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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.
Naglfar, it wasn’t “one person’s experience.”
On the next page:
Grossman: Sure, there are women on campus who are making wise choices in their relationships.
(Me: Grossman didn’t say those women were abstaining from sex, mind you.)
Grossman: But if you think Heather and Olivia are unusual, I have news for you: our schedules are overbooked with them. They’re lining up for appointments and flooding our phone lines. I’ve seen so many students like these, they blur together in my mind, a pitiable crowd of confused, vulnerable young women, ill prepared for campus life, making poor choices, and paying high prices. No amount of Prozac or Zoloft is going to solve this problem…
(end)
@Lenona
The plural of anecdotes is not data. And even if it were, this is not a representative sample. For one, the author says they are seeing many women about things other than relationships. For two, there is no control group. And lastly, there aren’t any actual numbers given.
Ugh. Not in the mood to deal with this, but I will anyway.
I’m seeing subtle ageism and sexism on top of the slut-shaming, in the name of concern over a problem which barely exists. Even if the concern is genuine and the bigotry is unintentional, that’s not a good excuse.
Look, a lot of kids routinely have their consent violated (general consent, not necessarily sexual) by adults all the time, for their own good (and mostly in this case, “their” refers to the adults and not the kids). Some kids also abuse each other a lot. They’re expected to unlearn all that by the age of 18 without help and without any good sources of information, and then, if there’s social pressure to do so, re-learn it to use on their own kids. Not everyone manages this very well, it’s an ungodly mess which continues to screw up and screw over people as adults.
And now you’re suggesting that people should complicate things further by forcing teenagers into a narrow, safe, and frequently uncomfortable box until they are ready to unlearn it and discover who they are outside of the box. That’s on top of the fact that it’s a foot in the door to a return to the old way where no one is allowed out of an even narrower box, ever, and you’re going to be severely punished (if not outright executed, in some cultures and eras) if we catch you outside of it… well, okay, we’ll be lenient if you’re a straight [insert dominant race] man or a member of the nobility, but otherwise [throat slitting motion].
TL;DR: No.
I am, of course, not a historian, but this is the root of my peevishness. Especially in agrarian (western european, I should add, but that is the where we are talking about now) communities, marriages tended later, and also not neccesarily with church involvement even when well churched.
Or to put it another way:
The only bit here I’d dispute, marginally, is that church weddings are rather modern, by these lights, and throughout much of medieval times marriages were contracts of convenience.
But Lenona, could you do the least bit of research before you expound of history? Pretty please?
Because this:
It’s another thing where your ignorance of history hurts you badly.
Point the first: Nobody expected thirteen-year-old to do adult work. Like ever. Child workers have been used for different reason (expendabilty, slimness, obedience, et cetera) but trying to use actual children in place of trained adults is the finest, most time-tested way to squander money know to purse-pinchers.
Point the second: Are you familiar with the concept of summer holidays? You know, for the children. Where I come from, summer holidays came about because the children went home to do some of the farming bits. Of course they didn’t do “men’s work (not so much a thing on an actual farm)”, they did children’s work. Which I’ve done as well, the pointed difference is how I did for funnies over a couple of days, where I might have been told “this field of potatoes isn’t gonna harvest itself” if the field of potatoes belonged to someone other that my grandfather. But my dad did it without that luxury.
As an aside, I grew up on potatoes, moose and salmon, gotten via the farm, the forest and the river, because that’s how a lot of the farmer’s children became urbanites.
Getting back to the notion, there’s a lot in the usual view of “courting” that ignores how the actual people did it. Applying ideas of formal courtship, and of course arranged marriages, on people who actually formalized marriage mostly by tumbling in haystacks seems to me like shouting into the void with a bible in hand. If you’d ask me, that is.
I apologize if I’m misunderstanding people but as I read some of the conversation it seems like there’s this understanding that “having sex” means two people doing something with their genitals touching like PIV and maybe oral but not much else?
I hope not because I really disagree with that but it does kind of sound like that.
Maybe people should just encourage healthy attitudes about sexuality, eroticism and intimacy in general than just talking about who “has sex” with who and when.
Not accusing anyone here of saying something they didn’t say and sorry if I missed something in the comments but this subject is kind of central to who I am so it’s important for me to say that. Thanks.
…Rereading my last message, there’s an overuse of the word “it” which is sometimes lacking a clear referent. I blame that on my headache (which is unrelated to all the things I just read) but hope anyone who reads what I wrote can figure out what I intended, because I’m not going to rewrite all that.
Catalpa, as I already said, there’s no need to scapegoat one-night stands in particular.
As Feline said:
“Could we not merely have sex ed that stresses consent and bodily autonomy and watch teenagers make bad choices at odds with with what we’ve told them generally rather than specifically?”
Good idea. In the same vein, we could reduce the amount of drinking among teens if we would talk a lot more often about all the reasons why NEITHER men or women should drink heavily. E.g., you could stumble into traffic or fall onto subway tracks. You could wander off, get lost and freeze to death. You could find yourself driving drunk when you never intended to. Or…
But it’s not just consent and bodily autonomy that need to be discussed. I’d say respect is something that needs a lot of discussion at all ages, because there are at least four types of respect, so young people naturally get them confused. Example: When you’re five, it is not disrespectful to refuse to speak to strangers. It IS disrespectful to refuse to talk to your parents, unfair though it may feel.
Plus the fact that some stereotypes are only 5% true and others are 80% true (without naming any particular ones) and that it’s childish to pretend otherwise. Plus the fact that casual sex – OR premarital sex – is just plain emotionally painful for many young people, of any sex, and it can be very hard to predict whether that will be true for you or not, as an individual. (How often does ANY sex ed teacher say that? I don’t know, but I doubt they do, because they typically don’t want to be seen as anti-sex.)
It’s just that it’s not quite clear whether bodily autonomy includes the subject of respect and how many different types of respect there are
I was 32 when I had a really really devastating breakup. Didn’t have the defenses in place I should have had against that type of person.
So breakups can be devastating at any age.
Oh, I see, so your argument is that we should be telling teens to just not have sex, whether that be in a relationship or in a casual setting.
You’re spending a whole lot of words to make a pro-abstinence argument, but I suppose that’s what happens when you’re doing your best to obfuscate your true intentions.
Forgot to erase that last semi-paragraph. Sorry.
And Robert, I empathize with every word you said. Almost down to the exact age.
@Lenona
Ok, fuck you. You refuse to acknowledge your ignorance of history, sociology, and psychology and continue to prate om as though you had something accurate to say. Which would be bad enough, but justifying your homophobic bullshit by saying some stereotypes are really true is beyond the fucking pale. The only thing you should post in this thread, or this blog, ever, is a fucking apology for making us all deal with you.
TL;DR: Fuck your ignorant bigoted bs, go away.
Ah, highschool sex. Frequently awkward and uncomfortable, but apparently a requirement for any and all adult happiness?
But that can be too easily twisted into saying basically “I know better what you want sexually than you do.”
If the 18 year old Stacey (or even the 23 year old Stacey) had the confidence and support from others to say what she really wanted it would have been something like “I think so and so is handsome but no I don’t want to be his girlfriend and I also don’t want a one night stand with him. Neither. Instead I want him to lift weights while he wears a gladiator harness and I tell him what to do while *he* (pointing to another handsome guy) also wears a harness and has me on his back like we’re kids playing horsey and I want to wear the shoes you made me not wear because you said they were inappropriate”.
Rather than caution me about what might be emotionally painful maybe somebody could have delicately told me about BDSM and that other people liked that too and not shamed me for thinking that sex has to be something different than art.
@Stacey
While I’m not sure exactly how much/whether schools should include BDSM in sex ed courses, I would agree that courses should definitely avoid stigmatizing it and should allow for students to understand that there is a wide variety of sexual expression possible. And discussion of BDSM could potentially be useful in discussing consent in general.
I don’t know about other countries, but in the US a lot of sex ed is very abstinence only and sex negative. And guess what? It doesn’t stop kids from having sex. It does however result in higher pregnancy rates because they’re not educated about contraception.
The best way to avoid painful experiences around sex as much as possible is to teach young people about the importance of sex and to teach them that they should do what they want and what’s right for them instead of feeling shamed for either having sex or for not having it.
That said, any time you get into a relationship, including marriage, there’s a potential for getting hurt. That’s just the reality of life. I don’t see how having an attitude that pre-marital sex is bad will change that.
@Naglfar
I don’t mean they would or should have to get all into BDSM in detail and exclusively. I just meant that they shouldn’t talk about “sex” in narrow terms, like only some things count as sex and my choice is ONLY to do those few things either in a relationship or in a one night stand.
That’s the kind of thinking that has supported a lot of people who used to slut shame me.
Seconding @dalillama’s STFU to Lenona.
Shut up, sit down and listen to the people who actually know things, @Lenona. Your ignorance is painful. If not to yourself, then to the rest of us. You clearly lack any historical, psychological and sociological knowledge and your attempts at supporting abstinence only sex education, promulgating anti-LGBTQIA+ stereotypes, and other nonsense with unsupported claims – e.g. that casual or pre-marital sex is bad for all teenagers – is beyond ignorant (not exposed to other ideas) and well into willful ignorance (choosing to ignore any and all information that contradicts your beliefs). People here have provided you with accurate information or even just information that contradicts your statements based on their personal experiences, and you continue. You ignore the information you have been given and go off on a tangent. I don’t know what you expect to achieve by interacting with us in this manner, because you ain’t making any converts. If you are here to genuinely interact with this community and/or learn, shut up, sit down, and listen.
The edit function STILL won’t work…
Catalpa: “your argument is that we should be telling teens to just not have sex, whether that be in a relationship or in a casual setting.”
No. Just that if ADULTS in the workplace still need constant seminars as to what harassment is, what informed consent is, how important it is, and how misleading hormones can be, teens need that education even more, if they’re not going to carry their angst and bitterness against their fellow human beings into later years. No point in having them get more emotionally scarred than necessary.
Or, “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” Teens do appreciate warnings, so long as they don’t carry implications of condescension or bigotry. Such as what I said about non-partisan drinking. Why wouldn’t they appreciate the unsentimental advice given, say, by the readers of Dan Savage? The April 28th, 2005 column was “15 going on 16.” He said:
“I’m proud to present my long-delayed column devoted to advice for 15-year-old girls. What do the women who read Savage Love know now that they wish they’d known when they were 15?”…
“Here’s a pearl of wisdom I wish someone had shared with me: Just because a guy wants to —- you doesn’t necessarily mean he likes you. Sounds painfully obvious, doesn’t it? I was in my 20s before I finally figured it out.” -Now I Know
(There were plenty of others. I trust everyone knows Dan Savage is pro-sex and pro-self responsibility.)
The only painful thing to happen to me sexual was my rape. Everything else was good and helped me learn and become a person I am today. The friend I first slept with after my rape was an emotional experience with a lot of crying on both of our ends and was gentle and loving. I would have liked to have a relationship with him but after about a month we sat down and talked and he confided in me that he thought he might be gay and while he liked the sex, something felt wrong about it. We are still friends. I still love him. And he is living with a boyfriend now and is very happy while i am married and in love with my spouse. Can you imagine how devastating life could have been if he abstained from sex and forced himself into a relationship with a woman only to start off their marriage having sex and it feeling wrong?
Did the rejection of the relationship I was starting to hope for hurt? Yes it did a bit. But i learned a lot about myself from it and it helped me heal so much. The experience he had with me gave me the confidence and the healing to say yes to the handsome marine who caught me when i fell to coffee. It helped me say ” Hey do you want to come inside. My roommates are out” to said handsome marine after that first date and I wanted him. And helped me to realize i could be vulnerable without being broken or harmed which made me so much stronger.
Abstinence education left me ashamed and broken after my rape. Made me feel damaged and soiled and like that he had stolen the only value I had. Made me feel unloveable and used up. Luckily relatiy showed me that. It’s not so. Abstinence sex education is a lie that does nothing but harm teenagers.
@Stacey, Naglfar:
On one hand, we should let people know what the options are so that they don’t spend a lot of time wandering in the dark when they try to find themselves, metaphorically speaking. On the other hand, we have no idea what the necessary maturity level is for speaking about it in more than a vague and overly broad manner. It’s likely that at least some 17 and 18 year olds have that, and it might not even be an issue for 15-16 year olds, but it’s also possible that this is better put off until college.
Then again, BDSM enthusiasts get exasperated how the people who do occasional shallow dives for the sake of “spicing things up in the bedroom” usually jump straight for the intermediate level stuff without doing the research. Tying people to the bed, for example, is risking nerve damage, possibly permanent, if you don’t know what you’re doing. There would be some benefit to at least letting people know early on that you shouldn’t casually mess around with things like that.
@WWTH
It also leads to way more STDs and unsafe sex. Like in the case of the Saddleback church, where teenagers thought that if PIV was off-limits then unprotected anal sex would be a good idea. A lot of infections followed.
Or, in song form (NSFW lyrics):
@Lenona
Dan Savage is also transphobic, misogynistic, and racist. So kids who aren’t cis white guys might not appreciate him as much. I used to read his columns when I was deeply closeted and never understood why everyone thought he was so great anyway.
@Snowberry
This, and also that books like 50 Shades of Grey have given a false public impression of BDSM and it would be good for people to learn better information about safety, consent, etc.
@lenona
And I’ve fucked guys with no intention of being their girlfriend, marrying them or having them be anything else then a nice experience of pleasure for a couple nights. We both knew what that was and it was fun. Not painful. Just fun.
Here the thing, some people will try to trick those into sex by claiming they want more but there are a lot of people who just want sex and will communicate just that. And sometimes people do communicate that and the other person still tries to get something more but on that point its on them if they catch feelings and they can learn from any pain that might cause. Part of becoming an adult
If this is what you’re arguing, why the HELL are you bringing up anecdotes about how much pain a relationship that involved consensual sex caused, and bringing up prejudiced, stupid stereotypes about how “men only want sex!” and “gay men are totally all about one-night-stands but lesbians are definitely not!”? Or making historically inaccurate assumptions that medieval teenagers got married at 13 and spent all that time having unlimited sex, and how modern teen boys wish for that life?
What is your goal spouting these inane points? How does it support your argument?
@Alan Robertshaw – Over one hundred million books!? Dayum! As someone who once worked for a book charity, color me impressed.
As for all the sex stuff y’all talkin’ about… well, except for the historical marriage bit I mentioned in an earlier post, not really sure what I can contribute (41-year-old virgin, remember? At least I refuse to be stigmatized by it, maybe, I think) besides a blanket “sex ed good (IIRC we had some as soon as 6th grade when I was a kid), abstinence-only bad”, and that questions of consent are damned well important.
Honestly though, with all the talk we have on that subject, I’m kinda weirded out -I always thought as self-evident that sex was supposed to be about 2+ people mutually agreeing to have fun together by fooling around with their naughty bits; even dodgy porn (there was a lot of it in the 90s) I tended to rationalize as the characters spicing things up with role-play (given my utter loathing of rape, the alternative would have been a turn-off). So actually being aware that issues of consent are not self-evident to others to the point that serious discussions on the subject must be had just makes me feel even more like an alien (as in, literally extraterrestrial) than I usually do, which is quite a lot.
I mean, I once overstepped my bounds without meaning to in regards to StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved some months back, and when she called me out on it my knee-jerk reaction was to apologize and back off, followed by a bit of introspection… I just find it bizarre that so many others have the opposite reaction; I was raised in the same cultural milieu, after all, and I seriously doubt that my mild autism spectrum disorder is the sole cause of the discrepancy…
Good lord, NSSD, you clearly didn’t read what I quoted from Wendy Kaminer, or you’d never claim I support abstinence-only education. (Maybe I should have quoted the part where she said she was having premarital sex, but I didn’t think I needed to.) She’s one of my idols, along with Katha Pollitt, Peter McWilliams and Sam Harris. (Despite his flaws.)
At any rate, parents who want an abstinence-only school program should PAY for it – NOT the taxpayers. Why? Because if parents can’t figure out how to brainwash their kids that way, why would some stranger lecturing at the school have any better luck? Besides, even conservatives can’t come up with solid proof that such programs delay sex more than a year – and when the teens do have sex, their guilt makes them less likely to use condoms. (Thank goodness Colorado and Delaware seem to be doing better at keeping down teen pregnancy and disease, last I heard, with their comprehensive programs.)
Besides which, of course, we’ve all heard of how sexist ab-only programs are – and how damaging that can get.
From Amy Dickinson’s column:
“You should grant the term ‘sexually pure’a little more respect. A lot more, actually.” — Bradley
“Dear Bradley: I always applaud people making healthy choices. In terms of granting the terminology ‘sexually pure’ more respect? No, I don’t think I will. I would consider throwing some respect its way if this term were equally applied to boys (as well as girls), but it never is.”