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By David Futrelle
Here’s a new one, courtesy of one irredeemably “blackpilled” Tweeter.
My feelings about this, er, unique claim may perhaps best be conveyed with the following gif:
I mean, where to even start. How on earth does gay marriage have anything to do with the “regulation” of the heterosexual marriage, er, “market?” It’s not like striaght women are suddenly going gay so they can marry their female BFFs. The women getting gay married weren’t going to date you anyway, dudes.
Also: Chad is not hoarding all the women. Marriage rates started dropping decades before gay marriage was a thing. Even in the marriage-crazed 50s no one was guaranteed a spouse, and many of those who eagerly married in those years divorced a decade or two later.
Here, also from Twitter, are some infinitely more plausible explanations for the existence of incels.
Much more sensible explanations.
H/T — @vardex23, for bringing this lovely take to my attention
Is there a such thing as gay incels? I was wondering that the other day. I know that obviously gay men must sometimes have dry spells the same way anyone else does, but I’ve never heard of gay incels anywhere. Are they a thing, or no? I rather doubt it, seeing as incels seem to be an entitled straight male phenomenon.
This isn’t even a good post hoc ergo proctor hoc. Even in the days of “highly regulated marriage” (which generally seems to mean a fantasy version of the 1950s), there were men who were “confirmed bachelors,” a phrase that could mean anything. Gay. Preferred to date but not marry. Not a good candidate for marriage, for whatever reason.
“This is all obvious.” No, dear. This is all mammoth poop.
I initially thought that surely gay marriage (and the liberalised social attitudes that went along with it) meant that incels could get a boyfriend instead if they were that desperately horny. But of course no self respecting gay man would go near them either. I suppose they could always screw each other?
@naglfar gay incels would run into the problem of whether they’re entitled to a hot virginal partner or whether they’re the hot virginal partner someone else is entitled to?
@Nick Kiddle
Well, one MRA suggested that. I don’t think he followed through with it.
They’d probably just assume the former.
When you’re comparing same-sex marriage to Ronald Reagan, something has gone drastically awry in Libertarian Hypocrite Land.
Don’t these guys usually identify as conservative or libertarian? So, shouldn’t they think that deregulation is a good thing?
@Moggie
In my experience, conservatives want small government for themselves and want to restrict everyone else. Deregulation is good when it serves their interests, bad when it allows anyone else freedom.
So, small government unless it’s on LGBTQIPA+ people, or on PoC, or on women, or anything else that doesn’t perfectly conform to 1950s white picket fence suburbia. Then, big government with tons of regulation is the order of the day.
No idea how it was in the US, but in my corner of Europe you needed a certain amount of money to actually get married.
So, your bog standard farm hand of any gender, most of the servants, all tradesmen who weren’t masters? Didn’t get married.
People still lived together and had kids, but marriage was beyond them.
Seriously. Mass marriage as we know it today started after WWI and really took off after WWII for the lower classes.
@Knitting Cat Lady
I don’t know how this was historically, but in the US at present there is a fee to get married. In most states it’s around $50, but in other states it’s higher. I just looked it up and in Minnesota it can be up to $115*.
*It says on this site that in Minnesota “The marriage license fee is $40 with Premarital Education completed. $115.00 without Premarital Education.” Not entirely sure what Premarital Education is. Maybe some Minnesotan Mammothers know?
That’s making the mistake of assuming that conservatives and libertarians actually have principles and beliefs. Only their hatred is honest; everything else is just tactics.
@Naglfar:
Whatever it is, it has negative value, so presumably it makes you dumber. Best avoided, I think.
@Moggie
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably some right-wing program to encourage 1950s sexist gender roles and reduce same-sex marriage. Probably once they realized abstinence-only sex ed can only be applied to children in school, they wanted to find ways to impose these ideas on adults who survived it. If that’s what it is, incels would probably like it.
Re Marc Knight’s tweet:
So what does that last “t” in “thott” stand for? That ho over there there? That ho over there temporarily?
@Naglfar
Nailed it. You gotta have your priest or pastor sign off on having told you what it’s like to be married, though I’m damned if I understand how priests are supposed to know that.
I’m Minnesotan, but never married, so I didn’t know about that. Ick. We’re typically a fairly progressive state (by US standards) so it’s disappointing.
@Naglfar, @Dalillama,
IF this is the program I’m thinking of, the point of Premarital Education is to figuratively dump a bucket of cold water on folks who are still in the haze of love and make them actually think about the realities of marriage before it becomes extremely expensive to get out of it.
Like, from what I understand of the program, the counselor (religious or otherwise) is supposed to make sure the couple is on the same page about finances, whether or not to have kids and when, stuff like that. The idea is to prevent divorces by asking the couple hard relationship questions while they have time to back out of the wedding without loosing a ton of money on it.
Supposedly a lot of marriages get postponed or called off after going through this program, from what I’ve heard. Which probably means that the couples in question decided they weren’t quite ready yet for taking that plunge, and decided to wait a while until they were ready.
ASSuming my information is still correct (I last read about this program at least a decade ago; things could have changed since then), then that’s what Premarital Education is supposed to be about. Not Abstinence Education for Adults.
Since relationships work exactly like economics, you’d think incels would be heartily supportive of the supply-side approach. All the Staceys SHOULD go exclusively to the top 1% Chads. Chads are sex makers, not sex takers.
Incels just need to be patient and wait for the extra Staceys to be reinvested and trickle down.
@Redsilkphoenix
…
…
Every single time I think I know how fucked up het people are about relationships, it turns out I was underestimating it. Some people got a lot of fucking nerve talking to us queers about how we run our lives, is all I’m saying.
Meaning no offence to our het commenters, but that many grown fucking adults not having discussed this kinda shit long since is a sign of something deeply wrong with the entire culture around relationships in straight spaces.
@Dalillama
Look at all the “family values” conservatives who had affairs. Or the evangelicals throwing themselves at Orange Shitstain*. The people who run their mouths the most about being holier-than-thou tend to be the most hypocritical.
It’s what happens when we don’t tell teenagers accurate answers about sex, pregnancy, birth control, abortion, bodies in general, or relationships. And have a culture that promotes 1950s style heterosexual relationships as the only way.
*side note: Orange Shitstain sounds like the name of the worst soda ever.
@Dalillama
I think the rushing into marriage without having had these serious discussions is in part a product of the religious culture that emphasizes marriage as the only acceptable venue for sex and that encourages women to think that marriage is the only acceptable life path and that enforces a sex-separation in many activities such that some young people really have no real contact with the opposite sex outside of courtship.
@Susan
I know people who grew up like that, got married young because they thought that was the only way, and had awful marriages that fell apart quickly but they were stuck in them. It is not a good system.
Way back in the early 90’s, when my family was still dragging me around to various fundie churches in an attempt to save my soul, the youth pastors were always screaming about the Gay. Gay marriage seemed like an impossible pipe dream at this point, and yet they spent huge amounts of time on it. I asked one of them why they cared so very much about something that would never happen, and the response was: in a gay relationship how can you tell who’s the boss? If heterosexuals see relationships like that, it will corrupt them. They will want to not have a boss either. The line he used was something like “why would anyone want a husband when they could have a wife?”
And yes, there were a few “married just to have sex” cases in my extended family among people who were way too damn young.
Translation: Many men are so loathsome that no one wants to marry them and thus guarantee them steady sex. Won’t someone bring back the bad old days, when women were paid even less than now and men could be certain of sex on the regular.
I get so many confusing mental images from this and I love the dig at Reaganomics. Thank you.
I feel like I have to paraphrase a mamotheer a couple of articles back who said that straight women are the proof sexuality is not a choice. Seems relevant. :p