By David Futrelle
Incels aren’t really very good at the whole “humor” thing. Last week, I wrote about the “Imaginary Girlfriend” meme in which an earnest stick-figure woman declares that if she hadn’t been aborted she could have grown up to be every incel’s dream girl. “Sorry I couldn’t be there for you,” she says. “But my mom had other plans … would have liked to have a lot of kids with you.”
*Shudder*
To me, the meme looked more like the work of a troll doing a pitch-perfect parody of incel logic than an actual incel meme, but a lot of other people thought it looked real, and it certainly could be. One of these people tweeted this:
https://twitter.com/BobbieA10284800/status/1018114427705585665
Well, long story short, some incel found the tweet and posted it to the Braincels subreddit. And the incels there, not all of whom knew what she was referring to, lost their shit.
![fuckbitchesman 36 points 1 day ago Baby killing whore. Burn in hell. permalinkembedunsavereportgive goldreply [–]Zyklon_Bae 23 points 1 day ago Women are soulless Golem. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]Bobodzadza 14 points 1 day ago Fact](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/dr7ct8yiu.png?resize=499%2C444&ssl=1)
Huh. Not having a baby when you don’t want to have a baby seems pretty logical to me.
One fellow fantasized about beating her up — and her liking it.
This lovely fellow suggested genital mutilation:
Still others reminded us that most incels are only a step or two away (if that) from being straight up Nazis.
Lovely.
Naturally she gained some new fans on Twitter as well, some of whom also appear to be Nazis or near-Nazis.
Ending your genetic line and damning yourself to Hell to own strangers on the internet, such a typical white woman thing
— YUNG W!GNAT (@gnat_w) July 17, 2018
https://twitter.com/Archeon_/status/1019045553139838977
https://twitter.com/FashKermit/status/1019260806779809792
I’m still not sure why posting a picture of a delicious looking Arby’s roast beef sandwich, intended to suggest that a woman is a “roastie” who has had so much sex that her labia have mysteriously grown larger and more roast-beef-like, as if that’s really a thing, is considered an “own,” even by these idiots. Sex is good; Arby’s roast beef sandwiches are good. The two of them together would be fantastic, with the only real drawback being the slight danger of getting horsey sauce on a tender area.
It remains funny to me, in a sad sort of way, that incels — whose personalities are basically a collection of red flags — have managed to convince themselves and each other that women hate them for their looks.
@Katiekitten420
Okay, I’ll make my position on how I view “pro-life”, however you choose to define it, very clear.
If the pro-lifer (or any other person who identifies as something else) wants to outlaw abortion (or outlaw abortion in all but the most extreme “mother’s life must be in danger” cases), then they’re trying to infringe upon the bodily autonomy of people with uteruses and I will not stand for it. I don’t care how angelic this person is, I don’t care how many fostered kids they have or how much money they give to charity or how much they advocate for other good things. Their pro-life stance is shitty and they deserve to be held accountable for it. They can take a flying leap into a pile of Legos.
If the “pro-life” person is just doesn’t like abortions, will never have one themselves, but won’t try to force other people to keep unwanted pregnancies, then I don’t give a shit. They can keep on doing whatever they want, so long as it doesn’t infringe on other’s rights. If they accept that no matter how lovely the foster system is, no matter how much childcare is available and aid for mothers is provided, I will still get an abortion the SECOND the test shows a positive result, then I’m fine with them. If they respect other people’s CHOICE, (hmm, I wish we had a word for what that stance would be…) then they can do whatever they want.
And there’s another aspect to this, too. Abortion isn’t only policed by the government but also by society. Even if your friends think it’s okay for people to get abortions in a life threatening situation, they’re clearly vocal enough about their “pro-life” stance that you know all of their beliefs in detail. So they must repeat this a lot. And maybe some person will internalize that message that the fetus’ life is sacred and make decisions that they wouldn’t otherwise make. They’ll feel guilt and pressured into keeping it, into risking their own life, when maybe if they saw it as what it is, a growth that is threatening their health, they would instead try again with another pregnancy. So your friends are contributing to the misogynistic view that abortion is bad and should only be used sparingly.
Imagine if other procedures were treated like this. You have a fatty tumor pressing on a nerve. Should you proactively get rid of it? Well, it might *not* paralyze you. It’s living tissue, so we should allow it the opportunity to continue living.
You want a breast reduction for your back? Won’t you feel guilty for taking life from those tissue cells you’re removing? Can’t you live with the pain a bit longer?
Abortion isn’t bad. It isn’t wrong. It shouldn’t be weighed heavily. No one should feel guilty for it. It shouldn’t be made illegal. It should be proposed as an option to anyone who might want or need one, and preventing someone from getting information or receiving one, or harassing people who enter clinics where they are performed should be illegal.
Okay I think I understand what people are trying to say now it’s kind of like how saying I don’t see color in the 80s was a progressive point of view but now if you say it it’s essentially a dog whistle. From what people are telling me if you say pro-life people are just going to see you a certain way no matter what.
Like they don’t want to legislate abortion but they personally feel it’s morally wrong except in cases where the mother’s life or health is in danger. I realize that now if you say you’re pro-life people will just assume you want to legislate against abortion and even though in my opinion that is not the literal meaning of pro-life that is what it has colloquially come to mean. So the group of people I’m talking about keep in mind they’ve been calling themselves pro-life for I think about four or five decades, so they may precede the current pro-life movement. I’m honestly not sure when the current hostile ignorant pro-life movement really gained momentum.
So I guess what most people are saying is if these people call themselves pro-life no matter what their actions show cuz I judge by actions words are wind as they say in Game of Thrones LOL. The people I’m speaking out are pro-life in the truest sense of the phrase but since the phrase has been co-opted buy a much larger group of assholes, referring to them as pro-life is just misleading. I just have to explain the whole concept of the group if I’m going to refer to them in the future I guess because saying pro-life even with caveats is just too confusing. It does not convey the actions or intentions of the people I’m speaking of.
Like I’ve said before subtleties are hard for me so that’s why it took me so long to see what people were trying to say. I think most people would agree that the specific actions the people I’m speaking about are taking are good useful/helpful actions but they would not consider those actions to fall under what pro-life has colloquially become to mean currently. If I’m still wrong please correct me. Okay I’m actually going back to sleep for about 2 hours now so I’ll see if anyone responded when I wake. Hope everyone’s having a lovely day.
@ Alaniel, alan, Dvärghundspossen:
But a lot of the people in need of organs have health problems which are the reason they need them, and which would automatically disqualify them from donating (the one organ recipient I have personally known was a friend from high school and later university whose liver had begun to break down in his teens, due to an auto-immune disorder.) I can imagine a healthy person who’s signed up to be a donor suffering an accident or illness that damages their heart, but I doubt that’s the majority of people in need of new hearts.
The more you talk about them the more they sound like every other “pro-life” Christian who is against women having abortions and therefore against the bodily autonomy of women. These people don’t always agree that it should be legislated, but they all feel perfectly fine guilt tripping people for getting a medical procedure. They want to see themselves as good and warm and about life, but they don’t look at their own beliefs critically and don’t care about the emotional and physical harm done to people pressured into carrying unwanted pregnancies because of their actions.
No. Pro life never meant anything but part of the movement trying to outlaw abortion. It’s not an assumption or stereotype.
If one calls themselves pro-life, they are aligning with the movement which was never anything but a backlash against feminism and women’s freedom.
@Mooncusafer: We all said you’d only be disqualified if you decide to keep your organs for no reason. Obviously you can still receive organs if you can’t donate for health reasons.
‘Quick’ notes, since I got on this late:
The idea that ‘if it came down to either the mother or the child’ fails on the fact that hospitals have been known to actively delay abortion if there is any noticeable heartbeat, even when there is no possibility of a safe birth, and condemn both mother and child to death as a result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar
Note that this event a few years ago was almost certainly one of the primary causes for the debate and recent decriminalization in Ireland.
As for how recent anti-abortion sentiment is, Fred Clark has long talked about that:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-biblical-view-thats-younger-than-the-happy-meal/
Basic summary: up until the end of the 1970s, the American Religious Right considered abortion to be a Catholic issue, and not one of theirs; it was unfortunate, but sometimes necessary. It only became a Religious Right issue after they lost the fight on desegregation and needed some other way to pretend to be morally superior to everybody else.
The Bible doesn’t forbid it. In fact, one could argue that the Bible actually commands it in one case, as an ordeal when a woman is accused of infidelity.
Amusingly, Fred Clark has a few articles about that particular passage as well, including one with this comment:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/02/03/sotah-solomonic-theater-bible-commands-abortion-part-2/
@KatieKitten420:
The most generic way of doing quotes is to just enter the HTML directly in the reply panel, so that:
<blockquote&rt;a quote</blockquote&rt;
becomes
(I run sites without Javascript, mostly, so while there may be buttons to give you shortcuts for that, they don’t work for me.)
@Who?
Quotation strongly needed, can be should be monitored, but nope I know parents who adopted 2 kids from another country, (a boy and a girl) nothing criminal happened there, they just gave both those children a home.
You don’t actually know this. The fact that the buyers are happy with the system? Well, that is who the system is designed to serve. Another thing that adopters are paying for, besides the body of the actual child is to be insulated from the crimes committed. This is part of why so called adoption is so expensive.
Another fact that propaganda has muddied and erased? Actual orphans are rare. Only 14% of children in International Orphanages have even one parent who is dead. When we go to both parents dead? The numbers drop to less than three percent. Then taking the next slice of children who have no extended family and this approaches zero.
I can flood the comments section with citations if you really want, but for the moment, I will limit myself to the following:
he 1997 Australian Parliamentary Inquiry
The Recent Australian Apologies to both Indigenous and White Mothers
You want citations? I am more than capable of flooding the comments section with them. Who? I am not lying about this, not making it up, not trying to destroy anybody’s unicorn fairy dust dreams just to be argumentative. A friend of mine called adoption the perfect crime – and it is and one of the reasons is because records are sealed. Even doing research into it is extremely difficult.
But here are some citations:
https://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/adoption/orphan-statistics.html
See especially The Lie we Love: Orphans and International Adoption
But the entire site is good.
http://www.originsnsw.com/
https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/20136
And see the origins sites for the United States, Canada and England. All of research into the effects and the fact of forced adoption on mothers and children.
Please pay special attention to the menu on the left that leads to research, Dr. Rickarby’s articles, the other origins sites for further research.
http://babyscoopera.com/
This site has a research paper.
Oh, you want to say, this only happened in the bad old days? Nope, not really, in fact I would argue that the coercion and pressure on women who get caught by the traffickers is even worse today, especially a vulnerable woman unlucky enough to be carrying the prize of a healthy white infact. In my lifetime alone, I have seen the time line of the baby scoop expanded. It used to be just the fifties and sixties, then into the seventies and then into the eighties by some estimates. The boundaries of forced adoption expand as the stolen children age into adulthood. Even though adoptees do not enjoy equal treatment under the law, they do at least partially stopped being owned as they age into adulthood – but still unequal under the law.
So, Who? the fact that you know happy customers? Not really that convincing. Please let me know if you would like additional citations because I can provide them. I’ve spent the last thirty years on reproductive issues.
This is a human rights violation of both women and children. Further, this, combined with the never ending, circuitous abortion arguments keeps us from really addressing reproductive safety and freedom for all women.
@KatieKitten420:
Sorry, that should have been:
<blockquote>a quote</blockquote>
produces
(The downside of no Javascript also means no edit button.)
I prefer to pronounce it “Bra-incels.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEPAEvLIdbY&w=560&h=315%5D
@Katamount:
Root for the Leafs?
Why on earth would anybody root for the Leafs?
🙂
@Surplus to Requirements:
Obviously, because it’s polite to cheer for the ones who are going to lose. It’s just not nice to leave them without anyone cheering.
Re: organ donation
One of the most interesting, and as far as I can tell rarely talked about, things Dr. Kevorkian argued for was the right for death penalty inmates to donate their organs. Apparently in most death penalty states, they’re legally barred from doing so. As Kevorkian pointed out, if you’re going to have the death penalty, why not allow the inmates a way to genuinely give back, if they want to? Unlike what happens in China, he was adamant that this would have to be the inmates choice.
The answer to why not, of course, is that it would make the death penalty serve a purpose other than revenge, and we can’t have that. Plus probably some concern over the clusterfuck that would happen if someone discovered they’d been given a murderer’s heart or whatever.
Kupo makes good points. Pro-lifers who don’t want to make abortion illegal (if they exist), but still want to put up barriers to access for abortion are also awful. Whether that’s with stupid bullshit legislation requiring ultrasounds before an abortion can be performed or legislation meant to force abortion clinics out of business, or harassing people outside of abortion clinics or by setting up sham “pregnancy crisis centers” meant to deceive and guilt trip pregnant people, or actively guilt tripping/blackmailing personal acquaintances and threatening to tear away their social support structure… None of these things are about literally making abortion illegal, but they’re still used to coerce people away from a choice they are 100% entitled to make. And they’re all incredibly shitty and shouldn’t happen.
@ rapid rabbit
“Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” notwithstanding, would that even be possible? My understanding of current execution practice is it renders organs unusable anyway.
Just your daily reminder that incels are the biggest fucking hypocrites on the internet: woman who had an abortion, which proves nothing more than that she had sex exactly once (not that her sex life is anyone’s business but hers), is “passed around like a hockey puck”…according to a bunch of dudes who spend their lives whining that no one will have sex with them.
No sexist double standard here, no sirree!
AuntieMameRedux:
I should have made clear that I know that no crime was comited to those children after they came to Germany. You called this sex trafic and I know the parents and the children (who are my age btw), and know that the adopters aren’t bad people.
Do I know what happened to my former clasmate before he came here (was 2 btw), no, I know he came from an asian orphanage, had a headtrauma (because somethink happened there). As far as I know, he was in that orphenage before my parents friends tryed to adopt him.
Your links do concern two countrys mostly Australia and the USA. I will not say that what happened here, wasn’t a crime.
I know for a fact, that it isn’t the same here. (Adoption is dificult in Germany and while there may be some presure on exspecially young mothers to give away their children it doesn’t come from the state) Taking away children is hart here. (Has to be to safe the children from a danger)
So our national adoption is not a crime (Second case btw aunt adopted a older girl, who was an orphan)
The country were my cases were from was South Korea if someone knows more (I know of a 3rd case, but this was a politican who was also adopted and made a carrear here)
@Alan
It’s been a while since I read the book in which he made his argument. Presumably, as a medical expert in killing people, he had some ideas about how to carry out executions that would make it possible.
Just to make sure I wasn’t missing some strange change to my anatomy, I went in the bathroom and looked at my bits.
I still have the regular lady parts in place. No roast beef.
Any of you ladies ever look at your bits and see that roast beef has usurped your expected anatomy? I’ve never had that happen.
@ rapid rabbit
He was probably angling for the job.
Regarding ‘root for the Leafs’:
Well, as someone originally from B.C. and not really a sports fan anyway, I’m not really in the best position to talk; but I will note that I have a good bit of grey hair (I’m 50) and the Leafs haven’t won the Stanley Cup while I’ve been alive. In fact the last time they won, Tim Horton was still playing defence for them.
Besides, there’s a bit of the old ‘evaporative cooling’ thing going on here. Anybody who was ever going to give up on the Leafs already has, so of course the remaining fans are going to be intense.
More generally, I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I can understand what Katamount was saying about ‘raw consumerism’. Again, I grew up in B.C., which has its own weird politics (and a lot of the B.C. identity is about how weird the politics get) but while the comment was focused on Ontario, there’s a fair bit of that which applies to Canada as a whole. Canada is a fairly young nation, with a history that involves a lot of political compromises that make for less rousing legends than revolutions, and there just really isn’t the same sort of ‘national identity’ that a lot of other places have. The closest thing we have to a ‘national identity’ is probably ‘not Americans’. In some ways that’s part of why Canada became such a middle-man in international politics, gaining a lot of goodwill that has been unfortunately largely squandered away of late.
(All of which hasn’t stopped a lot of the proto-authoritarian types like the Proud Boys from importing a lot of ‘national identity’ ideas, thus squandering even more of the goodwill we used to have.)
Regarding adoption:
My younger sister was adopted, actually, though she was maybe a month or so old at the time. In her case, it was relatively local, a family who didn’t feel they could actually take care of a child yet; they later had other children together once they were more financially stable, so my sister has biological full siblings. We never particularly hid the fact that she was adopted, but never made a big deal out of it either. Once she hit 18, we went through the paperwork to get the records unsealed, and she has somewhat connected with the other side of the family; there is understandably still some awkwardness there. (Due to things like tracking inheritable diseases, most provinces have shifted towards allowing the records to be accessed as long as parties agree.)
Granted, that’s also pretty close to a best case as far as adoption is concerned.
Sorry if I’m cutting across an existing conversation, but I needed to say.
The point about pregnancy is that it’s irrelevant when “life begins”; it’s always going to be about an existing life and a potential life. Given that pregnancy involves risk, and – once babies are born – we privilege the parents’ opinion on their welfare, I’m a little confused why we don’t beforehand. It’s almost like we recognise that babies are selfish little beggars. Once they’re born. Why would pre-birth be any different?
I was ranting to myself about how Golems aren’t “soulless,” they have God’s name written on their foreheads and protect the Jewish community…and then I realized that for these people, “protects the Jewish community” probably does make you a soulless demonic entity.
WTF is sexual incontinence? I don’t want to visit the Incel underworld/mom’s basement to find out.
For you, maybe. Adoptive parents need to stop speaking for adoptees, though. Also, most adoptees don’t realise the damage relinquishment and adoption have done to them until at least their 40s. Half a lifetime of burying it causes all the coping mechanisms to start failing, sometimes literally as cortisol overload, stress & adrenal fatigue kick in. Of course, those are the lucky ones. The less lucky aren’t with us anymore, since adoptees have extremely high suicide & addiction rates.
I hope that includes listening to and learning from the voices of adult adoptees and deliberately seeking out blogs, books and podcasts from adoptees, starting with the book The Primal Wound, and including the AdopteesOn podcast. (http://www.adopteeson.com/ They also have a great resources page, although they’re missing adultadopteesupport.org)
I think that last part is the bigger problem, especially with all the evidence that even just blood transfusions can alter your tastes and the evidence that transplant recipients often have changes to personality, preferences , etc.
I remember a news story years and years ago that had a mouse in lab with a human ear growing out of it. I’ve wondered for a long time why that tech/science has never seemed to make much further progress. It seems the ideal solution – grow people new organs from their own cells. No more risks of rejection, no more wait lists, no conspiracy theories about doctors killing off people for their organs. Seems like nothing but upsides. Well, except if you make anti-rejection drugs, I suppose.
@AuntieMameRedux I admire your willingness to speak the truth for adoptees. Adoption has such a long standing, public brainwashing about how wonderful it is that people find it incredibly hard to hear that it’s human trafficking that hurts children. It’s wonderful for the multi-billion unregulated industry and adoptive parents. It’s a lot less wonderful for children and first families.
Are you a member of the “triad”?