By David Futrelle
Today is a very special day on the Incels.co forums, because it’s a day of celebration for the women that incels love the most, their own mothers.
So naturally the site is filled with sweet tributes to these women and to mothers in general.
Here, one incel offers his appreciation to the single mothers of the world.
Here a fellow with a somewhat naughty name (which I have censored) expresses his desire to become a father.
Meanwhile, this fellow offers these lovely sentiments to all sorts of mothers (and even some non-mothers) around the world:
Seriously, folks, take a moment today to think of the mothers of these guys. Imagine going through nine months of pregnancy only to have your child turn into one of these dudes.
H/T to EXPELincels on Twitter
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At this point, they can only be satirising themselves? Surely?
@Naglfar, @Snowberry:
I’m guessing they don’t really believe themselves to be subhuman, it’s a ‘look what you’ve made me do’ performance of self-hatred: “Well, if I can’t have sex with any woman I want, I guess I’m not allowed to do anything! I guess I’m a subhuman monster! Better go crawl on the ground and eat worms, hadn’t I?!”
@Moon Custafer
That may be true to a degree, but I think incels also genuinely do hate themselves. Though it is hard to tell what they actually believe because they are so overly dramatic and Poe’s law comes into play.
Regardless, I wonder if it would help incels if they had a healthy hobby to distract themselves. When I’ve been depressed or otherwise feeling down, hobbies have sometimes helped.
@Naglfar
Incels’ problem is not depression, it’s misogyny and anger. While I have no doubt that some incels are clinically depressed and could benefit from therapy and/or meds, the majority of them are angry rather than depressed. That anger is entirely self-inflicted.
A general question, responding to “think of the mothers who had a son turn into one of these dudes.” One of the stereotypes is “living in mother’s basement.”
If I had a son that turned out like this, I would straight kick him out when he reached his age of majority. He would indeed be homeless or have to wage slave to fund his own internet and lodgings to post this shit, no free rides off his mum for that. Am I inhuman for this? I don’t think that a mother should have to suffer abuse at the hands of the sons that post this kind of shit.*
*Which I’ve seen, I know a friend’s younger brother turned into one and he’s disgusting towards his mother. So far he’s not hit her, but he screams at her and is verbally horrible in a way that no guest–and he is a guest now that she is not required by law to support him–should be towards their host, let alone a son towards his mother. Along with other problems he creates for her, trashing her house, getting the cops called, etc.
@ naglfar
I’m not sure that’s necessarily correct. It’s like the idea that bullies have low self esteem. Often they have very high self esteem; hence their impulse to dominate.
Some movement no doubt do arise from doubt and self loathing. I suspect for many Nazism was a manifestation of neuroses.
But I think the defining character of incels is a sense of entitlement. So it’s their perceived situation they hate; and the people they believe responsible for that, rather than themselves.
YMMV of course, it’s just a hypothesis.
@Policy of Madness: One can be both angry and depressed; in fact, constant anger about unfulfilled entitlements (among other things) can result in depression. Giving up that anger is the first step in recovery, but as it’s usually the only thing which still feels real it can be the hardest thing one can do in that situation, perhaps even harder than suicide sometimes.
@Snowberry
Sure, one can be both, but it’s the anger (specifically at women) that defines incels. There are plenty of depressed people out there who are not terrible. Depression doesn’t make a person terrible, it’s anger.
@Policy of Madness:
I’m not sure we’re on the same page here. I had the impression you were saying that chronic anger and depression are unrelated, and was meaning to correct that as “where both exist in the same person, they nearly always *are* related”… but you seem to have responded as if I were excusing the anger somehow, but I’m not 100% sure of that.
On the subject in general:
Even if some incels are trolling with the self-hate (or even if some of them are fake incels trolling real incels) that kind of thing can become a “your mind makes it real” situation if you do it too much.
“Today we celebrate all mothers who gaslight and virtue signal their sons about women’s nature…”
Huh. Who’d have thought the poorly but excessively used “virtue signal” would cease to have any actual meaning at all.
O/T, but could be for a future post:
Even other TERFs are starting to turn on Graham Linehan (link cw transphobia). Admittedly it’s mainly because they think he’s making them look bad, not because they have an issue with his transphobia (though a few did actually criticize his actions), but I’m curious if this is building up to some sort of “gender critical” civil war between pro-Glinner and anti-Glinner factions. A TERF war, if you will.
TERFs make themselves look bad? NO. Say it isn’t so!
Although it’s fun to see TERFs eating their own, it always does bother me when feminists put some dude up on a pedestal just because he’s saying that women are humans. It’s giving a man extra kudos for meeting basic standards. It happened with Hugo Schwyzer, too, and he, too, turned out to be an embarrassment to all the (white) women who supported him. It’s super cringey that even TERFs fall to the male-savior trope.
@PoM
I know, and Graham is gross to cis women as well as trans* people, so I’m not condoning him in any way. And to their credit a couple of the TERFs did actually point out that issue and give actual criticism of him. I just think it’s telling that it took until something like the last week to get them to stop worshiping him.
@Naglfar
Even if he were perfectly feminist and not TE, it would be cringey to see him held up as an icon. You’d think radical feminists would be less susceptible to this, but I guess not. :/
@PoM
I feel like at this point that any radical feminist views TERFs may have they are willing to put aside when convenient, like when allying with conservative anti-LGBT and antifeminist groups or sharing a platform with white nationalists. Similarly, they were able to put aside such views to embrace Graham’s harassment of cis women who didn’t agree with them.
It does seem to be a pattern that when TERFs actually push back on one of their own, it is never “this is bad,” but “this could be used to make us look bad.”
That says a great deal about them. They don’t object to the awful views, they object to those views being expressed out loud where others can see them.
@Allandrel
What’s funny about that is that in general TERFs and the alt right both seem to think their communications on public forums are super secret and will never be seen by others. As a result, they are confused about why their false flag operations rarely fool anyone other than each other. Pretty much all their subreddits and forums like Mumsnet are out in the open to see, and even their federated social media sites like Glindr and Spinster can be accessed by non-members with Fediverse viewing links (like this, cw transphobia).
@Naglfar
Funny but not uncommon, alas. Back in my LiveJournal days, I remember butting heads with another LJer who didn’t think I knew what I was talking about because I hadn’t left comments on her journal entries. Apparently she thought I would have left a comment if I’d read them. I’m still boggling over that one – admittedly, this happened years ago, but “The Lurkers Support Me in E-mail” had already been written.
O/T: further Graham update:
He posted a self-pitying screed to his website saying he won’t take the offending tweets down and will try to use this time to “raise awareness” of other TERFs who have been “silenced.” In other words, he won’t be back on Twitter any time soon because of his own ego, so that’s good news.