By David Futrelle
Today, someone posted a picture of the world’s oldest wombat to the Braincels subreddit under the headline “It’s over for wombatcels.” Because, you see, the world’s oldest wombat also happens to be a virgin, making him also the world’s oldest wombat incel.
While most of the commenters made jokes, one fellow was strangely heartened by Patrick the Wombat’s inability to score.
![DFWAggie 15 points 5 hours ago I'm not sure if this is cope, but I honestly enjoy knowing that many animals die virgins. Strange, but it gives me a sense of inner peace. permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]Nightstalkerr_ 11 points 4 hours ago Nah bro their brains are wired differently they don’t need sex, and it’s not as important as it is to humans. So yeah this is cope bro](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/cf7r8tf9yg708h-9.png?resize=508%2C545&ssl=1)
“Cope,” by the way, is how so-called incels describe strategies they come up with to, well, cope with their bitterness about their ongoing celibacy; incels, being the perversely miserable sorts that they are, look down their noses at it, preferring instead to wallow in their own largely self-made misery.
But you know what, DFWAggie? Taking comfort from a wombat’s virginity might be a little weird, but hey, if it helps to cut through the bitterness and to remind you that unwanted celibacy, while unfortunate, isn’t actually the end of the world, go ahead and indulge this particular cope all you want. “Cope” is good.
I know it’s far from the most important thing to take away from this article, but Patrick the Wombat died more than a year ago. Pretty sure he died still a virgin, but he lived a very long life that almost didn’t even hapen – his mum was killed by a car but he survived and was taken to a wildlife park :https://wildlifepark.com.au/wildlife/patrick-the-wombat/
Compared to some of the stuff they take comfort from, ’29 year old wombat hasn’t mated’ seems pretty benign.
I’m sorry but this is nonsense. It is a fact that sexual intimacy is part of Maslow’s hierarchy. Asexual individual are statistically very rare, and just because they exist doesn’t mean we can’t make generalizations about human needs based on a statistically overwhelming set of cases.
Sure, but Maslow’s hierarchy is a load of crap. Scildfreja elaborates on that more above.
Needs are universal. Especially when you’re talking about the basic physical existence needs that Maslow’s hierarchy claims that sex is included in.
Humans will literally die without food or water or air or shelter, in short order. All humans. There isn’t some “statistically rare” human out there who can survive without breathing.
Humans will NOT literally die without sex. Hell, all humans go for well over a decade without anyone (well, almost anyone- I suppose some pedophiles probably have a different opinion) thinking that they should be having sex in the first place.
So, no, I stand by my position that the idea that ‘sex is a basic human need” is a load of steaming bullcrap. You could MAYBE convince me that sex can be bundled into one of the higher-level, personal wellbeing needs like affirmation.
Here’s the thing that bothers me most about the sex as a need hypothesis.
If it’s a need, how does it get fulfilled? Food, shelter, water, health care, those are needs that can be provided without oppressing anyone. Sex on the other hand, is a need that requires someone else’s body to be fulfilled. The implication is there that a certain group of people would be duty bound to provide sex to those that need it and can’t get it.
This leads us straight into “men wouldn’t murder if women would let them do sex on them” territory.
Sure, lots of people would be miserable without sex. Lots of other people are fine without it. It’s not a need. It’s a want. Calling it a need will never lead anywhere besides coercion. Usually the coercion of women. Usually women from marginalized groups.
@WWTH
No no no no, you’re getting it all wrong! Apparently “sex” is just a word for a whole bunch of things, including masturbation (and kissing and hugging)! People can totally masturbate without oppressing anyone else! So it’s completely unproblematic to say that sex is a need, completely unclarified! Everyone knows that when someone says that sex is a need, they mean that need can be 100% fulfilled by masturbating!
It’s not as though our society defines sex as a way to lose virginity, and which requires another person’s participation! Once you masturbate, boom, you’ve had sex and you’re totally not considered a virgin anymore! That’s just how it works!
There would NEVER be anyone who would say that “sex is a need” as a way to support the argument that women should be obligated to provide sex! Nope! That’s definitely not a thing! /sarcasm
Weirwoodtreehugger: One of our cats had a litter before we adopted her, and one was a free-roaming tomcat. Our cat population is therefore almost certainly two-thirds nonvirginal, which is honestly not something I had previously given much thought to.
@forgot
Yeah, you should prolly read up on how Maslow went about creating his hierarchy. Cos a statistically overwhelming anything it ain’t…
Alan:
Yeah, but look at those small wrists. You can see why he’s a virgin.
It’s nice to know I’m a statistical anomaly who can be ignored when talking about humans.
@Moggie
I know, right? It’s so great to be dismissed as someone who doesn’t quite fit the definition of being human, someone who is lacking what is apparently a fundamental aspect of humanity. I love it when my life and experiences are dismissed as aberrant and inconsequential, to the point of them not being representative of a human being. Super fun times right here.
@Alan: That’s what she/he/they said!
And while he may yet be dead, that wombat doesn’t look like he spends uncountable hours tantrumming about all the female wombats who squandered his life. If anything, he looks only slightly miffed at being hoisted around for the cameras like that.
My considered opinion: fuck incels; wombats are cool.
I’m not defending the concept of “sex is a need” or Maslow’s Hierarchy. However, I will take exception to the idea that if something isn’t universally needed, it isn’t a need. Externally-produced insulin isn’t a universal need among humans, but it’s certainly needed by some. Conversely, some humans just seem to function with significantly less sleep than the average person (like 4-5 hours instead of 6-8), but that wouldn’t mean that 1-3 hour additional sleep that most people engage in isn’t really “needed” just because it’s not completely universal.
Do these yutzes really “need” sex, though? No, or else they’d already be dead.
@ChimericMind
Keyword is “universal” IMO
Re Maslow’s Hierarchy in general, the few times I’ve seen it referenced IRL have ranged from clueless entitlement to pretty blatant rape apologism, so yeah color me a skeptic. It has the kind of Freudian feeling of a once radical idea that is now pseudoscience, and mainly used to prop up bad politics.
Also TBH I find it both offensive and inaccurate how the Hierarchy indicates the lower tiers as necessities for e.g. ethical behavior. The most practically ethical people I know tend to be those who are lacking some of those lower tiers, or at least have not forgotten what it was like to lack them.
@ChimericMind, absolutely! I think this is a case where the English language sorta lets us down a little. We’ve got the same word, need, to refer to food, water, sex, and a tropical vacation. I mean, sure, maybe I don’t need to be sitting on a Bermuda beach right now but I sure as heck need it.
Far as I’ve seen, modern academic discussion on it pretty much avoids using the word “need,” replacing it with “drive” or something else altogether. A need is one of those ironclad physiological things, food, water, oxygen, etc. A drive is something that will make you unhappy if you aren’t getting to some degree. I’d put sex in the latter category, with the degree of drive varying by individual.
As usual, language is a fuzzy mess, less adorable than our dearly departed Patrick.
@Cyborgette,
… huh
Now I understand why Maslow’s Hierarchy and the MBTI, despite being discarded in science, persist in business schools and corporate personnel profiling.
That clarifies things a lot. Thank you.
@Scildfreja
Oh, wow. Thank you in turn for making that link; I’d mainly seen it from medical and male social standpoints. And yeah, that makes a horrifying amount of sense on a horrifying number of levels.
I feel like an analogy to Lysenkoism might be appropriate TBH.
See, I would argue that those needs are all still universal, just that there are variations in the way in which the need can/must be met.
Humans NEED insulin. Some can’t produce it on their own and require aids. Humans NEED sleep. Some can require less or more sleep in order to function.
In the same vein, humans NEED food, but some people require more calories to sustain themselves, and others are required to avoid certain foods that would be totally fine for others, etc.
But I suppose we’re arguing semantics at this point. The definition of “need” is not super well defined, since English uses it as both a verb and a noun, and the verb can be very flexible in its use. However, mixing the definitions of “need” to include both “something which is literally physically required for survival of an organism” and “something which will result in specific individuals’ suffering without” without any kind of clarification between them is a weaselly damn thing to do.
…I suppose that there are some ailments which require specific treatment/substances that are not needed by others. I might not NEED antibiotics at this very moment, but someone suffering from a massive bacterial infection certainly does.
I could argue that it’s not the antibiotics providing for the “need”, that the need is actually the need to have functional organs, and the antibiotics are just the specific way that we can use to kill bacteria which may be threatening that need. That human biological systems don’t actually “use” the antibiotics in the same way we “use” food and air and water. That humans “need” antibiotics the same way that someone “needs” a gun to shoot a bear that is right now charging at them to kill. But that is admittedly REALLY stretching the semantics we’re arguing about.
In either case, a lack of sex is NOT something that causes organ failure like an untreated infection, no matter how high someone’s libido might be, so the idea that it’s a physical need is still so much bullshit. (I know you’re not arguing that it is, ChimericMind, just adding the disclaimer in case people think I’m walking back my opinions on the idea that sex is a need.)
Libido can vary considerably among cats. I was used to toms that needed to be castrated asap as soon as they hit full puberty. To wait too long, meant they peed all over the house and fought or tried to mate with every other cat they could find and they wandered all over the place to find as many of them as possible.
Then I got my own apartment and my then partner got me a main coon kitten. I jokingly said when he was little: “as long as you behave you get to keep your balls””. To my surprise, he never scentmarked inside my house. He does not howl in order to attract mates. He was in every way indistinguishable from all the neutered toms I had known. Except for the fact that he never over eats. Mind you, I would have had him neutered as a kitten if I did not live in a building with an enclosed courtyard and I knew that all my neighbours had had their pusses spayed.
I thought he might me asexual until a neighbour loosened a puss in heat on him that belonged to someone who lived elsewhere. After a few hours of courtship he knocked her up.
After this experience, he remained his usual self. He is fourteen now.
@ Cyborgette;
Yeah… and there’s a LOT OF THAT going around these days…
Scildfreja, thank you again for your continually AMAZING analysis. I’ve learned so much from googling stuff you reference in your comments.
Actually, from stuff a lot of mammotheers post!!
Living in a society where physical affection and emotional intimacy are often something shared only with sexual partners is probably clouding the waters in this discussion. Anyone else notice how the term ‘touch-starved’ suddenly became common is the last couple of years? It’s not necessary to survival*, of course, but touch and intimacy are certainly needed for our emotional well-being. But our society thinks physical touch=sex.
*Except lack of affection may make babies more prone to die, I think?
Maybe I’m just desensitize but by incel standards taking comfort in a wombats virginity is fairly tame. At least there not celebrating a mass murder for once.
Trump is making moves to force a whole lot of immigrant women back into the kitchen:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/27/h1b-visas-work-permits-donald-trump-rescind-immigrants
The misogynistic horrors never cease with this administration. How do we bring it to a swift and sudden end?