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.
@Auntie:
Sorry for the late reply:
Yes I didn’t think of the mothers, because well bias in thinking about national adoption towards international.
Here we have 3 cases:
1. children are Orphans.
2. Parents give the children away to be adopted.
3. Saftyreasons demand it.
Mothers as sexslaves is not really in the thoughts.
I thought most cases if not orphans are given away with the consent of the mothers, if I am wrong my fault.
I know that most adoptions(here) are done with international organisations like in the case of a german politican Terre des hommes. I think the couple I talked of used the same organisation or somethink similar.
Do I 100 know, that everthink was koscher. Nope. I know enough about the situation that the parents thaught everythink was okay. (From my opinion of them and what the told me about it) To make it more difficult the case is older than the time you spent on the research.
I know I am vague in some points, but that happened, when I was a small child, and we talked only rarely about it.
I am not trying to disregard what you are saying. I just don’t believe that its true for every international adoption and exspecially don’t believe that all the potential parents know anythink about it or can know anythink.
The only difference between a pet rodent and a pest rodent is the emotional/moral value that humans arbitrarily assign to one or the other. There is no objective, inherent difference between them. You like one of those rodents and find the other one to be a nuisance, therefore you’re fine with one of them being killed.
Uhhh, no, potentially being born is not “just” what a fetus can do. Human pregnancy is extremely taxing on the human body, almost to the point of being parasitical. Fetuses will force the pregnant person’s body to give up tons of nutrients, which can cause deficiencies in the host, as well as things like diabetes. And that’s before childbirth, which has a whole host of pain and harms inflicted on the body, even up to the point of death. Sure, the fetus isn’t “trying” to make the pregnant person hurt and sick, it’s just trying to survive. But so are the bacteria.
Some women may willingly take on these risks and injuries. That’s their choice. But to say that a fetus is a harmless thing is blatantly not true.
Sorry, I keep using the term “women” instead of “people with uteruses”. Damn reflexive biases.
@ Katiekitten420:
First off, I’d suggest that with regards to placing a mouse, a tumour and a fetus on a “morality” scale: the mouse is the only one of those things that possesses consciousness and the capacity to feel pain, so I’d say it outranks, even if the other two contain human DNA.
@ Catalpa:
I’ve recently begun seeing more scientific articles on how pregnancy works – relevant detail: the thick lining of the uterus is actually to make it *difficult* for the embryo to implant – basically to weed out the weaker ones, because pregnancy is really rough on the parental body, and had better be worth the effort (plenty of things can still go wrong after implantation, of course, but presumably there’d be even more miscarriages if that quality-control weren’t implemented at the beginning).
@KatieKitten420
If you view it as immoral for a woman to have an abortion you’re taking an inherently anti-feminist and misogynistic stance. Are you equally appalled at masturbation that causes sperm to be released and the potential lives to be destroyed?
KatieKitten420: A very important thing to remember: NOT ALL BUGS NEED DRUGS. This might seem to be totally off from the discussion, but this is for you (and lurkers). Many people go to the doctor with a virus, and demand antibiotics. The doctors will give it to them, so that they feel like the doctor has done something while they get better on their own as their own immune system handles the virus.
Antibiotics are for bacteria only, and will not do anything at all to a virus. All it will do is contribute to antibiotic resistance.
A commercial for the ‘Not all Bugs Need Drugs’ campaign:
You’ve said a few times that you aren’t sure about biology. Here is a resource for learning more about it, khan academy.
(this links to the bacteria video, because that was the link I had handy.)
I would also like to once more point out how thanking people who were nice is not a very nice thing to do. You’re tone policing.
People have very intense reactions to the things you are saying, because people have been fighting for the right to have an abortion for a very long time. Many American commenters are extremely worried that their right is going to be even more under threat, with the new supreme court judge.
You’re welcome, and I’m glad you read and thought about the things I said. Just because I could say them nicely doesn’t mean you should discount people who couldn’t. This isn’t some thought experiment, it is peoples lives, bodies, and futures.
As to the consequences of giving birth, others have covered the biological tolls, how about the effect of not getting an abortion when wanted?
Here’s an article on a study about that.
I know you are saying that you aren’t sure if it’s ‘moral’ or not to have an abortion. Here’s a question: Is it ‘moral’ to condemn people with uterus’ to poverty? To condemn their existing children to a more difficult existence?
Because that is what happens when people think that something is ‘immoral’, even if they don’t want to legislate it.
Social shaming works. It obviously works. What do you think the pressures are on a person to not have an abortion, when the result will be ostracization from their community because of the immorality of the act?
I would be interested to see what your mother and this group felt about changing their self-chosen title to ‘pro-choice’. I’m going to bet that it won’t go over well.
ETA: Dr. Jen Gunter has also gone over this ‘only when the mother’s life is in danger’ BS. It’s a good article, but warning for some harsh realities described.
Katiekitten420
You are taking a moral stance, though, which is what leads you to frame bacteria and tumors as intentionally malicious while you ignore the negative consequences of pregnancy.
Bacteria and tumors aren’t trying to do anything. The negative effects they have on their hosts is a mere consequence of how they live and grow. Fetuses also aren’t trying to do anything, either, but they wreak similar havoc on the bodies they inhabit. There’s no “just” becoming a baby.
No “innate difference” separates zygotes/fetuses from bacteria and tumors as forms of life—at least, other than how nature biases us to see zygotes/fetuses as special for the sake of perpetuating our species.
That said, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with making moral judgments over which kind of life is better than another. Our continued existence requires it. I, myself, stomped a cockroach to death within the last hour. But you can’t give into your bias so much that you end up pretending your gut feelings are able to objectively measure of the value of different lives.
Further, if it’s so immoral to deny access to your organs to a potential life, then surely it’s even *more* immoral to deny access to your organs to a fully alive person. So please go give a kidney or liver or bone marrow donation to a person in need before you talk to me about the immorality of denying the use of my uterus.
It is indeed ambiguous, so most biologists default to the position that they fall in the grey area between life and chemistry. My dad — who’s retired but was a professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at a Tier I university — personally believes they should be considered a form of life because they evolve, but he fully understands why others disagree.
Hell, even the scientific definition of what constitutes life isn’t exactly settled, so…ambiguous is the right term.
Since Kupo mentioned it, yes the catholics curch, sees mastrubation and condoms as evil. Less people are following that than the abortionstand.
I think that the lifequestion is a bit unfair, since to talk about protecting all life (to absurd extremes) is somethink else than protecting what is in a mothers womb.
We are talking about a potential (allready growing) intelligent life here. I have zero problems with a woman saying she has moral problems here (for her personal case) but hasn’t got any problem in using modern medicine to battle cancer or an ilness. There is no inconsequence here.
(The ped rodent and the rat is more of a logic problem, exspecially since some people have rats as pets)
That is just me thinking okay the argument is in danger of getting a bit lost here.
Yeah, wouldn’t want a person’s bodily autonomy to get in the way with potential intelligent life. This is why we must call Male masturbation what it is: murder. We must picket bedrooms and bathrooms of bepenised individuals and show them graphic images of dead creatures and throw blood on them to stop them squelching potential future lives. We must call them sluts and whores and shame them for not keeping their hands off their goods. These are potential people they’re murdering!
On Abortion,
@KatieKitten, let me try to cut through the fog for you. There’s a lot of emotional fog that billows up around this question. I think I can clear the air a bit, if you’ll let me.
We don’t care about bacteria or tumours; we care about how they affect people. We care about mice, but generally not as much as we care about cats or dogs. We care about people most of all. Because we care about minds.
If we have a loved one who suffers grievous neurological damage and is in a coma, we hold on to hope until their mind is gone, at which point we grieve for that loss – even if their body is alive, that doesn’t matter. If someone we love leaves for awhile and comes back thinking and behaving in a way that we find loathesome, we shun them, and grieve for the loss of the person we loved (and perhaps fight to get their old way of thinking back). Because we love minds.
Mice have minds. They’re itty-bitty things, but they have pretty much the same brain structures we do, albeit in different proportions and arrangements. We don’t have a good reason to think they don’t. Bacteria and viruses don’t behave like they have minds, and don’t have any structures or things-about-them that we believe could ever support a mind.
We are concerned with the capacity to love, the capacity to suffer, the capacity to feel. Zygotes have none of these. Comparing a zygote to a mouse in this way deeply undervalues the mouse. The little squeaker may not have a very clear memory of the past, and may not be able to project the future, but she can recognize your scent and scurry over and nuzzle you with affection; she can round up her little squeaky children and hold them close when it’s cold out. A fetus can do nothing more than draw nutrients and maybe do a little wiggle. I’d compare it to a sea cucumber, but sea cucumbers have a bit more neurological activity so it’s a grey area.
That sounds harsher than I’d like it to! What’s catching you up here, I think, is the potential for love and feeling that a foetus has. They could turn into a mind capable of love and life. Which is true! But it sells away the rights of the loving, feeling person carrying it for the potential mind of the potential person that might be in the future.
That’s a decision every pregnant person in the world has to go through, because that’s a value judgement – Do I sacrifice my desires for this possibility? That’s up to the individual to decide, and it’s the heart of what pro-choice is, in my opinion. And it’s got nothing to do with killing a person, because there’s no person there. No mind. There’s possibly, maybe, could-be-a-person-at-some-point there. Same as for every sperm or egg in every gonad. The only difference between an egg in an ovary and a foetus is a shift in probabilities, and not nearly as big a shift as many would have you believe.
Does this clarify things or make them worse? Anti-abortion advocates muddy this issue a lot, and make it way more complicated than it needs to be. That way they can tangle as much emotion and grief in there as possible to guilt women to get into their patriarchal roles. Catches up a lot of good people in that tangled mess.
Kupo: What I meaned with lost is only the baby vs tumorpart.
I was not clear on that, perhaps.
Point taken that it is a doublestandard, made easier by the fact that it is earlier in the process (and men would be the target).
Point exspecially taken that we should stopp treating women that have an abortion so badly.
My point that was lost a bit, was that this is a damm hard decision for any women in that situation and I understand those, who have a moral problem with the question what they should do if they are in that situation.
What is a good think to have potential help for the women, who are pregnant, because children are expensive. (On of the oficial reasons for the privilage of mariage is that the state want to give people help because the system needs children for the staate to stay stabil)
There is no baby involved. That myth needs to stop.
No, it really isn’t. It has the POTENTIAL to be a hard decision, for certain people. For other people (for example, me), the decision to have an abortion would be no more difficult than the decision to have a tapeworm removed. It’s an unwanted organism in my body, there without my consent, and it will be unceremoniously ejected at the soonest opportunity. There is no objective reason why abortion SHOULD be a hard choice to make. (That doesn’t mean that it SHOULD be easy, either, just that it has the potential to be either, depending on the individual whose organs are being used.)
It’s a myth that abortion is a difficult decision too. Most people who want one decide quickly and are sure about it.
https://www.guttmacher.org/evidence-you-can-use/waiting-periods-abortion
That’s an important myth to dispel because as the link explains, it leads to mandatory waiting periods which are detrimental both financially and health-wise.
It’s almost like women and other people with uteri have thought about whether or not they want and are ready for a baby long before an unplanned pregnancy actually happens.
Hello, I’m a biology professor.
When I was getting my degree, I took Developmental Biology, and it actually made me more OK with abortion than I already was before. I had an abortion a couple of years previous to that, and it was very reassuring finding out how undeveloped that embryo was at that stage (I got it done before it counted as a fetus – which isn’t until 8 weeks). It didn’t even have a brain yet, and certainly no ability to feel pain or be aware of its own existence.
Now when I teach my own students about human development, I am sure to go into detail about this stuff. I don’t bring up abortion directly, but I am sure that many of my students have also been misled about what a human embryo or fetus is like at the stages when many abortions occur. Maybe some of them have also had abortions themselves, so I hope that I can reassure them like I was reassured when I was a student that they are not actually killing a tiny baby.
The main regret I have about my abortion is that I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place. I was a teenager, got my first boyfriend, and nobody taught me that “pulling out” wasn’t a reliable contraceptive method. The abortion was painful and expensive. Would have been much better to not have gotten pregnant in the first place, but the abortion was much LESS painful and LESS expensive than actually having a baby would have been!
But really, talking about human developmental stages and the reasoning behind having an abortion and stuff like that is a distraction, because the real issue is bodily autonomy. Even if you think an embryo or fetus should have legal personhood, nobody forces people to donate blood or tissue or organs against their will, even if the person will die without the donation.
Giving an embryo or fetus “personhood” status effectively gives them MORE rights than anyone else. Certainly more than the pregnant woman, but what about all those people on organ donor waiting lists? They don’t get to just take other people’s organs without permission. A lot of them die before getting an organ. Should we start FORCING people to give them organs?
Interesting, I didn’t know that mandatory waiting periods were even in the discusion.
I could google but what times are we talking about?
Correct me if I am wrong but isn’t abortian a less dangerous and less dificult operation early in pregnancy?
About the decision being hard or not, it is at last one which huge consequences so it is natural that women think about it before they are in the situation.
Force towards either decision, shaming etc sucks.
Another Dr. Jen Gunter link, because she is awesome:
the entire abortion tag.
Who? The mandatory wait isn’t usually very long, which doesn’t sound so terrible. Until you remember that someone likely had to drive a significant distance from their home to get the first appointment, and now has to stick around this other place for an extra day or two.
That’s an extra day off of work, so money lost there. Also a day where you’ll need to pay for food and lodgings, and perhaps make sure someone is taking care of children you already have.
You’ll also have to go past the forced-birth protesters again, which can be really difficult to do.
Here’s a quote from people who study this:
From here.
This isn’t just in the discussion, it’s a law in many states.
Rhuu – What about prophylactic antibiotics? I understand that they probably improve outcomes for surgeries in aggregate, but are they always necessary?
MILbeast is terribly allergic to almost* all forms of antibiotics and is blind due to cataracts because there are no docs that take Medicare who will remove them for her without a course of antibiotics.
*She got a course of antibiotics in the hospital a couple of months ago without too much** trouble, but they still had to cut it short and put her on oxygen for a day when her airway started swelling up.
**Compared to the time she nearly died, anyway.
Don’t be silly, waiting times aren’t about the health of the pregnant person! They’re meant to be a barrier to obtaining an abortion, because poor women who may not be able to afford to take multiple days off to go to a clinic multiple times, (especially if the only abortion clinic is 100+ miles away because every other one in the state got shit down and she doesn’t have a car) will be turned away and told to think about their decision for a few days and come back later. People who can’t afford a hotel in a far away city for those few days and can’t get transport to the clinic, well, they’ll just have to have that baby and face the consequences of their slutty actions.
It also gives extra time for the pregnant person to be guilt-tripped into keeping it.
Yes there really are waiting periods and more.
I’m lucky that I had my abortion a long time ago before Texas passed these awful laws we have now. I just had to make an appointment over the phone, then come in once and got it all done within a couple of hours (filling out forms, counseling, the procedure itself, and recovery from the nitrous oxide).
But now you have to go in to get an ultrasound, the doctor forces you to look at the ultrasound, they read you some state mandated script designed to guilt trip you about it, and then you have to go leave and come back in three days for the actual procedure.
And a while ago they passed a law that mandated that abortion clinics become ambulatory surgery centers, which shut down most abortion clinics in the state. It ended up being overturned by the Supreme Court, but most of them weren’t able to reopen. It’s OK if you live near one of the major cities, because they managed to keep at least one clinic open each, but if you live out in the boonies somewhere, you could end up having to drive over 100 miles to get to a clinic.
We also have a 20 week abortion ban. I think I already mentioned my friend who aborted a wanted fetus at 19 weeks because she went into premature labor and didn’t want to have to just wait around for the fetus to die. Oh, and it turns out they still do the ultrasound and the state mandated anti-abortion spiel even when something like that is happening. Like, there’s no way your fetus can survive, but we’re going to guilt trip you about aborting it anyway.
It’s all to make it harder for women to get a safe abortion at a clinic and has nothing to do with health or safety. Dangerous do-it-yourself abortions have gone way up since these laws have passed.
It’s much easier to buy a gun than to get an abortion.
Hambeast – Had to look that one up! Found this page, where it says
Here’s one about using them before dental surgery in patients. It looks like they are also recommending it less.
My post was more about people going to the doctor for the cold and demanding antibiotics, but it is interesting to learn that they seem to be changing the procedure for other uses of antibiotics as well!
(opinion formed based on a quick reading of two articles, definitely ready for an expert to drop some education if necessary)
Wiki also points to this article, where the American Heart Association is recommending it less as well.
@ rhuu
When I had that abscess they offered me the choice of antibiotics; but said the preferred approach was just to drill and drain it. There were also posters to that effect in the waiting area. So that seems to be the vogue here now.
Who?
Count me as another voice saying this is total BS. Thanks.
Still BS. If an individual goes through any kind of emotional struggle, it’s because of who they are as a person and/or their particular circumstances, not because abortion itself is specially fraught with consequences.
Right now, I’m trying to get some of my teeth replaced with dental implants, and that requires a lot of weighing of the consequences, such as, how will I schedule the steps of this long, drawn-out process so I don’t risk becoming unable to eat while having to work, and do I want to spend so much time and money on something that could wear out within a few years, etc. But I’ve known since I was very young that I don’t want to have children, so the only time “huge consequences” would come into play over abortion is if I were somehow denied one.