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I will try to keep this short. Please take your adderall.
For the last months I have been reading and listening to several articles, jornalistic reports, podcasts, debates and interviews about the incel phenomenon in modern society, and even if the majority of them were highly against incels, I should point out that their argumentations were either wildly imprecise or relatively easy to deconstruct, but whenever there was an incel present they would not be any better at argumentations, which is somewhat understandable for even if one passes trought a very specific situation it does not mean they are some type of professional debater that will be able to defend the views that he has acquired trougth personal experience in a suficiently articulated and convincing argumentative speech. It is my hope that by sharing my reflections on this topic that I may strengthen the arguments of incels so that we can have a more productive participation on the societal debate about incels.
To begin this discussion we should observe that essentialy what inceldom is, is a symptom of the existence of sexual selection in the midst of human societal practices, I would say that to many people this is not so much of a problem to accept, and that would be true, but there is at least one group of people that this becomes somewhat of a taboo when they are beeing completely honest in the discussion, and those are the people that defend egalitarianism, sure what they usualy mean when they are defending egalitarian measures is that they don't agree with how in Captalism a person is arbitrarily born in either a rich family or a poor family and that the one born in a rich family has way more opportunities than someone born in a poor family, and how this makes many poor people work their entire lifes, many times not beeing able to leave poverty and reach the middle class while other people hardly work at all but have the privilege of beeing born into a rich family. On this note it is interesting to notice that what happened in every socialist country when they abolished Captalism and forcifully equalized the economy, instead of money being what people strived for, it became political power, for the political institutions would by then have become more stratified and with the most opportunities centralized around a political hierarchy of the state, and then again inequality emerged for those people with political power and those without, for people that were arbitrarily born into a more influent family and people that were born into a unrecognized family. Of couse, no coutry ever achieved this, but suposing one coutry were able to go trougth socialism without breaking, and were then able to implement comunism were there would be no state and therefore political power would then become equally distributed amongst the people what then would become the thing people would then strive for ? Well I am sure there could be many things but if I were to guess I would conjecture it would be sex, the differences in sexual hierarchies would be intensified creating caste systems where people that were arbitrarily born more attractive would be able to enjoy the status of a higher caste where they would have many opportunities and people that were born very unattractive would live lives as untouchables, members of the lowest caste were no opportunities would ever emerge. In this truly dystopian scenario, but nonetheless plausible for caste systems were very common in India and many other asiatic coutries, obviously there would never be any forced redistribution of sex, for it would be societal sanctioned rape which obviously is a crime ( even though every other forced redistribution of capital, and of political influence were also crimes, although one could argue that they were of different proportions) and therefore we would never really have any egalitarian utopia but only changes of through which medium inequality would arise.
All this talk about socialism and comunism has made me remember Slavoj Zizek’s article about incels (https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-moebius-strip-of-sexual-contracts/) and how he commits the hilarious mathematical error of saying things like "We would thus oppose the logic of universal human rights and the logic of social hierarchy as the two sides of a Moebius strip " when one of the most notorius characteristic of a moebius strip is that it only has one side, it gets even worse when after that he says "and focus on their point of intersection" (« Facepalm » ) what does he mean ??? the whole strip ??? And when you think it couldn't get any worse he begins to talk about turning and reversing shapes which only have one side, it's like some sort of mathematical torture, I know he is a specialist in Hegel and that makes him by consequence a specialist in meaninglessness and in utterly nonsensical things but this is too much. It is nothing more than the screaming example of double standards at play and nothing more, only then could he make a distinction of two things that are the same, that is, there can be no true equality if it doesn't encompass every significant thing in a person's life and that includes "politico-economic life and sex ". Although until here it may seem that I am advocating that there should be some type of enforcement of sexual partners, I would like to express how utterly appalling I think such thing is, and if you think that would be the only way to achieve equality of sexual relationships amongst everyone, then you are agreeing much more with the so called incel black pill than you are openly expressing. It is funny how the incel-normie situation resembles that of the lumpenproletariat - proletariat situation, much like how the proletarian class looks at the bourgeois class with envy, the proletarians at the same time despise and fear the lumpenproletarians for they may envy the proletarians, just like how the proletarians envy the bourgeois, and in doing so they may undermine the legitimacy of the proletarians in the class struggle and in this way prevent the Proletarian revolution.
This takes me to the question of "do incels belive they are entitled to sex ?" To which my answer would be : not any more than anyone else. I mean think for a minute, when an incel goes to declare himself to someone and ultimately gets rejected, the very rejection could only happen either because this person does not want to be in any relantionship ever, or because the person he declared himself to thinks they are entitled to someone better. Incels are not any more guilty, than they are victims of entitlement. And then one would say that there are no more reasons to belive that there should be any asymmetry between dating strategies of males and females, and that would perhaps be the case if humans layed eggs instead of adopting a gestational strategy in which the mother becomes vulnerable, which by itself, was a big problem since humans where nomadic for the greater part of our existence, and therefore there was evolutionary pressure to make females have higher standards whenever they would select their mates, to justify the risk they would have to pass through. Ok, so if this is something that has been this way since times immemorial why is inceldom a contemporary problem ? I would not say it is a contemporary problem, it is a problem which has been greatly amplified in comtemporary times in which everyone is having way fewer children because of the cost, and because it is only in contemporary times that we have seen the dismantlement of what feminists would call the patriarchy, and more conservative people would call the traditional family model and there is also the absolute abandonment of responsibility. Those things contribute first to women beeing more picky as a return to those more primordial instincts in these times in which it has become so expensive to have children, and along with the understanding that stability together with responsibility are in the decline, making women in general choose a much more select group of men, and beeing with any one of them by much less time. Creating a whole mass of women that have not been in many, if any, long therm relationships, a group of men that have relative easy acess to as many relationships as they desire and another group of men that have each time less and less chance of being in a relationship. Returning to the question of entitlement, if there is such a thing as a belief of entitlement to sex that is supported by a whole subsection of the population then we have to look for the origin of this belief, and although many people would go quite trigger happy to say that the source of this entitlement is this forum and others like it, I wouldn't be so sure of this, for a forum only reverberates opinions and narrative images that are already existent in society, this problem, if it exists at all, is much more profound than that, it has to do with the socialization process, and to better illustrate what I mean by saying that I will make reference to a personal experience, not because I think this will prove anything about how everyone behaves, for it is certainly statistically insignificant, nevertheless I belive this report will bring to light the superstructure of values and beliefs present in contemporary society that does much more to foster this entitlement than it does to sever it, that is to say that although statistically insignificant I belive my report not to be meaningfully insignificant.
When I was in High School I remember that in the first of a series of classes about sex education there were phrases profered such as "Since everyone in here will sooner or later have a sexual relationship ..." and "sex is a fundamental part of every healthy lifestyle" and many other like-minded sentences, since in my family I have an uncle that, differently from every other adult in my family, was not married and I remember the day that I, as a young boy, asked my mother why that was and she said that he was never able to date anyone and that he had given up on actively search for love, but she was sure that one day the right person would show up in his life. To me he was always an example of person living an alternative lifestyle, one that was as much valid as any other, for he was, and still is, one of the happiest people that I have ever know.
As I grew up I found out that he as a teenager studied in high school at morning and had began working part-time at evening, and once he had finished High school he began working full time in a factory and was living with my grandmother until he had saved enough money to buy his own house, but by his late twenties my grandfather died and he took the responsibility, as the oldest son, of economically helping my grandmother. Acording to my grandmother he never had had a girlfriend and she used to joke that because of that he had become grumpy. As time had passed he knew nothing but rejections in every declaration of love he had ever made, until he had enough of it and stopped caring about love all together. My uncle was what we would call today an incel. Today he is 78 years old and lives a simple retired life, he likes to buy old watches and repair them if so they need and then he sells them at slightly higher prices than for what he purchased, he goes on walks in parks and plays chess.
When I was having the first class in sex education and the teacher kept implying that sex was a inevitability, initially I thought about myself and how I have never had a girlfriend or even any type of close relationship with a girl and how I couldn't imagine my future self being any better than my then current self in this regard, and then I thought about my uncle and how his situation was the perfect counterexample of what that teacher had said, and then, having become somewhat troubled by what she was saying, I asked : "Teacher, you have been making several generalisations about how everyone will someday need to know all this information about sex, but what about those people that do not wish to have sex or what about the people that will never in fact be able to be in a sexual relationship ? Isn't this type of information useless to them ? I mean there are all kinds of important information about self preservation that we don't talk about, like airplanes or ships safety precautions or workplace safety procedures or even how to be careful about possible legal loopholes that might ruin someone's life, and yet we do not talk about these topics, probably because we do not think that they are applicable to everyone in here, so why is it that this classes are obligatory if there are people for which this information is useless and these classes are nothing more than lost time? and why is it that you have not mentioned abstinence as a prevention method ? " to which she answered : "It is important to learn about sex because even though presently you may not want to have sex, one day when you meet the right person this information will be useful, you may be doubting now about what I am talking but it is not as if we choose for whom we will fall for." this answer made me really unconfortable back then and reflecting about it made me realise that society as a whole is in large part to blame about people believing that they are entitled to sex, people feed hope of a better romantic future, many times in direct oposition to what every shred of evidence seems to indicate, to those who have difficulties with romance with talks like “ you don’t need to be worried about being rejected you just have to be yourself and one day someone who values you for what you are will appear.” and “you are a nice person you just need to wait until someone realises that.” and “ I’m sure that if you did X you would be much more in evidence and people would notice all the other great aspects about you” and “the right person for you is somewere out there you just have to find them” etc.
We drown people with all these hopes and promises and then we become infuriated if they ever complain about how they think life is unfair for not manifesting love to them as it does to the vast majority of other people, we say to they then “you are not entitled to sex” and “of course nobody will want you if you have that attitude” among other things, this is simply a image of how hypocrite and full of double standards society really is, in a first moment out of pity and some times as a form of doing away with a annoying situation, we offer this blind hope to those people in such a way as to make we not need to feel guilty with ourselves for our accomplishments and to not have to deal with any annoying and complicated thing as the romantic frustrations of another person, but in fact we don’t know if any of those promisses we made will ever be fulfilled and to begin with there is no way we can know about those things, and when all this hope we gave to those people backlashes we become offended or we laugh and ridicule that which we ourselves fostered.
That being said, I don’t tink there is anyone who actually thinks that they are entitled to sex in as much as there is people that recognise that intimacy is a type of fundamental human need and that people deserve to have such needs fulfilled. This understanding that intimacy is a fundamental human need can be very well observed in those people that go to psychologists and decide to talk about their romantic shortcomings, and the answer of the psychologist is never to say: “Get the hell out of my consultory! You are not entitled to sex or intimacy or romantic appreciation, if you have not yet understood this, I advise you to stop being a cry baby and deal with it !”. The problem about fundamental human needs and if these needs implicate rights is a difficult and important debate, especially for those that honestly hold a more egalitarian ethos, but it is not one that I will tackle in these reflections. To be completely fair then I will assume that someone that, trough the contrapositive of a belief arrive at another, that is to say, if someone believes that “I don’t deserve to live in solitude” it implies the belief that “I deserve companionship “, and since I consider that the original belief is as valid as the belief that “I don’t deserve anything “ that implies “I don’t deserve companionship “, leaves me to conclude that it is as fair to think that one does not deserve companionship as it is to think that one deserves.
Another story from when I was in High School is about one day in which we, the students, were handed a survey about our future aspirations and some of the questions were in multiple choice format, in particular one of those questions were “What is your most important objective in life ?”, amongst the answers were things like having a successful career, having a comfortable life with many travels trough the world, living a balanced life with no lack’s and no excess, and also there was a option that said “to marry, establish a family and have kids.”, initially I had read this sentence with a certain disregard, perhaps because at that time I already had a notion, based on what I had witnessed by then, of how my future would be like, and It had made the very notion of “establishing a family” as not something one could ever strive for, that is to say, it wasn’t anything that one could ever direct any work or effort towards, people would just live their lives and dedicate themselves to their ambitions, and only if one such people had the luck of meeting with someone that not only they liked but that also liked them in return, would then one be able to “establish a family”, in a sense this were a random event that could or could not occur within one's person lifetime, it is not something that has a continuous progression and therefore it is not something that one could rush towards as a objective, because there isn’t even any direction to rush towards. In my mind only those emotionally needy people would choose that option, those people that don’t seem to be able to be alone for any amount of time, and that always seem to be dating someone, and that make periodic references to their significant other and how they wished they were together in that specific moment. These people seem to be afraid of being alone or of even loneliness itself, it is the type of people that would say that their biggest fear is to die alone, and in saying that forgets that in life the majority of people are born alone and die alone, and they kind of contemn the lives of those people that live their entire life in solitude. With my disregard towards people that would choose the alternative “to marry, establish a family and have kids.”, I openly expressed my opinion about what I thought of that to my two best friends, it so happened that one of them had chosen that option in his survey, we then entered a discussion about how in my opinion that was a pathetic objective, and my friend rightly pointed out that what is important to each person is subjective which put me in a position where I had to concede that he had won the argument, and although in that moment I still didn’t think that objective to be worthy of being the most important to anyone, that for me was still the aspirations of cattle not of (mostly) rational human beings, but as time went on I began to see from new points of perspective this aspiration and began to not think so lowly of people who thought of constituting a family as their main objective in life and in fact at some point I began to accept that as valid as any other objective people might have in life, things like thinking about how according to several economists one of the main factors that move the economy is in fact the establishment of families, which generates many demands that in turn creates jobs to increase the supply and in this way equilibrates prices, other perspective that was quite enlightening was that of looking towards my own parents to which I am indebted for the rest of my life for having cared for me throughout my whole childhood and adolescence and how they sacrificed many things in favor of securing better opportunities in life to me and my siblings, than that which they themselves had, and they did that because their biggest objective in life is the well-being of their family, having benefited myself from such a life ambition how could I criticize others that may wish to follow the same objective ?
Obviously I can’t. And so I have come to terms with people who have their main ambition in life “to marry, establish a family and have kids.”, but immediately we arrive at a problem, take this friend of mine as a example, my social life in High School was mainly interacting with people who had the same problems to fit in with the rest of the class as myself, and this friend of mine was not different in this sense, I have kept in contact with the majority of my friends of High School and with my two best friends, and even now many years after we graduated High School and University none of us has ever had any relationships, even my friend which his biggest dream is to marry and constitute a family wasn’t able to even have a girlfriend in all of this time, so, even though it is not my life, I still think we have to reflect about this cases in which a person begins to see the years and years go by and their humble, if I may say so, life's dream appearing to be every time farther and farther away of being realized, can someone really be angry at the thought of someone in this situation gets disenchanted with life, and sometimes by doing so, begins to resent people in general ? Since I am talking so much about High School let me make an analogy with one of my particular experiences in High School, do any of you know how it feels like when you like something let’s say an group sport like soccer or basketball for example, but every time people would make the teams you were always the last one to be selected ? Well I know very well how this feels because that last person to be selected was always me, I used to like to play volleyball with my family in a volleyball court that was close to home, I never was very athletic but I liked to play, but as I began to play volleyball, any sport really but I liked volleyball in particular, in PE class in Middle School and High School I was always the last one to be chosen for any team and during the game all my teammates always treated me as some type of dead weight that they had to carry, and it was by observing their behavior towards me that little by little I not only stopped liking volleyball, but it became the sport that I hated, and still hate, the most. The feeling of being treated as if you are incapable of any positive collaboration to the victory of the team, the sporadic occasions in which a member of your team noticed how sad you were at not being able to participate in the game and purposely let you touch the ball, only to make themselves feel better for what they were doing, as if that was some act of charity they were performing. It all got to my nerves at some point and all I could feel every time I played volleyball was how little my classmates thought of me.
One can make a parallel between my description of the games of volleyball on my School years to what happened to my friend that had as his main ambition in life “to marry, establish a family and have kids.” in his adult life, except that in life no one is obligated to accept you just because you have offered yourself, so were you to be the last to be selected, in fact you just wouldn’t be selected at all, and that is what happened to him ( it also happened to me ). And sometimes when his Parents or his work colleagues noticed how lonely he were they would try to arrange to him a date with some women, and when he ultimately didn’t succeed at making a girlfriend, they would go to him and criticize him for letting such a chance let go like that, as if they were doing some type of charity to him. Could you really get mad at him for resenting those people who always seemed to reject him and also those people that felt bad for seeing the contrast between their lives and that of my friend and “mercifully” decided to offer him some time of emotional charity by arranging a date with some single woman they knew, only to not have to witness the loneliness of others.
Another topic that I have been thinking about was about how we model our understanding of the existence of incels in society, and since I have been watching several lectures of Jordan Peterson, I have been interested in the Jungian idea that at the most primitive and/or fundamental level we human beings model the world trough the use of archetypes, it then stimulated me to think about which character would best represent the incel archetype ? Thinking about it quite meticulously it came to mind at least two stories that had major characters that we would today categorize as incels, those would be The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s Quasimodo and Cyrano de Bergerac’s Cyrano. Although Each of the stories have their own qualities and defects, through the semiotics of inceldom both characters are the representation of one societal occurrence, that is the utterly bankruptcy of Ethics at the predilection of Aesthetics, and as such I ultimately would have to choose Quasimodo as the better representative of the incel archetype, given the genius of Victor Hugo there is actually a passage in which Quasimodo leaves two vases in the window of Esmeralda’s room “One was a very beautiful and very brilliant but cracked crystal vase. It had allowed the water with which it had been filled to escape, and the flowers which it contained were withered. The other was an earthenware pot, coarse and common, but which had preserved all its water, and its flowers remained fresh and crimson. I know not whether it was done intentionally, but Esmeralda takes the withered flowers from the crystal vase and presses them passionately on her heart for the entirety of the day.”. This symbolism represents almost perfectly the incel conundrum, this behavior of Esmeralda is the behavior of the vast majority of females, and although we cannot say that every incel can be described as a person that is internally akin to vibrant flowers that remained fresh and crimson, even if we were to exclude those that are morally corrupt, which seem to be homogeneously distributed trough all social groups, there would still be those that have scarred hearts from their previous failures, although the vast majority of incels have been naive and hopeful at some time in their lives, this naivety progressively becomes a presupposition of malice and this hope becomes scorn, that is to say, can one honesty believe that a unkept flower in a uncracked earthenware pot would not shrivel, dry and die ? Given that it’s necessities were not being fulfilled in a very long time (perhaps even never) ?
The usual reading of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, from my experience, looks with disdain towards the indirect rejection he suffers from Esmeralda, some people look at that and categorize it as a simple sexist instance of “it’s tragic because he didn’t get the girl”, where the situation is not anywhere that straight up, to quote Jordan Peterson on rejection: “It is a real judgement, at best it would be like: while I don’t mind your physical presence, your genes should definitely not survive another generation”, and if that was all perhaps that would be okay, but that is not all that happens, Esmeralda chooses Phoebus instead of choosing Quasimodo or even not choosing anyone at all, she rejects Quasimodo despite all of his good intentions and chooses Phoebus regardless of his egotistical intent. Why does she do that ? This has already been answered in these reflections, it is because se makes an aesthetic judgement and not an ethical one, Quasimodo is judged for his ugly and deformed appearance, of which he had virtually no choice, and Phoebus is judged for his handsomeness, of which he had been gifted without having done anything to deserve such blessing. Other people see that as a pathetically obvious result: “what did he expect ? Esmeralda is way out of his league, he should just accept that and hope that he finds someone that is just as ugly and deformed as himself, if that is even possible, and why should I even care for such a story ? The vast majority of the population, including myself, is neither deformed or that ugly and never have passed or will pass though such a life.”, whilst ignoring it’s own connotation as wildly discriminatory and sickly eugenic, much like Plato in his Republic: “It follows from our former admissions that the best men must mate with the best women in as many cases as possible, while the opposite should hold of the worst men and women; and that the offspring of the former should be reared, but not that of the latter, if our flock is going to be an eminent one. And all this must occur without anyone knowing except the rulers ... So then, we will have to establish by law certain festivals and sacrifices at which we will bring together brides and bridegrooms, and our poets must compose suitable hymns for the marriages that take place. ... I imagine that some sophisticated lotteries will have to be created, then, so that the inferior man of that sort will blame chance rather than the rulers at each mating time. ... And presumably, the young men who are good at war or at other things must —among other prizes and awards — be given a greater opportunity to have sex with the women, in order that a pretext may also be created at the same time for having as many children as possible fathered by such men.”, this is said by Plato, one of the most influential philosophers of the western world, so it is not that strange that people with such eugenic thoughts still exist and many times do not even realize the dangerous similarities between these two views, to simply accept this imposed hierarchy is not any better than to be like sheep that cannot begin to fathom the intentions of the shepherd.
That leaves us to think why is it exactly that almost every decision one can make is subjectable to ethics, with the notorious exception of romantic/sexual judgments, it is at this intersection between a unscrupulous pursuit of one’s desire and a prudent restriction towards ethical conduct, that the intellectual dishonesty begins, because there are considerable interests at stake, therefore the very notion of ethics in the judgment of romantic partners is discarded and this rustic, amorphous, sometimes even mystical, and a priori unprincipled imagery of what is love is pushed forward as a means to justify partial/biased judgment and to crush dissent among those that are at the margin in this aspect of life. This imagery is propaganda, and just like any propaganda, it seeks to create a narrative that encourages complacency towards the present status quo and vilifies the desistance of pursuit of those success goals that have been dictated by the narrative. That is why there are people that having been exposed to the narrative that effort is not only necessary, but sufficient to achieve economical success, for example, these people that take contemporary society to be a complete meritocracy, can pass by a homeless person and not only they become incapable of being sympathetic towards the difficult situation that those in misery pass through every day, but take that as a just sentence, for if those people had been committed and hardworking they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with, as they are it can only mean that they haven’t been those things, that they haven’t put enough effort to free themselves from poverty in which case they are only experiencing that which they deserve and one should only feel repugnance and aversion towards those people.
If anyone thinks that this is only exaggeration and a way to justify an inferiority complex, or as people in my country say a mutt complex, if you think so I suggest to you to make a thought experiment, imagine you had to cheer up Quasimodo that was sad because of his loneliness, could you honestly tell him things like “You just have to keep trying to find your soulmate, she is definitely out there.”, would you really think that was the case for someone that deformed ? And if you would say that what makes you think that this situation is any different from that which was jokingly pointed out by George Carlin in one of his jokes about prisons where he said something like “Everybody more or less agree that we need more prisons, some people even scream 'BUILD MORE PRISONS ! ... but not in here.' “. It is like those people that keep saying how people should be seeking love because they believe that society is full of bitter and resentful people , but then feel insulted if anyone they don’t fancy ever declare romantic feelings towards them. This characterizes a insidious cycle where society at large advocates for love as a fundamental element of having a successful life, and then there is a number of people that fail at that, and then society reaffirms love and then surprisingly enough more people seem to fail and then not only society reinforces this idea of love, they condemn those that fail at it, this is what is happening in Japan where an ever increasing number of men are not able to find female romantic partners, which then reflects negatively in the number of births which then begins to affect the economy of the country, another bizarre phenomenon that is happening there is that the number and popularity of female aimed brothels, or as they call it there Host clubs, that although also exist in the male oriented forms, they don’t reach the ridiculous proportion that the female oriented Host Clubs have achieved where there are literally huge billboards promoting the most popular “hosts”(gigolos) outdoors in clear day light , and then some people begin to complain that this situation is unique to Japan and that the situation on the vast majority of the world is different from that, and that may be true presently, but what they fail to see is that the demographics of present day Japan accurately represents the projections for the immediate future of all developed countries and that it already began to show in developing countries as well, so we would better learn what can be learned from Japan's situation because we will pass trough that soon enough.
Returning to how ethics has lost to aesthetics in the dating landscape, we may depart from a rational ethical analysis from what we experience in our failed attempts at dating, and the most recurring basis for rejection is not behavior or education or dedication, these things only achieve critical importance once two people have already begun dating, the thing that really works like a filter is attractiveness, which fundamentally means looks, knowing this we may begin this ethical analysis by asking what it means to exert judgment on other people mainly trough aesthetics, and that is, what makes anyone more aesthetically pleasing than another person ? Is it the actions that one chooses to take ? Is it the way one thinks about things ? Is it the behavior one upholds ? Is it the personality one has developed throughout his life ? Or is it one's physical appearance which was primarily defined by his genetics at the moment of birth, and secondly by the environment in which he grew up, both of which are random events in which one doesn’t have any influence over ?
Supposing one has honestly answered those previous questions can anyone say that the physical appearance is not a fundamental factor towards attractiveness ? If one still doesn’t agree then imagine yourself honestly telling that to Quasimodo, that is, if you were even capable of that. Still in this topic of attractiveness, a strange phenomenon that has been happening since about the 1990's when the percieved beauty standards for males changed radically. Generaly it is women that complain about the unattainability of such ideals, what is obviously a statistically and ethical valid complaint and one that I will take as a given, yet although unattainable they can hardly be said to be unfeminine, if for anything, the unattainability of such female standards arises from the exaggeration of the feminine to unrealistic levels, where as the contemporary beauty standard for males is almost entirely unmasculine in it's nature. The common feature shared by most male models of female oriented magazines is that, with the exception of their musculature and their jawbone that tend to be accentuated, they resemble some type of androgynous angel-like figure, having therefore more feminine traits in opposition to those biologically induced by characteristic masculine hormones like testosterone. In conclusion while women complaints of beauty standards are based in the fact that the cutoff region of what is considered attractive in the multivariate distribution of feminine aspects is so narrow that they become unrealistic, although the variables of the distribution are in principle still comparable throughout, if not all, the vast majority of women; Where as with men the problem lies in the fact that there is a break between men who have in their appearance those feminine dimensions capable of mustering an androgynous look, which has become attractive as of late, and those who doesn't have this dimension to them, and in this discrete, discontinuous classification we have men being forsaken not because they don't lie within some range on the scales of attractiveness, but because they are not even on many of those scales to begin with, that is, some times it is not only because someone is on the lower strata that they are rejected in favor of someone else, sometimes it is just because they aren't even comparable in the first place, and this is a big problem because, may people like it or not, there are way more people that look like Quasimodo than there are people that look like angels anyway.
One fascinating exemple of how ethics becomes mixed with aesthetics occurs when a feminist calls all men pigs (or at least some portion of men), is the identification of a men with the figure of a pig a ethical judgement or an aesthetical one ? It almost seems as if the problem was not the actions perpetuated by those men but their aesthetics, that those actions would be somewhat acceptable, were practiced by some Christian Grey of Fifty Shades of Grey instead of some random creep. Still talking about those feminists, there is much talk about how women should just wear whatever they want and that they shouldn't be demurred by any possible sexual aggressor, after all the guilt of any aggression is always of the aggressor (which is a correct assessment, of course), nevertheless it should be pointed out that this type of discourse has many times promoted debauchery and demoted prudency, and this is a problem because, although the guilt of the aggression is of the aggressor, we have to remember ourselves that sexual impulses are not triggered by rationality and logic (hah, we wish that were the case, imagine if things were so simple and reasonable as solving numerous logic problems from a set of "propositional calculi" « See what i did there ? » ), but by instinct, so that it only takes a person with bad judgement for a tragedy to happen, is it really okay to encourage women to make themselves preferential prey to those molesters ? One thing is to envision an idealized society, another one entirely is to advocate unprudent behaviour in the real world. In the extreme end of feminism we find organizations such as Femen wich proclaims to fight against the malice of the patriarchy, only to do so with malice of their own and to fight malice with malice can only increase the total amount of malice in the world.
So we have people judging other people mainly trough randomly assigned traits, considering, of course, that even those who can improve themselves into becoming more attractive have first to have the potential to become more attractive, and this potential is equally randomly assigned. We have then to ask ourselves if this is ethical, which it is not, for it is an arbitrary judgment, and knowing that we must ask ourselves what can be done to remedy this unjust behavior, obviously we could not force or coerce people to change this, for it would be equally not ethical, the only thing we can really do is to accept the way things are and to take our own judgment upon this unethical situation. One thing that I have seen recently that has made me a little irritated was this, rather vulgar, video by BuzzFeed (), the guy in the video is certainly not a very ethical person by what is portrayed of him thinking, but for a second forget what he thinks and what he does in his privacy, no one else in the real world would know that to begin with, what I think is the most irritating thing is the part where he buys a watch to gift to the coworker that he belives he is developing feelings for, even if it is in his own twisted way, and when he finally goes to give the gift to her, he freezes and is not able to say anything and she gets uncomfortable with that and walks away, at the next moment we see him in the HR being scolded for inappropriate behaviour, since when does trying to give a watch to someone constitutes inappropriate behaviour ? It is as Roger Scruton has once said (), as society is tending towards becoming less and less civilized, romantic relationships begin to stop requiring a previous period of courtship and become each time more dreadfully direct, or how Roger Scruton said “Nowadays, of course, sexual harassment just means sexual advances made by the unattractive, who are the majority, so you know, there is a huge injustice in this.”.
Going back to the topic of how incels are seen by society, we may spend days and days arguing about how every time there is, for a lack of a better word, a public exhibition of the subject there is always a permeating hypocrisy of some sort, either they think we are just “bad losers” in a way, that just because we aren’t able to date anyone we think it is alright to be whining about how we couldn’t achieve that which we wished, and how this is only because the world is unjust and so on, when in fact the majority of them revert right back to this state whenever their established relationships crumble, and in this moment they don’t think that in fact they are just whining and that they should just “buckle up, kiddo”, or when people are so reductionist to the point that they say we incels are just frustrated because we can’t get laid and begin talking about how this is some justification for why prostitution should be legalized, when in fact just because something is illegal it doesn’t mean it is impossible to find, prostitution, much like illegal drugs, is not that difficult to find if you are actually looking for it, these people forget about the deepest existential question that is in fact what really desolate the incels, these people just say this because they have had the privilege of having had their emotional needs fulfilled and reassured by this they have taken the liberty of dissociating one thing with the other, and having had their emotional needs fulfilled they begin to only think about sex and their sexual desires instead of the more basic, humane, problem. In the last case people just assume that if someone is rejected by everyone they have ever approached, then that means they are some type of freaks that should just lay down and rot, after all the word of the people have been ushered, and the word of the people is law. But jokes aside, I wish to talk about one opinionated person in particular, Natalie Wynn the transexual woman of the YouTube channel ContraPoints, in her video about incels to which many people took to be a pondered, even perhaps conciliatory, stand on the question of inceldom, yet, although better than the majority of the expositions of the topic she still makes fundamental mistakes about incels, in particular in the part about how the black pill is just catastrophizing, or how she exposed it as being defined by psychotherapists as “A cognitive distortion where anxiety or depression leads you to infer apocalyptic conclusions from mundane setbacks and anxieties.”, every incel reading this might instantly see where the problem in that is, it only gets worse when she gives the first example of such a situation, she says to consider a person that is late for work and that from that they get to the conclusion that they and their hole family are going to die because of that, later on she tries to show how the black pill is just another scenario of catastrophizing, except that it isn’t as simple, consider first her first example, sure one person who once got late may not get fired because of that, but what about someone that is always late ? In fact forget the whole scenario where this person is employed in the first place, this scenario is already too reassuring to begin with, consider instead someone that is unemployed and has always been and the reason that that is so is amongst other things that they seem to always get late to their work interviews, let’s say that happens because they live in a city that has a serious problem of traffic congestion, since this person has not been able to get a job until now it would not be strange if they accepted that their chances of being able to get a job are low, and if they aren’t able to get a job soon they and their family are soon enough starve to death, of course this put in this way has a simple solution, just wake up early!, but let’s talk about something more real, in Brazil there has been a economic crisis that has subsisted over the last five or so years, and that has generated a somewhat new class of labor force categorization, roughly speaking there are the employed, the unemployed and the dismayed (in portuguese “desalentados”) that have given up on looking for a job and that according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) has estimated to be around 4.8 millions of Brazilians in the last year (2018) estimates. Which only demonstrates how giving up at situations of an overwhelming number of rejections is not some type of silly catastrophizing, it is something more close to a natural reaction towards this ubiquitous presence of rejection, but let’s go back to Natalie's description of the black pill, she begins with saying that experiences of rejection and isolation, where she doesn’t quantify this, making it seem as if it is just some experiences of rejection and isolation and not the only thing one has experienced, then she says one might infer that one’s unattractive to women, what may seem a plausible inference from someone that has had some experiences of rejection but is quite certain for someone who only has experienced this, then she goes on to say that from this one may conclude that they will be attractive to any woman, which again is a very big jump for someone who has had some experiences of rejection, but it is not that big of a inference jump for someone who was only experienced rejection, she then goes on to say things that are not inferences but deductions from the last inference in points 4-You will be forever alone; 5-You will always be Unhappy; and 6-Women did this to you. And then she goes on to talk about some points that can try to explain why would things be in such a way as to allow someone to come at those previous conclusions, that is points 7-feminism empowered women to do this to you; 8-The social trends that made this possible are only getting worse; And then there is that last conclusion that I will take the liberty of rewriting as 9-Humanity itself, as understood to be the association of every human being as equally “human” and therefore equally deserving of existence, nutrition, education, housing, friendships and love; is therefore Doomed. Having reach this conclusion is it really that strange if someone were to begin to think that the only thing that one can do in this overwhelming scenario where one is faced with nothing more than the perception and understanding of impotence towards the status quo of things ? That figuratively, in this scenario of powerlessness, the only thing one can do is to lie down and rot ? She then goes on to make rampant generalizations about how incels could stop being incels, or how she puts it “Mom the shit out of them.”, if they just socialized more, made some friends, ..., and many more standard discriminatory assumptions that people in general make and that they think they have the solution to. But to be frank I don’t dislike completely her video, compared to what other people have said she is almost comprehensive in this video, and if it were not for her latest video on Beauty
For the last months I have been reading and listening to several articles, jornalistic reports, podcasts, debates and interviews about the incel phenomenon in modern society, and even if the majority of them were highly against incels, I should point out that their argumentations were either wildly imprecise or relatively easy to deconstruct, but whenever there was an incel present they would not be any better at argumentations, which is somewhat understandable for even if one passes trought a very specific situation it does not mean they are some type of professional debater that will be able to defend the views that he has acquired trougth personal experience in a suficiently articulated and convincing argumentative speech. It is my hope that by sharing my reflections on this topic that I may strengthen the arguments of incels so that we can have a more productive participation on the societal debate about incels.
To begin this discussion we should observe that essentialy what inceldom is, is a symptom of the existence of sexual selection in the midst of human societal practices, I would say that to many people this is not so much of a problem to accept, and that would be true, but there is at least one group of people that this becomes somewhat of a taboo when they are beeing completely honest in the discussion, and those are the people that defend egalitarianism, sure what they usualy mean when they are defending egalitarian measures is that they don't agree with how in Captalism a person is arbitrarily born in either a rich family or a poor family and that the one born in a rich family has way more opportunities than someone born in a poor family, and how this makes many poor people work their entire lifes, many times not beeing able to leave poverty and reach the middle class while other people hardly work at all but have the privilege of beeing born into a rich family. On this note it is interesting to notice that what happened in every socialist country when they abolished Captalism and forcifully equalized the economy, instead of money being what people strived for, it became political power, for the political institutions would by then have become more stratified and with the most opportunities centralized around a political hierarchy of the state, and then again inequality emerged for those people with political power and those without, for people that were arbitrarily born into a more influent family and people that were born into a unrecognized family. Of couse, no coutry ever achieved this, but suposing one coutry were able to go trougth socialism without breaking, and were then able to implement comunism were there would be no state and therefore political power would then become equally distributed amongst the people what then would become the thing people would then strive for ? Well I am sure there could be many things but if I were to guess I would conjecture it would be sex, the differences in sexual hierarchies would be intensified creating caste systems where people that were arbitrarily born more attractive would be able to enjoy the status of a higher caste where they would have many opportunities and people that were born very unattractive would live lives as untouchables, members of the lowest caste were no opportunities would ever emerge. In this truly dystopian scenario, but nonetheless plausible for caste systems were very common in India and many other asiatic coutries, obviously there would never be any forced redistribution of sex, for it would be societal sanctioned rape which obviously is a crime ( even though every other forced redistribution of capital, and of political influence were also crimes, although one could argue that they were of different proportions) and therefore we would never really have any egalitarian utopia but only changes of through which medium inequality would arise.
All this talk about socialism and comunism has made me remember Slavoj Zizek’s article about incels (https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-moebius-strip-of-sexual-contracts/) and how he commits the hilarious mathematical error of saying things like "We would thus oppose the logic of universal human rights and the logic of social hierarchy as the two sides of a Moebius strip " when one of the most notorius characteristic of a moebius strip is that it only has one side, it gets even worse when after that he says "and focus on their point of intersection" (« Facepalm » ) what does he mean ??? the whole strip ??? And when you think it couldn't get any worse he begins to talk about turning and reversing shapes which only have one side, it's like some sort of mathematical torture, I know he is a specialist in Hegel and that makes him by consequence a specialist in meaninglessness and in utterly nonsensical things but this is too much. It is nothing more than the screaming example of double standards at play and nothing more, only then could he make a distinction of two things that are the same, that is, there can be no true equality if it doesn't encompass every significant thing in a person's life and that includes "politico-economic life and sex ". Although until here it may seem that I am advocating that there should be some type of enforcement of sexual partners, I would like to express how utterly appalling I think such thing is, and if you think that would be the only way to achieve equality of sexual relationships amongst everyone, then you are agreeing much more with the so called incel black pill than you are openly expressing. It is funny how the incel-normie situation resembles that of the lumpenproletariat - proletariat situation, much like how the proletarian class looks at the bourgeois class with envy, the proletarians at the same time despise and fear the lumpenproletarians for they may envy the proletarians, just like how the proletarians envy the bourgeois, and in doing so they may undermine the legitimacy of the proletarians in the class struggle and in this way prevent the Proletarian revolution.
This takes me to the question of "do incels belive they are entitled to sex ?" To which my answer would be : not any more than anyone else. I mean think for a minute, when an incel goes to declare himself to someone and ultimately gets rejected, the very rejection could only happen either because this person does not want to be in any relantionship ever, or because the person he declared himself to thinks they are entitled to someone better. Incels are not any more guilty, than they are victims of entitlement. And then one would say that there are no more reasons to belive that there should be any asymmetry between dating strategies of males and females, and that would perhaps be the case if humans layed eggs instead of adopting a gestational strategy in which the mother becomes vulnerable, which by itself, was a big problem since humans where nomadic for the greater part of our existence, and therefore there was evolutionary pressure to make females have higher standards whenever they would select their mates, to justify the risk they would have to pass through. Ok, so if this is something that has been this way since times immemorial why is inceldom a contemporary problem ? I would not say it is a contemporary problem, it is a problem which has been greatly amplified in comtemporary times in which everyone is having way fewer children because of the cost, and because it is only in contemporary times that we have seen the dismantlement of what feminists would call the patriarchy, and more conservative people would call the traditional family model and there is also the absolute abandonment of responsibility. Those things contribute first to women beeing more picky as a return to those more primordial instincts in these times in which it has become so expensive to have children, and along with the understanding that stability together with responsibility are in the decline, making women in general choose a much more select group of men, and beeing with any one of them by much less time. Creating a whole mass of women that have not been in many, if any, long therm relationships, a group of men that have relative easy acess to as many relationships as they desire and another group of men that have each time less and less chance of being in a relationship. Returning to the question of entitlement, if there is such a thing as a belief of entitlement to sex that is supported by a whole subsection of the population then we have to look for the origin of this belief, and although many people would go quite trigger happy to say that the source of this entitlement is this forum and others like it, I wouldn't be so sure of this, for a forum only reverberates opinions and narrative images that are already existent in society, this problem, if it exists at all, is much more profound than that, it has to do with the socialization process, and to better illustrate what I mean by saying that I will make reference to a personal experience, not because I think this will prove anything about how everyone behaves, for it is certainly statistically insignificant, nevertheless I belive this report will bring to light the superstructure of values and beliefs present in contemporary society that does much more to foster this entitlement than it does to sever it, that is to say that although statistically insignificant I belive my report not to be meaningfully insignificant.
When I was in High School I remember that in the first of a series of classes about sex education there were phrases profered such as "Since everyone in here will sooner or later have a sexual relationship ..." and "sex is a fundamental part of every healthy lifestyle" and many other like-minded sentences, since in my family I have an uncle that, differently from every other adult in my family, was not married and I remember the day that I, as a young boy, asked my mother why that was and she said that he was never able to date anyone and that he had given up on actively search for love, but she was sure that one day the right person would show up in his life. To me he was always an example of person living an alternative lifestyle, one that was as much valid as any other, for he was, and still is, one of the happiest people that I have ever know.
As I grew up I found out that he as a teenager studied in high school at morning and had began working part-time at evening, and once he had finished High school he began working full time in a factory and was living with my grandmother until he had saved enough money to buy his own house, but by his late twenties my grandfather died and he took the responsibility, as the oldest son, of economically helping my grandmother. Acording to my grandmother he never had had a girlfriend and she used to joke that because of that he had become grumpy. As time had passed he knew nothing but rejections in every declaration of love he had ever made, until he had enough of it and stopped caring about love all together. My uncle was what we would call today an incel. Today he is 78 years old and lives a simple retired life, he likes to buy old watches and repair them if so they need and then he sells them at slightly higher prices than for what he purchased, he goes on walks in parks and plays chess.
When I was having the first class in sex education and the teacher kept implying that sex was a inevitability, initially I thought about myself and how I have never had a girlfriend or even any type of close relationship with a girl and how I couldn't imagine my future self being any better than my then current self in this regard, and then I thought about my uncle and how his situation was the perfect counterexample of what that teacher had said, and then, having become somewhat troubled by what she was saying, I asked : "Teacher, you have been making several generalisations about how everyone will someday need to know all this information about sex, but what about those people that do not wish to have sex or what about the people that will never in fact be able to be in a sexual relationship ? Isn't this type of information useless to them ? I mean there are all kinds of important information about self preservation that we don't talk about, like airplanes or ships safety precautions or workplace safety procedures or even how to be careful about possible legal loopholes that might ruin someone's life, and yet we do not talk about these topics, probably because we do not think that they are applicable to everyone in here, so why is it that this classes are obligatory if there are people for which this information is useless and these classes are nothing more than lost time? and why is it that you have not mentioned abstinence as a prevention method ? " to which she answered : "It is important to learn about sex because even though presently you may not want to have sex, one day when you meet the right person this information will be useful, you may be doubting now about what I am talking but it is not as if we choose for whom we will fall for." this answer made me really unconfortable back then and reflecting about it made me realise that society as a whole is in large part to blame about people believing that they are entitled to sex, people feed hope of a better romantic future, many times in direct oposition to what every shred of evidence seems to indicate, to those who have difficulties with romance with talks like “ you don’t need to be worried about being rejected you just have to be yourself and one day someone who values you for what you are will appear.” and “you are a nice person you just need to wait until someone realises that.” and “ I’m sure that if you did X you would be much more in evidence and people would notice all the other great aspects about you” and “the right person for you is somewere out there you just have to find them” etc.
We drown people with all these hopes and promises and then we become infuriated if they ever complain about how they think life is unfair for not manifesting love to them as it does to the vast majority of other people, we say to they then “you are not entitled to sex” and “of course nobody will want you if you have that attitude” among other things, this is simply a image of how hypocrite and full of double standards society really is, in a first moment out of pity and some times as a form of doing away with a annoying situation, we offer this blind hope to those people in such a way as to make we not need to feel guilty with ourselves for our accomplishments and to not have to deal with any annoying and complicated thing as the romantic frustrations of another person, but in fact we don’t know if any of those promisses we made will ever be fulfilled and to begin with there is no way we can know about those things, and when all this hope we gave to those people backlashes we become offended or we laugh and ridicule that which we ourselves fostered.
That being said, I don’t tink there is anyone who actually thinks that they are entitled to sex in as much as there is people that recognise that intimacy is a type of fundamental human need and that people deserve to have such needs fulfilled. This understanding that intimacy is a fundamental human need can be very well observed in those people that go to psychologists and decide to talk about their romantic shortcomings, and the answer of the psychologist is never to say: “Get the hell out of my consultory! You are not entitled to sex or intimacy or romantic appreciation, if you have not yet understood this, I advise you to stop being a cry baby and deal with it !”. The problem about fundamental human needs and if these needs implicate rights is a difficult and important debate, especially for those that honestly hold a more egalitarian ethos, but it is not one that I will tackle in these reflections. To be completely fair then I will assume that someone that, trough the contrapositive of a belief arrive at another, that is to say, if someone believes that “I don’t deserve to live in solitude” it implies the belief that “I deserve companionship “, and since I consider that the original belief is as valid as the belief that “I don’t deserve anything “ that implies “I don’t deserve companionship “, leaves me to conclude that it is as fair to think that one does not deserve companionship as it is to think that one deserves.
Another story from when I was in High School is about one day in which we, the students, were handed a survey about our future aspirations and some of the questions were in multiple choice format, in particular one of those questions were “What is your most important objective in life ?”, amongst the answers were things like having a successful career, having a comfortable life with many travels trough the world, living a balanced life with no lack’s and no excess, and also there was a option that said “to marry, establish a family and have kids.”, initially I had read this sentence with a certain disregard, perhaps because at that time I already had a notion, based on what I had witnessed by then, of how my future would be like, and It had made the very notion of “establishing a family” as not something one could ever strive for, that is to say, it wasn’t anything that one could ever direct any work or effort towards, people would just live their lives and dedicate themselves to their ambitions, and only if one such people had the luck of meeting with someone that not only they liked but that also liked them in return, would then one be able to “establish a family”, in a sense this were a random event that could or could not occur within one's person lifetime, it is not something that has a continuous progression and therefore it is not something that one could rush towards as a objective, because there isn’t even any direction to rush towards. In my mind only those emotionally needy people would choose that option, those people that don’t seem to be able to be alone for any amount of time, and that always seem to be dating someone, and that make periodic references to their significant other and how they wished they were together in that specific moment. These people seem to be afraid of being alone or of even loneliness itself, it is the type of people that would say that their biggest fear is to die alone, and in saying that forgets that in life the majority of people are born alone and die alone, and they kind of contemn the lives of those people that live their entire life in solitude. With my disregard towards people that would choose the alternative “to marry, establish a family and have kids.”, I openly expressed my opinion about what I thought of that to my two best friends, it so happened that one of them had chosen that option in his survey, we then entered a discussion about how in my opinion that was a pathetic objective, and my friend rightly pointed out that what is important to each person is subjective which put me in a position where I had to concede that he had won the argument, and although in that moment I still didn’t think that objective to be worthy of being the most important to anyone, that for me was still the aspirations of cattle not of (mostly) rational human beings, but as time went on I began to see from new points of perspective this aspiration and began to not think so lowly of people who thought of constituting a family as their main objective in life and in fact at some point I began to accept that as valid as any other objective people might have in life, things like thinking about how according to several economists one of the main factors that move the economy is in fact the establishment of families, which generates many demands that in turn creates jobs to increase the supply and in this way equilibrates prices, other perspective that was quite enlightening was that of looking towards my own parents to which I am indebted for the rest of my life for having cared for me throughout my whole childhood and adolescence and how they sacrificed many things in favor of securing better opportunities in life to me and my siblings, than that which they themselves had, and they did that because their biggest objective in life is the well-being of their family, having benefited myself from such a life ambition how could I criticize others that may wish to follow the same objective ?
Obviously I can’t. And so I have come to terms with people who have their main ambition in life “to marry, establish a family and have kids.”, but immediately we arrive at a problem, take this friend of mine as a example, my social life in High School was mainly interacting with people who had the same problems to fit in with the rest of the class as myself, and this friend of mine was not different in this sense, I have kept in contact with the majority of my friends of High School and with my two best friends, and even now many years after we graduated High School and University none of us has ever had any relationships, even my friend which his biggest dream is to marry and constitute a family wasn’t able to even have a girlfriend in all of this time, so, even though it is not my life, I still think we have to reflect about this cases in which a person begins to see the years and years go by and their humble, if I may say so, life's dream appearing to be every time farther and farther away of being realized, can someone really be angry at the thought of someone in this situation gets disenchanted with life, and sometimes by doing so, begins to resent people in general ? Since I am talking so much about High School let me make an analogy with one of my particular experiences in High School, do any of you know how it feels like when you like something let’s say an group sport like soccer or basketball for example, but every time people would make the teams you were always the last one to be selected ? Well I know very well how this feels because that last person to be selected was always me, I used to like to play volleyball with my family in a volleyball court that was close to home, I never was very athletic but I liked to play, but as I began to play volleyball, any sport really but I liked volleyball in particular, in PE class in Middle School and High School I was always the last one to be chosen for any team and during the game all my teammates always treated me as some type of dead weight that they had to carry, and it was by observing their behavior towards me that little by little I not only stopped liking volleyball, but it became the sport that I hated, and still hate, the most. The feeling of being treated as if you are incapable of any positive collaboration to the victory of the team, the sporadic occasions in which a member of your team noticed how sad you were at not being able to participate in the game and purposely let you touch the ball, only to make themselves feel better for what they were doing, as if that was some act of charity they were performing. It all got to my nerves at some point and all I could feel every time I played volleyball was how little my classmates thought of me.
One can make a parallel between my description of the games of volleyball on my School years to what happened to my friend that had as his main ambition in life “to marry, establish a family and have kids.” in his adult life, except that in life no one is obligated to accept you just because you have offered yourself, so were you to be the last to be selected, in fact you just wouldn’t be selected at all, and that is what happened to him ( it also happened to me ). And sometimes when his Parents or his work colleagues noticed how lonely he were they would try to arrange to him a date with some women, and when he ultimately didn’t succeed at making a girlfriend, they would go to him and criticize him for letting such a chance let go like that, as if they were doing some type of charity to him. Could you really get mad at him for resenting those people who always seemed to reject him and also those people that felt bad for seeing the contrast between their lives and that of my friend and “mercifully” decided to offer him some time of emotional charity by arranging a date with some single woman they knew, only to not have to witness the loneliness of others.
Another topic that I have been thinking about was about how we model our understanding of the existence of incels in society, and since I have been watching several lectures of Jordan Peterson, I have been interested in the Jungian idea that at the most primitive and/or fundamental level we human beings model the world trough the use of archetypes, it then stimulated me to think about which character would best represent the incel archetype ? Thinking about it quite meticulously it came to mind at least two stories that had major characters that we would today categorize as incels, those would be The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s Quasimodo and Cyrano de Bergerac’s Cyrano. Although Each of the stories have their own qualities and defects, through the semiotics of inceldom both characters are the representation of one societal occurrence, that is the utterly bankruptcy of Ethics at the predilection of Aesthetics, and as such I ultimately would have to choose Quasimodo as the better representative of the incel archetype, given the genius of Victor Hugo there is actually a passage in which Quasimodo leaves two vases in the window of Esmeralda’s room “One was a very beautiful and very brilliant but cracked crystal vase. It had allowed the water with which it had been filled to escape, and the flowers which it contained were withered. The other was an earthenware pot, coarse and common, but which had preserved all its water, and its flowers remained fresh and crimson. I know not whether it was done intentionally, but Esmeralda takes the withered flowers from the crystal vase and presses them passionately on her heart for the entirety of the day.”. This symbolism represents almost perfectly the incel conundrum, this behavior of Esmeralda is the behavior of the vast majority of females, and although we cannot say that every incel can be described as a person that is internally akin to vibrant flowers that remained fresh and crimson, even if we were to exclude those that are morally corrupt, which seem to be homogeneously distributed trough all social groups, there would still be those that have scarred hearts from their previous failures, although the vast majority of incels have been naive and hopeful at some time in their lives, this naivety progressively becomes a presupposition of malice and this hope becomes scorn, that is to say, can one honesty believe that a unkept flower in a uncracked earthenware pot would not shrivel, dry and die ? Given that it’s necessities were not being fulfilled in a very long time (perhaps even never) ?
The usual reading of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, from my experience, looks with disdain towards the indirect rejection he suffers from Esmeralda, some people look at that and categorize it as a simple sexist instance of “it’s tragic because he didn’t get the girl”, where the situation is not anywhere that straight up, to quote Jordan Peterson on rejection: “It is a real judgement, at best it would be like: while I don’t mind your physical presence, your genes should definitely not survive another generation”, and if that was all perhaps that would be okay, but that is not all that happens, Esmeralda chooses Phoebus instead of choosing Quasimodo or even not choosing anyone at all, she rejects Quasimodo despite all of his good intentions and chooses Phoebus regardless of his egotistical intent. Why does she do that ? This has already been answered in these reflections, it is because se makes an aesthetic judgement and not an ethical one, Quasimodo is judged for his ugly and deformed appearance, of which he had virtually no choice, and Phoebus is judged for his handsomeness, of which he had been gifted without having done anything to deserve such blessing. Other people see that as a pathetically obvious result: “what did he expect ? Esmeralda is way out of his league, he should just accept that and hope that he finds someone that is just as ugly and deformed as himself, if that is even possible, and why should I even care for such a story ? The vast majority of the population, including myself, is neither deformed or that ugly and never have passed or will pass though such a life.”, whilst ignoring it’s own connotation as wildly discriminatory and sickly eugenic, much like Plato in his Republic: “It follows from our former admissions that the best men must mate with the best women in as many cases as possible, while the opposite should hold of the worst men and women; and that the offspring of the former should be reared, but not that of the latter, if our flock is going to be an eminent one. And all this must occur without anyone knowing except the rulers ... So then, we will have to establish by law certain festivals and sacrifices at which we will bring together brides and bridegrooms, and our poets must compose suitable hymns for the marriages that take place. ... I imagine that some sophisticated lotteries will have to be created, then, so that the inferior man of that sort will blame chance rather than the rulers at each mating time. ... And presumably, the young men who are good at war or at other things must —among other prizes and awards — be given a greater opportunity to have sex with the women, in order that a pretext may also be created at the same time for having as many children as possible fathered by such men.”, this is said by Plato, one of the most influential philosophers of the western world, so it is not that strange that people with such eugenic thoughts still exist and many times do not even realize the dangerous similarities between these two views, to simply accept this imposed hierarchy is not any better than to be like sheep that cannot begin to fathom the intentions of the shepherd.
That leaves us to think why is it exactly that almost every decision one can make is subjectable to ethics, with the notorious exception of romantic/sexual judgments, it is at this intersection between a unscrupulous pursuit of one’s desire and a prudent restriction towards ethical conduct, that the intellectual dishonesty begins, because there are considerable interests at stake, therefore the very notion of ethics in the judgment of romantic partners is discarded and this rustic, amorphous, sometimes even mystical, and a priori unprincipled imagery of what is love is pushed forward as a means to justify partial/biased judgment and to crush dissent among those that are at the margin in this aspect of life. This imagery is propaganda, and just like any propaganda, it seeks to create a narrative that encourages complacency towards the present status quo and vilifies the desistance of pursuit of those success goals that have been dictated by the narrative. That is why there are people that having been exposed to the narrative that effort is not only necessary, but sufficient to achieve economical success, for example, these people that take contemporary society to be a complete meritocracy, can pass by a homeless person and not only they become incapable of being sympathetic towards the difficult situation that those in misery pass through every day, but take that as a just sentence, for if those people had been committed and hardworking they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with, as they are it can only mean that they haven’t been those things, that they haven’t put enough effort to free themselves from poverty in which case they are only experiencing that which they deserve and one should only feel repugnance and aversion towards those people.
If anyone thinks that this is only exaggeration and a way to justify an inferiority complex, or as people in my country say a mutt complex, if you think so I suggest to you to make a thought experiment, imagine you had to cheer up Quasimodo that was sad because of his loneliness, could you honestly tell him things like “You just have to keep trying to find your soulmate, she is definitely out there.”, would you really think that was the case for someone that deformed ? And if you would say that what makes you think that this situation is any different from that which was jokingly pointed out by George Carlin in one of his jokes about prisons where he said something like “Everybody more or less agree that we need more prisons, some people even scream 'BUILD MORE PRISONS ! ... but not in here.' “. It is like those people that keep saying how people should be seeking love because they believe that society is full of bitter and resentful people , but then feel insulted if anyone they don’t fancy ever declare romantic feelings towards them. This characterizes a insidious cycle where society at large advocates for love as a fundamental element of having a successful life, and then there is a number of people that fail at that, and then society reaffirms love and then surprisingly enough more people seem to fail and then not only society reinforces this idea of love, they condemn those that fail at it, this is what is happening in Japan where an ever increasing number of men are not able to find female romantic partners, which then reflects negatively in the number of births which then begins to affect the economy of the country, another bizarre phenomenon that is happening there is that the number and popularity of female aimed brothels, or as they call it there Host clubs, that although also exist in the male oriented forms, they don’t reach the ridiculous proportion that the female oriented Host Clubs have achieved where there are literally huge billboards promoting the most popular “hosts”(gigolos) outdoors in clear day light , and then some people begin to complain that this situation is unique to Japan and that the situation on the vast majority of the world is different from that, and that may be true presently, but what they fail to see is that the demographics of present day Japan accurately represents the projections for the immediate future of all developed countries and that it already began to show in developing countries as well, so we would better learn what can be learned from Japan's situation because we will pass trough that soon enough.
Returning to how ethics has lost to aesthetics in the dating landscape, we may depart from a rational ethical analysis from what we experience in our failed attempts at dating, and the most recurring basis for rejection is not behavior or education or dedication, these things only achieve critical importance once two people have already begun dating, the thing that really works like a filter is attractiveness, which fundamentally means looks, knowing this we may begin this ethical analysis by asking what it means to exert judgment on other people mainly trough aesthetics, and that is, what makes anyone more aesthetically pleasing than another person ? Is it the actions that one chooses to take ? Is it the way one thinks about things ? Is it the behavior one upholds ? Is it the personality one has developed throughout his life ? Or is it one's physical appearance which was primarily defined by his genetics at the moment of birth, and secondly by the environment in which he grew up, both of which are random events in which one doesn’t have any influence over ?
Supposing one has honestly answered those previous questions can anyone say that the physical appearance is not a fundamental factor towards attractiveness ? If one still doesn’t agree then imagine yourself honestly telling that to Quasimodo, that is, if you were even capable of that. Still in this topic of attractiveness, a strange phenomenon that has been happening since about the 1990's when the percieved beauty standards for males changed radically. Generaly it is women that complain about the unattainability of such ideals, what is obviously a statistically and ethical valid complaint and one that I will take as a given, yet although unattainable they can hardly be said to be unfeminine, if for anything, the unattainability of such female standards arises from the exaggeration of the feminine to unrealistic levels, where as the contemporary beauty standard for males is almost entirely unmasculine in it's nature. The common feature shared by most male models of female oriented magazines is that, with the exception of their musculature and their jawbone that tend to be accentuated, they resemble some type of androgynous angel-like figure, having therefore more feminine traits in opposition to those biologically induced by characteristic masculine hormones like testosterone. In conclusion while women complaints of beauty standards are based in the fact that the cutoff region of what is considered attractive in the multivariate distribution of feminine aspects is so narrow that they become unrealistic, although the variables of the distribution are in principle still comparable throughout, if not all, the vast majority of women; Where as with men the problem lies in the fact that there is a break between men who have in their appearance those feminine dimensions capable of mustering an androgynous look, which has become attractive as of late, and those who doesn't have this dimension to them, and in this discrete, discontinuous classification we have men being forsaken not because they don't lie within some range on the scales of attractiveness, but because they are not even on many of those scales to begin with, that is, some times it is not only because someone is on the lower strata that they are rejected in favor of someone else, sometimes it is just because they aren't even comparable in the first place, and this is a big problem because, may people like it or not, there are way more people that look like Quasimodo than there are people that look like angels anyway.
One fascinating exemple of how ethics becomes mixed with aesthetics occurs when a feminist calls all men pigs (or at least some portion of men), is the identification of a men with the figure of a pig a ethical judgement or an aesthetical one ? It almost seems as if the problem was not the actions perpetuated by those men but their aesthetics, that those actions would be somewhat acceptable, were practiced by some Christian Grey of Fifty Shades of Grey instead of some random creep. Still talking about those feminists, there is much talk about how women should just wear whatever they want and that they shouldn't be demurred by any possible sexual aggressor, after all the guilt of any aggression is always of the aggressor (which is a correct assessment, of course), nevertheless it should be pointed out that this type of discourse has many times promoted debauchery and demoted prudency, and this is a problem because, although the guilt of the aggression is of the aggressor, we have to remember ourselves that sexual impulses are not triggered by rationality and logic (hah, we wish that were the case, imagine if things were so simple and reasonable as solving numerous logic problems from a set of "propositional calculi" « See what i did there ? » ), but by instinct, so that it only takes a person with bad judgement for a tragedy to happen, is it really okay to encourage women to make themselves preferential prey to those molesters ? One thing is to envision an idealized society, another one entirely is to advocate unprudent behaviour in the real world. In the extreme end of feminism we find organizations such as Femen wich proclaims to fight against the malice of the patriarchy, only to do so with malice of their own and to fight malice with malice can only increase the total amount of malice in the world.
So we have people judging other people mainly trough randomly assigned traits, considering, of course, that even those who can improve themselves into becoming more attractive have first to have the potential to become more attractive, and this potential is equally randomly assigned. We have then to ask ourselves if this is ethical, which it is not, for it is an arbitrary judgment, and knowing that we must ask ourselves what can be done to remedy this unjust behavior, obviously we could not force or coerce people to change this, for it would be equally not ethical, the only thing we can really do is to accept the way things are and to take our own judgment upon this unethical situation. One thing that I have seen recently that has made me a little irritated was this, rather vulgar, video by BuzzFeed (), the guy in the video is certainly not a very ethical person by what is portrayed of him thinking, but for a second forget what he thinks and what he does in his privacy, no one else in the real world would know that to begin with, what I think is the most irritating thing is the part where he buys a watch to gift to the coworker that he belives he is developing feelings for, even if it is in his own twisted way, and when he finally goes to give the gift to her, he freezes and is not able to say anything and she gets uncomfortable with that and walks away, at the next moment we see him in the HR being scolded for inappropriate behaviour, since when does trying to give a watch to someone constitutes inappropriate behaviour ? It is as Roger Scruton has once said (), as society is tending towards becoming less and less civilized, romantic relationships begin to stop requiring a previous period of courtship and become each time more dreadfully direct, or how Roger Scruton said “Nowadays, of course, sexual harassment just means sexual advances made by the unattractive, who are the majority, so you know, there is a huge injustice in this.”.
Going back to the topic of how incels are seen by society, we may spend days and days arguing about how every time there is, for a lack of a better word, a public exhibition of the subject there is always a permeating hypocrisy of some sort, either they think we are just “bad losers” in a way, that just because we aren’t able to date anyone we think it is alright to be whining about how we couldn’t achieve that which we wished, and how this is only because the world is unjust and so on, when in fact the majority of them revert right back to this state whenever their established relationships crumble, and in this moment they don’t think that in fact they are just whining and that they should just “buckle up, kiddo”, or when people are so reductionist to the point that they say we incels are just frustrated because we can’t get laid and begin talking about how this is some justification for why prostitution should be legalized, when in fact just because something is illegal it doesn’t mean it is impossible to find, prostitution, much like illegal drugs, is not that difficult to find if you are actually looking for it, these people forget about the deepest existential question that is in fact what really desolate the incels, these people just say this because they have had the privilege of having had their emotional needs fulfilled and reassured by this they have taken the liberty of dissociating one thing with the other, and having had their emotional needs fulfilled they begin to only think about sex and their sexual desires instead of the more basic, humane, problem. In the last case people just assume that if someone is rejected by everyone they have ever approached, then that means they are some type of freaks that should just lay down and rot, after all the word of the people have been ushered, and the word of the people is law. But jokes aside, I wish to talk about one opinionated person in particular, Natalie Wynn the transexual woman of the YouTube channel ContraPoints, in her video about incels to which many people took to be a pondered, even perhaps conciliatory, stand on the question of inceldom, yet, although better than the majority of the expositions of the topic she still makes fundamental mistakes about incels, in particular in the part about how the black pill is just catastrophizing, or how she exposed it as being defined by psychotherapists as “A cognitive distortion where anxiety or depression leads you to infer apocalyptic conclusions from mundane setbacks and anxieties.”, every incel reading this might instantly see where the problem in that is, it only gets worse when she gives the first example of such a situation, she says to consider a person that is late for work and that from that they get to the conclusion that they and their hole family are going to die because of that, later on she tries to show how the black pill is just another scenario of catastrophizing, except that it isn’t as simple, consider first her first example, sure one person who once got late may not get fired because of that, but what about someone that is always late ? In fact forget the whole scenario where this person is employed in the first place, this scenario is already too reassuring to begin with, consider instead someone that is unemployed and has always been and the reason that that is so is amongst other things that they seem to always get late to their work interviews, let’s say that happens because they live in a city that has a serious problem of traffic congestion, since this person has not been able to get a job until now it would not be strange if they accepted that their chances of being able to get a job are low, and if they aren’t able to get a job soon they and their family are soon enough starve to death, of course this put in this way has a simple solution, just wake up early!, but let’s talk about something more real, in Brazil there has been a economic crisis that has subsisted over the last five or so years, and that has generated a somewhat new class of labor force categorization, roughly speaking there are the employed, the unemployed and the dismayed (in portuguese “desalentados”) that have given up on looking for a job and that according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) has estimated to be around 4.8 millions of Brazilians in the last year (2018) estimates. Which only demonstrates how giving up at situations of an overwhelming number of rejections is not some type of silly catastrophizing, it is something more close to a natural reaction towards this ubiquitous presence of rejection, but let’s go back to Natalie's description of the black pill, she begins with saying that experiences of rejection and isolation, where she doesn’t quantify this, making it seem as if it is just some experiences of rejection and isolation and not the only thing one has experienced, then she says one might infer that one’s unattractive to women, what may seem a plausible inference from someone that has had some experiences of rejection but is quite certain for someone who only has experienced this, then she goes on to say that from this one may conclude that they will be attractive to any woman, which again is a very big jump for someone who has had some experiences of rejection, but it is not that big of a inference jump for someone who was only experienced rejection, she then goes on to say things that are not inferences but deductions from the last inference in points 4-You will be forever alone; 5-You will always be Unhappy; and 6-Women did this to you. And then she goes on to talk about some points that can try to explain why would things be in such a way as to allow someone to come at those previous conclusions, that is points 7-feminism empowered women to do this to you; 8-The social trends that made this possible are only getting worse; And then there is that last conclusion that I will take the liberty of rewriting as 9-Humanity itself, as understood to be the association of every human being as equally “human” and therefore equally deserving of existence, nutrition, education, housing, friendships and love; is therefore Doomed. Having reach this conclusion is it really that strange if someone were to begin to think that the only thing that one can do in this overwhelming scenario where one is faced with nothing more than the perception and understanding of impotence towards the status quo of things ? That figuratively, in this scenario of powerlessness, the only thing one can do is to lie down and rot ? She then goes on to make rampant generalizations about how incels could stop being incels, or how she puts it “Mom the shit out of them.”, if they just socialized more, made some friends, ..., and many more standard discriminatory assumptions that people in general make and that they think they have the solution to. But to be frank I don’t dislike completely her video, compared to what other people have said she is almost comprehensive in this video, and if it were not for her latest video on Beauty
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