/week or they're moving on.

The intimacy and romance is built alongside the physicality. If it exists.

There's an unwritten rule about not being too clingy during that time, and if the two people fall for each other then they do, but also you have to not be too clingy too quickly or else it becomes massively unattractive. This is a major hurdle for incels because of course they're massively insecure and that same insecurity causes them to massively overthink everything and become far too emotionally attached too quickly to the point that it makes the other person uncomfortable how they're being.

Incidentally, one of the veins of discourse in the incel community is basically doing conversion therapy to become gay because they believe that it's way easier on average for a dude to get laid if he's gay. I've never seen someone report that the converted themselves, though.

I don't think it's easier to get laid if you're gay. I think it's easier to get laid if you're into kink and that community happens to almost entirely crossover with kink due to comfort with exploration.

Not to keep playing reverse "Spot the Contradiction," but you need to remember that these are people who generally have never had a girlfriend. Period. They might get a first date or two and then get ghosted. In the context of a first date, do you think that for a het woman, a man more interested in emotionality than sex is somehow a red flag?

No.

Like yeah, if he's trauma dumping to you while you're at the diner and you don't even really know him, that's probably not gonna fly

This is practically all of them. They will all tell you just how much life has it out for them with practically no prompting, and it's deeply offputting to most people.

but if anything I would think emotionality that is somewhat in check and deprioritizing sex would be considered substantial positives for these guys as candidates

It would be, if they could get their incredible insecurity in check or at least successfully hide it for long enough for someone to see the real person they are.

However, one of the problems with insecurity is that it controls you in a way that causes you to act differently. It holds you back, it makes you not say things, or say things you shouldn't, it causes acting out, etc etc. If you can remove insecurity from the situation you end up with a completely different person, one that is attractive assuming they don't say some women-hating bullshit.

[–] Hime@hexbear.net 8 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Aaaaa nooooooooo

You can't convert to being gay, sexuality is fluid sure but if someone finds relief in dating men they didn't successfully convert themselves, they were just a repressed queer person. That's legitimising conversion therapy but the opposite way round.
No, nobody is happy to hear straight people are "converting themselves queer" if it's because of mental health and trauma. That's awful. I want all queer people to be happy, not forced by some self hatred.
No gay men don't get it easier, it's just as difficult/easy for them, this is a wild bit of homophobia. They aren't more promiscuous or sex having. Just as many sit on the Internet being horny as straight men do and not getting laid like everyone else.
We don't apologise for fascists here for getting radicised, we have nuanced conversations about how radicalisation happens i hope. Inceldom is classified as an extremist ideology. If people want to reform from it then they have to take ownership of themselves and their behaviours to some degree, not look for imo whataboutisms regarding an ideology that's lead to multiple mass shootings, murders, redacted etc of women.

Maybe I don't get what you mean but to me it seems like you underestimate how scary this ideology is to women given how damaging and harmful it can be. It's gone beyond sad boys getting ghosted and venting on the Internet.

Sorry maybe I'm speaking from my own trauma here but this stuff is so scary.

You might be happy to know, though, that one of the veins of discourse in the incel community is basically doing conversion therapy to become gay because they believe (I think correctly) that it's way easier on average for a dude to get laid if he's gay. I've never seen someone report that the converted themselves, though.

This paragraph i'm referencing, nope nope nope.

[–] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

I wasn't weighing in on whether their conversion ideas were legitimate or not, merely saying that some people talked about pursuing it.
I was being facetious, I apologize if I upset you. It might have been insensitive of me. I'll remove that part.
I think the logic goes that lots of dudes want, whether by social conditioning or natural libido or whatever, to fuck anything that walks. Lots of women, for the same reasons, don't. Therefore, if someone wants to have sex, they should have sex with men. It's not about gay men being more libidinal than straight men, it's about men being more libidinal than women. Again, their logic, not mine. Hopefully you don't see this as defensive, since it's not like conversion is a key pillar of their ideology, it's just something that pops up conversationally here and there.
I never excused their actions, I merely want to understand it causally and sometimes to help others make sense of it. The problem with their ideology is that it is reactionary, not that it is extremist; we're extremists, too! I get how you take me for an apologist (though I'm not), but I don't get how you took anything I said to be a "whataboutism".

I'm not particularly aware of the violence it has caused beyond the mass shootings, but I've read some of their violent fantasizing on their board and I won't reprint it even with a CW. I know that this is a dangerous "culture" (network of cults) with a bad ideology, the point isn't to say that it isn't bad. But if you're really serious about acting against them, it's important to understand how they work and where their motivations come from, you can't just make shit up or hastily string faulty inferences together and then have it be unassailable because challenging this negative claim is de facto apologetics. It doesn't make any sense.

Now of course, if you read my dumb rant (which I don't encourage, I think it'll just upset you), I do admit that I personally feel bad for the more sad boy contingent of them, just as I feel bad for a friend of mine who got brought into a more literal cult and now recruits more victims, even though I also condemn their actions and basically everything they do or think at this point. However, my feelings might motivate my attention to this issue, but I do not justify anything with those feelings as that would be absurd and no one here would even understand it, much less agree. It would also be poor reasoning. Ultimately, what I want is the best outcome for the most people, which statistically means mainly that people should be protected from incels, but it also means that -- insofar as logistics allow it -- the incels should be put in re-education camps rather than on death row, and they don't need to repent first, they just need to be put somewhere where they can't hurt anyone and then learn why they should repent.

This paragraph i'm referencing, nope nope nope.

I understood before, but the particularly offensive content has been removed

By the way, you don't need to apologize for voicing concerns, it is a good thing to do.

[–] Hime@hexbear.net 2 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

It's ridiculous and should only be condemned. It's concerning that the foundation of some of these people is belief in conversion therapy. Sorry for implying you did.
Probably
This gets said a lot but most gay men I know are vers/switch and don't have hard and fast rules in actual dating relationships. The top shortage thing is probably more to do with hookups because for a hookup people usually have an idea about what they want which is to be railed.
Please don't insinuate im an extremist, I yap on a lefty forum on an account I made during a particularly bad period and don't do any violence or have any plans or desires or wishes to harm anyone, call me a lib. Conflating that with people who actively wish death on women is wild.

But if you're really serious about acting against them, it's important to understand how they work and where their motivations come from, you can't just make shit up or hastily string faulty inferences together and then have it be unassailable because challenging this negative claim is de facto apologetics. It doesn't make any sense.

Excuse me?

You have no idea who i am, what i do, what I've read or studied etc. That's just an assumption you just made.

Sorry I didn't prep for a debate on the motivations of violence towards women in that clique of men and have all my references and citations ready to go.

I didn't see you as an apologist more someone who's missing half the picture on this issue by virtue of being a man and not the victim of the chain of violence. And also made some dodgy comments i replied to.

I had read the rest of your comments and others before I replied. I only commented cos of the things I initially called out.

It's not like I haven't read or taken anything in and I don't like how you assume I've dismissed it. I do talk to men in real life. I have spoken and listened to others, I do have a boyfriend who has a voice and opinion too. I wasn't planning to spend all night effort posting either.

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Please don't insinuate im an extremist, I yap on a lefty forum on an account I made during a particularly bad period and don't do any violence or have any plans or desires or wishes to harm anyone, call me a lib. Conflating that with people who actively wish death on women is wild.

I just wanna point out that we don't really wish for violence, we simply know that it's going to come to us. The bourgeoisie will not give up their power willingly and will use extreme violence to keep that power. The violence of the revolutionary left is self-defence in that regard as far as I'm concerned. Especially if you ever read The Jakarta Method it just becomes plainly obvious.

[–] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 5 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Conflating that with people who actively wish death on women is wild.

I was going to say that if you accused me of equivocating, I swear on me mum. The extreme right and the extreme left are both extremes, people who adhere to either are extremists. Extremism isn't an ideology or a value, it's a descriptor of how an ideology relates to the status quo (i.e. being really far away). Unless you meant I was equivocating liberals [on a leftist website] with incels, which would make less sense. I just didn't know you were a lib since almost no one with a HB account identifies that way.

Excuse me?

I should have phrased it more carefully, but I wasn't actually referring to you with that comment. Remember this is all based on you responding to me saying other stuff, there was more context than just us talking, and it's a bad habit of this board (and, admittedly, people in general) to make hasty assumptions about their opposition. I've been getting in trouble with using the general "you" a lot; I need to figure out how to signal things more clearly.

[–] Hime@hexbear.net 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I'm not a lib lmao but I'm also just here to vibe. I'm probably a lib to most people here but like 🤷‍♀️

Tbh I do the whole saying you thing alot when I'm trying to explain stuff and people are like what no I'm not and I'm like oh no I meant like the general topic of conversation.

In the end I think for guys who've been near to that centre and have pulled away there will be a natural sympathy that imo (to be debated another time) presents as understanding of wider issue because of a personal experience. And then believing that personal experience to be representative of the wider whole.

That same paragraph could be applied to women who've faced violence or grief from incels but the difference is that we are the victims, we HAVE to understand why men are violent to survive them and we've being doing that for a while now with feminism.

I'm not saying women have the answers but we have decades of research, academia, discussion and lived experience as well as facing similar and more oppressive societal structures.

Maybe trust we might have a good starting point for this debate than men who only started really addressing their cultural issues more recently?

Incels propagate violence towards women. They aren't the first. This is a cycle. We have a good starting point on why violence towards women happens. Why incels are uniquely the way they are is to find out but feminists do have a decent bit of knowledge to draw from that is always dismissed in my experience.

Anyway I'm not the smart feminist to be soapboxing and I've probably said something stupid so I'm slink away now. Sorrryyyy going to sleeeeppp.

Edit: aaaa I did the using you but not actually meaning you personally thing. Shit.

[–] WHATABOUTISM_DETECTOR@hexbear.net 2 points 3 hours ago

soypoint-1 whataboutism soypoint-2