By David Futrelle
Several hours after the news broke that a gunman had shot five people dead at the Capital Gazette newspaper offices in Annapolis, Maryland, but before we knew much of anything about the shooter himself, I took a look at the forums on Incels.me to see if anyone on the site was saying anything about this latest mass killing.
Incels, after all, have an almost reflexive tendency to praise or excuse anyone who kills a high enough number of the “normies” incels consider their sworn enemies, and many of them worship incel mass killer Elliot Rodger as a virtual saint.
But no one there seemed much interested in this particular killer. “[P]rolly some political kind of shit given that it’s a newspaper,” wrote someone called mutant in a not-very-busy thread on the topic, “really it’s only normals who care about left v right.”
Several hours later, we learned that the Annapolis shooter’s anger at the media — and at the Capital Gazette — had its roots in the newspaper’s coverage of his conviction for harassing a former high-school classmate on Facebook. Though she didn’t remember going to school with him, she told the paper, she tried to be nice because it seemed like he was having a rough time. But he quickly turned on her, allegedly bombarding her with threats and trying to get her fired from her job. Ultimately, the future shooter pleaded guilty to pleaded guilty to one count of harassment — and then started directing his ire at the Capital Gazette for having the gall to write about his case in a way he thought was unfair. (A court disagreed, dismissing his defamation suit against the paper.)
Well, this bit of news woke the murder fans on Incels.me right up, and soon they were hailing the Capital Gazette shooter as a new hero.
“Praise the saint,” wrote someone called JeffGoldblumInTheFly.
“When will he be canonised?” asked AfrikanCel.
“The newspaper was bullying him for being incel and Jarrod Ramos stood up to his bullies,” added incel4life. ” Jarrod Ramos is a hero.”
“Bless His Heart,” agreed doktordoom, “death to the media.”
A few of the commenters wondered if their new hero had managed to kill any “femoids” — that is, women — in his rampage.
“Did he score at least one femoid frag?” asked the aptly named evildoer.
In fact, he killed two women. “I don’t condone shootings,” noted someone called Jackson14, “but anyways looking at the victims one was a Stacy.”
This last assertion proved somewhat controversial, because the possible “Stacy” in question was a bit older than most incels consider ideal. “Maybe Stacy from 30 years ago,” grumbled Notgoingtomakeit.
“Come on man you don’t think she is hot?” Jackson14 asked.
Not everyone on the incels.me forums considers Ramos a saint, though. Someone called AR15 was unimpressed with his body count. “Weak score tbh,” he sniffed.
Others were unimpressed with his looks. “Homeboy look like a Lamb Of God tribute act 
,” wrote one. “He legit looks like an egg.” added another.
Somehow I suspect that all the “sex redistribution” in the world wouldn’t transform any of these guys into actual decent people. It would just put more women at risk.
A lot of pieces of the puzzle up there. Clearly there’s a radicalization pipeline, a process that leads through disaffection to stewing resentment and anger to, eventually, joining something violent. That can be the “incel” groups, or a cult, or ISIS, or other terror organizations, or tiki torch parades in Charlottesville, or even legitimate organizations that take advantage of the same despondency in their potential recruits, such as nation-state militaries. And clearly boys and men are much more likely to move far down the pipeline, due to toxic masculinity.
Equally clearly, those early in the pipeline can be saved, though it’s likely far, far too late for anyone posting murder praise at an incel site. And, there is a branch in the pipeline, which a few boys and most girls caught in it follow instead, which leads to self-harm and potential suicide instead of to outwardly-directed violence. Sometimes that self-harm can consist of seeking out (perhaps unconsciously) abusive partners.
This problem should be attacked from two angles. On the one hand, obviously toxic masculinity must be dealt with, as it leads to mass violence. Not even just incel terrorism and sporadic unaffiliated spree-shooting. I suspect most of the world’s armed forces depend on the pipeline for recruits, in this era of little conscription. Without military recruits to build standing armies, there would be little or no war. Address toxic masculinity and the rewards might not “just” be the usual assortment of feminist goals. They might include peace on Earth.
The second angle, of course, is to stop people entering the pipeline to begin with. Even if toxic masculinity were “solved” somehow, we’d still have depressed, withdrawn people committing suicide after taking the other branch, unless the pipeline is blocked at the source.
What is that source? Why do some people become excluded and devalued? It’s not just members of oppressed groups, though they are especially likely to (and to end up on the self-harm branch since society does not give members of these groups license to feel entitled and to commit violence — hence the lack of many violent, toxically-entitled gay men). Random cishet white men end up ignored and devalued here and there as well, for no readily discernible reason. It seems to be a spontaneous symmetry breaking.
My guess here is that the missing piece of the puzzle is the hyper-competitive neoliberal dog-eat-dog ideology of most of the western world these days. This zero-sum thinking demands that someone in any group has to be “the loser”. It also says you’re stupid if you spend any time with “the loser”, who will just drag you down. Certainly you don’t pick “the loser” to be on your team in any competitive event. So, someone whose skills are not seen as especially useful, or even just someone at random, will get excluded. And the more a person gets a reputation as “that loser”, the more self-reinforcing it becomes, in a feedback loop. So even if you had a class of 20 identical boys, statistically indistinguishable from one another, they’d have a basketball practice, one would by sheer chance shoot the fewest baskets, and that would be the start of a downward spiral for him, socially. Or one would underperform in a math test, or happen to get the flu and miss some event, or …
There’s a deeper underlying problem of devaluing people qua people and considering the value of a person to be limited to one’s estimate of their usefulness. This is inherently a part of neoliberal ideology. There is a type of objectifying language found everywhere these days that resembles the ways women get objectified, but is even more pervasive and, since no-one is excluded from it, even more invisible. It shows up whenever we talk about some CEO’s “net worth” … a person’s worth is reducible to the dollar value of their assets? It shows up when we ask “what are you?” and the answer isn’t “a person” but “a plumber” or “a lawyer” or “a TV repairman”. You are your job? You are your skills? You are your assets? You are your income? Are you nothing more?
This, I think, is what the Wachowskis were hinting at in the first Matrix film. It is why Neo was a cubicle drone by day and every blue-pill seen in the films is bustling to or from work, otherwise a part of the machinery of neoliberal commerce, or is desperately trying to escape temporarily from the same (the rave early in the first film — the only time we see blue-pills outside a workday context, and, significantly, where the red-pills are recruiting).
There’s a very pervasive and nearly invisible view of people that reduces them to their present or potential future commercial value, and which even reduces the rich to just their fortunes. And I think it is this that plays a large role in people falling into the very start of that pipeline in the first place, by shaping social interactions and relations even from a very early age with an unhealthy degree of competitive, zero-sum thinking that creates a ruthless calculus when some five-year old asks another, “will you be my friend?” … and the respondent considers whether associating with this person will raise or lower their status, and what will their other friends think.
@Surplus to Requirements
This is also what Fight Club was satirizing, complete with showing exactly how that pipeline of toxic masculinity you described works. Everybody who got involved in Tyler Durden’s movement was a man who’d been chewed up and spit out by the machinery of post-Reagan neoliberalism, from the narrator who worked as a product recall specialist for a car company (literally calculating how much a human life is worth, with shades of the infamous Ford Pinto memo from the ’70s) to Bob the former bodybuilder, whose abuse of steroids to achieve an idealized masculine form led to him losing his testicles to cancer — a literal emasculation if ever there was one. They turn to the fight club and later Project Mayhem as an escape, but as it turns out, it’s only a more extreme version of the values that put them in that place to begin with, simply taken to their logical conclusion. Fight Club basically called the manosphere fifteen years in advance, right down to the fact that, behind its mask of countercultural “sticking it to the (wo)man”, it offered no solutions or even much in the way of actual rebellion.
(In the most bitter irony, the biggest fans of Fight Club wound up being among the very sort of self-styled macho men that Chuck Palahniuk was mocking, people who missed the joke entirely and embraced Tyler’s messages whole-hog without a hint of self-reflection. To give you some idea of just how badly the point flew over some people’s heads: this was the movie that invented the term “special snowflake” that’s so beloved by the dregs of the internet, and there is a pick-up artist who calls himself Tyler Durden.)
If feeling isolated, bullied, and victimized results in mass murderers, then you’d think that fat kids, LGBT kids, and kids who are a visible minority would make up the vast majority of mass murderers, since they tend to be the most isolated and the most targeted by assholes due to being different. And you’d expect generally even ratios of male and female murderers, since it’s not like one gender has a monopoly on being tormented as a teen.
And yet the vast majority of mass murderers are slim white cishet dudes. Ergo, suffering is not what creates these murderous pieces of shit. Maybe it’s a factor in it, but given that almost everyone suffers in a similar fashion yet only a very specific demographic tends to produce spree killers indicates that the suffering is not the unique property causing this.
Depends. If a dickhead decides to spout misogynistic, racist, bigoted bullshit and ends up losing all his non-dickhead friends, I’m not going to feel bad about the asshole’s isolation.
However, if said dickhead is plowed into by a drunk driver while crossing the street, then, yeah, I’m going to be shocked and saddened that the dickhead is in intensive care because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because, you know, basic human empathy.
Similarly, I’m going to be saddened if a feMRA is hammered with misogynistic harassment or if an asshole-y POC is subjected to racism, or if a violent criminal is raped in prison. Because human beings shouldn’t be subjected to horrible treatment like that, no matter how shitty of a person they are.
If a wicked person suffers from proportional consequences for their wicked actions, then my sympathy for them is going to be nil. If they’re suffering because something unjust which shouldn’t happen to anyone is occurring, then I’m going to be sad about that.
I shudder at the thought of monitoring kids’ “social milestones”, and “getting them professional help” if they’re not hitting those within somebody’s norms. Should more help be available for kids? Absolutely! I sometimes wonder whether my life would have taken a different path if there had been stigma-free counselling available at my school, to anyone who chose to use it. But schoolkids are already under plenty of pressure to hit targets: do we want to add normative social behaviour to this? “Please report to the health office, because you’ve been observed spending a significant amount of time alone in the library instead of socialising, and your teachers report that you smile less often than the norm for your age”. I’m pretty sure schools would find a way to make that do more harm than good.
This might sting a bit because I’m going to be blunt. What you should be sorry for is not seeing women as full human beings. This is how society molded you, so I’m not saying it’s something you did intentionally, but that’s what it is.
I’m guessing you have considered that other boys/men had similar experiences. But to not even consider that women experience this, too, is to not consider women to be similar to you. To believe they can’t understand what it’s like. That they’re not individuals who might have good social skills or bad social skills or a mix of the two. That they don’t suffer from lonliness. That they never get rejected.
You also probably (because this is common) only think of attractive women when you think about women. It’s common for men to assume women don’t experience rejection because they don’t even notice women they don’t find attractive. We (women who aren’t conventionally attractive) are straight up invisible. Even if we’ve asked one of these guys out he’ll honestly believe he’s never once been asked out because we don’t count. We’re another class of person altogether, one that’s not allowed to be part of the dating pool. We’re quite regularly abused for even attempting to wade in it.
Makes me wonder sometimes if there’s such a thing as “empathy fatigue” because, f’rex, when that Northern Kentucky white supremacist was killed by a drunk driver I couldn’t even pretend to feel sorry.
So I think the sitcom “Coupling” by Steven Moffat was overall really fun despite being pretty sexist… And this reminds me of an ep, it was pretty long ago I watched it so I don’t even remember which season, but anyway, there’s this guy Patrick at a party chatting to a couple of attractive women, and we first see the conversations from his point of view. A few of the lines seem off though, and don’t really make sense. Later, we’re shown what really happened at the party. Turns out there was also a fat woman in the conversation, and some lines of dialogue were said by her – that’s the reason the dialogue was a bit odd when we saw it from Patrick’s perspective, because she was literally invisible to him.
Maybe that’s the most important problem. Society tells them that they’re at the top of the food chain, or social ladder. When there is a movie or a book describing how a PoC or a homosexual or a woman etc. reached success, the implied message is that they reached success despite the “handicap” of being a PoC or a homosexual or a woman etc. and that if you try hard enough you can obtain what effortlessly belongs to slim white cishet dudes.
And yet those slim white cishet dudes see that, not only they’re not effortlessly getting girl friends, but even if they try women will have nothing to do with them.
IDK, I grew up with similar levels of isolation and systematic abuse, and I even got to do it while looking and living like a guy. I went through the whole hating-my-own-guts thing, the suicidal depression, the feelings of uselessness, everything. Still never considered murdering random strangers over it. And especially never considered murdering women, being busy putting them on pedestals and all. When I was shamed for being a virgin, I got angry at the stupidity of using that as a measure of adulthood.
I just can’t bring myself to sympathize with incels. Like, I get the radicalization process thing, but anyone who gets this irrationally angry at other people over lack of sex is just fucked up on a very deep level.
Also the “passing on mah genes!” thing. Guys, do you have any. idea. whatsoever. how much effort it takes to raise a kid? Let alone several? That is some serious work there. Or you can slack off and abusively make your wife do all the work, and traumatize the hell out of your descendants, maybe for several generations to come – that sounds SO much better than not having any kids, right?
God, I can’t even imagine the horror of growing up with an incel-aligned dad. And I’m a survivor of childhood abuse myself, including sexual abuse.
Nope. No sympathy. At all.
J said
Never in my entire life until tonight did I even consider that childhoods like what you describe happened to girls/teens/women.
Am curious, if you think back to that time in your life, how did you think girls experienced dating?
This perspective seems to be a revelation to you.
That is exactly the root of incel and other misogynistic groups. Men and boys are not socialized to see things from women’s perspectives or think of us as real people. If you’re not a real person, you can’t really suffer and you don’t really need bodily autonomy. The same is true for other privileged vs. marginalized classes. I remember reading about a study that showed that white people perceived black people as experiencing less physical pain than white people do. I’ve always wondered if a similar study has been done with men. I think a major reason that men are so likely to engage rape apologia and so likely to think that a man getting rejected or laughed at is a bigger deal than a woman being beaten, raped or murdered is that men simply don’t grasp that we’re able to suffer.
Anyway, I think it’s important to take a long hard look at yourself and figure out why it never occurred to you that women experience these things. I would encourage you to really listen to what women say. Both online and off. Try to read more books and watch more movies and TV shows that are created by women about women. It’ll make you a better person.
Me too and I’m glad someone else here admits it! Despite its flaws it frequently had me in stitches. Especially the Jeff and the Jane centered episodes. I remember exactly what episode you’re talking about too. It so perfectly captures exactly how men see (or don’t see) women. Incels and aggrieved nerd boys can whine about not being seen as cool all they like, it’s better than not being seen at all. The invisibility of not conventionally attractive women is also captured really well by the Buffy season 1 episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” Clea Duvall plays a shy frumpy girl who is ignored so much that she literally becomes invisible and starts taking revenge on Cordelia and her friends.
Passagere clandestine,
That’s definitely a big part of it. Kyriarchy promises white cishet middle class men that if they do their part to uphold it, they’ll get their portion of the spoils. The spoils being things like a good non-dead end job and attractive women. But that promise is a lie. Some men will get the spoils, some men won’t. With people who are not white cishet middle or upper class men refusing more and more to be second class citizens and with capitalism being in the end stages where it’s no longer functioning in a way that can sustain a big enough population that’s secure enough to not question the system, the number of men who get the spoils is shrinking. These men are angry about that but too unaccustomed to empathizing with people who are different than them to begin to understand where their anger should be placed.
The last thing I’m going to bring up is not addressed to a particular person but to the thread in general.
Why are we assuming that incels as a group experienced bullying in childhood at a higher rate than the general population? Why are we assuming that they suffer disproportionately from depression? These seem to be taken for granted by most everyone who discusses incels, whether they are sympathetic to them or not. But I’m not aware of any real research into this. It’s just kind of assumed. And I think it relates to the knee jerk assumption that man pain is very important and therefore, if a man self reports that he’s suffering more than everyone else, it must be true.
I’m not convinced these dudes had rougher childhoods than anyone else at all. I’m sure some of them were bullied. I’m sure some of them have depression. But that’s going to be true of every group. Until I see some evidence that these claims are true, I’m just going to go ahead and take the default position that if a man is a virulent misogynist, it’s because he’s an entitled shithead.
Regarding not realising that everyone feels loneliness, including women… Kupo bein’ a star, here. Thank you for your bluntness.
WWTH:
QFT. Thank you for articulating something that has been bothering me, but that I hadn’t been able to figure out.
Perhaps it is taken for granted because they *say* they’ve been ‘bullied’ or ignored, when in reality they just had a fairly normal life. This contrasts to the cishet white male protagonist in media that they expect, and is perhaps why they FEEL they’ve been so hard done by.
wwth
This applies in spades to colonialist attitudes. The English lords and masters (and I presume the French-Spanish-German-Belgian-everyone as well) are easily identified in the way they regarded the populations they subjugated or otherwise exploited. Indians, Irish, indigenous people in randomly assorted places from Africa to Pacific islands were always presumed
1) not to suffer in childbirth the way delicate refined English women did,
2) not to grieve when their children died in the way that people of “superior” white populations did.
As soon as you read or hear someone opining that “those women go back to picking potatoes straight after childbirth, doesn’t affect them at all” you know that you’re listening to someone who is racist, classist or both. (Though it’s hard for us now to comprehend that in those environments, aristocrats and landed folks ran race and class together. They actually believed that their maids, gardeners, shopkeepers and craftspeople were a different, inherently inferior, race compared to them in _exactly_ the same way that people with the wrong coloured skin were.)
A frustrating attempt to get Google Scholar to produce the sort of study we’d need about how men regard women’s pain … went nowhere fast. There’s probably something out there somewhere but my brain won’t come up with the open sesame search term that would get me where I wanted to go.
@ Rhuu and WWTH – I agree. With incels, we’re dealing with extremely unreliable narrators when it comes to the proportionality of their suffering vs. what actually caused it. These are people who, in all seriousness, equate a single romantic rejection with the Holocaust. And it’s usually a gentle rejection, too. Women are likely to be more careful with men’s feelings due to socialization, safety fears, and less anxiety about the effect on social status of being asked out by someone unconventionally attractive. You’ll never see women wearing the equivalent of “no fat chicks” T shirts.
So when an incel claims he was mercilessly bullied, I tend to think maybe he didn’t get to be first in line for the bus that day, or somebody took the last ice cream sandwich at lunchtime.
Doctors instead of men, so women do it too, but if anything it confirms that society as a whole doesn’t see women as suffering as much as men:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180518-the-inequality-in-how-women-are-treated-for-pain
@Kudo
Doesn’t sting because it’s true. It just is. Sorry to be selfish but it’s all really distressing. There isn’t a syllable of what you said that I doubt for a moment. If it’s fine, I’d like to lurk a bit.
@Birdie Bird
Frankly, my girl friends (platonic) downloaded their problems on me very often. I knew the difficulties (and sometimes abuse) they dealt with in their relationships. However, the idea that a girl couldn’t find a relationship to me is just, I don’t know, impossible? Girls were better in every single way possible, an entirely different kind of person.
This kind of idealization of women and girls is… well, maybe ‘soft sexism’? Because you’re not perceiving them as full human beings that come in as wide of a variety as men and boys do. The girls that couldn’t get relationships in high school were invisible to you because they weren’t attractive to you. Trust me, they were there.
I couldn’t have gotten a boyfriend (I’m bi, but where I grew up having a same-sex relationship was unthinkable) in high school if I’d paid for one. I was an awkward kid (diagnosed with autism as an adult) who wore thick glasses and was a little chunky. No boy was interested in me. No boy even spoke to me kindly. They were happy to sexually harass and assault me (because I had to audacity to grow large breasts), telling me that I was ugly and disgusting and that no one would ever love all the while, but be my boyfriend? Nah. Not even when I lost weight and got contacts.
I had a similar experience in my youth; i only lost my virginity past 20 and only had a real relationship lasting more than a few weeks when i was past 25. Now I was what they call a mentalcell because from time to time there were actually girls that showed interest in, them taking the initiative even, me but then I withdrew for some psychological reasons of my own. I broke this pattern eventually without any kind of professional help by asking myself really seriously do you want to change your life and are you willing to change and to sacrifice other things to make that happen.
I never doubted that there were girls and women in a similar situation actually or otherwise feeling very bad about their lives. I knew some of them. Intellectual understanding is one thing and emotions are another however and on an emotional level I could certainly feel anger at women and have revenge fantasies, though never seeing it as more than fantasies. But what if I had encountered an ideology telling me I was justified in hating and wanting to hurt other people (Internet just barely existed at the time, few people sought out communitites of peers then)? The tendency to rationalize feelings is strong, so maybe I would have picked up radical masculinist ideology too.
I think there is a lot of truth to the idea that men tend to externalize more often than women so women suffering from social isolation and being unwanted, if they let those feelings dominate their lives, it doesn´t take the form of aggression but rather of self-harm, depression etc.
Just testing because my last comment got eaten. I haven’t commented in a couple of months, maybe I come off as new?
[Okay I’ll try this again. Hoping this doesn’t end up as a double post]
This kind of idealization of women and girls is… well, maybe ‘soft sexism’? Because you’re not perceiving them as full human beings that come in as wide of a variety as men and boys do. The girls that couldn’t get relationships in high school were invisible to you because they weren’t attractive to you. Trust me, they were there.
I couldn’t have gotten a boyfriend (I’m bi, but where I grew up having a same-sex relationship was unthinkable) in high school if I’d paid for one. I was an awkward kid (diagnosed with autism as an adult) who wore thick glasses and was a little chunky. No boy was interested in me. No boy even spoke to me kindly. They were happy to sexually harass and assault me (because I had to audacity to grow large breasts), telling me that I was ugly and disgusting and that no one would ever love all the while, but be my boyfriend? Nah. Not even when I lost weight and got contacts.
@LindsayIrene
The comments have been having issues lately. Some just get eaten, unfortunately. 🙁
@j
Lurk or contribute, either is fine. 🙂 I want to let you know that we’ve had quite a few former manospherians come in here and most just insult us and tell us we’re wrong and mean for pointing out these kinds of things in their posts, so I just want to say it’s really great that you’re open to new ideas and ways of looking at things.
Completely off-topic. The best election ad ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi6v4CYNSIQ
This woman is great.
@wwth
That is an excellent point about bullying and childhood hardship, and I think you’re right. My bad. Also suspect there’s a victim blaming dynamic there, like how school shooters are assumed to be bullied.
Last time I had a (almost violent) encounter with fascist types though, they didn’t remind me of victims, but of the bullies I knew growing up. Used to getting their way through aggression and physical strength, and terrifyingly angry when called out on it.
Those were probably Proud Boys or such trash, but the difference seems kind of academic at this point.
mildlymagnificent – I think that has a lot to do with the way retail/food service/domestic workers get treated today, as well.