By David Futrelle
You may worry about your country descending into chaos, or turning into a fascist hellhole, or even a bit of both. But when incels imagine the future they have much more specific concerns. Oddly specific, you might say.
Over on Incels.me, one paranoid commenter conjures up what for him is evidently the most nightmarish future dystopia he can imagine: One in which women can use sonar technology to check out penis size at a distance.
In a thread titled, with typical incel melodrama, “[SuicideFuel] In 2030, it will be absolutely over for dicklets” — dudes with tiny dicks — a fellow called Cuckcel offers his dire warning.
Incel dudes, when women look at you the first thing that pops into their mind isn’t “small dick.” It’s “huge asshole,” because that’s what you are.
@Scildfreja:
I expect this is a defensive response to persistent concern-trolling by religious prudes and other assorted rightwingers whose goal is to censor stuff rather than to improve sex ed in schools.
I saw an argument for circumcision that amounted to ‘won’t my son be confused because his penis doesn’t look like mine?’
I asked my younger son’s therapist about this. “Is this really a thing? I had a wonderful relationship with my father but I have absolutely no idea what his penis looked like. I’m sure he *had* one, but that’s about it.” She replied tactfully, “Well, Robert, there are *all sorts* of families. . .”
CW:TMI
Both of our sons are uncircumcised, and we had no issue with it. I think infant circumcision is becoming less common in the United States.
Regarding size – I’m utterly indifferent to it. I once had a conversation with another gay man about it, and remarked, “What difference does it make how fast a car looks when it’s parked?” He pointed out that as someone who a) doesn’t drive, and b) has no particular interest in penes as such, my perspective might be atypical. I’ve told my husband that the thing I like about his isn’t the size, it’s that it’s *his*.
@Austin:
A quick skim over those headlines suggests that he doesn’t have a problem with blockchain per se, but rather with a whole host of scammers and fly-by-nights appropriating the terminology as a marketing buzzword.
If there is a problem with the actual bona-fide technology, rather than just with various misapplications of either it or merely its name, I’d like to know about it. Because it seemed recently to me to show great promise as the potential base for a truly decentralized net — no central name authorities, all static content retrievable by file hash regardless of whether any particular web server happens to be down, and of course less susceptible to censorship by tyrannical governments … not to mention, less susceptible to some types of malware, since sites would be accessed ultimately by a crypto signature and not a plain Jane domain name. Making funny money with it never struck me as the important use. Making authenticated, but decentralized, edits to cloud documents by majority decision is far more significant. In some ways it would literally democratize the net. If you worry about the growing corporate stranglehold via such centralized silos as Facebook and Google, this should interest you. Unless, of course, it won’t work…
@Full Metal Ox:
No, you’re not being rude. He was converting to Judaism. He’d married a Jewish woman, and I think her family insisted he convert. He didn’t have any real attachment to the religion he grew up with.
@Full Metal Ox: There’s also Phimosis, a fairly common issue where there is no elasticity in the foreskin, where a circumcission is the usual remedy. My brother had it done when he was around 20, it was a very unpleasant healing period.
@Surplus: I think I remember reading somewhere that there is also a worry about what is contained in the blockchain. Anything could be in there, and not knowing about it isn’t a defense if it’s something awful like child porn. (Or links to child porn?)
Ah, here’s an article about that.
I’m healthcare worker with an interest in sexual health, so I see a lot of flaccid penises.
1) they are not interesting.
2) as people have said, there’s really not dramatic variation. Especially in the context I see them where people are tense and kind of cold.
3) it is so toxic to base your self worth around your sexual characteristics. The desire and ability for sexual acts can change over a lifetime. This is normal. People are asexual/demisexual. This is normal. Aspiring to be as horny as a stereotypical teenager, having as much sex as a stereotypical undergrad, with the prowess of someone mature, doesn’t just set you up for failure, it basically doesn’t exist. Normal healthy sex is the sort of safer sex that makes you and your partner(s), if any, satisfied. The normal amount of sex is the amount you (and any partners) consent to have. The things you like/dislike about sex are healthy and normal as long as everyone consents and you are doing things as safely as is reasonable. People are different. I wish sex Ed at least taught this.
OT, but in another thread someone (I think Mish?) posted about that comedian who was murdered and I came across this tweet about it.
https://twitter.com/Ahhmandah/status/1014601507394555904
Yup. Remember kids, when it comes to incels the mantra is “It’s only okay when we do it to people we don’t like”.
There are a lot of predators in feminist spaces, and it’s a reason why a lot of feminist women are so leery about men in said spaces. It got around a while back that being a “feminist” was a great in-road to getting laid in the wrong types of circles (see people like that douchebag Roosh V), and spread the idea that all you had to do to be a “feminist” was to say you think women are equal and pander to them for a bit, and watch the panties drop.
Then there are people like Joss Whedon who will say they’re “feminist” and do the bare minimum effort to appear so, but then will turn around and do shitty misogynistic things, but claim it’s okay because they’re a “feminist”. (See: People who claim that scantily-clad women in media is TOTES feminist because she’s flaunting her sexuality, or dudes who think that you’re “not really a feminist” if you don’t send them nudes, or men who seem to think that feminism means “I’ll fuck any dude who asks because I want to be sexually promiscuous”.)
Nowadays, a lot of feminists and feminist-leaning people are really onto the bullshit. Personally, I find that if you ask a man to identify as a “feminist ally” rather than just a “feminist”, his answer can be rather telling of his reasoning for wanting the title.
If he gets super defensive and demands to be called a feminist, then you know he’s not there for the right reasons. He’s most likely there to appear like a “good dude” and for the adoration that comes with it, and not because he’s actually fighting for the cause as it were. Depending on the severity of his reaction, you might be able to explain to him why feeling that way just undermines the reasons he’s claiming to be there.
If he understands and goes along with it, it’s a sign that he might be a guy who’s actually concerned with feminist issues and is willing to listen to women, instead of putting his ego first.
It’s not a full-proof plan, but in my experience it does help spot a likely douchebag.
That guy is definitely an MRA too. Not as in has MRA type views. He’s a literal MRA and cited that as one of the reasons he vandalized Eurydice Dixon’s grave.
He also said he did it because he was upset that vaccines caused the killer’s autism. So he’s all flavors of asshole mixed into one flaky white shell.
@Paradoxical Intention
I’m not surprised and then again, very surprised. In MRA-leaning spaces I used to haunt it was very common to hold feminist men in the highest suspicion. “He parrots feminist axioms so he can screw cute girls who want to save the planet.” Some MRA’s though will use anything as proof that feminist are ball busters so all accusations about feminists are taken with a grain of salt.
Speaking of…
Male circumcision isn’t a serious issue. (since I saw people bringing it up) I mean it is, sure, since boys have had their penises cut off by mistake somehow, but it’s so easy to fix. Just, uh, stop it? Kinda like the domestic abuse thing, I never understood why it’s so important to push that men are abused in equal magnitude by our spouses. We’re not.
I just get so frustrated with the petty selfish BS. Meanwhile, a commander in Iraq is KNOWN to keep boys, sometimes younger than twelve, around as his slave sexual playthings and the US military still works with him. But no we gotta talk about rich men having to pay their ex wives spousal support.
@Paradoxical Intention: Just for clarification, what kinds of feminist spaces has this occurred in, if you don’t mind sharing a bit more?
Re: Circumcision
It always irritates me when menist types try to claim intactivism in the Western world as a men’s rights issue. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where exactly in the Western world are adult men being circumcised against their will?
Intactivism in the West is a child’s rights issue. Which is partially why so many good feminists are in fact intactivists.
@ Katamount,
“Oh yeah, and Happy Independence Day from the great white north, American Mammotheers!”
Hey. Hoser 🙂 From the Miami of Canada (chi), nice Tocque 🙂
Eh?
@kupo, wwth,
That guy is all kinds of revolting, for sure. And today we have media people arguing that this is all feminism’s fault – apparently if it weren’t for feminism, we wouldn’t have toxic masculinity. The hating of the menz causes them to become womz-haters.
Does this ‘logic’ sound at all familiar, anyone?
http://p.fod4.com/p/media/48aebbb9f0/UGcNNsWzQfvhtNfRjmH0_8B4Xkf8xToWyeokdkaea_eyeroll-gif-cover.jpg
@Surplus:
I think the problems with blockchain have to do with people thinking it can solve problems it can’t actually solve, and with people trying to make funny money with it, as you put it. Merkle trees are the basis for BitTorrent’s file verification as well as for Bitcoin ledgers and related tech.
Your vision of a decentralized world is admirable and I think we need to agree on new mesh technologies to replace (or layer on top of) the centralized, for-profit, corporate-controlled, government-monitored Internet. Blockchain may be one way to solve problems like non-repudiation (saying or agreeing to something, then later saying someone impersonated you). But do humans even want that?
I’d be happy with something more like the old BBS days (or the comments section on this very site), where bad comments can be deleted, or misspellings edited, and the site doesn’t exist by virtue of some automated consensus algorithm (how do you stop people from cheating the vote, or do they get one vote per coin, and how is that fair?), but by a benevolent dictator.
Sometimes the dictator isn’t so benevolent, and you get something like the Linux kernel mailing list, where it’s okay to belittle other people if you don’t like their code, because Linus doesn’t care. These are issues of human nature that the software has to be designed to accommodate.
Sprinkling blockchain on a hard problem that involves human nature doesn’t make it easier. I think that’s why a lot of people are wary of those who get too into the blockchain religion. There’s also the electricity consumption for mining BTC & other cryptocurrencies, which is a major design flaw, with climate change becoming an increasingly important issue.
My blockchain-loving friends say that private blockchains don’t have to suffer from that specific problem, so that’s probably the most promising of its uses. Blockchain for supply chain management is a big thing, and those companies by definition have a trust relationship with each other, but it’s still a helpful way to solve the problem technically. But that doesn’t have the same cyberpunk cool factor as the original, planet-heating cybercurrency that people use to buy illegal things with, not realizing that the cops can see that ledger just as anyone else can (it’s the account #’s that may or may not be mappable to real-life people).
So where it’s the most workable, it’s the least sexy, and a lot of people who are attracted to tech buzzwords want to make a lot of money, so they seem to be trying to solve the least workable problems, chasing geek cred. That’s why people are cynical. But you’re totally right that the core technology isn’t snake oil. It’s what people try to build with it that may or may not be.
I’m not sure if this is the right thread, it might be the female author one, but I’d like to thank whoever recommended the Netflix Hannah Gadsby: Nanette special. I just watched it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more powerful hour of comedy. I laughed plenty, that’s nothing new. But this might be the first time stand up comedy made me cry. Can’t recommend this enough. Watch it as soon as possible. Then also watch the other new comedy special on Netflix, W Kamau Bell: Private School Negro. Also great.
No, just no. Unless you mean in incel circles, and then you may be right, but I’ve never met an anti-Semitic intactivist in actual intactivist circles and I’ve been in many groups for many years. If they exist, they’re hiding it really well.
I’ve seen actual posts from actual mothers with pretty much that exact reasoning as to why they had their baby boy circumcised, actually. Although, most common (but still related) is “Uncut pensies are gross”. Which is disturbing in it’s own way, because you’re not going to be having sex with your son, so what does it matter what his penis looks like?
OT If anyone can clue me in on how to quote people with their names in the quotes without having to try (& mostly fail due to some serious memory problems) to remember who posted it, I’d really appreciate it.
Meet the Foreskin Man comic
The main villain is Monster Mohel
@occasional reader
I’ve seen a few pictures of unborn children that suggests that ultrasound can indeed show things that are Hidden in something else. I suspect almost all the energy gets reflected by a big change in density though, so ultrasound in air would probably bounce off clothing rather than penetrating it far enough to allow what’s underneath. It would probably work just fine in a swimming pool, though. Millimeter wave radar would work, but no-one has made one phone sized yet…
Anyway, the real incel dystopian future would be when they all realize that guys with average and small genitals can, in fact, get girls and that the failure of incels is still not down to their body, but the fact that they’re horrible people.
@Surplus
These are all good reasons not to use the word “blockchain”. If nothing else, it is often used to mean the blockchains that are the basis of bitcoin or ethereum (or some other cryptocurrency) which is a terrible thing to build a new technology upon.
None of the things you’ve listed require blockchains. Other, older, adequate technologies exist, they’re just not new and cool and made of techbro libertarian boners.
@ pie
Some of the techbros have been advocating for the use of blockchain based “Smart Contracts” in some commercial law transactions. However people have raised some queries. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but the end result was effectively: “So what you’re saying is, that with a number of major modifications we could incorporate blockchain into the process and it would be only marginally less efficient and safe than the system that’s been in place since 1925?”
ETA: Basically even with blockchain, it would still be necessary for humans to speak to each other and original documents to be physically transferred, and we’ve been able to do that since the invention of the telephone and post boxes.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
Glad I have the day off from work because I stayed up to 5a.m. watching that special twice over and replaying her stories. I thought the comedy was decent but the stories were indeed powerful. Easily the best personal piece I’ve heard on stand-up.
Well, I can provide some anecdotal evidence in support of your claim: I’m uncircumcised, and I have never been dumped because of that fact, nor have any of my sexual partners had a negative reaction because of it.
The closest thing was one woman who was a bit concerned that she wouldn’t know what to do because she’d never been with an uncircumcised partner before, but her concern didn’t last for more than a few seconds…after all, it’s not like a foreskin makes penises radically different.
…plus, I’m going to steal the term “bepenised partner,” just fyi.