By David Futrelle
If you’re wondering whether Godwin’s Law still has a role to play in a world that’s once again filled with actual Nazis, the answer is yes, because how else are we going to deal with the so-called involuntary celibates on the Incels.is forums who are currently comparing their lack of a sex life to the literal Holocaust, and concluding that what they’re dealing with is somehow worse.
A week ago, one regular Incels.is commenter called lifeisbullshit95 dropped this alleged truth bomb on his incel colleagues:
![[It's Over] Social media and dating apps have killed more men than both world war combined](https://i1.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Captureyg9hu08ji-.png?fit=600%2C384)
His message was somehow even more inflammatory than his headline, an all-caps wall-of-text rant, sans line breaks and even punctuation, declaring that all but the handsomest of men are suffering a “NEW HOLOCAUST” because of Facebook and Tinder.
“THIS IS THE NEW HOLOCAUST,” he began.
HITLER TARGETED THE JEWS TINDER AND SOCIAL MEDIA HAVE TARGETED SUB8 MEN WE’RE DYING A PAINFUL SEXLESS LIFE FULL OF SUFFERING AND DEPRESSION
Huh. Quick survey: Raise your hand if you’re a SUB8 MAN and you’ve had sex. Hell, raise your hand if you’re SUB8 and still alive, despite all the Holocausting from Tinder and Facebook.
Oh, but apparently you don’t have to be physically dead to count as a dude killed by social media.
HOW MANY LIFE TINDER,INSTAGRAM,FACEBOOK ECC HAVE CLAIMED YET? LIVING A SEXLESS LIFE ISN’T LIVING
Raise your hand if you’re not having sex at the moment but are somehow still living a life worth living.
ESPECIALLY AS MAN THEY DEFINITELY CLAIM MY LIFE AND THE SADDEST THING IS THAT NOBODY IS DOING ANYTHING WE’RE LEFT GETTING MURDERED
I can’t help but think of poor, rollerskating Terry on Reno 911.
Of course, Reno 911 was a comedy, and lifeisbullshit95, who has posted more than 700 decidedly non-humorous comments to Incels.is forums, isn’t kidding.
Like many incels lifeisbullshit95 is convinced that social media makes women too stuck up to even consider having sex with any but the most Chadly of men. This, as it turns out, is a widespread belief in the Manosphere, promoted by everyone from MRA douchebag Paul Elam to PUA douchebags like Roosh V to the denizens of MGTOWforums,,com. As these misogynistic men see it, women on dating sites and social media get so much flattery from thirsty men that they come to see themselves as better than the “looksmatched” men they should be dating. (Incels don’t really seem to understand how many of the “flattering” messages that women get online are literal dick pics or otherwise creepy as fuck.)
NOBODY FIGHT SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE DATING APPS THAT HAS GIVEN SO MUCH POWER TO WOMEN EVEN TALKING ABOUT THIS TOPIC IS TABOO
And so somehow we’re back in 1930s Germany, but this time women are Hitler.
HITLER CAME TO POWER BECAUSE THE GERMANS WERE AN- GRY AND WANTED A REVOLUTION WOMEN CAME TO POWER BECAUSE THEY FELT ANGRY ABOUT NOT HAVING EQUAL RIGHTS AND WANTED A REVOLUTION IT’S ALL SO SIMILAR
And now these Hitler-women are using dating apps to sex genocide all but the top 20% of men.
BOTH HITLER AND THE DATING APPS HAD AS A GOAL TO WEED OUT FROM EXISTANCE THE INFERIOR MEN
You may wonder how exactly not getting matches on Tinder is similar to being murdered in a death camp. Lifeisbullshit95 has this, er, answer:
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? DYING IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER IS STILL DYING WE’RE THE VICTIMS OF THE NEW HOLOCAUST MY FRIENDS.
Okey dokey then.
You may wonder if any of the other incels stopped for a moment and told lifeisbullshit95 that he was completely full of shit. The answer, of course, is no.
“my face is rotting each day and female hypergamy is only getting potentialized with dating apps,” wrote someone calling himself JeffGoldblumInTheFly, and perhaps taking his handle a little too seriously, “its fucking over.”
“Dating apps and social media not only killed men but it make us suffer,” declared someone called Cuyen.
JeffGoldblum and Cuyen have, together, posted more than 20,000 messages on Incels.is, so I’m pretty sure they’re not drive-by trolls.
And even if JeffGoldblumInTheFly is joking about his face rotting away like, well, Jeff Goldblum’s face in “The Fly,” incels do believe that as each day passes they become ever less likely to ever validate their lives by having sex with a woman. More importantly, his comment here serves to offer its own sort of validation — of lifeisbullshit95’s hyperbolic, hateful rhetoric blaming women for essentially every problem in men’s lives.
Social media and dating apps don’t kill, but depression does, and sites like Incels.is add to the problem by steering young, desperate men away from real help and into a hateful, self-destructive fantasy world. That’s the real danger here.
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Let me try and explain the above two situations again…
The first was not “common.” It happened once, as described, at a party where I was drunk and obnoxious, and I have been milking the gag ever since for comedic value.
The second was not girls “asking their boyfriend to kill” me, it was them saying that their boyfriends were extremely jealous types, who were desperately fearful that they would lose their girl to anyone. That happened in high school and to a lesser extent, college, when immaturity reigned.
More often, girls would say that their boyfriend would like to “meet me,” because we might have a lot in common, or simply say that they were taken.
My entire take on my five answers from women has been something of a comedic gag with myself as the butt of the joke that I have been using for the past 45 years for its hilarity value.
My sense of humor, like Rodney Dangerfield, is self-deprecating, to cope with my negative view of myself and my lack of self-esteem. In other words, if I stink at life and my life is a failure, it may as well be a funny failure.
Is that making myself clear?
I didn’t think so.
So as I also say to folks who want to attack me, “Take a number and stand in line.”
Great story…I presume he was in a marching band or something?
The fact that so many boyfriends were nonplussed about me asking out their girlfriends and took time to chat pleasantly with me actually made me feel less embarrassed about the situations I was in and better about the world.
A good number of girls were impressed with me, but they came equipped with boyfriends.
Equipped oy s a weird word, here. I’d avoid it.
These girls would tell me that some would enjoy meeting me for the common interests, others were insanely jealous.
That’s nice? What are you even saying with this?
The girls who hurled harsh responses to me were not very common — they tended to be have their own senses of entitlement.
Ah, yes, if a woman makes it clear you make her feel unsafe she must have entitlement issues. ?
@Skylalalala
INORITE?! I was like “Hold up, hold up, Queen released The Works in 1984. They never ‘broke up’!” And given the breadth of Queen’s discography, what songs were on what albums were all muddled up. I can forgive fudging some timeline elements in a biographical film in service of some solid character insight, but we never really got that either as Jim Hutton gets one brief scene in the middle, then Freddie meets up with him on the day of Live Aid, then the performance is the end of the film. The last six years of Freddie’s life (and three more Queen albums, excluding Made In Heaven) are just glossed over in some ending text. And because they fudged the timeline of Freddie’s HIV diagnosis, everybody behaves like Freddie’s going to die the next day. It’s so tonally inconsistent.
Eh, we’ve always got the real Freddie in his wonderful music videos.
How I met all five of my long-term partners:
1. A mutual friend’s party. I wasn’t actually looking for a relationship, but she rang me out of the blue a few days later (she’d got the number from our friend) and one thing led to another.
2. She was the PA to a regular client; we got to know each other pretty well over the phone for over a year before we met – we were usually both bored, so were happy to chat at length.
3. A regular at a place I used to manage – I found out much later that she immediately asked a colleague if I was spoken for, and then waited patiently until I was legitimately free a few months later (I had no idea about any of this at the time).
4. Usenet posts (remember them?) leading to private emails – again, we didn’t meet in person for several months, mainly because we lived in different countries.
5. An online dating forum: I’d posted a pictureless ad in a moment of drunken self-pity, while she’d just that moment decided to abandon her “no picture, no date” rule and start looking for people who could write well and make her laugh. The next morning, I was just about to delete my ad when I saw it had attracted a single reply.
I married the last one eighteen months later and we’re not far off notching up two full decades.
And one thing that really strikes me about that list is how often, contrary to stereotype, she made the first or most decisive move – and I’m about as far from a stereotypical Chad as it’s possible to imagine.
@WWTH
How strange. And here I was thinking that the Somali communities that started showing up elsewhere than Somalia in the 90s were founded by people getting out of a dystopic hellhole.
@Kiwiwriter
He’s a PFC United States marine who was at my college for a Veterans day celebration. They was a large open section where the different type of soldiers are at. He was standing near the side walk with the curb I missed.
Ah…I see why he would have got in trouble. He should have been commended for his quick injury-saving action.
What is funny about responses that sound like you genuinely made women fear for their safety? Maybe read the room, here, and stop doubling down about how funny your anecdote us.
Nobody was ever actually fearful for their safety. Ever. The only time I was tossed out of an event by security was when I was drunk, 40 years ago. It happened once. And it was my fault.
My God, you make it sound like I went through life like Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump.
I am succeeding only at offending people…it’s time for me to leave. It’s pretty obvious now that every single person in this group loathes me and my existence. Perhaps you would be happier if I had killed myself 40 years ago. The first time it was because my high school teachers said I was the “stupidest person in class” when I answered a question right. The second time it was because my college math instructor spent the entire math lab trying to convince me — a student with the lowest math grades in his school’s history — to become a mathematician. When I begged him to stop, he wouldn’t. With two minutes to go before the lab ended, I asked if I could go home, where dinner was waiting. He told me I would fail the lab. I knew then I would fail no matter what, and tried — again — to kill myself.
Would it be better if I had succeeded? Judging from the answers here, AB-SO-FREAK-ING-LUTELY.
I’m done here.
Kiwiwriter —
The problem with your original post was that it gave the impression women regularly call security on you when you try to approach them, and that you’re blaming that on your Asperger’s.
If I understood correctly, neither impression is true: the reality is that once, 20 years ago, someone threw you out of a club for being drunk, and you’re only saying Asperger’s makes it harder in general for you to connect with women, not that it makes you frighten or abuse them.
Fair enough, but you can see why the original post caused a negative reaction.
@Kiwiwriter, I don’t know if you will see this – for what it’s worth (and I know that’s not much, I’m just another internet stranger) this looks to me like a huge miscommunication. I don’t think everybody here loathes you or anything like it; obviously I can and do only speak for myself, but I read what you wrote as an attempt at humour gone wrong followed by an attempt at explaining which didn’t work out.
I know there are a lot of people here with good reason to feel vulnerable (and that you’re one of them – and so are many others). We all fuck up, especially in writing – I know I do, which is one of the reasons I tend to lurk a lot more than I write.
Maybe stick around? But let this one go and don’t try to explain it any more than you have?
I think Kiwiwriter’s comments overall point more towards their being a mammotheer than otherwise, if that makes sense.
@Kiwiwriter
You would think so, but he was disobey an order so he got in trouble for it. as he likes to say the Marines have screwed him over since his first day in boot camp lol.
@kiwiwriter: If you don’t use appropriate language around here(not just correct words but phrasing and style), you will face a barrage of righteous indignation. Call-out culture runs deep in places like this.
Also, many women really have a great deal of contempt for men who are socially inept and/or have experienced difficulty getting along with women. They rationalize this contempt by wrapping it up in moralistic language by ranting about how “entitled” and “misogynistic” they are.
Quite frankly, I am already growing tired of this place and the conspiratorial worldviews of certain posters(I won’t name names). Righteousness makes me sick.
Going off on a tangent here: I’ve always believed strongly in fairness so I tended to lean left. But the modern left, especially the hard left, almost views itself as an aristocracy with a holier than thou mentality. They have a creed. If you question anything in their creed you can expect to be shouted down(proverbially and even literally). It is as if political ideology has replaced religion. Not unlike what happened in the 1960s(and spilling over into the early 70s). One thing that people like this hate more than anything is those who ask questions and those who don’t *tow the line*. Enough znough.
@Nowherepants
You can leave you know. you don’t have to be here.
Your on a page about a guy who’s comparing himself to be a victim of the Holocaust because online dating websites make it easier for people to have sex and their not having sex with him. You know the Incels, the one that women dead for not sleeping with them or for sleeping with someone other then them, or for not being pretty enough. you on a page about that and this is what you write buddy. I just hope you understand that.
Why is it that being unwelcoming to internet diagnoses so controversial? That’s got to be the number one cause of blowouts around here. Even after the comment policy was updated. I truly don’t get it.
At least that’s what I assume Nowhere Pants is concern trolling about. I suppose it could be anger about being asked to not mansplain vaginas too.
@kiwiwriter
It’s telling that you react to a gentle suggestion that you examine what you consider to be funny a bit more closely by hyperbolicly comparing yourself to a man who has been credibly accused of at least 16 sexual assaults.
I don’t know if you’re doing this on purpose, but it reminds me a lot of my brother. He’d talk about how much he wanted to hit women, but whenever called on it would say that at least he wasn’t Chris Brown. Like the existence of Chris Brown made it so my brother’s stuff wasn’t worth talking about.
Again, I don’t know if that’s what you’re doing, but definitely my experiences with my sibling color my interpretation of you and everyone else. For all of us, our past experiences color our present reality.
@Nowherepants
If you truly don’t like it here, then why do you keep coming back? You seem to have experiences that wildly diverge from reality as experienced by myself or anyone else on this blog, or as written about by anyone with a credible source.
Like that. In every way, not representative of my experiences either before or after transition. But it is the sort of thing neo-misogynists like Incels say a lot. Because they’d rather throw people with poor social skills under the bus than admit there might be anything wrong with their behavior or views. Behavior that includes: Calling for women’s deaths, stalking, harassment, theft, and assault. And views which include: Fetishizing sex crimes, advocating for the enslavement of women, and seeing women as something less than human.
Now, I’m not sure whether you’re part of this specific hate group. But if these are views you do espouse, then you’re a misogynist period.
If your belief in human rights varies based on whether others see you as a paragon of morality regardless of the choices you make and the views you hold, then you are not left-leaning. Like, this is basic morality here. You do the right thing because it is right, not because other people treat you better for it.
Nah, it’s okay. I know one of the people you’re talking about is me. I’m used to people who don’t like what I say claiming I’m some kind of conspiracy theorist. People said the same thing about Cassandra of Troy, with a heaping side dose of “Women can’t know anything” and yet she was completely right that there were soldiers in that horse, and her city fell because she wasn’t believed. Anyway, it’s perfectly normal for people to claim red is green just because I say it’s red, so I don’t hold this specifically against you.
Ok. Personally, I’m giving Kiwiwriter the benefit of the doubt because he’s been a commenter here for awhile and I don’t recall any issues with him before. I think he’s just put his foot in his mouth and has made the mistake of continuing to dig a hole. So let’s set this specific issue aside for a minute.
In general, fuck all the way off with this notion that women can’t tell the difference between awkwardness and boundary crossing creepiness. We can. We have to. Our safety depends on it. There are just as many socially awkward women as there are men. So why is it that “awkward” people behaving creepily is such a gendered phenomenon? Because it’s bullshit. Social awkardness, ineptness and autism is used as a shield for men who are actually predatory. If you don’t believe women about this, maybe you’ll believe a man?
https://www.doctornerdlove.com/socially-awkward-isnt-an-excuse/
Here’s the crucial bit
Women (and everyone else) have every right to have and enforce boundaries. Whether or not it hurts feelings. We always have every right to be angry when someone infringes on those boundaries. Especially since when we do trust someone who turns out to be a bad guy, we get the blame for that too. We can’t win. If we aren’t nice, we’re unreasonable man hating bitches. If we are nice and trusting, we’re stupid sluts who got what is coming.
So, please tell me. How exactly are women supposed to discern which men are nice but well meaning and which are dangerous? How precisely are we supposed to defend our boundaries without hurting any man’s feelings ever? Really. I want to know. I always hear from men about women are doing things all wrong, I never hear how we’re supposed to behave in order to prevent all rape and abuse but still always be nice. Come on. Don’t just tell me what not to do. I have a feeble lady brain. I need to also know what I should actually do!
Or if you’re ready to listen to a lowly feeeemale, read and comprehend this
https://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/
Just stopping in to say I am absolutely an aristocrat and I am extremely righteous. Nothing the left likes more than the hereditary rich!
I don’t think you’re a bad egg @kiwiwriter. This just sort of went off the rails. It happens sometime. Has happened to me here, too. Consider it an opportunity to learn about yourself and the world around you.
And I would like to say that I am aristocratic as fuck, but less in the Queen Victoria way and more the Boudicca way. As in, I would like to leave such a wake behind me that I write my name indelibly into the geologic strata of the Earth. Does that count?
CatMara drew me out of lurking by letting the word “sexless” lead her to endorsing and linking my favorite album of the 21st century, Seeming’s ‘SOL: a Self-Banishment Ritual’ https://seeming.bandcamp.com/album/sol-a-self-banishment-ritual
Versatile, superbly-produced goth in modes from orchestrated majesty, to electro-punk, to dark funk, to ’80s New Romanticism.
But also, Alex Reed is a superb lyricist whose politics should be extremely WHTM-friendly. “Articles of Secession”, a one-off single with Elizabeth Sandifer (a postmodernist Marxist Doctor Who blogger) and Meredith Collins, is my utopian manifesto of choice, and I think a lot of you would dig it: spoken-word over electronics, with sense of humor firmly in place.
https://seeming.bandcamp.com/track/articles-of-secession-with-i-p-l-f
For the record: I have never advocated violence and honest to Pete I want no part in this “incel” culture.
Just because I am single ATM does not mean that I am desperate or need fixing. Actually, I don’t exactly have room for a partner in my life(which is in a state of flux but not in a negative way nor do I want to go into it).
I don’t think that incels are just purely eevil demons coming out of the woodwork from the bowels of Hell though. Sexual revolutions historically have had some very dire, unintended consequences. Like syphilis and AIDS among other things.
But more importantly, I wish I knew how to catalyze social change putting an end to the stigma of being single and piling on pressure unto people to get laid/get paired off(even if they don’t really want to anyway)just to prove that they can. There are other ways that people can compete beside sex. Because sexual competition inspires violent behavior.
@Kiwiwriter
No, no one in this group wishes that you killed yourself. Suicide is a horrible tragedy and I am sorry that you’ve had so many brushes with it. I hope you’re in a better mental state now.
That said, reacting to mild criticism of your anecdotes with “oh so you all wish I was dead!!!” is… not a great look.
As far as I can discern, the issue being taken with your story is that the punchlines can be interpreted like this:
“While I was single (and presumably seeking a partner), women responded to me by:
1. Telling me that they had a boyfriend who might physically harm me (i.e. a common tactic used by women who feel threatened by advances and feel like they need to invoke the protection of a strong male “owner”, who will generally be taken much more seriously by the advancing dude than the woman’s refusal would be.)
2. Women being super rude and mean!
3. Women being gay and upfront about it, which I interpreted as a gesture intended to mock me.
4. Women feeling the need to call for someone to physically intercede between me and them!
Isn’t that all like, super wacky? Women, amirite?”
Of the four responses you listed, at least two of them sound like things that would happen to someone who was aggressive and threatening towards the women he’s coming onto, and the other two are focused on how outlandish and interpreted-to-be-cruel the responses are by the women turning you down. That’s not a great joke to tell in this kind of community.
Are the commentariat claiming that you are/were some kind of horrific serial predator? No. Of course not. We don’t know anything about you. The only information we have to go on are in the posts that you provide us, and what interpretations we can make of it. And what interpretation we can make of that initial spiel is not great.
Sure, in later posts you clarified the situation more, but the tone of your posts seems to convey that you think we should have just automatically known all that additional information from the start, without you telling us. Which isn’t exactly sporting. We can only go off of what you have told us.
With the additional information provided, yeah, sure the situations are significantly more innocuous than we were initially led to believe. But that still doesn’t make the joke funny. (Well, not here at least. I’m sure the joke kills in groups where it’s standard to laugh at women being outlandish about exercising their right to refuse.)
And just because you told a bad joke doesn’t mean that people want you dead. Plenty of folks tell bad jokes. It’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world either. Maybe just try to consider your audience more next time?
@Nowherepants
I’d ask exactly which sexual revolution you think caused syphillis, but actually, I’d rather not know. Please go away.