These ideas were laundered to smell a bit better
Talia Lavin notes with what a light heart men can ask hey now if we talk about fairness in the distribution of wealth, income, health care, housing, why can’t we talk about it in the distribution of access to women’s genitalia?
Let’s reconstruct this sequence of events, shall we?
Shortly before he committed mass murder on April 23, Alek Minassian, 25, logged on to Facebook. “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161,” he posted. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”
It looks like typical online bullshit, but he wasn’t joking or playacting or bullshitting; he meant it.
A few days later, a tenured professor of economics at George Mason University, Robin Hanson, published a post entitled “Two Types of Envy” on the blog Overcoming Bias arguing that incels might have a salient point to contribute to the national discourse. As Hanson put it, “Those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”
By the same token, those with much less access to domestic servants to scrub their toilets and get rid of all the dust might like redistribution along this axis.
Yesterday, Douthat — that incorrigible chinstrap-bearded prophet of pedantic reason — published his own thoughts on the issue, entitled “The Redistribution of Sex,” positing that the idea of sex as a redistributable resource is “entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern sexual life,” and blaming “sexual liberation” for inceldom and its victims.
It appalls but does not surprise me that neither of these august ideologues sought even once to examine a primary source on the issue. That neither of them bothered to emphasize that it is not incidental that incel ideology has led to multiple massacres. It is far easier to write an abstract consideration of the economics of sex and a generalized bemoaning of contemporary mores than to face the glaring and obvious truth: Inceldom is an ideological system premised in its entirety on a poisonous, irrational, and thoroughgoing hatred of women.
Along with a conception of women as not fully human in the way men are fully human.
Do you want to know how incels would like to redistribute sex?
Take them at their word. Here’s a quick segment from an incel manifesto that began making the rounds this weekend after it appeared on r/badeconomics, and which lays out a few clear principles for a sex-redistribution matrix. Among the ideas on offer are banning makeup – a means of feminine deceit – and suggesting a system of state-mandated “sexual-market value cards” measured on a one-to-ten scale. The proposal culminates in the following: “Women with more than 9 sexual partners and single moms should be forced by the state to date and have sex with incels that can’t get any women despite the above changes.”
I wonder if an open program of state-mandated mass rape, à la The Handmaid’s Tale, would make it into the crisp pages of the New York Times. It’s a good thing these ideas were laundered to smell a bit better.
The Times launders terrible ideas through Ross Douthat the way Trump launders money through compliant lawyers.
I wish Ross Douthat had had my weekend: After tweeting about incels — in a state of fairly earned horror, I tweeted a screenshot of the mass rape manifesto mentioned above — a number of them discovered my Twitter account.
(That is, after she tweeted about incels, a number of them discovered her Twitter account. Watch those dangling participles, folks.)
That’s when I found out what incels like to call women they consider slutty. The term is “roastie,” and it’s short for “roast beef,” and it derives from a physics-and-anatomy-illiterate understanding of female genitalia. Their theory, you see, is that a woman who has too many sexual partners (perhaps even more than nine!) suffers from an excess of friction, and her labia begin to resemble the folds of a roast beef sandwich.
And so, dear reader, for hours and hours, incels tweeted photos of roast beef at me, intending to shame me for my distended pudenda. I was disgusted at first. Then I got angry. Then I wanted Arby’s.
But if women are so gross, why do the incels want to use them for sex? Why not just put all that talent to work creating a hand-held vagina instead?
But that’s by the way. The real point is why is the Times laundering incel ideology?
Ya know, if these guys want nothing out of a woman but a compliant, appropriately moist, sized, and flexible hole – there are devices for that. It neatly cuts out the use of a human being part, which is the stickler among folk with consciences or even a high functioning sociopath’s commitment to adhering to principles they don’t actually feel. (Clearly these guys aren’t hitting either of those categories, which leaves me to wonder why they are roaming free at all when we have oh so many prison cells.)
It’d be a rather modest public investment to get them all one of those devices – redistribution of (very specific) wealth as a cost-effective way of mitigating likely criminal behavior. (One more cost item that these rapists and distinguished rape-cheerleaders seem not to address, that.) Much cheaper than the prisons, in fact, though there’s no reason not to combine the proposals.
And if that’s not going to work, well, that just makes it clear that these guys aren’t even after the redistribution of sex – they are after the decriminalization of any sort of sexual violence by them directed at any woman. Do make sure you’re clearly defending that one, Ross and Robin. Come on, show off the consistency of your conservative principles.
Yeah, Jeff, sounds like a good solution – if what they really wanted was just to get their jollies. But as we all know around here (because we are not as ignorant of incel ideology as Hanson and Douthat) what they want is to punish women. To hurt women. To humiliate women. To denigrate, degrade, and dominate women. And that has absolutely nothing to do with economic redistribution (even if I could buy that smelly ideology in the first place).
I know of absolutely no impoverished individual who is interested in humiliating, denigrating, or punishing money. They are only interested in exchanging it for the necessities of life, like food, clothing, housing, and medicine. They don’t care if they dominate it, they merely want to spend it. Even with that, the idea of redistributing access to female genitalia fails the smell test…why should they be entitled to “spend” female genitalia to get their jollies? Who ever told them they were entitled to that? (Purely rhetorical – I know the answer). But when you add in the desire to treat women like slaves and property, and to leave them broken and humiliated, the odor increases a thousand fold, until you can smell it all the way to the moon.
I dunno – the world has all kinds of kinks represented in it, and we may both of us just not be looking where that one is hanging out…. :) I’m going to have to go slap a quarter and call it bad, bad filthy lucre and see if it does anything for me. (The slapping; I fully realize the quarter may not be cooperative and I totally get that.)
Oh, Douthat knows very well that it’s all about punishing women for exercising any self-determination. We’re talking about a guy who, according to his memoir, almost fell prey to the sexual temptations of a “chunkier Reese Witherspoon” until she uttered the libido-killing phrase “I’m on the pill.” Ugh, a woman who not only wants sex, but has actually planned for it to protect her body? What a turn-off!
So you think I’m giving him too much credit? You might be right; he does have some odious ideas.
It occurs to me that the existence of these incels (and here I’m referring to the assholes who believe they’re entitled to women’s bodies, not to the general group of “guys who can’t get a girlfriend”) is a good answer to the recurrent Nice Guy complaint about how women are supposedly attracted to abusers. Generally speaking, they aren’t. There are lots and lots of would-be abusers who women are quite wisely avoiding, and so those men are limited to abusing women via trolling.
It’s just that some abusers are better at hiding/controlling their tendencies and are able to lure victims in, and those are the ones who get the chance to be abusive in the up close and personal way.
So this twit blames ‘“sexual liberation” for inceldom and its victims.’
And the end of feudalism is responsible for capitalism and its victims?
And the abolition of slavery is responsible for racism?
Viewing women as property, and/or sex as a commodity to be traded, coerced, or pillaged, obviously not some byproduct of 2nd wave feminism.
Patriarchal societies generate a surplus of males. In, say, Warren Jeffs’ culture, they just dump the extra boys in the nearest town. But I don’t think anyone has thought to harness the anger and disappointment of those boys into a movement of murderous rage.
Screechy @ 5, there’s a whole class of
porn writingerotica (and for that matter video having done a quick google) that is entirely framed around impregnation fantasy. While not abusive as such, in my mind it falls firmly into the category of thought that treats women as chattels to be possessed, rather than as people. That Douthat admits to such a fantasy is telling.Aaaand I just looked Douthat up on Wikipedia*. Conservative Catholic. Go figure, not surprised.
* He’s not a thing in New Zealand, so I had no idea who he was other than he writes for NYT.
Rob, yeah, I think the Douthat story was more about a good Catholic boy being revolted that a girl would use birth control instead of having unplanned unprotective sex in a “moment of weakness” like Catholics are “supposed” to. If he had been admitting to some kind of fetish, I wouldn’t necessarily have held it against him.
Screechy, it’s interesting how many men think that their disgust at women having control over their own bodies should translate into policy. I was reading a history of Al Qaeda, and it apparently started from a Muslim who went to a church dance in Colorado and was absolutely revolted at what he saw as the decadence of the women (yeah, women at church dances in the mid-20th century were obviously little different from pole dancers, right? I’m not saying he has any right to create murderous dogma eve if they were pole dancers, but it’s amazing what little it takes for these men to see decadence).
And somehow that policy they want to establish always ends with their particular group of male humans at the top of the pecking order, getting to tell women what to do.
Here us the thing, and it is a basic one, these guys have access to at least one hand, and the sex industry has created toys which mimic women’s genitalia. There is porn which works off of VR headsets, with rigs that can simulate the act.
If all they want is sex – we have engineered solutions to that particular problem, and the solutions are getting increasingly sophisticated. Even without that, prostitution though largely illegal and frowned upon has never really been successfully policed out of the realms of ready availability.
Now how you or I feel about these “alternatives” is a bit aside the point, I’m talking about the practical realities of our day – these things exist.
The fact is that it is not sex that these “incels” are after. if they were there are options. What they’re after is a target to bully and hurt, someone they can abuse. Their idea of what women like, is actually a projection of a Platonic self which is ultimately not nice.
They see themselves not simply as entitled to sex, but entitled to the emotional labour of what they would have as their abuse victims. The commodification and depersonalisation of sex in this case is a sham to mask the fact that they want to hurt people.
They do not see their victims as things, as objects, part of what they seem to enjoy is the fact that their targets are very much human, and they see sport in dominating and destroying that humanity. It is not simply a matter of wanting to be at the top of the pecking order – it is what they want to do if they get there.
They behave the way they do not because they are involuntarily celibate, but because they enjoy it, and they won’t stop enjoying it if they get to have sex, and they won’t stop enjoying it if they get into a position of power.
We’ve seen powerful men just like them who are not celibate, they don’t suddenly become decent people. Harvey Weinstein is not a decent person. We cannot fix them, they can fix themselves, but acting like they’re somehow the victims of some injustice isn’t going to encourage them to take the effort.
They’re not deprived, they’re just assholes, treat them accordingly.
The full Acton quote is: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
That is definitely the default position to take. Here I am reminded of Corporal Himmelstoss, the character in Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front. (1929)
In my military days I encountered the type far too often, and concluded that a little bit of power was all it took. The man on the second-lowest rung of the ladder is often the worst of the whole bloody hierarchy, possibly because he has such little way to fall before those he tyrannised before fall on him and tear him apart: as happens in the novel to Himmelstoss.
And needless to add, power corrupts women as well. That I have also seen.
https://acton.org/research/lord-acton-quote-archive
https://www.shmoop.com/all-quiet-on-western-front/corporal-himmelstoss.html
I have heard this ‘theory’ first hand, from a man explaining to me why he doesn’t date ‘slags’ (but spent every weekend looking for one-night stands!).
I asked him what the difference was between a woman who has had multiple partners, and one who has had just as much sex as Ms. Multiple-Partner, but with just one man rather than several. How would multiple partners distort the genitals of a woman in a way that a single regular partner wouldn’t?
He had nothing except ‘Everyone knows it does’!