By David Futrelle
So here’s a screenshot floating around the internet that offers a sensible, common-sense solution to the problem of incels literally murdering people because they’re angry no hot women with have sex with them.
And by “sensible” and” “common-sense” I mean, “what the fucking fuck is this fuckery?”
Here’s the full text if you’d rather not squint at that:
People make is sound as if the “Incel Rebellion” is a laughing matter and that people don’t understand problem.
The incels are not the problem, but rather they are a symptom that something is very wrong in our society — and unless their legitimate grievances are addressed this could very soon spiral out of control just like what happened in Iraq, Libya and Syria when their respective governments refused to address and deal with the legitimate grievances a portion of their popolation had.
Calling the Incels a bunch of virgins and “frustrated losers with communication skills equal to that of an autistic potato” is oversimplifying the problem yes they are all that but why are they frustrated virgins?
The real issue is that with the advancement of makeup, healthy at any size bullshit, feminism and through social engineering a lot of women have become detached from reality. The reason these Incels arn’t getting laid is because women with a sexual market value equal to theirs use makeup to go from a 3/10 – 7/10 (false marketing in my opinion and should be a punishable offense) to fuck with men above their league.
So I propose that rather than making Incels look bad we look at the reasons they’ve become this way and what steps we can take to deconflict and reverse things because, let’s be real calling them names, labeling them a terrorist organization etc isn’t going to make the problem go away.
There are several ways I propose we do this:
1) Women are no longer allowed to wear makeup, ie falsely advertise their beauty and hence stop them from banging guys above their league.
2) Women are only allowed to date men with equal sexual market value to them. State-mandated tests should be made and everyone get a sexual-market value card ranging from 1/10 to 10/10, like an ID card.
3) Every time a woman sleeps with a new man she lose one 1 rank on her sexual-market value card until she reach the lowest rank 1/10.
4) There’s no way to rise through the ranks other than through excercise
5) Women with more than 9 sexual partners and single moms should be forced by the state to date and have sex with incels that can’t get any women despite the above changes.
This would deal with the problem not the symptom and is the ay we deal with everything from counter-piracy to counter- terrorism. The incel threat is real and should be treated the same way.
Though I haven’t been able to track this screenshot to its source, my guess — as someone who has been reading this sort of shit for years — is that it’s a sincere post from an incel sympathizer. If it’s a parody, and I really don’t think it is, it’s pitch-perfect, written by someone who has utterly mastered contemporary internet misogynist logic.
H/T — r/BadEconomics via Talia Lavin on Twitter.
<entirely unrelated complaining>
If I see one more person with a username like “Progressive Feminist #MeToo #Resist” post one more tweet like “I support Al Franken because he’s a Democrat and one of his accusers is a Republican,” I’m going to punch this whole worthless planet in half.
</entirely unrelated complaining>
http://i.imgur.com/dCJT2wX.jpg
SFHC,
There’s a Republican who changed parties to run as a Democrat on basically a “bitches be lyin'” platform against the (of course) woman who was appointed to Franken’s old seat.
https://www.msnbc.com/katy-tur/watch/richard-painter-running-for-al-franken-s-seat-says-the-senator-deserved-better-1222575171865
I’m hoping my fellow Minnesotan DFLers are not stupid enough to fall for this and vote for a guy who was a member of the goddamn George W Bush administration, but I don’t know.
The Uglies series, though, doesn’t feature people being ranked by hotness. “Uglies” are tweens and teens. All members of the society are totally overhauled at sixteen, and made beautiful by extensive plastic surgery. Their ideology is that differences in attractiveness caused social inequity in the past. Also anorexia and the use of fossil fuels, both of which they have beat.
The people who are trying to take down the dystopia are a group of older people who left, and some younger ones who are evading the surgery completely. But being ‘ugly’ (ie, normal unaltered person) is an act of defiance, not something they’re stigmatized for.
It’s a really good series. Westerfeld is a terrific writer. I also recommend his Leviathan books–wild WWI diesel-and-biopunk. Very cool.
@redsilk
Hello, I’m not massively familiar with comics, but I have read Sandman – Hippolyta was also pregnant with Daniel in Sandman, under clear magical/dream imprisonment circumstances. That’s explained later on in the series as the reason Dream chooses him as a successor – he has been “gestated in dreams”.
@dalillama
This was also my take on it. Dream is not presented as a a hero. He is a massive shit, and the series is about him realising he is a massive shit and effectively committing suicide. The whole thing where he imprisons a girl for a thousand years in hell for turning him down – I came away from that story feeling it was made completely clear that action was unforgivable. One of the story arcs is when he comes to realise what he did to her, and it contributes largely to his eventual decision to die.
(BTW I’m not for one second saying there are not problematic things in that series. There are a lot of them. I have considerable issues with the treatment of Wanda in A Game of You, for example. But I do think those two particular criticisms are not points I agree with)
Yeah I’m not gonna die on this hill or anything, but the girl (I don’t remember her name right now) who was sent to Hell muses that maybe she could have walked away if she wanted to, like she starts to blame herself a bit and as I recall it’s not clearly stated that she’s wrong in doing so… that made me really uncomfortable…
Yeah, Dream sort of commits suicide in the end and, like, we’re not supposed to think he’s a great guy, but he still gets some sort of tragic brooding anti-hero treatment, and yeah… I was kind of in love with him when reading the series as young and then on re-reading it as middle-aged I was like ugh.
Also the women of the series are continuously saddled with being the responsible ones who also do all the emotional labour for the brooding men like Dream. Even freaking Delirium gets saddled with that role!
But I’m not dying on the hill that the series let him off too lightly.
Yeah Wanda was also problematic. We’re clearly meant to sympathize with her and the transphobia she endures, but was it necessary to have the freaking gods declare her “not a real woman”? And also she doesn’t find happiness until she’s dead. But this is something Neil Gaiman has really thought about and addressed in interviews afterwards.
@dvarghundspossen
Well, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree – you’re right, this hill is not worth dying on 🙂
Different people take different things away from books, and I think to a certain extent this depends on the baggage we bring to a reading. A book’s like a conversation between us and the author – we contribute to it as well; if I tell you to imagine “a handsome man with black hair and hazel eyes” you and I would see two different men. So you and I might have interpreted the story differently, depending on what we were bringing to the party.
To be fair, I read Sandman in my early 20s so it’s been a long time since I looked at it. Maybe I’ll have the same reaction when I pick it up again!
And who knows: I might see it differently if I read it a third time! 😉
I lived in quite a sheltered, religious household. Wanda from A Game Of You was the first trans character I encountered; and was before I had encountered any openly trans people in real life either. The fact that she’s not only very humanised, but also given agency (and given a fantastic scene in which she dresses the gods themselves down for not respecting her agency) was very formative for me.
At the time, I also liked how humanised the other female characters were, especially compared to other ’90s comics. Nowadays… yeah, less so.
(At the risk of whataboutthemenzing, the other thing that really struck me about Sandman when I was a kid is that it avoids the normal problematic attitudes that comics have towards power and violence. So much of the media that boys consume makes the assumption that being a protagonist is equivalent to being an inflicter of violence upon those weaker than you, and I think that’s not a good message to saturate your media with.)
I think we’re agreed then: we all need to go read Sandman again!
Ah crap, it’s in my damned storage locker. Ah well, I’ll probably dig it up next time I drop off some DVDs.
Aw who am I kidding, I won’t do that….
“There’s a Republican who changed parties to run as a Democrat on basically a “bitches be lyin’” platform against the (of course) woman who was appointed to Franken’s old seat.”
Tulsi Gabbard (many Dems speculate she will run for vice president for Sanders in next pres election and then onto pres candidate further down the line) used to be a republican and if you dig deep into her connections, there are some red (no pun intended) flags there.
@idli
You just going to pretend that whole conversation didn’t happen and refuse to answer the questions asked of you?
I like how (by which I mean, I dislike how) SMV is a scale from 1 to 10. That’s… not how any market evaluation works. Like, what do the numbers mean? A market, and the abstract concept of ‘the market’, is a forum for exchange. And I get that the ‘sexual market’ describes the system of access to a woman’s naughty bits and the status intrinsic in accessing her naughty bits in exchange for… something or other (sometimes Catan resources, sometimes protection from brown violence, sometimes simply penis). But a relative hotness scale is no way to measure value* in a market
What is a HB9? What is a standard trade for an HB9? How much ore is an HB9 worth? If you have a 6 worth of ore and a 3 worth of penis, does that add to HB9 or even out to 4.5? If you pool together 3 penes, all worth 3, does that make a HB9 worthy 4some? If you have combined resources, genitals, and ninja skillz worth 16, can you afford all the HB9s you can find, or are you limited to a pair of 8s/quadruple 4s?
The only way a 1-10 scale makes any sense** is if the ‘sexual market’ is immune to inflationary and deflationary effects (which we know it isn’t, cos of all the whining about fat gals gaining value due to betas or whatever) or if there’s some force or system keeping the value, combined or otherwise, of anyone at or below 10 (the government taxes resources, sure, but pretty sure one’s junk is duty free)
I fell into an economics related wikihole recently, and ^this is what popped out when I read the OP. Pls send halp O.o
*And not just cos it’s gross
**Y’all know what I mean
It’s also weird that proponents of SMV assume that niche markets don’t exist and tastes never change.
Take salsa. Most people like it. Some like hot, some mild, some medium, some like super hot ghost pepper salsa and others sweet salsa made with peach or mango. Some people like the green kind. Some prefer chunky, others the more saucy kind. Some like fresh cilantro in their salsa and some don’t. Some people don’t like salsa at all. Others can’t eat it because they’re allergic to nightshades. Lots of people like more than one type of salsa. The grocery store makes a wide variety of salsas available because different people have different preferences. And some salsas are more popular in some areas, less in others. If you applied the SMV model to salsa, people would universally love, let’s say extra hot salsa. If they can’t obtain extra hot, they get hot. If they can’t get hot, medium. And so on. The idea that there is a universal 10, a universal 5 or universal 1 that can be applied to humans not only fails to take into account that people aren’t consumer goods, it fails because marketing consumer goods doesn’t even work like that anyway.
> Alan
Good one !
I wonder that if the root of my SMV is -1, can i be considered at least as an imaginary friend ?
@occasional reader The answer to that is complex.
@Axecalibur: Exactly. They talk about a market and forget how complicated real markets are.
I mean, there is such a thing as society’s beauty standards, and you could make a rough estimation of how well people conform to them. I guess many people’s tastes roughly align with those beauty standards (because, well, everyone’s influenced by the society they live in). Still, even given this, it’s true that
– it’s fairly common to have more niche tastes
– other factors than mere looks have a lot of effect on who’s attracted to whom
– and even an answer to “how well does this person conform to society’s beauty standards” is gonna be, as I said, rough.
I think the reason the whole “sexual marketplace” doesn’t make sense is because they give it a capitalist lens. (It also doesn’t make sense ’cause it’s spawned of idiots, but that’s another thing.)
[mild content warning for objectification]
The “SMV” exists and is as old as misogyny. Fathers get baby girls, and those baby girls are commodities that have a worth to the father. It’s in his interest to value that possession as highly as possible, and to protect that possession from devaluing until he can sell her. Other men, meanwhile, want to get those girls when they’re young enough to marry but no older than that, and they want to get them for the lowest price, so it’s in their interest to value those girls as low as possible. Father and prospective buyer haggle, a comparative value is reached, and goods are exchanged. Like trading cows for bushels of grain. It ain’t a stock exchange, it’s a bazaar.
They’re upset that they don’t have Father to negotiate with, and they have to haggle with the product they’re buying. Father can bargain, but these women have these awful, unfair ideas like “I am a human being and have inherent value,” and “I refuse to marry someone who I dislike.” Every argument they make that I’ve seen is just them whining that women can’t be traded for a flock of sheep, and that they should be willing to negotiate their own values, preferably to bargain-basement prices.
These idiots have no sense of history or of what they’re saying, though, so they have no idea that they’re just recapitulating ancient sexist garbage with more modern language.
Huh, that’s negging, too. I guess not surprising, since the PUAs use the idea of a sexual marketplace all the time. PUAs try to wheedle the price down, Incels overturn their “buying women, dirt cheap” stall when they don’t get a lineup. Does that work?
Anyways, there’s a ramble!
I don’t know what to say. They sound totally delusional, unable to understand that they are the reason they can’t have sex (and yes I know everyone here knows that).
Incels are a major danger to society.
Hello Wayne, and welcome! There’s a welcome package stashed around here somewhere, I think the link’s on the right.
Just a quick note to be careful about internet diagnoses! Misogyny isn’t a mental illness, it’s just hate.
And they definitely are a major danger to society, I hope people start taking angry men who say hateful things online seriously as threats.
Wow, just wow.
Just yesterday I was wondering what people imagined a 10/10 girl to be like, and just like the entire Alpha Male pseudoscience garbage that it is the idea is so subjective, it might as well be a friggin unicorn for all the difference that it makes when it comes to its reality.
It amuses me that these Incels pretend that gay men, alongside plenty of people who might have no interest in this whole sex thing, don’t exist (naturally, if they think that the meaning of life is sex and nothing else). Would it be a slave market combined with some trippy Marxist elements to it when it comes to distribution? I don’t know.