By David Futrelle
Incels seem to think that they are the only people on earth who have problems. They regularly claim that women are literally incapable of feeling real depression, feeling sad only when they’re temporarily denied the adoring attention they’ve come to expect. As if that’s how any of this works.
On the Braincels subreddit today, one incel brain genius argued that female “depression” — yes, with scare quotes — is “voluntary.”
Incels constantly complain that no one understands their pain, that no one else goes through what they go through. In fact, innumerable people go through the exact same things — feeling loneliness, despair, hopelessness — and somehow manage to do it without getting murderously angry and dismissing the problems of everyone else on earth as imaginary.
I’ve dealt with clinical depression, spending years of my life untreated and basically fumbling around in the dark. I’ve been close to a number of women (and men) who have also dealt with clinical depression and/or other mental illnesses, in some cases worse than mine even at its most severe. They all got better after they got help, though it sometimes took years. We all feel bitter at times, but none of us lashed out at the world and assumed that no one but us ever felt like shit or had to deal with real issues.
Incels, your depression is real, and not your fault. But it’s also not the fault of women, or feminism, or your height, or any of the other convenient scapegoats you like to yell about online. Your ideology is toxic. It makes your life worse. It makes the world worse. Unlike your depression, it’s something you chose. You don’t have to allow that shit into your head. It’s voluntary, and as long as you choose to believe it your life will remain shitty. Get off of Braincels. Get off of Incels.me. Get help. Fix yourselves.
No it isn’t. It’s a good thing. Anything that warns innocent women off these guys is a huge plus.
He DID mention that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed. Does that count?
Otherwise, he apparently really likes Fox and Friends, and apparently his aides have a hard time getting him to stop watching television. Given what he tweets about, I assume what he enjoys watching is anything about him.
Also, I completely don’t mind having the off-topic political stuff being contributed! It’s good to be informed. Only problem I have is sometimes not being able to find the post again for reference because I can’t remember which thread it was posted on, since it was off topic.
One thing I noticed the other day was a tweet from Trump (I think it was the Robert DeNiro one) where he used the epithet “low IQ”. Now that of course has become a standard insult/response on the Incel forums; and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s common to other cesspits too.
Now I’m not suggesting that means Trump does frequent such sites, but would anybody be surprised if it turned out he did?
Trump likes Citizen Kane. There’s an interview with him where he said the lesson to learn from CK was to make sure you have a good, loyal woman by your side. Because of course that’s the lesson he took.
BuzzFeed has an analysis.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmore/how-donald-trump-rewrote-citizen-kane?utm_term=.iqn8Xmwj5#.xpqbm2eMD
Yup, I take two 150 mg capsules of Effexor every damn day because I’m pretending my condition is real and I’m trying to get sympathy from people. Not because my neurochemistry will make my life and attention span hell without it. It’s all a big illusion.
Assholes.
I apologize if this is going to far, but personally, if an incel were to “rope” himself…
I don’t think I’d care.
Have you seen this story?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/09/california-police-white-supremacists-counter-protest
Notice this little gem.
Domestic violence. Because of course cops are sympathetic to the perpetrators of domestic violence as well as racist. Gee, I wonder why women don’t report?
Anyway, this story comes out of CA. Imagine how white supremacist the cops are in the former confederate states where the police force was already historically full of KKK members. I’m not sure how much infiltration the neo-nazis really had to do.
Wondering:
Thanks for the Buzzfeed link: that was fascinating. I guess Trump must have had a longer attention span back then: ok, he hilariously misread the film, but nowadays I doubt he’d even sit through it. This is a guy who is known to fast-forward through movies to watch the exciting bits.
Mostly, though, I was sad that that Errol Morris project fell through. Morris is a terrific documentarian, and that film would certainly have been enlightening in ways Trump wouldn’t understand.
Knitting Cat Lady
“AFAB”?
@Pie:
Ever read “Quantum Night” by Robert Sawyer?
I did. Shortly before the 2016 election. This whole situation is even more giving me the heebie-jeebies because of that. And in the real world I don’t expect some SF deus ex machina to save the day, either …
@WWTH:
Because of course that was why he was in jail. Scratch a neo-Nazi, find a domestic abuser, every single time.
@Surplus: AFAB = Assigned Female At Birth
Similar term is AMAB, Assigned Male At Birth
Usually the first thing the midwife or other birth assistant says once the kid is born.
‘It’s a girl/boy!’
They are right the vast majority of time.
As a Criminal Justice major and an aspiring FBI applicant, I’m honestly ashamed about the state of the police force in America.
Did Trump actually watch Citizen Kane, or did he just read through the Wikipedia summary? Either wouldn’t surprise me. People on the right are really terrible at interpreting movies, literature and television.
Hey Mammotheers. Long time since I posted here last. I’m wondering if there’s an active open thread right now as I really need to vent about something. I tried to look for one but didn’t spot one anywhere during the last month or so. 🙁
@David
What about a dedicated open thread that’s always on the sidebar?
@Monzach Not lately. David brought up that very topic in this thread, so hopefully there’ll be one soon.
Re: Nazis in the police. I remember having a conversation with my teaching coach a couple years ago about a friend working in the Oakland police department being reprimanded for de-escalating a situation. We were talking about people from Oakland having a hard time making it a better place when the people in charge make decisions that negatively impact the community. So then she told me about how in the 70s the OPD was actively recruiting white supremacists from the south. It’s just mind boggling why they would be so antagonistic to the community.
*blinks* …I mean, you’re not strictly wrong, transgender and nonbinary people are a relatively small portion of the total population. But I’m not sure why you felt the need to emphasize that the assigned gender at birth is usually right?
@calmdown:
Yeah…like me, the last time I was in a serious relationship and routinely getting laid. None of it made any difference to my depression, except maybe to make it worse. Once I even had an orgasm while with my then boyfriend, but burst into tears immediately after, because it hadn’t helped at all. It just reminded me how very sick and miserable I was. If an orgasm doesn’t have the power to make you feel wonderful about yourself, what good is it? I thought I must be truly terrible to be so ungrateful for that, which is typical of the stinking thinking that goes on when one is that deep in the toilet.
And of course, the boyfriend himself was no help at all; when he wasn’t using shallow and stupid (and often sexist) tactics to try to jolly me out of it, he was making my already low self-esteem nonexistent by telling me my ass was too big and he didn’t find me attractive anymore. (Item: I was still physically the exact same person I’d been when we started seeing each other; the only difference was that I wasn’t sick and miserable when the relationship began. THEN, he had to be reminded to keep his eyes on the road, because he kept staring at me while he was driving!)
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from killing myself was a lack of energy, brought about by a sickness that had me alternately dizzy with fear, filled with horror at my own morbid thoughts, and totally lethargic in between bouts of fear and horror. The sickness was real, and physical. If my boyfriend had been wiser, he’d have dragged me off to the doctor to get some meds. But I guess these dim bulb incels would just say I was faking that suicidal depression because I was hitting the wall (I was 26 at the time) and panicking that no one would want me anymore, just because some wanker that I have since gotten completely over thought my very average, not-bad ass was too big.
Fuck them, and I don’t mean sexually. (It wouldn’t help them anyway.)
Interesting how being celibate is involuntary, but being depressed is voluntary.
OT: wow, this twitter thread went to an unexpected and important place.
On depression, I don’t think I can add anything to what the rest of you have written. But this idea that you can’t really be depressed if you have some good things in your life really needs to die.
@Moggie
OMG 🙁
That feels very real though. Not just on a “humans are flawed” level, but re the way some people (usually men in my experience) talk really big about ethical principles while also callously violating those principles, and *somehow don’t see it*. It’s a pattern that I’ve seen a lot of with abusers.
Makes me wonder if they actually know it and are self-loathing underneath, or really can’t see the hypocrisy at all.
@WWTH
Yeah, I saw that, though I’d forgotten the bit about the collaborator’s DV charge. Good catch there. 🙁
And yes, the infiltration couldn’t have happened if cops weren’t utter garbage to start with. And the FBI likewise – thinking of the far-right factions at work re the stuff with Comey and Clinton. Like attracts like.
@Cyborgette : I think he don’t see anything yet, and I would dare to say that people who don’t doubt themselves are *MUCH* more likely to not see that they are going haywire. Like, that guy was persuaded to be a paragon of vertu because he was well-learned and principled. But because him being virtuous was so evident, he didn’t checked twice if he still acted on his principle. He lived long enough to become the villain.
Some people say that self confidence is never a bad thing, and truth be told it’s useful and it can help avoid depression ; but thoses guys show why like self confidence need to have some bounds.
(as a side note, I am well aware that someone can both be overconfident and suffer from low self esteem. I just don’t see thoses kind of guy to actually be aware of their specific hypocrisy ; I almost never seen that kind of guy actually show sign of being aware of that)
Right??? Isn’t it weird how everything they’re sad about is totally an Act of God, but whenever someone else has problems, it’s all made up and not real.
Which kinda leads me into this line of thought I’ve been tossing about the last few weeks: Inceldom is a destructive cult. While most cults are religious in nature, Inceldom is a particularly odd duck in that it doesn’t consist of a single religious practice.
I’m not a cult expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I have been listening to a few podcasts about them from different people out of curiosity, and some things have stuck out to me when we talk about Incels. Things that destructive cults have been known to do.
Some examples:
-The Us/Them Mentality is something they espouse all the time. “You’re with us, or you’re against us.” They seek to separate themselves from “Chads/Stacies/Normies”, and to also cast them as their enemy. They also encourage this behavior in others, to the point where they are likely separating themselves from friends/family and obviously healthy relationships with other people. Everyone is a potential enemy or a commodity to them, rather than a person. Women in particular are dehumanized to objects/cattle.
-Intolerance of Dissent About Their Beliefs: Anything that goes against their Doctrine is immediately hand-waved away, in ways that don’t make sense to an outsider. They don’t tolerate dissent from many people, or else the person asking questions is one of “Them”, and they just don’t understand, or it’s framed as “persecution” of them for being Incels.
-Unreasonable Fear of the Outside World: Incels show a massive amount of fear of being harmed or rejected by the outside world, and many incels come to the community because they feel as though they were rejected. This can also lead to seperation with friends and family, and thus bringing them deeper into the cult mentality.
-Feelings of Unworthiness: Coupling with their unreasonable fears of rejection comes with a feeling of “never being good enough”. Now, in some cults, this is usually in a way of “I’m not good enough for My Leader”, but in terms of Incels, they’re made to feel like they’re just not good enough period. Wrist size, the tilt of their eyes, the color of their skin, and so on and so forth are all presented as reasons why they are incel, and thus are scum to “them”.
-The Leader is Always Right: While Incels don’t have a singular individual at their helm, they still have a version of dogma. Their groupthink is the way of the world, period. “We are scum, we are persecuted for things we have no control over, the world is against us, women will never love us.” and so on and so forth. Their mantra is one that cannot be questioned.
-Doctrine Over Person: All their dogma is sacred and cannot be challenged, even when personal belief says otherwise. Their groupthink is dominated by this dogma, a single interpretation of belief of how the world works.
Sources:
Quackwatch.com
FutureConscience.com
This is by no means a full list, nor is it more than a cursory glance at the things I’ve noticed, but yeah. This has really been bouncing in my brain.
Inceldom has taken a leaf from 1984 in that it’s adopted mythical ‘leaders’ like ER or that ‘St Blackops2cel’. So they can never be let down by them. Which ironically gets back to your original point that there’s a lot of almost religious trappings.
Note that the overlapping kekistan mob have made Pepe a god (tied in with some Egyptian deity).
Cyborgette:
I’m afraid that’s now my default assumption about American Christians, and Sessions and his “lock children in cages because bible” didn’t surprise me. I expect large numbers of evangelical voters will continue to support this.