As bad as most of the misogynistic ideas I write about on this blog tend to be, they at least have a certain perverse logic to them; if you accept their deeply flawed premises, at least long enough to try to parse the arguments, the conclusions make a sort of rough sense.
But when I wander into the online worlds of the so-called “involuntary celibates” I can quickly lose my moorings. Most incels are hugely depressed, and as I know from my own experience dealing with depression of varying degrees of severity over several decades, deep depression not only distorts your thinking; it also can make you weirdly self-obsessed, assuming that everything that happens in the world has something to do with you — both with your own imagined failings and with the alleged injustices the world supposedly imposes on you.
When you combine all this with the standard bad ideas of the misogynistic manosphere, incel “logic” can quickly become very strange indeed.
I say all this as a sort of introduction to this little “true story”I found on the Incels subreddit, a story that starts out with an awkward not-quite-interaction on a largely deserted bus and ends with a plot twist I have to say I never saw coming.
So let’s take a look at the post titled “Feminism’s fault I’m incel,” (archived here) by a fellow calling himself Brazierlord.
I was sitting next to this girl on the bus the other day and as the bus starting emptying out, I stood up to change seats like a good male is supposed to. I would be labeled as a danger to females if they saw me continue to sit next to that innocent female when I could easily move – obviously I was preparing to stalk her and rape her as soon as we got off the bus.
Obviously what he means by that last bit is that the others on the bus might consider him a bit creepy if he continued to sit next to the girl in question when there were now plenty of open seats. But his choice of words here, while meant sarcastically, make him seem even creepier than he intends.
So I stand up and I see her look at me through the corner of my eye. I move to the seat behind and at angle of -45 degrees from the horizontal to her. The entire time she is tracking me. Once I am seated she looks away and lays her head on the window.
Maybe she’s “tracking you” because you’re “tracking her” as you move to a new seat.
We get to our stop and she glances back at me. I am standing at this point and she hurries off the bus and nearly breaks into a run in the opposite direction.
Either she’s in a hurry, is nervous about being out alone, or our narrator really is giving off a creepy vibe.
So far, this seems to be a relatively straightforward story of a guy who may be giving off more of a creepy vibe than he realizes.
Then we get this:
If it weren’t for feminism I wouldn’t have changed seats and she wouldn’t hate me for breaking her heart. She probably would have followed me to my apartment and asked me if she could have sex with me and I wouldn’t be a virgin anymore
WHAT.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You didn’t break her heart. At best, she barely noticed you; at worst, you creeped her out. That’s it. Everything else is going on in your head, and nowhere else. Women do not follow strange men to their apartments to ask them for sex because they happened to sit next to each other on the bus. This is the sort of fantasy you come up with when you can’t imagine actually interacting with a woman as a real human being.
Get off of r/Incels and into therapy. Please. For your sake, and for the sake of every woman you sit next to on the bus.
I have two interests that are Ren Faire adjacent – Historical European Martial Arts ( HEMA ) and Anglo-Saxon history, and both have a slight tendency to attract assholes. HEMA as a whole is a bit more “structured” and has some strong anti-asshole organisations ( Esfinges and Fighters Against Racism are both organisations that I think would be well received here ), but even then there’s a sad tendency for forum threads or facebook posts to occasionally slide from historical discussion to talk of “ancestral identity” to out-and-out racism. Luckily the communities I’m involved in are pretty alert and jump on that stuff quick. However, it makes me genuinely sad that so much of the Anglo-Saxon history stuff on Facebook seems to be constantly hijacked by people banging on about racial purity and calling people “cucks” ( and I imagine viking interest groups are far, far worse ).
@Alan:
Yes, feathers is another word that people use for that. Especially for really hairy-legged horses like Clydesdales, who have those massive mops over their hooves. I wonder if this phenomenon is behind the whole Pegasus thing — that people imagined horses with feathery feet having wings on them, and that those wings were later transposed to the shoulders of the beast? It certainly calls that to mind for me…and I’m not even a particularly horsey person.
@Alan:
Anyway, to avoid leaving you without an explanation, I managed to find the original picture which spawned the “unshorn fetlocks” in-joke:
(The joke being that Luna missed out on an entire millennium and thus can be a bit of an old-timey fish out of water at times.)
@Sinkable John
Good luck!
@Alan
The fetlock is the tuft of hair that many breeds of horse have just above the hoof, and my metonymy also the name for the joint located there (which is technically a knuckle, not an ankle)
@Gipsz Jakab
Oh. Oh, that’s funny.
(Not sarcastic, just a bit more coherent than textified laughter.)
@BaronJenks:
I’ve wanted to get involved in HEMA for a while now, so it’s really good to hear that it has anti-racist groups. Nowadays, any hobby practised predominantly by white people is making me worried about possible Nazis.
@EJ
HEMA does have a tendency to be mainly “white guys with beards” ( as a WGWB myself ). However, all the groups I’ve been involved in have been happily free of all the macho rubbish that can come with martial arts, and instead been laid back and welcoming. Rapier groups seem to be more gender balanced than longswords in my experience though, but you’re right, all the groups I’ve been in have been overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, white.
Just being nosey, is there a specific area or type you’re interested in? I do some longsword and some sabre myself.
@BaronJenks:
I really like the aesthetics of longsword, particularly the style which I believe is called Ringeck or Liechtenauer. I’m a tall skinny guy so it’s nice to see something in which long limbs are more useful than muscle mass.
@EJ:
I started off leaning Fiore’s style ( Italian, pre-Ringeck and basically a different approach ) and then moved clubs to a Meyer class ( post-Ringeck and influenced by him ) so my longswording is some ugly mish-mash of all sorts. Having long limbs is super useful though – an extra 6″ of reach can make all the difference 😀
Pee Vee – Aww, thanks! I got mildly obsessed with Marie Dressler last year when Turner Classic Movies had her as their Star of the Month. Most of her films were silent and I really like silent films anyway. Also, in that pic, she looks a lot like my great-grandmother.
Sinkable John – Bonne chance! I hope you have a much more wonderful time than you anticipate!
Bina – Let’s not tell Alan about mini horses!
This is a fully grown mini with a Jack Russel Terrier
@ bina
That has a ring of plausibility about it now you mention it. Especially with that Hellenic thing of portraying flying characters with winged ankles.
@ dalillama
Ah I’m glad you said that. I’d been thinking of all the times horsey friends have mentioned pulling fetlocks and other injuries. After Bina told me it was a hair tuft I thought they’d been taking the piss in a ‘tartan paint’ sort of way. Makes sense now.
@ hambeast
What? How far away are they?
@ gipsz
I like the cartoon. Mind you, in relation to the feathered feet thing, I was thinking about how I like shires and cobs, or as I call them “horses that work for a living”.
So I’d probably be joining Luna in writing to the Equestrian Daily Telegraph.
Hmm, now I’m thinking of a character ‘Mary Whitehorse’. Maybe only Brits will understand that?
OT: How do you actually change the symbol displayed in these comments sections? I ask because I know what I’d change it to, but don’t know how.
Re: fandoms, is anybody here a fan of RWBY? It’s probably one of my favorite series, and it would be nice to vaguely know somebody with that same interest. Also, most of the main characters are women and they kick a hell of a lot of ass, so take that as a firm recommendation from me.
@Swedish
Yup, RWBY is great. New episodes of Rwby Chibi start on the 13 so I’m looking forward to that.
@Swedish Sexual Bread
Make a Gravitar with the same email address you use here and it will update itself through some arcane sorcery after about 5 minutes.
Edit: delete due to accidental unfinished post. The chop on cell phones sucks.
@Alan Robertshaw
I did not think you were being dismissive. It’s a typical social response to something that hits a vibe of concern, and this community gas many good reasons to concerned when it comes to sex and porn. Truth be told I am walking a very fine social line here but think the benefits are worth it.
I’ve thought about stuff and I’m not the only one. This still has some ethical holes from my perspective (explicit introduction of consent is also needed with reasonably implied consent.
It was an inevitable community subject to be addressed.
The shape of my felt connection to anthropomorphic cartoon characters has even shifted over the years, and this is all in addition to my sense of attraction for other human beings. I stared out on the “humanized” end and ended up in the “feral” end of the chart. Are there even an ethics of having an attraction to inguinal breasts? It’s very nature says things about how humans can fragment the objects and felt meaning in our social lives. It’s one of those “I didn’t ask for it, now what do I do with it” things.
This is my favorite version of that chart.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/328/736/4fc.jpg
We gotta figure this stuff out. How many kinds of social developmental stages are there? What ages do they start and stop at? What kinds of information is recorded? Do the “kinds of information” relate to each other and conscious awareness differently at different ages? I can’t help but be fascinated.
@Alan
Did you just make an Original Character pony?
BLARNEY! DRINKS ALL AROUND! You are now a brony!
Now write some goshdarn fanfiction or draw some pones.
[toots a tiny party roll-up horn]
@Fabe: Yeah, I knew about that. (Yay, Penny’s alive again!)
@Policy of Madness: Thanks for the info, I’ve got a new profile picture now.
@Alan
Terribly late as usual, but I believe I’ve heard the name. Basis Mary Whitehouse, a woman with quite a few things she considered worthy of censorship?
@Troubelle
Apropos of nothing but I practiced a little drawing yesterday.
@Fran
yaaaaaaaaaaaaay
@Troubelle
Thank you!
It’s all I felt up to.
I’ve been writing on and off recently, but I can only keep it up for about an hour or two before I shut down and can’t go on.
I’m just gonna say it’s taken a truly heroic effort on my part to function and go to work and housekeep these past few weeks (months? Fuck, since Orange Fuckwit was elected).
It requires so much willpower I am useless for any artistic endeavors.
Make the nightmare stop. This is hellish.
@Brony
That’s a nice titillating Rarity you have there, but have you considered the alternate universe where Celestia is a chubby, sassy black woman who likes food?
If the creators of the show had the sense the Gods and Goddesses gave an ant, they would do a Twitter thing saying that Cel looks like this in Humanworld.
The fandom would purge itself of the neonazis overnight.
ETA:
Fuck, they should have made Equestria Girls more realistic and made Cel a sassy, plump black woman and ended the conflict between Bronies/Pegasisters of Color and the White Supremacists instantly.
ETA2:
I’m not entirely sure but Luna (the girl on the right) looks Asian, which would further irritate the white supremacists.
Luna is on the left. Fuck. Derp.
Also, I claim Sassy, Chubby, Food-Lover Black Empress Celestia as my new spirit animal.