“Romance Tips for Angry Incels” from comedian Rachel Parris and BBC2

@Catalpa

I think, if you have even considered joining the toxic mindset that is that of an incel, there is something fundamentally flawed deep, deep inside of you. Something deeply, terribly wrong.

@Hexum

Totally agreed. There is little that can be done for them. Our strategy should be: Isolate, isolate, isolate. Take away their forums, their websites, their hangouts. Mitigate the harm they can do to us women.

Meanwhile, at McSweeney’s, we have:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-female-incel

It’s almost painful how accurate it is.

Meanwhile society’s enforcement of TOXIC FEMININITY has made women unfit and undesirable as relationship partners

And it is very frustrating how, on nearly every incel post, we get guys who go “wow, i really see where they are coming from!”

Yeah, it is. I saw Eli show up with his “Hi, I’m a guy who’s new to the site…” post and I braced myself for more of the same. I was very pleasantly surprised to see a guy make a first post on an incel thread that went “what is wrong with these people!?” instead of “I could definitely see myself becoming one of those guys.”

@weirwoodtreehugger

Toxic femininity = women have and use agency instead of arranging their whole lives around pleasing men.

I dunno, a quick peek at the manosphere would suggest that this “agency” thing is not considered at all feminine. Maybe “toxic femininity” is that mind controlling vaginal secretion thing?

When I think “toxic femininity”, TBH, I usually think of the way women are encouraged to police each other towards normatively acceptable behavior.

@Pie

So yeah, there’s a pretty widespread tacit agreement in patriarchal pop culture that men have free will and women don’t. For examples, just look at any TV show that ever involves incubi. Or demonic possession in Christianity, where victims are almost invariably women or girls. Or even anything involving vampires with mind control/seduction abilities – *technically* those might work on male characters, but you usually only get to see it with women, and the guys tend to opt out via rage/cleverness/sheer willpower/etc. Once you know what to look for, it’s everywhere.

(I’m thinking in particular of Dresden Files episode with the incubus larva and the photograph, ugh. But there are so, so many examples.)

And Stargate: SG-1, the first Hathor episode. Men get controlled, but women resist. (The ep never addressed whether she’d affect lesbians, not affect gays or anyone ace, or affect bisexual people…)

@Pie There are succubi, too – female sex demons who prey on men. Because homosexual desire was considered sooooo horrible that not even demons would do it. *rolls eyes* source: Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer (Ew, ick)

[In this regard Lost Girl is not strictly accurate. :D]

Toxic femininity is the gender roles of female entitlement … like this video promotes… the idea that women are somehow entitled to be wooed by men … who are presumed to have a reciprocal heteronormative ‘duty’ to act as ‘good and proper’ sexual conquerors and conquer women in the ‘right way’ women demand and expect… by performing toxic masculine gender scripts… I mean that’s a big part of TOXIC FEMININITY… as it manifests in this video… but how it normally manifests is a female attitude of entitlement to male provisionment…

Mick,

Did you even watch the video? Because I saw nothing in there about men needing to act as conquerors. Or even that they need to woo. It just pointed out that interacting respectfully with women is likely to lead to more romantic and sexual success than spending all day in incel forums calling them bitches and fantasizing about them being raped and murdered. I’d think this would be pretty basic and uncontroversial advice. Can you quote what specifically she said that promotes entitlement?

@Cindy, I’m speaking living in America so I don’t know where you live and if this applies, but I really wonder how can incel (and while we’re at it, any hateful site and/or movement) websites can be taken away to further isolate them. I constantly wonder if there’d be lawsuits involved because of muh free speech and first amendment stuff, and it reminds me of the case of that Nazi goblin (is that what they call him?) from the Daily Stormer who was almost banished for good had he not gone over to the dark web and eventually someone was willing to profit from his hate to put his website back again.

Same could be with Incels, as long as the internet exists they’ll have some sort of community, and if all their websites were taken away, the ones willing and knowing how to would move over to the dark web, the true hell of the internet. Maybe their community would be smaller, but it’d still exist.

I’ve heard that there are more obscure incel sites that are far worse than Incels.me, so cynical me says that humans always find a way to continue to propagate their hate, even if actual censorship is used.

Mick, you asshat, go chew on a dead seagull.

I’m not saying there aren’t good points accompanying it, but this “I could never be lured in by a cult, no matter how young and stupid and emotionally unhealthy I might have been, and anyone who could have must be a Bad Person, then, now, and forever” rhetoric seems a bit… well, unimaginative, at least.