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By David Futrelle
What if incels took a break from their endless circle-jerking about the putative evil of “femoids” and “cucks” and how the world treats them so badly it’s like another Holocaust, and decided to put some of their energy into making the world a better place for incels?
Well, some incels have decided to do just that, setting up a website for a largely imaginary incel political party, complete with statements of principle and even a half-baked platform. Not surprisingly, it urns out that their vision of an incel utopia would destroy the civil liberties of other people while keeping incels themselves as miserable as they already are.
The platform on the Incel Party site is a genuinely weird set of proposals, ranging from the almost sensible (their version of universal basic income) to the bizarre (forcing Hollywood to make “More Michael Cera movies, but where he is not just shy, but unemployed and living with his parents”). You see, as the platform explains,
The national socialists were able to convince a buncha Germans that Jews needed to be gassed (against human nature, as gassing is not a natural human drive). Similarly, (but non-violently) we could legally convince women that unemployed men are desirable through hollywood movies. IE men don’t need hollywood to adjust our sexual drives, but women do. And it wouldn’t be scamming women, but genuinely overriding their nature. Female sexuality is more influenced by social mores than male sexuality.
The incels are not big on respect for women.
In case you’re wondering, the Incel Party platform has a solution for that whole “involuntary celibacy” thing: “Pay femcels and incels to date each other.”
Given that most incels don’t even think that femcels exist — because every women on earth can apparently get all the sex she wants — I’m not quite sure how this plan would work on a practical level.
And apparently this plan would only work for white people, as the platform also demands “[s]tate mandated femdom girlfriends for all people of color. No they won’t be paid.” What if people of color don’t want femdom girlfriends? More to the point, what if the femdoms don’t want to be femdom girlfriends for incels? Women’s bodies can’t simply be distributed like government cheese.
The party also has a rather unique program for helping millennials aquire real estate: simply confiscate homes now belonging to boomers. But don’t worry! The boomers would still be allowed to live in their old homes alongside the new owners. “We are not trying to just kick Dad out.,” the Incel party helpfully explains.
The strangest demand?
Make all anime real life immediately with absolutely no exceptions.We will seize the portal to imagination land the government has and bring all the anime girl to our reality.
Depressingly, alongside all this ridiculousness, the Incel Party devotes most of its energy to a completely self-destructive platform plank: “Abolish psychiatry.”
Most incels could benefit immensely from good psychiatric care or, at the very least, therapy. But that’s incompatible with the basic tenets of their intensely pessimistic and self-defeating “black pill” philosophy, which holds that psychiatry is a simultaneously ineffective yet also dangerous attempt to control incels and others. As the Party asserts on a page devoted to the suject:
Psychiatry is an instrument of social-control for deviants who aren’t in regular jail. In other words, “Society’s Sewer“. If you deviate from society in any meaningful way and you do not live on your own, expect to meet a psychiatrist at some point in your life.
It’s basically RD Laing meets Scientology, though the incels insist that their irrational, pseudoscientific hostility to psychiatry is is somehow different than Scientology.’s irrational, pseudoscientific hostility to psychiatry.
The entire project reflects incels on their best behavior. There are no nasty attacks on “foids,” no creepy discussions of the sexuality of underage girls, no glorification of Elliot Rodger or other incel mass killers. But incels are incels, and the Incel Party website is as suffused with misogyny as any Incels.co forum rant. And the site is steeped in the nihilistic pessimism of the “black pill” philosophy. It’s telling that the platform offers only jokey non-solutions (“make anime real”), “solutions” that abrogate the rights of others, and the wholly self-destructive demand to abolish psychiatry, which in the end is one of the few things that could bring incels back from the edge.
It would all be a lot funnier if it weren’t also so sad.
H/T — once again goes to Twitter’s @EXPELincels, whose tweet brought my attention to the incel party website
@francis
Apologies for my error, I was only familiar with the white and pink ones.
As far as anti-psychiatry goes, I say:
Broke: Scientology
Woke: R.D. Laing
Bespoke: Félix Guattari
Gross creepy incels say
“Female sexuality is more influenced by social mores than male sexuality.”
This woman’s sexuality is influenced by neither.
I’d actually love it if society’s mores and male sexuality both validated my preference for a handsome, tall, muscled partner whose body that looks good in the harness I put on it, respects the I guidance give by it and the leash attached to it, is fully compliant, respects my whip not just for what it is physically but its symbolism, is good with his tounge when I want it and through all that also has the heart and soul to join with me partner in the beautiful intimate performance art we create together and knows that for me love and sex are art. Sorry if TMI but with these creeps just talking so insensitively about femdom and what I’m supposed to like they make me mad.
I love my men and they’re not easy to find and it’s in spite of a lot of society and cishet men’s sexuality not the opposite but as goddess I do it anyway.
Quite a lot of entertainment “realities” are just the real world, except in some tiny corner of it, something weird or unusual going on which the book/movie/game focuses on. Which is, again, actually just the real world in a lot of tiny corners all the time, except that magic and aliens and the like probably aren’t real.
Realities which are fundamentally different are nearly always dystopias, or undergoing a world-shattering crisis. This is because utopian settings rarely make for interesting plots. There do exist semi-utopian slice-of-life things, but AFAIK they’re fairly rare.
I don’t know which aspect of incel expertise I’m more impressed with, their expertise on matters geopolitical or their expertise on things psychological. Cough, cough.
@Snowberry
That may be true, but in the specific case David referred to, teen movies, seem to present a view of high school and adolescence that does not resemble my experience or anyone else’s that I know of. It’s some sort of stereotype that doesn’t resemble reality but has become a trope in the movies. The real issue is how it has been taken as some sort of weltanschauung.
@Naglfar:
I was reacting to the whole “what movie reality would I live in” idea rather than the OP, but now that you mention it, how different is that really? It *could* easily be explained as something unusual going in some small corner of the world! And as for why it’s all similar, I refer back to my earlier post where the current state of Isekai Animé being all pretty much the same these days – because it’s what’s popular.
Though I admit that even so, that doesn’t erase the issues where certain real-world “comedy” genres (teen comedy and romance comedy in particular) usually aren’t obviously outsider fantasies to actual social outsiders, which can skew the perspectives of a large chunk of the audience it’s aimed at. Sort of like if the only perspective that most auto enthusiasts had of cars and driving was NASCAR and car-chase scenes in action films.
@Snowberry:
My Next Life as a Villainess is absolutely hilarious, mostly because while the protagonist attempts to be manipulative (to save her own skin) she’s just so inept and clueless at it. Every character has their own motivations. It’s very well-balanced, and I say this as someone who normally can’t stand sitcoms where the main character is made to look like an idiot.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
Yuri on Ice is also amazing, and you can really tell that the animators loved the subject matter. (A friend of mine recognized the Mississauga arena building from the two-second shot it got at one point; they really showed their work.) I’ll admit, as a Canadian, I got Toller Cranston vibes from Yuri (he was a Canadian figure skater back in the 1970s who also tended to lean more to the artistic side than the technical side, and never won gold as a result). I’ll also admit that, as a Canadian, seeing the Canadian skater of the group be more of an egomaniac than the American was an amusing change of pace.
@Naglfar:
Yeah, the way ‘teen movies’ have become their own thing in the U.S. and diverging more and more from the way schools actually seem to work is… disturbing in and of itself.
@OP:
Really, they seem so much to believe they’re too smart to be ‘brainwashed’, while at the same time just demonstrating the old problem of anybody who believes they’re too smart to fall for something is just leaving themselves open to it because they aren’t looking for it. So they want to use media to brainwash everybody else, and they want to block the few things they’re worried might brainwash them with drugs, and they don’t even understand that there’s a contradiction there…
@Naglfar:
As some sort of what? Sorry, but you seem to have lapsed into … something that isn’t English there. (If I had to guess, I’d say German, but I’m not a professional linguist…)
Actually I think Lust would be the one female character from that series the incels would want to bring into the real world, given how she looks and her name. And, of course, ignore the fact that that her main personality attribute wasn’t sexual lust, but blood lust. In other words, not someone you really want to meet with in a dark alley anytime soon. IF you’re smart.
@ Naglfar,
While I haven’t seen very many episodes of My Little Pony either (no time to sit and watch any of it, tbh ;_; ), I have read some commentary and criticism of the show back around its first few seasons, and evidently there are a couple of problematic racial strains in the show. However, they appear to not be things that are baked into the setting, and there is the possibility that the show runners might have adjusted things in later episodes to be less problematic. (I read these criticisms years ago, so my memory is a tad fuzzy on what exactly the details were.)
As for MLP’s creepy fan segment, I read an article a few years ago about that, and evidently that’s not the only girl-centered show that has that problem. The article was comparing MLP fandom to various magical girl fandoms, and evidently the MG creators deliberately put in things like upskirt shots just to make the creepy dudebro contingent happy. After all, since those shows inevitably attract that kind of fan, why not toss them a bone or two once in a while, ya?
If I can find that article again before this thread goes cold, I’ll post it here for others to read.
@Surplus to Requirements: “weltanschauung” is German. The literal meaning is “worldview”. In philosophical discussions, it usually means something like “the basis behind a culture’s (or subculture’s) collective worldview.”
@Snowberry
It could, but I have yet to hear of a region where that is the case. As you mentioned, the real issue isn’t how it’s improbable but how people who don’t know better might interpret it.
@Jenora Feuer
It’s not just movies, either. Last I checked there were a lot of TV shows aimed at children that portrayed adolescence in a similar way albeit sanitized somewhat. It’s a problem when kids TV also presents this to kids who really don’t know better.
Making anime real. Hmm.
Does that include male anime hotties? I can has Alucard robolover? I can also has Hector and Isaac and complete the set? I can has orgy with sexy priests and vamp guys from Trinity Blood?
Guessing that’s not quite their intention.
I wrote my own alternate universe fantasy, just for myself. It was a very sweet, oddball, sidesplittingly funny universe — to me. A few years later I met my boyfriend and was shocked to find that he closely resembled the fictional character that I loved the most.
@Kat
I’ve spent much of my life daydreaming about some sort of alternate universe I made up bit by bit (though I never wrote it down, it was like an ongoing mental serial novel or similar). I have yet to meet any of the characters I invented IRL.
The only American teen show I’ve seen that came close to portraying high school realistically was My So Called Life. There were 2 episodes that dealt with the supernatural, so that wasn’t too realistic, but other than that. The extras all looked like real kids, not models and the school sets looked so similar to my high school in the 90’s. The episode The Zit perfectly shows not just how teen girl insecurities work but illustrates how you don’t win in the patriarchy by being beautiful either. It seems like the current teen shows tend to be more soapy than true life. Of course, my generation had crap* like 90210 too, but if there’s a MSCL type show out there right now, I’m not aware of it. It’s all Riverdale and the like.
* No shade, I like crap too
@Naglfar
There have been times in my life when I devoted a significant amount of time to fantasy. And why not. It made me feel better. And some people’s fantasies make them rich.
Sorry, no one asked for me to rhapsodize about MSCL. I just had a nostalgia moment.
I’m probably way late to this discussion, but how can we be sure that Spirited Away isn’t already reality? There could be little Japanese girls wandering into the spirit world via abandoned amusement parks every day and then coming out having learned valuable lessons about maturity, and just not talking about it.
Anyway, fuck incels. Or rather, continue not fucking them. Let them fuck themselves. (Or each other.)
Redsilkphoenix : I would like to add that magical girl anime *have* different audience in mind, just like disney movies. A lot of them aren’t just for children. (some definitely aren’t for childrens, even)
It don’t quite excuse upskirts and other voyeuristic gratification. It’s more that it’s not quite the case of a product for children who accomodate pervert. Generally speaking, a lot of people think that any and all fans of thoses kind of anime are either children or pervert, which is unfortunate.
(I don’t know MLP enough to know if they did the same AKA pandering to different audiences, but that seem likely)
Oh, well, let’s put them in any of Junji ITÔ stories. Good ridance.
Having an incel party does not really come as a surprise, as i have read there are quite a number of people from (or endorsing) Qanon who are running for Senate.
@occasional reader
What’s scary is that a lot of QAnon candidates are expected to win, as they are from red areas. All the ones I’ve heard of have been running for the House of Representatives, though there could be some running for Senate as well. The weirdest one seems to be K.W. Miller from Florida, whose Twitter timeline talks about him in the third person a lot and sounds quite a bit like a WWE wrestler narrating, to the point that I thought it was a parody account until I found it was real.
I’m coming late to this thread. Seeing mention of MLP and its fandom(s) makes me want to recommend Jenny Nicholson’s recent video on the topic, “The Last Bronycon: a fandom autopsy”. I never watched the show, and always regarded bronies with suspicion, so I found it interesting. And, in places, rather disturbing.
@occasional reader
Anything but the Cat Diary, though. Yon & Mu deserve better people in their lives.
OT:
When I was younger, I was pretty frustrated with how the English language seems to go “nice word you got there, I’ll just take that”. Otherwise understandable texts just seemed to have random foreign words thrown in and you just had to deal with it. Even “weltanschauung” is listed as an English word on Wiktionary.
It just seemed so lazy to me, especially since I think my first introduction into this was hearing the word “Schadenfreude” used in English. Puzzled, I asked, “Isn’t there an English word for Schadenfreude?” and the answer was practically, “Yeah, it’s schadenfreude”.
English doesn’t so much borrow from other languages as it chases them down dark alleyways, steals their words, and rifles through their pockets for spare grammar.