What is the cause of this new misogyny?
I wrote before about this new trend of misogyny. Young men, calling themselves "incels" or "involuntary celibates" are arguing that they are owed sex from attractive women and that feminism has destroyed their lives.
I mean, not that they are self-centered or anything.
I read online a story from one such loser, who opined that he was masturbating so much to online porn that he could no longer orgasm with a real woman. He finally meets a woman who agrees to have sex with him, and after hours of frustration, cannot achieve orgasm. The poor woman, worn out and sore, declines a second date. Those damn feminists!
He pleads for help as to what to do! Notably missing: Any consideration of the sexual needs of his date.
Feminism is the simple proposition that women are people, too and should be treated on an equal basis as men. Even the old misogynistic religions treated women as being special and put them on a pedestal. You didn't treat your wife like property, you adorned her with jewels and furs to show off your wealth. Hey, back then, there was a 50/50 chance she would die in childbirth - the suffering of women was recognized, not enhanced.
What I find odd is that these men claim to be 30-something virgins, and yet, as a gay man, I have had more sex with women than they have. The trick isn't all that hard - you just have to view your sex partner as a person who has their own needs and wants. And you have to view sex as something more than a ten-minute race-to-the-finish with the climax being the end-all goal.
But no, to hear these "incels" talk (which makes you want to take a shower afterwords) it is all about them and their needs, They posit that sexual "relief" is owed to them by women as a biological necessity. And it isn't hard to figure out why they are single, lonely, and depressed.
There would not be an "incel movement" (which sounds like a turd to me) if it were not for the Internet and certain odious commentators who tend to amplify this nonsense. And I am sure that some foreign forces are at work, hyping this crap, to get people to go further off their rocker. It would be just something stupid to laugh at, but more than one self-identified incel has gone on a killing spree, just in the last few years.
Objectifying women is nothing new of course - it has been going on for centuries. The "Morning Zoo Crew" type radio stations made their bread-and-butter from fart jokes and taking potshots a "hairy armpit lesbians" and whatnot. But in more recent times, you have podcasts by the likes of Joe Rogan, who many young men idolize as the epitome of maleness or something. Or take "comedian" Bill Burr (please!) who does a "podcast" about the "female douche-bag of the week" - and interesting phrase in and of itself, as the douche is a means of cleansing female genitalia. Paging Dr. Freud!
What puzzles me is that these "men" - and I use that term loosely - all had Mothers and perhaps sisters as well. Do they feel this way about their own female family members as well? Or are they just men who are no damn good?
I think it is a variety of factors. There have always been horrible men out there - losers, whiners, rapists, serial killers. And often the target of their disdain was women. Before the Internet, they didn't have club to join, where they could commiserate about how awful women are - and to lionize those who commit murder.
One "conservative" incel commentator argues that arranged marriages are the answer - forcing women to marry men, whether they want to or not. They pitch this as a means of procreation in an era of declining birth rates, but the real "sell" to their audience is the idea of having a perpetual sex slave, or in fact, just a slave.
We truly have turned a corner when the GOP platform is indistinguishable from that of the Taliban. What's next? Flying planes into buildings? Trying to take over the government by force? Oh, wait....
The problem with the Internet isn't that a few loud voices are arguing for horrible things. Rather, the system feeds from the bottom-up. Whether they realize it or not, these podcasters and "comedians" pander to their audience, and they become keenly aware of what "sells" to the audience in terms of YouTube hits and revenue. And what sells generates income, so they either consciously or subconsciously gravitate toward "controversy" as a means of generating hits.
And for this, we have Howard Stern to blame - he figured out early on that controversy was good. People would tune in because they liked him, but were twice as likely to tune in because they hated him. People want to be outraged - look at the stupid "reaction" videos on YouTube, for example. You can sell outrage far easier than logic. But outrage blinds us to reality, logic does not.
But again, if it wasn't Howard Stern who discovered this formula, it would have been someone else. He just capitalized on the need of certain men to vent their frustrations with misogynistic humor. Again, this is fed from the bottom-up, not the top-down. Before this "incel" movement came about, these sort of men were just lonely losers - isolated individuals. Today, the Internet allows people like that to band together and go down the rabbit hole together. Where we go one, we go all - same shit, different mental illness. And sometimes they overlap.
Internet platforms have, in the past, largely gone along with this - allowing odious content to spread across their sites, because it generated ad revenue. And the worst sort of stuff generated the highest rates of "engagement" - although I am skeptical that a survivalist is going to buy anything advertised, other than pallets of survival food. And maybe that is the answer right there - the Odious Glenn Beck went off the air not because his ratings were low, but because none of his audience had a nickel of disposable income to spend. Advertising is not just about reaching an audience, but reaching a paying audience.
Sadly, there are many on the far-right who want not only to allow such odious discourse to become the norm, but force us all to support it, listen to it, and pay for it. They are fighting right now in court - and it will go to the Supreme Court - for the right to force individuals and private corporations to host odious content or even content they disagree with, on the grounds that anything else is "censorship" and censorship is of course mentioned in the Constitution. They seem to fail to have read it. The first amendment only prohibits government censorship - it does not require that private companies or individuals provide an outlet for thoughts they disagree with.
What would be so funny if it weren't so tragic is that "conservative" discussion sites, newsgroups, and other online platforms, routinely censor content (and ban users) who say things they disagree with. Go on Trump's "Truth Social" and see how long your account lasts, if you question the orthodoxy. Rules for thee and not for me, apparently. Or maybe Conservatives are just now discovering the Constitution has a "penumbra" and says things that are not explicitly stated there. Maybe next, they will find a "privacy right" in the 4th Amendment. So much for the impartiality of the Judiciary.
But getting back to the source, what causes young men to go off on this tangent? If you scratch the surface of these cases, you find that the typical "incel" has a host of personal problems and not getting laid is not among their highest priority. These are mentally ill people, basically, who have latched onto a "cause" as being the source of all their "problems." In other words, it is externalizing once again raising its ugly head.
It isn't their fault that they lost that promotion at work (and that dumb bitch Stacey got it instead!) but it was all due to feminism and political correctness! That's why they still live with their parents and can't get a date or bathe regularly. It is the reason they obsessively play video games and download "Hentai" porn all day long. It is all the fault of women!
Externalization is fun, of course, because nothing in the world is ever your fault. You are perfect, you are "beautiful" (as one odious ex-President likes to tell them) and "but for" the actions of others, they would all be Billionaires like him. Except that, not. It is like the annoying man I met one day, who probably considers himself a gay incel, as his odious personality drives away people. Unless you are dating within the Qanonsense community, odds are, people are going to run away.
But this is what it has come to in the USA - and the far-leftists are equally as unhinged. They are not entitled to sex, of course - they just want free college, free money, free houses, and free jobs. And it's always someone else's fault when their personal lives are a trainwreck!
Maybe we can put all these people on Elon Musk's rocket to Mars (with Captain Elon at the helm, one-way only!) and let them sort it out there. They can fight over who gets the last oxygen.
