By David Futrelle
Pity the poor incels, who are not only oppressed by snooty women who refuse to have sex with them just because they’re “pretty sure this guy would murder me and use my skin to make a fedora,” but also have to pay taxes.
Now, because of that first thing, incels think they shouldn’t have to do the second thing. Like many of their manosphere brothers, you see, incels are convinced that women live lives of ease, heavily subsidized with the money that Big Daddy Government extracts from hardworking male taxpayers like them (assuming they’re not living the incel dream, sitting pretty in mom’s basement without the bother of a job).
But at least non-incel men get to have sex with the women they supposedly subsidize with their tax dollars. Since these women (aka femoids, aka foids) are basically living off the government, their bodies are a “public good” that incels are unfairly being denied access to.
On Incels.me, the largest incel forum outside of Reddit, one unhappy taxcel recently demanded what he sees as justice:
The text:
Robo Sapien:
Since wagecuckcels are funding a public good that we don’t get access to, who else here thinks that verified incels shouldn’t be taxed? Or at least given prostitutes as fair compensation for state programs that go to foids? Let me know your thoughts gentleman.
Robtical:
We should either not be taxed at all or given weekly prostitutes.
Robo Sapien posted a little poll, and those who clicked on it overwhelmingly agreed:
Aggrieved entitlement in action!
The unfairness of taxes is a longtime obsession of incels. In a Incels.me thread last December, someone calling himself Dry Spell argued that women should have to pay higher taxes than men because
it’s too easy for them to make money. Women can literally flash (part of) their boobs on youtube and make easy money. They don’t even have to be super attractive.
Another commenter had a slightly more radical idea. “Women must not pay taxes,” wrote Incelman. “Thye must have sex with an incel instead.”
In another December thread, a regular commenter called wandercamp suggested that women should be forced to pay a “sex tax” — not a tax on having sex, but a tax in the form of sex — in order to prevent the sexual frustration that he thinks leads incels to seek “retribution” through mass killings.
“What would have saved the lives that ER ended?” he asked.
Sex. Thats it. 20 minutes and all of those young women would be alive.
But apparently thats too much to ask after a weekend long cock train that your average sorority sister rides each saturday.
So its simple, we make it mandatory for women to sleep with incels.
>b-but thats oppressiv…
Shut up. You wont put out for 20 minutes to save the lives of 7 people?
>we need to examine his mental state
>our culture led to thiswho cares? We want to save lives. Put out. Its that simple. You can spend 50 years researching sexual culture to solve the problem of homicidal virgins or you can put out.
>but sex is personal
Obviously not if you defend casual sex
>its enslavement
No its not. You work a certain amount of hours each week to pay taxes, and you dont call it enslavement. Requiring some of your sex to be with incels should be no problem
Stated this baldly, these various proposals to combat alleged “sexual inequality” by giving incels tax breaks and/or forcing women to have sex with them are obviously deeply offensive and completely absurd. But as I’ve said before these spurious solutions — and the perverse logic behind them — are not that far off in spirit from the more carefully worded “solutions” to so-called sexual inequality that have begun to seep into the popular discourse.
Like wandercamp here, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson thinks that “involuntary celibacy” fuels mass murders and that reducing the celibacy would reduce the murders. Like so many incels, he sees sexual inequality is fundamentally analogous to income inequality and his proposed, er, solutions seem to come straight from the incel playbook. “Sex could be directly redistributed,” he wrote in a now infamous blog post after the Toronto van attack, “or cash might be redistributed in compensation”
That’s pretty much exactly what Robo Sapien was suggesting. But Hanson isn’t an anonymous commenter on an incel forum; he’s a tenured professor whose blog post on the “redistribution of sex” inspired a New York Times column that reached millions.
Meanwhile, psych-professor-turned-self-help-guru Jordan Peterson — the most influential representative of the so-called “intellectual dark web” — also thinks that men turn violent when they can’t have sex, and wants us to essentially reorganize society in such a way that women are essentially forced to marry the guys who now call themselves incels (though he now insists that his vision of “enforced monogamy” will somehow managed not to involve force, which makes one wonder why he used the word “enforced” in the first place).
Though both would vehemently deny it, both Hanson and Peterson are de facto apologists for incel terrorism. Their ideas are as dangerous as those of incels like Robo Sapien and wandercamp; unfortunately they are much more influential.
The alleged “unfairness” of taxes is a longtime obsession of the right wing in general.
You would have thought that Thomas Paine had put that argument to rest all the way back in 1797:
(warning, gratuitously non-gender-neutral)
@Axe:
What is it, then, a preference for quality over quantity?
Catalpa-Thanks. I’m glad I’m not the only one! Also, not only did some comments get eaten, only half of my moniker auto-filled on some of them. I didn’t noticed until I posted a couple of times, so there will be some comments from “MissEB47 (Resident Rainbow” soon! 😀
Count on incels to say aloud what the rest of the manosphere thinks.
@Surplus
Lotta hypotheses around, some I think as more valid than others (but I’m not the one studying this subject, so what do I know?)
1)Kids are on their phones too much with their FaceSpace and their porns and whatnot. Of course they ain’t going forth and multiplying, they’re to busy on the internet to meet somebody (you can prolly tell, I’m not so sure about that one)
2)Young people are more liberal and open about sex, which means they’re more aware of things like consent and assault and that it’s supposed to be fun and that having sex doesn’t actually make you an adult and that maybe it’s OK for a girl to wait for the right girl. And folks are less likely to be peer pressured into tryna get laid before they’re ready. Like you proposed, quality over quantity
3)Millennials are worked too damn hard to be able to go out and build relationships. Low wages, outside our fields of study, with endless or unpredictable hours. Our version of the similar, more publicized thing going on in Japan
4)Less solid script. Olden times, the ideal was you go steady with your high school sweetheart, have sex after a certain number of dates (unless super religious), ask her dad for her hand after you landed a good union job, happily ever after. No part of that is so simple these days. Which is a really good thing in a number of ways. But, yeah, things can be confusing, so why not hold off?
5)I haven’t actually seen this out there, this is 100% me theorizing. But, while Gen Y are more accepting and open, that don’t mean we’re entirely woke about sex. I bet there’s significant ‘me and my friend did some things cos we’re all liberated and such, but it wasn’t PIV, so I’m not sure it counts’ type stuff
Not an exhaustive list, I’m sure. And, again, what do I know? But that’s what I got. Mostly tho, whatever the reason, Gen X pundits are waaay too freaked out/enthralled by this. I promise, the kids are alright 😛
I’ve seen an interview with Peterson where he proposes enforced monogamy as a solution to incel mass murderers. Then I’ve seen followers of his going “oh it’s just the system we already have in place, nothing horrendous”. The problem is that this interpretation makes zero sense of it being a proposed solution, since the system we have now clearly didn’t prevent Rodgers or Minassian from being sexless or from killing people. So “it’s just the system we have now” looks like clear back-pedaling.
I’ve also seen Peterson followers going “But it’s not gonna be the government forcing people into monogamous relationships, that would be horrible, libertarianism yada yada, obviously it’s just gonna be social pressure”… Uh yeah that’s alright then. Not.
This could be a precursor to Sovereign Citizen ideas taking root in the incel community. Would incels be fertile ground for that nonsense? If so, expect the results to be particularly toxic.
Ok, let’s turn these fools’ idea on its head for a moment. Sex Enjoyment Tax anyone ? ‘No red blooded taxpayer will wish to appear…lacking.’
It’s not mine (house point for mentioning the source) but even a joke from an old film points out how lacking in common sense this incel idea is.
I’m imagining the office potluck…
Phyllis: “Why, no one’s touched the lovely asshole casserole I brought! Warren, I thought you loved asshole casserole, let me get you a plate, at least take a bite or two, I’d hate to see it go to waste and my family already eats too much asshole casserole as it is! It’s rich stuff, so my waistline can only take eating it sparingly!”
Everyone else: “SECURITY! That Phyllis lady got in again and brought ANOTHER asshole casserole! Can you remove her from the premises and throw that shitty dish into the incinerator??”
@Tessa
So, the solution to our current problem is to keep doing exactly the same thing? How does that make any sense?
Let’s not kid ourselves: He meant exactly what he said.
It’s funny how the master communicator Peterson keeps saying things which are easily “misunderstood”. It’s almost as if that’s intentional…
It is of course impossible to disagree with Peterson. Whatever you disagreed with, you either took it out of context, or failed to understand it. Please note that the entirety of his published work and any record of what he said and did is not enough to provide context or to understand him, and his army of cultists will be ever so quick to remind you of this. You either agree with him, or you are wrong.
You’ll find similar thing with the like of Sam Harris, or Eliezer Yudkowsky; cults of personality that attract people who are ever so sure that there not just right but in fact entirely rational and reasonable, too.
Going back to the OP, though:
Every time I think we’ve reached peak linguistic fucking idiocy, I’m proved wrong 🙁
I confess. I wasn’t really cleaning out my storage unit this weekend. I was riding the weekend-long cock train.
Would I also get money redistriputed as compensation for me for just continueing to exist without any sex as an ace person, or do you need to be unhappy about your situation?
@the real cie
I bet the cock train was at least on time, unlike a normal train
@Tessa
Lobster Man should stop using words. And you should stop defending him.
@Valkyrene
Very good point.
Suppose I had sex once in the last three years; what financial compensation would I get? Is one encounter enough to exclude me?
How long do you have to be without sex before you are an incel?
What about if you are a virgin and not ace but perfectly okay with it?
How many sexual encounters do you have to have to reach the threshold to get taxed? Over what time period?
What, exactly, constitutes sex – does it have to be PiV? If so, what about “teh gays”?
How do you prove you are incel and not just cel?
and my favourite:
If an incel has sex with a government-sponsored prostitute, he is by definition no longer an incel, so he’s not entitled to have sex with a government-sponsored prostitute. Incel22!
See also: this means his prostitute simultaneously exists and does not exist
@Tessa my friend, it is just as coercive as he said outright.
What happens to people who do not follow enforced monogamy? In some cases they go to jail and sometimes worse, right? Lots of people have spent decades trying to dismantle this rotten egg called enforced monogamy and quite frankly we are not going back.
Where’s all the support for people who want to stick tree branches or bits into people? I’m not paying a cent more in tax until the government delivers me foliage of my choosing and a rando for me to stick it into.
Treecels are people too. Sad, lonely people sitting at home with a wilted branch because the government won’t fix it. Time to write more of my manifesto “My twisted tree root that no one will let me stick into someone.”
No, no, no! It’s certainly not the same thing! You see that “one man, one woman” bit there? That isn’t enforced. Gays can marry now! Obviously the fact that gay marriage/sex isn’t outlawed (non-coercively, of course) is CLEARLY the cause of the incel slayings, because something something moral degeneracy.
/sarcasm
It’s almost as if he is trying to radicalise his fanboys and swing over anyone who is on the verge of becoming one.
Everyone else? They just doooon’t understaaaaaaaand.
@Tessa
“Enforced” is somewhat ambiguous. It usually means enforced, but yes, it can mean anything from “Firing squad if you don’t” to “We will glare at you over the tops of our glasses if you don’t.”
“Monogamy” is also ambiguous. It can mean a maximum of one sex partner, as you claim. It can also mean exactly one sex partner, i.e. a compulsary sex partner. Marital rape was legal in many places until the 1990s. It still is in many countries.
So when Jorden says something ambiguous, it’s unreasonable to complain people are taking it the wrong way. If you want to speak to millions without being misunderstood, you need to be clear.
Unless, of course, he’s deliberately unclear. That way, when people attack you for saying A, you can claim you meant B. And when people attack you for saying B you can claim you meant C. And when people complain about C, then obviously you meant A. Most people here believe that’s what he’s doing, and hoo boy can I see why.
Personally I suspect that he’s ambiguous because he hasn’t thought it through. I think he’s too puffed up with his own importance to be properly critical of his own ideas. He needs peer review, but he’s too arrogant to listen. He’s got God on his side so he doesn’t need anything else.
@ Buttercup Q. Skullpants
If, twenty years ago, I had tried to imagine the future, I’m pretty sure that “people proposing satirical ideas from Aristophanes as serious policy” would not have been on my list of predictions.
(PS — been meaning to compliment you on your icon — “Heeeeeeeliummmmm)
Hmm, well I only have part of one boob (thanks, breast cancer), but I somehow doubt flashing it (or the other intact one) on You Tube would pay enough to keep me in scented candles, let alone dinner.
Dang: at 58 I need a career plan that doesn’t include public monetised nudity.
Some of Peterson’s fans claim that we already have enforced monogamy, therefore he didn’t say anything bad. But when people point out that monogamy and marriage are already encouraged, lots of his fans jump in to say that we don’t have that anymore and feminists are dismantling the order of things and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, he definitely means whatever his supporters want him to mean at the moment. The goalposts are constantly shifting.
I’d also like to point out that David has a formal education. Lots of commenters here are formally educated, if not the majority. That is university degree or advanced degree. The commenters that aren’t formally educated tend to be well read. Everyone who comments regularly seems to be intelligent. Not that I know or care anyone’s IQ score, but the regular and semi-regular commenters tend to display reading comprehension, clear thinking, and reason. How likely is it that we all object to Jordan Peterson simply because we don’t understand him? Not really very likely.
Also, if he wants to be a public intellectual figure, he needs to be able to boil his message down to something easily digested in a TV or print story. You shouldn’t have to read all his printed work and watch all his YouTube videos to know the gist of what he’s saying. That’s the biggest part of the gig. Either he’s incompetent, or he’s being intentionally vague in order to dogwhistle to his real audience. Neither of those options make me want to take him seriously.