Check out my piece on Elle about Alek Minassian, Elliot Rodger and the threat of further incel terrorism

Interesting comments section
I do kind of disagree with women being less likely to pick apart by appearence as a good chunk of my adult bullies (I hate admitting I have any bullies but.. ) are in fact women but that could also be because of the rather enforced toxic behaviors of my homestate (we are slightly behind on any progression ) …
Back to incels though one my exes recently proclaimed himself an incel (not true but not getting into a TMI moment) which isn’t surprising. He repels women by his mean personality I can’t count how many times he made me cry and feel awful for not living up to his standards
I’m honestly a little wary with this

@Kupo
I wasn’t “coming in here to say ‘yeah but male beauty standards'” until I saw a comment specifically about that. The scope of my comment was response to another comment.

Also where did you get the idea that I was defending incels? Self-loathing explains part of why they are the way they are, but so do entitlement, isolation, poor socialization, poor emotion regulation, and online echo chambers, most of which is their fault.

I see lots of new commenters have popped up in the last few minutes. Welcome!

I will, unless the way the issue affects men is specifically brought up.

Why do we have violence?

…it’s that evil rock music!
…surely, it’s the porn!
…mental illness, of course!
…ah, his skin color!
…violent video games!
…swearing on television shows!
-and now-
…he’s a reddit redpill loser!

Incels are deplorable, but I don’t think they’re… ya know, The Crips or anything. Similar to Juggalos – there are violent people among them, and it’s really easy to demonize them because they’re terrible people. My fear is that letting them get away with “I am incel!” is no different than letting them get away with “The devil made me do it!”. It’s a copout, and it doesn’t get into the real issue at hand.

I believe incel culture does attract people who’re violent, and that between the reddit redpill culture and incel culture, there’s real damage caused and I hope someday that lawsuits can shut them down and get them in some serious legal trouble over the damage they’ve caused.

@Kupo
Eww I hate that. Bangability is such a lame concept. Yeah I can see that with lots of men, rarely women (with my bully exceptions).
Bleeeeeh

I’ve been thinking a lot on mra, incel, pua stuff. These groups are starting to really make me slightly uneasy. You think it’s regulated to internet only until you meet someone who follows it religiously although the three vary they share traits that are uncomfortable. Advocating violence, white supremacy views, harassment. It got worse when Trump got in. I’m not one to fear groups but these genuinely scare me. Maybe it’s my past as a rape survivor or abuse survivor I don’t know but this primal fear starts to gnaw at Me.

David Futrelle and other readers of this blog, I began my undergraduate study of history fifty years ago, in the fall of 1967, at the University of California at Berkeley, where I concentrated on the origins and consequences of the Thirty Years War of the Twentieth Century. My grandfather had served in the first phase of that war, World War I. My father had served in the second phase, World War II. I was particularly interested in the rise of National Socialism in Germany. This is a subject I have researched for half of a century, inspired in part by Hannah Arendt, focusing on the racist, anti-Semitic and economic origins of the imperialism that I thought provided the seed bed of the totalitarian movements that in Germany and Italy seized governments and led nations into war. In 1987, a very important 2 volume book, originally published in Germany, was translated and published in English in the United States, written by Klaus Theweleit, entitled Male Fantasies. I did not pay it much attention at the time, in my belief that economic forces where the most important influences in the history of nation states. The long gestating rise of the alt right and the prominence of misogyny among many of the young men in it have led me to reconsider the significance of Theweleit’s work. This review from the New York Times in 1987 will help you understand how Theweleit saw connections between racialist right wing movements and misogyny that we are seeing again in the United States. His book is over a thousand pages long, it is available free online. I hope the review motivates some of you to take a look at it. Archives | 1987
THE WOMEN THEY FEARED By PAUL ROBINSON
The New York Times Archives
MALE FANTASIES Volume One: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. By Klaus Theweleit. Translated by Stephen Conway in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. Illustrated. 517 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cloth, $25. Paper, $14.95.
FIRST published in Germany 10 years ago, Klaus Theweleit’s book is ostensibly a study of the imaginative world of the German Freikorps movement. The Freikorps units were paramilitary groups composed of World War I veterans who fought against the newly formed Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1923. They engaged in bloody confrontations with republican loyalists and engineered some of the more notorious assassinations of the period, such as those of the Catholic Center Party leader Mattias Erzberger and Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau. They believed that the German Army had never been truly defeated in the Great War, only ”stabbed in the back” by leftist-sympathizing civilians.
Although most of these illegal military organizations were disbanded with the stabilization of the Republic in 1923, a large number of their members ultimately found a home in the Nazi regime. A classic example is provided by Rudolf Hoss, who became commandant of Auschwitz. The Freikorps men were profoundly anti-Communist, devoted to the defense of what they viewed as traditional German culture, and seemingly addicted to a life of soldiering.
As a precursor of Nazism, the Freikorps movement has been the subject of a substantial amount of historical research. Klaus Theweleit’s distinctive contribution is to examine the fantasies of the Freikorps soldiers, under the assumption that their intellectual and emotional predilections would explain their behavior. He does so primarily through a close reading of the autobiographies and novels of a select group of Freikorps members (or ”soldier males,” as he likes to call them). In particular he draws our attention to the ideas they entertained about women and sex.
Depending on your taste, ”Male Fantasies” might be judged exceptionally rich or just plain disorderly. Mr. Theweleit, who is a West German freelance writer, himself calls the book ”meandering,” and a reviewer is more than usually hard pressed to summarize its argument. It contains a good deal of unanchored psychoanalytic theorizing, numerous asides and long stretches of text that have no obvious bearing on the Freikorps movement. In addition it begs more than its share of empirical and conceptual questions. Nonetheless, one can’t read it without feeling that Mr. Theweleit is onto something: the piling up of examples eventually begins to take its toll on even the most skeptical.
His central contention is that the Freikorps soldiers were afraid of women. Indeed, not just afraid, they were deeply hostile to them, and their ultimate goal was to murder them. Women, in their view, came in only two varieties: Red and White. The White woman was the nurse, the mother, the sister. She was distinguished above all else by her sexlessness. The Red woman, on the other hand, was a whore and a Communist. She was a kind of distillation of sexuality, threatening to engulf the male in a whirlpool of bodily and emotional ecstasy. This, of course, was the woman the Freikorps soldier wished to kill, because she endangered his identity, his sense of self as a fixed and bounded being. In this manner Mr. Theweleit links the Freikorps soldiers’ fantasies of women to their practical life as illegal anti-Communist guerillas: the Republic had to be destroyed because it empowered the lascivious Red woman, while it failed to protect the White woman’s sexual purity.
Among the most interesting features of Mr. Theweleit’s analysis is his examination of two distinctive elements in the fascist imagination: liquidity and dirt. He argues that aquatic and other liquid metaphors were associated in the minds of these soldiers with the loss of a firm sense of identity. Much of their literature speaks of Communism as a flood, a stream, or a kind of boiling or exploding of the earth – images he shows to be associated traditionally with sexuality.
In similar fashion, he argues that the idea of dirt terrified the Freikorps soldiers precisely because it also was linked in their minds to the loss of self and to bodily pleasure. The connection is perhaps clearest when the metaphors of liquidity and filth are combined, as in such notions as mire, morass, slime and excrement. Again, Mr. Theweleit shows how the anti-Communist rhetoric of the Freikorps soldiers was systematically informed by such metaphors, and he makes a plausible case for linking this political sentiment to their fear of sexuality. The member of the Freikorps, he writes, was hostile to ”all of the hybrid substances that were produced by the body and flowed on, in, over, and out of the body: the floods and stickiness of sucking kisses; the swamps of the vagina, with their slime and mire; the pap and slime of male semen; the film of sweat . . . the warmth that dissolves physical boundaries.” As this passage suggests, much of the power of Mr. Theweleit’s book depends on his own rhetoric, which is luxuriant and fearless.
The principal weakness of ”Male Fantasies” is its inability to demonstrate that the attitudes it explores were in any way limited to, or even characteristic of, the men who joined the Freikorps movement. Even if we are persuaded by the emotional connections he charts (and I am myself persuaded only in part), they would appear to be the common psychic property of bourgeois males – and perhaps of nonbourgeois males as well – in Western society since the French Revolution. In other words, there seems to be no reason to limit them to Germans, fascists or members of the Freikorps. Mr. Theweleit attributes the fantasies of his ”soldier males” to problems they encountered in the first year of life (in particular to an abrupt termination of the mother-child ”symbiosis”), but he presents not a shred of evidence to suggest that their childhood experiences differed from those of anyone else. Since he can’t establish their distinctiveness, in the end he asks us to believe that their hatred of women and fear of sexuality were merely an exaggerated version of what all men feel, or have felt for the past two centuries. The claim, I hardly need say, is a grand one, yet I find it difficult to dismiss out of hand. Mr. Theweleit is one of those intellectual mavericks, who, while he does not always respect the conventions of scholarship, may have captured a glimpse of our souls.”
This is the URL to another discussion of the book: https://timeline.com/male-fantasies-fascism-study-efe0a2773d1f
If you are unfamiliar with this analysis, learn about it now. These monsters have reawakened, they are back, living in our midst, and extremely dangerous.

I just posted this on another thread because I didn’t see your latest blogs about him. So here it is again. Incels In Psych Today

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/minority-report/201804/the-incel-involuntary-celibacy-problem

@Alan, you don’t think there is any marketing or social pressure that men have to deal with related to looks? It may not be as bad (except in porn where it’s worse) but it’s there. Every movie nowadays is a superhero movie, and a lot of those guys need HGH to get like that. That is not a realistic standard.

– Welcome to womens’ world! Cry me a river!

Another article: https://timeline.com/male-fantasies-fascism-study-efe0a2773d1f
Laura Smith
This study of fascist men shows their terrifying fascination with sex, death, and authority
‘Male Fantasies’ examined the inner lives of German fascists and reached a horrifying conclusion.
After World War I, a German paramilitary commander stood in the countryside, surveying a grisly scene: a lovers’ picnic interrupted by a grenade. The couple’s blood-smeared, mangled corpses gave the commander a strange surge of pleasure. The woman was a Communist whore, the commander thought, one of the many “Red women” destroying his homeland in the years since the armistice. He was a commander in the Freikorps, a paramilitary group made up of downtrodden German veterans who blamed Communist revolutionaries for their loss of the war. Many of the Freikorps later joined the Nazi regime. Perpetual war was not just their work, but their reason to be, the will to live merging with death. And one book would make a quest of understanding why.
Though afterward the Holocaust was declared “unthinkable,” that label was widely seen as an urgent call to untangle its root causes. Who did this and what were their motives? More than three decades after World War II ended, Klaus Theweleit’s 1977 book Male Fantasies, sought an unusual path to understanding. Theweleit, a German doctoral student in literature, wanted to understand the fascist man’s deepest desires. Not why did they do what they did, but what did they want? As German historian Sven Reichardt points out, while others sought political explanations for fascist violence, Theweleit shocked readers by looking to their quotidian lives for answers. The resulting two-volume book is an intimate analysis of the letters, poems, diaries, and novels of the Freikorpsmen: fascism up close and personal. To modern readers, the Freikorpsmen’s fantasy life will be familiar: a country in decline, a nationalistic call to purge it of disorder, a clear separation between men and women, rich and poor, your kind and the other.
When the book was published in Germany, it became a cult classic and required reading in leftist circles. “Everyone — at universities, in left-wing undogmatic circles, in communal communities or groups of men — read the book at the time,” said one German writer. In 1987, the book was released in English and instantly, modern-day parallels were drawn. A New York Times reviewer wrote that Theweleit had “captured a glimpse of our souls.”
While other writers sought to understand the rise of Nazism by looking directly at Nazi violence, Theweleit, perhaps sensing that this direct path was too on the nose, used a different access point to the proto-fascist mind: their relationship to women. For the Freikorps men, there are three kinds of women: their absent wives/girlfriends/fiancées; the pure, upper-class “white nurses” serving the cause; and the “Red women,” the unruly communist revolutionaries waving flags in the streets. The Freikorps violence was not limited to women, but women are a potent symbol of their most primal fears: the dissolution of the self in another. Sex and the female body are, to them, nothing short of horrifying, so it is better that women be absent, separate, or dead.
When the Freikorpsmen’s wives appear in their writing, they are usually nameless and only mentioned in passing, even when they die. One Freikorspman’s writes only of his wife, “When I came home, I found my wife suffering from a severe nervous disorder. She died soon afterward.” Two pages later, he mentions honeymooning with his second wife. The white nurse is similarly unthreatening. She is sterile, sexless, and statuesque.
The “red women” however, are where the ugliness really lives. They represent everything that the order-obsessed Freikorpsmen fear: unwieldy sexuality, the chaos of revolution, the mingling of people regardless of class, creed, and color. “It’s a well-known fact that women are always at the head of these kinds of riots,” a Freikorps General’s speech read. “And if one of our leaders gives the order to shoot and a few old girls get blown up, the whole world starts screaming about blooodthirsty soldiers shooting down innocent women and children. As if women were always innocent.”
Throughout their writing, the Freikorpsmen are nearly drooling over the opportunities they have to murder these “red women” and stop the “filthy-red wave.” Theweleit quotes a scene from a fascist novel in which a Communist woman is confronted by Freikorpsman: “his sight is pointing straight into her mouth, into the center of that slobbering hole, so wide open with hysteria that he can even see the gums.” Once he shoots her point blank in the face, he is amazed. The shot “threw her onto her back, as if she had been blown over by some gigantic wind. Is that thing at his feet really her?”
It is possible to read Male Fantasies as not really about the Freikorpsmen at all, but about an “irreducible human desire,” as Barbara Erenreich writes in the book’s English introduction. In 2004, historian Robert Paxton warned in his book on fascism that we should “not look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their swastikas.’’ They are in our midst, he was saying, perhaps in different clothes (though admittedly, sometimes they don’t bother with a wardrobe change). Theweleit’s startling proposition is that the Freikorsmen were human, that their fantasy life is alive and well.

Consider that a great deal of the support for Donald Trump was based on simple opposition to the possibility that a woman might be the President. Recall the relentless stream of misogynistic insults Trump has thrown at women. Observe the enthusiasm for Trump because of his sexism and his comments disparaging all groups that his supporters consider to be the other, the impure, the threatening. From the review in my first post: “Among the most interesting features of Mr. Theweleit’s analysis is his examination of two distinctive elements in the fascist imagination: liquidity and dirt. He argues that aquatic and other liquid metaphors were associated in the minds of these soldiers with the loss of a firm sense of identity. Much of their literature speaks of Communism as a flood, a stream, or a kind of boiling or exploding of the earth – images he shows to be associated traditionally with sexuality.”
Recall Donald Trump’s revulsion at the fact of a breast feeding woman providing for her child: CNN)Donald Trump had an “absolute meltdown” when a lawyer requested a break from a 2011 deposition to pump breast milk. “He got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me and he screamed, ‘You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,’ and he ran out of there,” attorney Elizabeth Beck told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Wednesday morning.
Recall Donald Trump’s remarks to Megyn Kelly: “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Friday night that Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her eyes” when she aggressively questioned him during Thursday’s presidential debate.
“She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions,” Trump said in a CNN interview. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever. In my opinion, she was off base.”
Theweleit would have seen Trump’s and his supporters’ hatred towards women for what it is, an obvious sign of their fascistic inclinations, not some mere epiphenomenon.

People seem to be forgetting that in these comments.

Nobody has forgotten that power and dominance are key to the male gender role. We’ve talked about it countless times on this site. It’s just not the direction the conversation went in.

I just saw a post on one of Germanys bigger news sites, asking “was he an incel” and I went “finally!”. And then the fucking thing starts with talking about mental illness. And claims incel is about involuntary celibacy, without going into depth. At least the accompanying “explaining about incel”-article was somewhat better and the comments (even though they’re closed now) pretty uplifting. But…. Ugh. “some comments demeaning women”.