Women are not cars, explained
Now Toby Young gets in on the act – hey all you lefty types think money should be more equitably shared so how come you don’t think the same thing about access to women, huh huh huh?
Robin Hanson, Alek Minassian, incel rebellion, Elliot Rodger, Chad and Stacy, blah blah.
Hanson wasn’t defending these two mass murderers, but querying why incels had been dismissed in the media as ‘self-pitying’ and ‘lonely weirdos’ in the aftermath of the Toronto attack, often by the same journalists and commentators who decry other forms of inequality. Why are terrorists who murder people in the name of redistributing wealth, like Che Guevara, lionised by the left, whereas terrorists whose aim is to draw attention to sex inequality are detested? A columnist on the Scottish Daily Record said Minassian was a ‘pathetic little boy who can’t get a girlfriend’. I don’t suppose the same journalist would describe the late socialist hero Jimmy Reid as a ‘pathetic little man who couldn’t afford a nice car’.
Sigh.
One can never tell – is he (whichever – Hanson, Douthat, Young) really that stupid or just pretending to be to wind us up? It’s right there in the words – girlfriend versus car. Now do you see what we’re getting at? A girlfriend is not like a car. How? A girlfriend is a person and a car is a thing. A girlfriend has thoughts and plans and ideas and feelings; a car has an engine and windows and wheels.
It works the same way with women on the one hand and money on the other. Women have minds; money does not.
Women are not things to be distributed. You’d think this would be too fucking obvious to say, yet they keep ignoring it, either genuinely or ad arguendo. Neither is acceptable.
Another failure of the analogy is that many people who cannot afford nice cars are working very hard for very little money while the owners of the businesses get rich off the work of others.
The Incels are not out there making the initial moves that ultimately result in other guys getting girlfriends; other guys are not having sex because they are being given so little for all their work. In short, these are not Cyranos. In fact, they are out there working as hard as they can to creep out women.
Nice change of phrasing there from Toby Young. If he had paralleled “terrorists who murder people in the name of redistributing wealth”, with “terrorists who murder people in the name of redistributing women” it wouldn’t have sounded quite so good.
I wonder if these ‘redistribution’ fans have even bothered to consider that there are also women who live their lives wanting but not getting sex / romance, possibly for similar reasons to the incels – ugliness, odious personality, poor hygeine, whatever it may be. Hah! I greatly doubt they have even come within a stone’s throw of that idea. I suspect they only got as far as fantasising about cute women being assigned to become their very own chattel.
#2
I wonder if these idiotic authors have considered that what they propose – “terrorists who murder people in the name of redistributing women” as you put it – is basically what Boko Haram have already put into action in recent memory.
Sex is powerful stuff. Being threatened, bashed, assaulted are recognized and blame can be assigned where due. Being spurned, or rendered invisible, are different but related sufferings. They aren’t on the same scale though, and we have a cultural/political trainwreck in which marginalized boys, rather than rejecting the patriarchal system that has marked them as ‘losers,’ explode in rage at women. And our ‘normal’ sexual economy seems to be pushing millions of people, of all sorts of genders, off to the margins.
‘Incel’ might even have become a reasonable term, as the woman who coined it intended. Instead we have a subset of rage-boys, whipped up into a perpetual frenzy, and ready to explode at the command of a pack of weirdo ‘net-trolls.
They remind me of the on-call death squats of madrassa students in Bangladesh. Internet fueled outrage and spite, on tap for anyone who can toss in a few crude code-words.
John, that sounds reasonable, but there are some problems. These “rage boys” (like that term) have a lot of trouble getting my sympathy because there are a couple of failed assumptions in their worldview. One is that they are entitled to women, to sex, and to cute women that they feel are “worthy” of them. The other is that they haven’t done anything to bring this on. As Dave Futrelle has noted, when these guys post pics of themselves, there is nothing to indicate that they are particularly ugly, in fact, they are relatively ordinary looking guys, the like of which are running around with cute girls all the time (and ugly girls, and in between girls).
They believe that girls want “alpha” males, by their definition, which they seem to relate to grabbing the girls by the hair and dragging them off to their man-cave for a cuddly afternoon of rape and domination. They don’t think they have to do the hard work to build a relationship, but that they should crook their finger and the girls come running. If they do put any work into building a relationship, that becomes oppression and girls just out to get goodies from the man before they give up their own…which, of course, the guy was entitled to in the first place, but laid out for dinner and a movie out of the goodness of his heart.
Where does this attitude come from? I don’t know that I can say for sure, because it is prevalent in the male members of my family (except my son), but my parents did not overtly teach this, nor that I can see did my sisters overtly teach this. But at the same time, the female members of my family have internalized their own lack of worth, their own sense of being somehow less (and yes, that includes me; I spent a decade in therapy to finally get to the point where I realize I have as much right to live in this world as anyone else). The messages on TV, in the movies, and so forth that we were allowed to watch, the books we were allowed to read, etc, were inherently sexist, but not with this level of malignancy. More the Leave it to Beaver type of benign, fatherly misogyny that relegates a woman to “her place” in the house being cared for by a fatherly type of husband that she waits on hand and foot. On second thought, that does sound rather malignant, doesn’t it? And perhaps the very benign-fatherly nature of it made it more malignant, because it didn’t look like domestic abuse.
I was watching a documentary on Shakespeare last night, and they were dealing with Taming of the Shrew (I hate that play). They paraded out a succession of women who had played Kate and who asserted all sorts of things about that play that you have to squint very hard and close your ears to get out of it, but what was most horrifying was seeing these women make statements that said something like “Petruchio’s treatment of Kate came close to domestic abuse”. What? No. It was domestic abuse. What has happened to women that they can see that scene where he is starving her, forcing her to run around without her clothes, and treating her basically like shit, and say it “comes close” to domestic abuse? How could anyone see her last speech, about the importance of obedience to her husband, and see that as some sort of feminist manifesto? See it as an act of feminist subversion when she puts her hand under his foot for him to step on?
These men all want to be Petruchio, taming women to do their bidding, and causing the women as much pain as possible in the bargain. That’s why I don’t see this as the rage of men who have been spurned, per se, but the rage of men who have not been handed what they believe is their right, which is sort of a different thing, at least to me.
I imagine Young thought he was being funny/provocative instead of stupidly annoying. That’s the story of his life.
On an individual level you can feel sorry for a nice bloke who hasn’t got a girlfriend. You would even, if you could, help him out, introduce him to suitable women or whatever. However you can’t really feel sorry for unattractive guys as a class – you have no idea why they are unattractive. Nasty personalities? Mind-numbing boringness?
If you want a poignant lament of what it’s like being an unattractive guy try Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis, where Graham , the friend of the main character, Patrick, takes out desirable Jenny and tells her how awful it is being unattractive. She pities him but still can’t find him attractive.
@iknlast – yes, I think women internalise the unattractive thing – “I am not worthy”. They are relentlessly told to give themselves winning personalities if they fail in looks.
@Holms – yes, part of the attraction of ISIS and the like is the availability of women as sex slaves– even after death.
Rosie, it isn’t just the unattractive thing. I was attractive as a young woman (very attractive) but did not believe that. But it was more than just attractive. I was the “smart” one, but never felt that I was competent or capable. I still do that in my head today, even when I have two terminal degrees, am successful in my field, and have achieved a level of accomplishment none of the men in my family ever achieved.
The men around me are usually more than happy to help with that. They talk over me, talk down to me, mansplain me, ignore me, contradict me (in my own field that they know less than nothing about – and if you want to know what I mean by less than nothing, they know some things, but they are all wrong), and in general push me aside. I fight back now, but that then gets me the sobriquet “Feminazi” – because standing up for oneself and one’s rights is so exactly the equivalent of killing 6 million people. Or some just go straight to “bitchy”, because, yes, a female dog is the right comparison for a strong, independent female who refuses to have her neck stepped on any more.
Reminiscent of the Amis – Kingsley and Martin both – attitude to Philip Larkin and especially to his longterm gf Monica Jones, whom Martin sweetly called “an eyesore” in Experience. No pity or sympathy (much less respect) for her.
But it’s even more reminiscent of Kingsley’s way of writing about Margaret in Lucky Jim.
@Ophelia
Yes – for both Amises women being unattractive is a criminal act.
This is true for all too many men.