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By David Futrelle
It’s not a secret that incels are obsessed with underage girls and the allegedly pure joys of teenage sex. Now they seem to have collectively decided that any guy who doesn’t manage to have sex in high school has lost out on something so magical that he is essentially scarred for life; he might as well rope, as they like to put it.
In a recent post on the Incels.co forums, an incel called Personalityinkwell declares, in all caps, that
SEX IN HIGH SCHOOL IS EVERYTHING
everything else is pure cope. …
The only thing that matters is having good genes/good parents so you can be a JB [jailbait] slayer, everything else is GIGACOPE.
Other incels expand on this theme. Mylifeistrash declares that
it’s the harshest pill
that you only got one shot in life and your genetics determined it all
no amount of self-improvement cope or money maxxing will ever make up for your teenage years
AmIjustDreaming agrees,
No amount of money or any other cope can make up for missed teen love. I’m almost 26 and the teenpill still gets to me. While I rotted playing video games, everyone else was having their first kiss, sex, teen love. It will fuck you up forever.
“Only teen love can make up for missed teen love,” laments LOLI BREEDING.
“Highschools need to offer euthanasia at the last day of school,” adds _wifebeater_.
The anger, naturally, stokes the incels’ feelings of entitlement.
“Its such a crime that we never got to fuck prime girls,” complains Ropemaxx.
And it’s not long before they start talking about the age of consent in the Phillipines.
Even aside from the pedophilia, an undercurrent in almost all incel discussions of sex, this is all just bullshit. There’s nothing magical about having sex as a teenager; it’s exciting, to be sure, but it can also be awkward and even a bit embarrassing, as no one knows what they’re doing at first. Sex can actually be a lot better for everyone once both partners have had a little more (or a lot more) experience.
And sex isn’t everything; it’s certainly a pleasant part of life, for those who are into it, but you can live without it. And lots of people do, living through “dry spells” than can last years. Not having sex in high school doesn’t make you special; it doesn’t even make you all that unusual, given that the average age at which Americans have sex for the first time at is 17, with the percentage of high schoolers having sex dropping below 50% in recent years.
That’s right: MOST PEOPLE in high school aren’t having sex.
Yes, it sucks to go through high school dateless. But there are worse things in life. And you have the rest of your life to make up for lost time. Move the fuck on, dudes; stop fixating on something you cannot change.
There are some guys whose lives basically peaked in high school who spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture what they felt the day they scored the winning touchdown. And they won’t shut up about it. Incels are doing something similar, only backwards, fixating on their sexual failures in high school and never shutting up about them. I can’t decide which group is more pathetic, but I know that neither the aging jock or the aging incel is going to be happy until they clear the resentment and self-hatred out of their heads and start living in the present.
I am not any kind of lawyer, nevermind a French one, but FWIW googling leads me to believe personal injury lawsuits do exist in France. Here are a couple of English-language sources I found:
https://www.angloinfo.com/blogs/france/south-aquitaine/french-law-blog/personal-injury-claims-under-french-law/
https://paris-law.com/assisting-i-paris/personal-injury-claims-indemnification-rights-of-victims-in-france/
How common they are and how likely the victim would have been to sue under these particular circumstances, I have no idea. I know here in Canada that, while the government will cover medical expenses, they generally won’t cover paramedical expenses, so those are part of what is sought in personal injury suits. Maybe that is true in France as well?
I had been craving Twinnings Lady Grey tea for months when I finally broke down and paid twice what it’s worth to get some decaf on Amazon. I couldn’t even find the regular kind in stores, not that I could have had it if I did. It was probably a very silly decision, but I love my mug of citrusy happiness every morning.
On the topic of railway tracks, I remember my mother was horrified to hear that I had walked on them, and hotly warned me against it.
…Only thing was, this was several years after the train service on those tracks was discontinued (even when we got a train to Jerusalem again, some years later, it came to a different station; the old tracks and the strip of land around them have now been turned into a park, and many people walk on them every day). She must have had those warnings engrained, maybe through PSAs like the ones you describe, to have had that kneejerk reaction of “NO! Never do that!”.
Are we still discussing the MacDonald’s case? The one about the extremely hot coffee that badly burned an elderly woman? I’ve got absolutely no evidence for my opinion about how that case changed the way we speak here in the USA, but I’ll say it anyway. Once that lawsuit was decided, we stopped talking about “hot food.” Nowadays, it’s “warm food.” To me, “warm food” sounds ridiculous. No, a good hot meal is what you want. I blame the MacDonald’s public relations department for this horribleness.
@Cats In Shiny Hats
Sounds wonderful. Google tells me that it’s $$$$$. Can you recommend a brand that’s not incredibly expensive? Or an online source?
Many thanks.
This. Even when it’s an ally doing it, and even when they’re trying to challenge stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, when people speak of men and women as if that encompasses everybody (or, at least, everybody who deserves to have their perspectives considered), it’s at the very least tiresome and at the worst it’s completely enraging.
@Threp : I do believe parsley don’t have a taste, and is more used for texture. Did the ham part of the jambon persillé have taste, or did the parsley somehow annihilated everything for you ?
In the (excellent) book The Flavour Thesaurus, parsley is described as having a quintessentially “green” flavour. I rather like this definition. I also happen to rather like parsley (well, most green herbs, really – yes, including coriander/cilantro, at least in some things; the only herb I can think of off hand that I dislike is dill, and even then it’s more a “meh” than a “we hates itttt”).
I’ve never heard of that “negative flavour” situation, and find it fascinating. I wonder what causes it?
Oh, remembered something else I wanted to say, in regard to extreme flavours – while I personally don’t really understand the appeal of going extreme (like the somewhat bro-y tendency to compete who can eat the hottest stuff; personally, while I enjoy spicy food, I agree with whoever said upthread that it should have a flavour other than just “hot”), I do on occasion enjoy saltiness (I think if they made a saltlick for humans, I’d probably buy one) and sourness (don’t ever remember just drinking straight vinegar, but like nibbling on lemon slices, licking the sour dust off candy, or occasionally sipping leftover dipping sauce).
The thing about extreme bitterness, though, is that our body connects bitter flavour to things being poisonous and Very Bad For Us. You can learn to like bitter foods, but I’m not surprised that trying to go extreme on that would cause negative physical reactions.
@Penny Psmith
Bitter? I’ve never tasted anything as bitter as the Chinese herbs I was prescribed by my acupuncturist. I don’t know exactly what was in those formulas, but I do know that they were so bitter they made me shiver and say Blecch! each time I drank them, which was usually early in the morning. But then I immediately felt a bit better, so I didn’t really mind the awful taste.
I don’t know what those herbs were or what their effect was (and tend to be a bit wary of acupuncture and “naturalistic” medicine and such, because these things are very badly regulated, but that’s a completely different conversation), but of course, there’s a reason that a lot of medicinal stuff is bitter – poison is a matter of dose, and these are probably things that can indeed be very poisonous when not taken in a very specific small dosage.
Coffee gives me the jitters, and insomnia if drunk after 20:00 hrs. Tea is fine, and usually much better-tasting.
I love vinegar, especially on my fries (US)/chips (UK). And lemons/limes. After squeezing out the juice I often eat the remaining pulp/inner membrane. For the Americans/Canadians out there: instead of butter, try a wedge of lemon or lime to flavor your corn on the cob. It’s delicious (and certainly Alan-approved! Also, sorry Alan but I actually also like apple cider vinegar…).
Also, I have on occasion walked on a railroad track near where I live, but 1 – trains run very slowly in that sector, likely due to Canadian laws (it passes right through a mostly-residential area and across important local roads with no overpass) and 2 – it’s very easy to get safely out of an incoming train’s way in that sector (even the railway bridge has 2-3 platforms for people to go on if they’re caught crossing the bridge on foot when the train comes along). Also, it always has to toot its horn when crossing the sector. You can hear it coming from over a klick away.
@Ohlmann
The parsley wiped out the taste of the ham completely. It was really odd. Like I say, it were the first time I’d had a dish which has a lot of parsley in it, so it were something I’d simply not come across before.
Tried it at home with a few things – a tabbouleh and a couple of veggie curries, as I recall – and it does the same thing to me for most flavours: if there’s a significant amount of parsley present I can’t taste anything at all.
I have eaten acacao-based chicken recipe. Turn out cacao is so bitter it’s nausea-inducing. There were a lot of pepper to hide it and allow the dish to be eaten. It was strange.
@Kat
We did? Where I live I’ve never heard anyone talk about warm food, but then again I don’t hear many people talk about hot food either. Maybe it’s a regional dialect thing.
@Penny Psmith
My experience with cilantro leaves is that they taste rather like soap. I am told this is a genetic thing, but oddly enough I like coriander seeds even though the leaves taste terrible to me.
Re: heat, I agree that spicy things need flavor, this is why I don’t like a lot of cheap hot sauce. My favorite flavor combination is probably when something is both very spicy and sweet at once, for which I have several curry recipes.
This conversation got random.
I thought I was being a bit harsh to Lenona but they continued and you all said similar things to what I had, so I suppose not. They seem to have gone now. Maybe they realised they weren’t going to convince us with their nonsense? Also, from a fat disabled person – another F! U!
In the subject of tea: This morning I had a cup of masala chai (loose leaf from a company called Snail and Rabbit of Nottingham) with my breakfast and I’m considering a a cup of Betty’s of Harrogate afternoon tea (tea bags – the box of tea was a gift from my older sister to my younger sister for dog sitting last summer). My favourite green tea is Twinnings gingerbread green tea. I have struggled to find it recently so I think it might have been a seasonal thing. I really want to go back to the Twinnings shop in London, because it is tea heaven and you can try the teas.
Train tracks and death: I have nightmares about this following an accident involving a group of teenagers, one of whom I’d worked with and whose mum I knew fairly well. They were apparently sat on a platform chatting, hanging out, possibly drinking (rural area, teenagers drink) and one of the lads slipped off. So person I knew went to help them back up. The lad got up and then a train came, the girl I knew didn’t have time. She was 18. I’ve had nightmares about my scooter stalling on the tracks ever since, even though I don’t have a scooter any more and it was over a decade ago. I’ve only been skimming some of the comments about this subject because I don’t need any more images in my head. I can’t imaging how traumatising it must be for the driver or for people who have to review and cctv footage. I can’t even watch PIF/PSAs because of how much I empathise.
Food: I have more of a problem with textures than tastes. I like sharp, bitter tastes like rocket or lime cordial. I don’t like things that are artificially sweet, like ‘low sugar’ stuff that’s had the sugar replaced with sweetener because it tastes bitter but not in a nice way. I like sweet stuff but my teeth hurt or I get a headache. I still crave it but not as much as I used to do, I think it’s more a psychological craving than an actual bodily need now, for me anyway.
Right, that’s me caught up. I’m going to make a pot of tea and read, because I have a review due Wednesday and another Saturday and neither book is particularly small.
@North Sea Sparkly Dragon
I’d imagine that they eventually gave up trying to shill whatever they were selling. I’m not entirely sure, but I think they were probably some flavor of conservative trying to convince us of something, as I mentioned earlier a lot of their language was very reminiscent of the way Evangelical conservatives talk about sex ed.
For me, the real turning point was how sex essentialist and fatphobic they were. I would have been nicer if they hadn’t been those, but despite repeatedly calling them out they never changed.
I’m the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t have the genetic soap taste thing with cilantro but nevertheless doesn’t like it. This makes me feel very special and important, of course.
Weird Eddie – Are you a Dr. Demento fan by any chance?
Naglfar and Snowberry – There’s a YouTube channel called emmymadeinjapan and Emmy cooks and tries all sorts of different things. She has a video where she tries gymnema sylvestre tablets and eats different sweet things. It really worked for her!
I’ve taken gymnema as a supplement for years because I have a family history of diabetes on both sides. My blood sugar tests always come out perfect. I don’t even take the full suggested dosage. The pills smell nice, like tea, but Emmy said they’re pretty bitter and not very nice. I’ve never tried to chew one up and now I’m rather glad.
That genetic thing with cilantro (going to use this form, rather than “coriander leaf”, for clarity and brevity’s sake)… well, it’s more complicated than how it’s usually presented. Not that this is anywhere near my field of study (which is literature), but I once read a little about it[*] and it turns out that while there is a genetic thing that makes people feel a more pungent flavour (what some define as “soapy”), it doesn’t necessarily mean they will hate cilantro; with people from cultures that use the herb more often, like in Mexico, Thailand and so on, even people who had that genetic thing still liked cilantro just fine. It makes sense when you think about it – after all, a lot of flavour perception is a cultural thing. Think about something like wine or beer or blue cheese, and imagine tasting it for the first time ever as an adult, after never experiencing anything similar in your culture; you would probably be disgusted. But we learn to like the flavours we’re familiar with.
(This is not an attempt to say “You just need to keep trying and you’ll like it eventually”; people don’t like what they don’t like and there’s no point forcing it. Just an interesting point about how these things are more complicated than we might think.)
And personally, I don’t feel the “soap” flavour thankfully, but don’t always like cilantro, it can be a bit much – though in recent years, as I’ve expanded the range of things I cook, I’ve grown to enjoy it more. I can definitely now recognise the citrusy notes in fresh cilantro which I’ve seen mentioned and in the past could not taste at all.
[*] For a somewhat silly reason: I was making a dish for a get-together that was going to have two batches, one with cilantro and one without, and wanted to make a funny little “no mutants allowed” (or “mutants only”) sign for one of them, but couldn’t remember if the genetic mutation was for feeling the pungent flavour or for not feeling it. So of course, had to do research…
(I ended up just doing a little warning sign that said “watch out for cilantro”.)
@Penny Psmith : for what it’s worth, the correct scientific answer is that it’s not a mutation, “just” two alleles (variants) of the same gene.
“mutant” is mostly a vernacular terms. Everyone have a tons of mutations compared to their parents, and have mutations affecting part of their bodies, but you cannot biologically define a standard from which deviations would be mutants
The non-racists use of “mutants” tend to be “individual with a spectacular allele that have a lot of cascading consequence”, like albinism, bicephaly, or that female lizard who had a mutation allowing her to reproduce without males, and basically founded an amazon lineage of genetically identical lizard on the island she was born. That being said, because it involve a common sense judgement about what is the norm, it’s not a scientific concept.
Fair enough (and thanks for the explanation), but it was going to be a funny, geeky sign, so in that context I’m okay with using a vernacular term that is not actually scientifically accurate but that has a lot of geeky resonance. 🙂
Is parsley the herb that reduces ‘garlic breath’?
It’s avocados that taste like soap to me. Yuk. Not denigrating anyone who likes them, but their effect on me.
We need all the safety education we can get about trains and their tracks round here. It seems like every year we have casualties, sometimes from ignoring crossing gates/signals (in a hurry,) treading on the third rail and being fried by the current (usually drunk I believe) and crossing tracks inappropriately while in a station (in a hurry/drunk quite likely.)
For me parsley has a very strong taste. If its only for texture why is there dry parsley?
For me, parsley is mentally linked to saltwater because at a Passover Seder, parsley is dipped in salt water before eating it. I don’t really eat parsley outside of Passover, so I’m not sure how it is in other dishes. IMO it has somewhat of a taste, but that could just be me imagining it from the texture.
… from The Guardian:
The week in piggyarchy
The London Zoo is now home to two hairless babirusas, sometimes called “demon pigs” or the “ugliest pigs on earth.” According to a zookeeper, they got this rather nasty nickname because of their long tusks, which are “actually teeth growing through their noses that curl backwards”. How metal is that?