By David Futrelle
Check out my piece at the Globe and Mail today about shutting incel forums the hell down. Here’s a snippet:
[I]f appeals to shared humanity are out, is there anything else we can do? We may not be able to win back those who have plunged too deeply into the incel rabbit hole, but we can take steps to limit their ability to recruit new members. Incels aren’t born; they’re made. Sure, most new incel recruits start out embittered and lonely. But they are radicalized by their incel peers on a relatively small number of message boards devoted to the incel ideology.
So we should take a page from the anti-fascist activists who’ve done so much to kick back against the so-called “alt-right” over the last year – not only by confronting the fascists in the streets but also working diligently behind the scenes to take away their platforms online.
You can find the piece here.
Why specifically female YouTube anti-feminists?
Oh look it’s fucking Robin Hanson and his fucking execrable personal though-bilge, Overcoming Bias.
This jackass is the alpha and omega of asshole-just-asking-questions, the veritable Mother of Sealions. A jackoff whose neoconservative just-asking-questions was the springboard that launched the Dark Enlightenment. But, you guys, torturing can be ethical! Here’s a fucking thought experiment where we fuel interstellar civilizations by harvesting the tears of eternally tortured children! I’ll argue for paragraphs about how that torture is completely-fucking-justified, but I’ll cap it off with a saucy you decide or some equivocating bullshit! Aren’t I bright and contrarian and ever-so-clever?
I have a lot of words. I am exorbitant in my prose, and can disgorge discourse at a whim on topics from binary to Byzantium. And I do not have words to express my violent seething disdain for that swaggering blatherskite. The neo-fascistic apotheosis we see in the world might as well have the name Robin Fucking Hanson etched into every fractal span of it with glowing-red hot embers of hate; a hate so shattering that AM itself might crack open a jagged maw to scream. Fuck Robin Hanson.
ahem
Sorry, I have feelings about that person.
Scild, can I assume that this guy is a gigantic asshole? I have only heard of him from that stupid twitter thread.
And now I wish I never had. Yuck!
If he gets Scild that heated up, he must be pretty damn bad.
So … not keen on him then, Scild? 😛
You are, I will happily repeat, impressive.
In other news – Milo’s sacked all his staff and Red State has had a huge writers purge. Seems being alt right don’t pay the bills.
Geez, Scild, don’t hold it in. Let us know what you’re feeling!
My current thinking on incels is that sex isn’t their problem. It’s their excuse. They feed on and enjoy the rage and thwarted entitlement and assumed victimhood.
And no, I don’t wish them or any other rage junkies on innocent sex workers.
never heard of him either. what’s the dark enlightenment? sam harris interviewed him. I wonder if sam is going to start inviting edgy alt-liters on his podcast, you know, for “honest, rational debate”.
kupo, I was thinking of lauren southern but forgot her name.
back to robin, he posted this on his twitter “Women are fatter than men in developing countries but slimmer in developed countries.” with a link to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X17302435
if its true another manosphere trope has been debunked.
Hello, fellow mammothers! Long time lurker, first time poster. I just wanted to give a shout out to David for being a great host & running a great site & to ya’ll for providing exciting, interesting,& intelligent dialogue! Keep it up!
David has another article out, in The Cut:
https://thecut.com/2018/04/incel-meaning-rebellion-alex-minassian-elliot-rodger-reddit.html
ok so now conspiracy theorists are claiming that incel terrorists are mk ultra sleepers who got activated to kill at specific times. the theory is that people are stripped of identity, ego, memories, implanted with code words/triggers, and kept on the down low until they are needed to kill certain people at certain times to keep the general populace living in a fear based state.
gives the term “sleeper cell” a whole new meaning.
Robin Hanson is not only a terrible human being, he is the wellspring of terribleness; the ur-terrible, if you will. If you trace any bad idea on the internet far back enough, there’s about a fifty percent chance that it began with him. His opinions are not only deeply hateful, but his style can almost single-handedly be credited with spreading the phenomenon of privileged men indulging in bloviated sounding-off while calling themselves “rational”, and all its consequences.
Unlike his notable proteges Curtis Yarvin, Eliezer Yudkowsky and (indirectly) Scott Alexander, Hanson is an academic. He has no excuse for sharing the same wilful blindness, the same overwhelming arrogance, and the same narcissistic anti-intellectualism as them. He should know better.
While Scildfreja’s position may seem extreme, I assure you that it is in fact a moderate one.
Bullying
I think it is usual to think that bully only happen when you are young and in school and once you are grown and go to work, all bullies become “mature” and mostly everyone is friends. I find this is not true.
but firstly, for solidarity, I want to say I also experienced plenty bullying, at school and also at home. At home it was not for any long time, it is from my oldest brother and he left home when i was quite young because he is much older than me. but at school it started when I was about 10 or 11 and continued until I left. like @kupo said, bullying is arbitrary. for example, first I mainly bullied because of my appearance, they said my nose is big and my teeth are weird looking and I look like gay or a girl. now I know there is nothing wrong with my face, it is quite ordinary face, and I also know I am bisexual so I don’t care if someone calls me gay. and I don’t care if someone says i am feminine either. but at school I believed always that I am ugly and strange. mostly it is girls and boys (even though I said on another thread girls never said anything nastly to me), but the girls stopped because they learned one person who is their friend is my neighbour and decided I am okay, if that friend likes me. however boys continued as boys always do!
but my point is not just about school – and second not just to say my story. I think there is this idea that bullying will make you tough or that bullying is what causes school attacks. I can say no to both. bullying made me weak, I believed they are correct about me, that I am nothing and ugly and strange in my behaviour. bullying made me weak to deal with other things in my life. secondly, no it didn’t make me want to hurt other students, even these who bullied me – quite simply, I wanted that they will stop. of course there is no way to make such people stop – so I just became quiet and stay with my friends and try to be mostly invisible so they will select another target. I know that is not okay, to wish for another will be their victim, not me – but it is what my reason at that time said.
but my final point – bullying does not stop after school. these people receive no reprimand or punish and when they go to work, they will continue. I met plenty in my job, every nationality they exist. people who tell me they don’t like “people like me” on ships, that people from my country at dishonest and of course, harassment and sexual assault. and you ask for help? sorry, not possible because who you ask is also a bully and they will betray you ? that is why feminism is important – because people who are misogynist, or patriarch or such things like MRA and incel is what bullies are when they grow. social justice is for people who still can’t escape these people they thought they left in school.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think you can fight this the way you can fight other right wing ideologies. There is a guy at my job like this, he glares at me in kind of a funny way and hovers around all the waitresses. Bullying isn’t going to fix him. We have a situation where extremely socially awkward men live in a society where community and local social networks have collapsed. These are guys who depended on their mother’s arranging their marriages for the past few thousand years. It’s not a political ideology, its a very immature and narcissistic reaction to a real societal phenomena of socially awkward men failing at dating and retreating into the internet. You can’t fight this like an ideology, it’s narcissistic immaturity slamming against a sad reality. A lot of men have trouble with women, but they don’t respond with “kill all humanity”. Trying to fight them with harassment, bullying, and doxing is just going to push their buttons.
Isn’t this the case already if you do legal sex work at a brothel rather than being self employed, in countries or states where brothels are legal? Your daily work task includes sleeping with the clients at the brothel, and you can’t just say “no” to this if you don’t wanna risk losing your job.
That’s one reason I don’t think it really works to go “sex work should be legal because it’s just like any other job when you go beyond your prejudices”. Forcing someone to have sex isn’t like forcing them to, like, do the dishes if they work in a restaurant.
(There might still, at the end of the day, be other good arguments for making it completely legal rather than doing the Nordic model – if, as some people claim, making it legal means less violence against sex workers than the Nordic model does. But “it’s just like any other job” isn’t a good argument in my book.)
It really isn’t. Neither a good argument nor “just like any other job.” Hell, half the time I’ve wound up treating sex workers more like a therapist – they’re usually good listeners, and there’s things it’s rather hard to say to collegues and impossible to say to subordinates. Maybe I’ve been lucky.
What I’d like to see – not only legal, but a reasonably well respected profession.
David, I read your pieces in The Guardian and The Globe. I am, as always, impressed and grateful for your writings. Your reasoned thoughtfulness and intelligent analyses, combined with some compassion for both the incels, MRAs and patriarchal fools AND the women and other targets and victims makes me hopeful that these terrible, painful…sometimes life-threatening attitudes can be dealt with in ways that encourage real healing and growth.
Thank you, and keep up the great work.
If a client acts in a way that suggests violence or other objectionable behaviour, or they lacked basic hygiene for example, it should be possible for the sex worker to refuse based on health and safety laws (you would think).
@Shadowplay, @idli, you already said his name twice. Stop now or you might summon him!
!!!! Noooooooooo !!!!
In my baby barristering days I spent a lot of Saturday mornings at the old Bow Street Magistrates Court. We used to hang around outside with the working girls. They’d be up for the rather Dickensian offence of “Being a common prostitute…”.
But as one of them said “We both rent out our mouths to people”. Can’t argue with that.
(I’m sure better historians than me can point out examples of when courtesan or whatever was just regarded as another profession)
ETA: You’ll be glad to know the law now recognises women as people.
http://metro.co.uk/2007/06/26/common-prostitute-erased-from-law-3432512/
Their hours billable are more reasonable. 😛
17th century Paris, Japan until about 1850, Rome around the time of Augustus, Phoenecian temple prostitutes – theres been a few times when it’s been a very respectable profession for some (by no means all).
@Dvärghundspossen
Not generally. It’s typically the case in places where brothels are *illegal*, though.
Just as with other professions involving intimate contact (I used to be a masseuse, and have done some minor sex work, thougj never as a full-time thing ), you can absolutely turn down clients; you’ll just make less money if you’re too picky.
Also, brothels aren’t the be all end all of swx work. A lotta (uncoerced*) sex workers are independents or contractors (most folks billed as escorts are the latter, frex), and have a whole lotta flexibility re: clients. This is a big attraction to a lotta folks.
Making sex work illegal helps absolutely nobody, and directly harms quite a lot of folks. Legalisation may have harmful effects too, depending on surrounding regulations, but I’m not aware of any current or proposed models that are anything like as bad as the current US (frex) system.
Sex employees in a situation where they have ordinary labour protections are no more coerced than anyone else with a job.
*Except insofar as capitalism coerces everyone living in its grasp to do labour that they mightnt otherwise choose to gain sustenance, of course
Yeah it seems pretty obvious to me that criminalizing people who sell sex is the worst option. But from what I’ve read German brothels, for instance, isn’t a great place to work either.
But re coercion – yeah you’re always coerced to do your job in a way. Even if you freely took on a certain profession, once you’re in, there’s an element of coercion. I freely became a university professor but now that I am, I can’t just stay home from a lecture if I totally don’t feel like lecturing today. I still gotta do it. My point was that this seems worse in the case of sex than in the case of other activities.
Just a quiet heads up – the new Doom movie has a female lead.
The screaming of gamebros should be somewhat loud.
Shadow;
I love doom, I am a big fan and I think honeslty there will not be so much outrage – all doom fans want is a good film, no matter who leads. because previous movies suck so much!