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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.
@Lenona
What does any of this have to do with sex? why are you against sex? why do teenager having sex bother you so much? does it make you cringe to find out i started experimenting at 14? should i have waited till i was 20 in your mind? should I have waited till marriage? are you against masturbation? Like really what is your malfunction fam?
Alright, this is the second time you’ve referred to fatness in a derogatory manner. Stop it. Fatphobia is a shitty and harmful thing to engage in and it actually does cause trauma and pain. If you actually cared about minimizing harm you wouldn’t take part in it.
I didn’t forget. I just skim your longer posts because they’re too boring to read. Concision, what is it?
That’s your decision. That’s not a decision for you to impose on everyone. Not everyone lives their lives hiding under the bed in fear of what might happen, and not everyone should, despite what you think. Your fears, your regrets, your heartache, don’t belong to everyone and not everyone experiences life the same way you do. One time I climbed down a cliff to get at a little cave under the overhang. I’m not a climber and had no equipment, and could have slipped and died. But I don’t live my life based on worst-case scenarios.
I feel like you’d be a fan of the evangelical book I Kissed Dating Goodbye which posits that heartbreak is the worst thing in the world and should be avoided at the cost of literally everything. You should never date, you should never “give pieces of your heart away” to someone you’re not going to marry. The book is a product of purity culture. That should tell you something.
One of the purported activities of the people that Qanon points the finger at (which is a fairly long list, both of people and activities) is killing children to take their blood for nefarious purposes (i.e. blood libel), so I’ll not say that “almost no one takes it seriously”; as we can see, enough do that it has become a problem.
Ok I’m trying to understand lenore, but all of it seems very incorrect and generalizing, so also basically incorrect. So leonora is saying:
that they think only certain people have sex and only in certain ways.
Lesbians donr have one night stands becuase of women’s feelings are too fragile?
But gay men can have one night stands becuase of what? They dont have feelings?
But either way, leonora thinks one night stands are bad? But doesnt give any evidence for this or make an argument.
Heterosexual couples can still give diseases to each other even if they are monogamous. But they dont mention that people can get disease tests to be sure there are no diseases if they want to stop contraception. Leonora doesnt seem to know this.
They also seem to think teenage girls cant want sex as much as teenage boys. And that teenage boys are always dangerous to teenage girls (and always interested in girls)
Ace people dont exist for leonora and disabled people dont have sex apparently???
Ans love doesnt exist without sex.
But anyway it is so hard to understand and leonora gives no evidence or arguement
Wow, this thread is a whole mess. (I almost said “trainwreck,” but then I thought better of it.)
As I understand it, unicorn poop has antigravity properties which cause it to float up into space immediately upon exit from the unicorn. No, I will not be providing any citations. You have my understanding.
@Lenona
I am sincerely happy to learn that you don’t regret the decisions you made regarding sex during your teenage years. Unfortunately, you seem to be unaware that there is a whole world full of people who are not you who have different desires and priorities and ways of looking at the world. The right decisions for you are not the right decisions for every teenage girl on the planet.
What is HAPPENING in this thread? Let me see if I have this straight. My blockquotes are summaries of what I’m understanding from @Lenona’s posts, and not direct quotes. I expand on my thoughts below them. (I am going to be really reductionary, and talk about cis women and cis men, for the most part. Sorry for that, I just needed to start somewhere, and this seemed the easiest thing to tackle first.)
It is not explained why, so I’m going to posit it’s because they don’t actually have meaningful relationships, they’re just have sex for the sex. Also, men have higher sex drives than women, always, so it makes sense that gay men would want more sex. Two men = twice the sex drive! (With extra double mint gum!)
Note: Men have varying sex drive, just like everyone on the planet. Generalising it to “men always want one thing!” says that men are
a) always up for sex (which makes it hard to believe they would not consent to sex, which makes it hard to believe they could/would be raped)
b)can’t control themselves around women. It’s up to women to stop men from having sex with them. This means that a rape is always the women’s fault, why wasn’t she better at controlling the men around her?
Women, on the other hand, don’t have the same huuuuuge sex drive that men do, so lesbians don’t want sex without a long term relationship.
This says that a) no women want sex, basically. B) women, without the influence of men, are less sexual.
WHY does ‘being fat’ keep being brought up? Or disabled? Out of nowhere??? Can you just not?
I mean…??? No? Communicate with your partner(s), make sure you’re all on the same page, and then proceed from there?
I don’t get why you have this concentration on ONSs, honestly. Explaining to teens how to prevent STDs and pregnancy, that consent needs to be continous and freely given, that any party can remove their consent at any time, having sex doesn’t make you a bad (or uncool) person, and not having sex also doesn’t make you a bad (or uncool) person.
You’ve talked about alcohol, let me share a story. When I was a kid, alcohol was a thing that my parents drank in my house. We got to have a little glass of it, or a sip of their drink. Not enough for us to get drunk, but enough for us to understand that alcohol wasn’t this huge taboo thing that we needed to rebel and indulge in as soon as we could.
I think I had a much healthier relationship to alcohol, because in my house, it was no big deal.
The whole thing was handled really well, I thought. If I had kids, I’d want to handle it the same way.
ANYWAY, it’s late, and I’m too tired to think about this more. I just wanted to cap it off with this:
@Lenona, if how I’ve summarised your points irks you, because I’m saying things openly that you don’t think you’ve said… Why did I interpret it the way I did? What have you said, to make me interpret your words and beliefs like this?
If you’re going to quote something (please don’t quote any more books, we literally can’t look up the context, so you going “BUT THE CONTEXT MAKES THIS MAKE SENSE” is ridiculous.) – please use the blockquote feature. You will need to have javascript enabled for it to show up, but it’s the little button above the window you type in that says ‘quote’. You can either hit that, type what you want, then hit it again to open and close the block quote, or select the words and then hit that button.
It’s super difficult to parse what are your thoughts, and what is a strange quote that doesn’t actually support anything, and we can’t go and check for ourselves, because they are books.
WTF was with bringing up *statutory rape* as an answer to one night stands??? That was SO strange.
Maybe using the *Christian Science Monitor* as a source is uh… not the strongest source you could find. Putting that out there.
God knows we probably don’t need it but my two pennies worth…
1. Boys sleeping with girls and then making fun of them online or elsewhere is not a sex problem, it’s a “teenagers being arseholes” and “entrenched sexism” problem. Adults need to promote a culture for teens where it is seen as more shameful to be a bullying prick than a girl who has sex. You want the good kids (and most especially boys) to feel empowered to say “that’s not on” when they see that kind of behaviour and direct social shame where it is deserved. I think Lenona’s approach would inadvertently do the opposite.
2. Speaking as a person uninterested in ONS and who has felt pressured into unwanted sex in my youth, what I needed to hear in my formative years was “you are a valuable person with sound judgement and instincts, don’t do anything you don’t want to do, here’s a load of tips on building your confidence and learning how to assert yourself”.
A blanket, if indirect, discouraging of casual sex wouldn’t have helped me, but it would have reinforced a damaging shaming culture, alienated other girls who liked casual sex, and subtly perpetuated sexist ideas. The sex ed in my school was very much along the lines of sex = DANGER and mainly led by a well meaning but highly misguided Christian group looking to stop girls (in a indirect manner) having abortions. The resulting sex ed programme was pretty similar to what has been proposed in this thread. Trust me, it didn’t help.
Is Lenona a troll ? At that point I have vibes of that.
@Snowberry : Qanon is scary. It look like it could generate a fascist religion useful to would be dictators, and as you show it already generate plenty of assaults.
I believe that, even if one believe the conspiracy theory of Qanon, that their actions are still morally bad and not justified. What make them do that is that Qanon isn’t just a set of outlandish belief, but also a twisted moral system, one that is unjustly violent.
It’s one thing to believe that the earth is governed by inherently evil vampires ; it’s another to say that the live of all their supposed dupes is worthless.
Oh right, I had a blockquote copypasta around here somewhere.
If you have javascript enabled
Method 1:
1. Copy the text that you want to quote.
2. Paste it into the reply field.
3. Highlight the text.
4. Click the ‘quote’ button.
Method 2:
1. Copy the text that you want to quote.
2. Click the ‘quote’ button; it will insert the opening tag.
3. Paste the text after the tag that was inserted.
4. Click the ‘quote’ button again; it will insert the closing tag.
If you have javascript disabled
1. Copy the text that you want to quote.
2. Type <blockquote>
3. Paste the text after the tag.
4. Type </blockquote>
I wonder if I wasn’t clear enough in a previous message directed at @Lenona suggesting that he use “quote tags” instead of his previous practice of putting a horizontal line at the end of quotes, like this:
This is a quote, but since there is only a paragraph break separating this from the previous paragraph it is hard to understand where the quote starts and ends.
_____________________________________________
I see now that he has switched to using quotation marks:
“This is another quote, but it still is not as clear as it could be.”
Of course (shameless self-promotion) I have also created a tool that allows one to blockquote entire comments on comment threads here, downloadable at the link in my username.
Edit option ran out before I could correct some typing and grammar mistakes, I hope it’s still clear enough.
…Huh, now it looks like the whole big comment (which I was referring to here) got eaten by the mammoth. Dang. I hope it shows up again.
@Viscaria, could you maybe clarify a little – so are rainbows made of unicorn poop or am I misunderstanding the science here? Thanking you in anticipation…
@ ariblester
May I prevail further upon your tech skills and ask, how do you make usernames into links?
Tend to avoid walls of text – life’s too short to waste on people who can’t be concise – but I got bored and had a stab at summing up Lenona’s posts.
Best I can make out, they boil down to: “Ma! Nanna’s watching Fox again!”
Okay, seems my earlier comment has indeed been irrevocably eaten by the comment mammoth, so I’ll try to do it again, and maybe will manage to be a bit more succinct this time around (although I make no promises :-/ sorry in advance if it’s too long).
I agree with LollyPop and Lainy (and probably others, this thread is such a mess I must have missed stuff) that Lenona seems to be seriously overcomplicating things, and agree with others who’ve pointed out problematic aspects. And a lot of the suggestions Lenona made for sex ed classes don’t even necessarily have much to do with sex ed – for example the bit about not having to get drunk to have fun is perhaps good general advice, but any aspect of it that has anything to do with sex would be better covered by other aspects of teaching about sex.
So, to put my money where my mouth is, here’s a general concept of what I personally would like to see in sex ed classes:
– Details about biology, including sexual and gender identity. This will include exploring your own body and your own pleasure, while not ignoring the fact that some people feel dysphoria about their own body, and giving resources to help deal with that.
– Details about STDs, pregnancy, contraception and protection; not in a “sex is bad because you can get an STD or get pregnant, don’t have sex!” kind of way, but just supplying information, and again, giving resources about how to deal with it. This part will include information about the different kinds of available contraceptives, how to use them, how not to use them (e.g. how wearing two condoms is actually less safe than wearing one), how to get them, etc.; it will also include information about various forms of protection that is relevant to more than just PiV sex, like dental dams or Truvada.
(Side note: I think that teenagers actually react better to direct information than to various attempts to be “sneaky” and give it indirectly, as long as it’s not given in a way that is condescending or fearmongering and is more along the lines of “here are some things you might run into, here are some ways to deal with them safely and some resources you can turn to”.)
– Presenting sex as a fun activity that people do together; this is a rather wide umbrella that includes several sub-topics, such as:
(a) It’s okay to have sex. It’s also okay not to have sex, for any reason, because people can have fun in different ways. (This part should deal with things like slut-shaming, virgin-shaming, asexuality, peer pressure, etc.)
(b) Everyone involved should be having fun. (This part should deal with aspects of both consent and the importance of open communication, and greatly expand on both.)
(c) There are different ways to have sex, and different things that people see as sex, not just PiV. (This part should at least touch on the topic of fetish and kink, to de-shame them and offer resources where folks could learn about them in a safe and positive way.)
And that’s the basis. All the stuff about romance and relationships and feelings could either be included under one of the above topics (such as communication, shaming, etc.) or could be dealt with in other contexts that teach general life skills, rather than in sex ed specifically.
I might have left stuff out, and I’m sure others here could point out various possible additions or tweaks, but as a basis I think this is what I wish I had learnt in school.
I put it as the Website in the text box that asks for it in the comments form, though I’m not sure of the process if you are using a Gravatar account.
Oh, maybe I should have just looked further down.
Test
ETA: Sorry Ariblester. My reading skills are on a par with my tech skills.
Re: Teaching kids of railway danger
Brits of a certain age will remember those public information films they used to show. Some were truly terrifying (“Dark and Lonely Water” anyone?)
The train one was basically The Hunger Games.
Alan … I could have done without that particular memory being hauled from the crypt I’d sealed it in, thanks.
😛
That one were actually frightening. Though the film loop we got in school on farm dangers was a bit moreso.
@PennyPsmith
I’m pleased you reposted, I would have missed your comment otherwise.
I agree 100%. I definitely think STI chat should be totally matter of fact and really comprehensive. Too many kids leave school dimly aware of the scary spectre of disease but with no idea where the local sexual health clinics are. Practical, stigma-free advice that directs to relevant services seems like a low bar but unfortunately one that gets missed – mainly because some adults seem to think STIs are a good scare story to promote abstinence (and telling kids how to avoid them/get treated/protect others would be nothing short of encouraging teen sex), instead of what could be a highly manageable public health issue.
@ threp
Why the heck did I go and rewatch that; I live in a rural area where the main industry is farming!
Now if you’ll excuse me; I need to go figure out a way of living my life without ever leaving the house again.
(What is particularly disconcerting is how real those scenes are; and that we never saw those child actors turn up in anything else)
@Penny Psmith
This is true, as attempts to be sneaky inevitably will fail and they will see it bright and clear, just maybe be annoyed that adults thought they could sneak it past.
This is the kind of thing I wish I had learned in school. The only sex ed I ever had in school was being shown reproductive diagrams once, we never learned about any actual sex/relationship stuff or this, and I think that maybe if I’d learned about sexuality and gender identity younger I could have come out much younger and wouldn’t have spent as long repressing it.
And I agree re: learning about relationships. Especially information like how to recognize an abusive relationship and how to get out.
@Alan Robertshaw
I stumbled across that particular film a few years ago. The main thing that stuck out to me about it was how its Wikipedia page contained the sentence “Although it is not strictly a public information film, it is often considered to be so by fans of the genre.” I find it a bit funny to think there are fans of 70s PSAs who debate the merits of each one.
@Alan – Ha! It’s a thought provoker that one. Though when I saw it, one of my mates piped up with “Sir, we still use horses on our farm … ” 🙂
@Naglfar
I’m not what you’d call a devotee of PSAs, but have a certain fondness for this one from WW2:
@ naglfar