The PLEDGE DRIVE is almost over! If you’re a fan of this blog, please help fund its continued existence by clicking the button below. THANKS!
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:
Oh wow, yeah, that is so important. And it needs to have information about more than just physical/verbal abuse (which is what you’d most often see in media), it has to include things like emotional abuse and gaslighting, financial abuse, and so on. How to recognize grooming, how to handle things when a friend is in a situation like that, and of course, resources you can turn to (because you will never be able to cover everything in class, and it’s important to know where you can get good information and help).
Plus I think there need to be more general discussions about power structures and how they are placed in them as teenagers (their relations with parents, with teachers or other authority figures, with the state, with each other…) and what they can do. That Little Red Schoolbook from the 70s that I mentioned before was actually not bad in that regard, especially in how to deal with the system, but is of course a bit dated, and I don’t remember if I saw, when I skimmed through that PDF, any mentions of various teen power structures like cliques, which I think should also be discussed. Peer pressure is too often presented as a sort of simplistic “come on, everybody’s doing it, don’t you want to be cool” situation, when often it’s a lot more pernicious.
But this is all pretty huge, and a lot of it is much more than just sexual education, so ideally it would be provided under some other lesson plan.
@Alan
In America AFAIK we don’t have many such fans, but maybe it’s because PSAs here are less entertaining.
Although I’m not a hardcore PSA fan, a museum near where I live used to do a show each year of the best British TV commercials, and I generally found that to be enjoyable.
@Penny Psmith
What about a larger curriculum of which sex ed is one part? Like a “health” curriculum that has different components for different years of school. For instance, it could start teaching about consent (in a non sexual way) starting at a fairly young age, then in later years start discussing more about sex and relationships, for a comprehensive education. Maybe this exists in some places already, I’m not sure.
I feel we are ignoring the fact that Lenora idolizes Sam Harris.
@ naglfar
This PIF (‘public information film’ as I insist on calling them; like we did in the 70s) got banned in the US. They’re only allowed to show an edited 30 second version!
Funnily enough, pertaining to the main discussion above, it does have a bit of a side plot about teen relationships. (Maybe that was as much an issue for the ban?)
@Specialffrog
I recall seeing that but had forgotten about it until now. Definitely telling.
At this point I think Lenona is a tradcon trying to sell us that ideology. Bit weird that this is the second troll in a week we’ve had pretending to be left wing/feminist in order to hawk right wing views. Is this the new trend for trolls? They could do to be more entertaining.
That’s not the only hint either, a lot of Lenona’s rhetoric very closely resembles the purity movement, like where they said that girls should be allowed to “go against the grain in a liberal context.” The idea of rebelling against sex, as though it’s somehow rebellious to be abstinent, is a common one in those circles.
@Alan
Possibly as part of the ban, it won’t let me watch it as it’s blocked in the US on copyright grounds. Not sure if that’s the formal ban or something separate.
@Lizzie
Ah, I see you are a fellow scholar! It sounds like you and I have received our information from the same very authoritative source that definitely exists but that I won’t mention here because reasons.
@Naglfar : it could be in general. For example, rebelious girl uniform is having a short skirt in the USA, but it can be having a long skirt in Japan. (I say “can” because the marker of rebellion seem to change fast and a lot in Japan)
Might be an european thing, but the pressure to have sex was quite high in my experience ; in that sense, telling youngsters that it’s okay to not want sex is useful, just as well as telling them that one-night stands are fine too.
In fact, as far as I can tell, the western society ask its youngster to simultaneously be good little samaritain that don’t do sex before marriage *and* crazed sex machines that need to try everything before being 18. Similar to how it ask its women to be both super thin *and* doing sports. I believe it’s why it’s popular for youngster to pretend that only PiV sex count as sex, because it let them fulfill both mandate at the same time.
Lenora sure peddle way strange and disquieting stuff however, who go much further than “hey, sex isn’t everything”. I fully think he or she is either a troll or at least a seriously conservative person.
@Ohlmann
I recognize that society does put pressure to have sex, but I wouldn’t say it’s “rebellious” to abstain when the dominant conservative political culture is pushing it. Conservatives like to pretend they’re rebels (e.g. “conservatism is the new punk rock!”) while repeating the status quo. It’s a common reactionary line.
@Viscaria
Aren’t you going to drop a poorly cited quote from a 90s book we haven’t read to explain it?
@Alan
Have you seen the “Charley Says” collection on DVD?
@ Naglfar
nuh-UHHH! I was a car-mad boy in the 1960s, I know that floor-mounted Hurst shifter had TWO jobe: stir the gears in the transmission, and represent my …
…
uhhh… nevermind
I wish schools also taught that if something happened and you got ab sti it’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of your life. There are treatments for you. Your sex life is going to have to change a bit and there will be awkward talks with partners and health providers but I wish there wasn’t a stigma around it because an sti doesn’t make you dirty, anymore then catching the flu because you shared a drink with a friend makes you dirty. They aren’t fun of course and you’ll have to deal with them but with a lot of things medical ( like mental health, addiction problems) if you could remove the big stigma around having them it will help people actually want to get treatment and testing done.
OT, but you may have seen this Pharyngula post re a Dear Prudence letter in Slate, from a bloke who threw away his wife’s birth control and thinks she’s overreacting.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/08/15/the-unfixable-man/
It’s frighteningly oblivious, a real Yes-You-Are-The-Asehole flesh-creeper of a guy.
In my experience as an asexual person, sex ed is generally pretty good at emphasizing that it’s fine to not have sex if you’re not ready. The harm inflicted on me came from the assumption and societal pressure that you are always eventually supposed to be “ready”, and that there’s something seriously wrong with you if you’re not.
The conservative position was never “hey, not having sex is good actually”, it’s “you must have sex, but only with the person you’re married to”. It’s not even relevant to those of us who don’t want sex.
Seriously, the only time I have ever seen the term “heavy petting” was in an “advice” column by Ann Landers… in about 1969
@opposablethumbs
Holy shit. He threw away her birth control and now is demanding she give up more things for him? She needs to get out of that marriage ASAP.
You might want to send a link to that to David if you haven’t already, that’s the kind of guy he could post about.
@Catalpa
Exactly. Lenona keeps trying to both sides it and might subscribe to the golden mean fallacy, when really the two sides aren’t polar opposites. One’s about giving people choices, the other is about forcing one path onto all people and shaming those who don’t follow.
Re: heavy petting
I’ve mostly seen that term in the context of satire, mocking the way conservatives talk about sex. I don’t think I’d seen someone use it unironically in anything written after 1970 until today.
@ Naglfar:
😉 😉
@ Vicky P
Ooh no; but I have of course seen them all as a kid. And then there’s the Prodigy sample.
Did you know the voice of Charley was provided by Kenny Everett?
Paging Cats in Shiny Hats
This popped up in my emails. Don’t know if it’s of any interest to you?
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/quarantine-mail-art-initiative-usps-1902009
“Heavy petting” – is that some furry kink?
In Finland we used to ski to school all year round, both ways in trackless snow.
Re: Petting
This was a very familiar sign in swimming pools here (I love that they had to expressly prohibit smoking)
And is referenced in this song.
@ Opposablethumbs:
re: unfixable man….
and he is totally oblivious to the fact that everything after the first conversation (about starting a family) was based on a social convention that HIS wishes have priority.
(TL:DNR…. there IS a point being made here…)
I was in a monogamous relationship for nearly 40 years, to a person who was well-read, feisty and opinionated. We NEVER had a “calm” conversation. We had emotional conversations, heated conversations, crying-together conversations, angry shouting matches….
And conversations. No “calm” conversations. My point being, if the man qualifies the exchange as “calm”, I suspect that either 1) it was not, or 2) he thought he was going to prevail and did not
In my life, I’ve done shit that I knew to be against the values I wished to uphold. I’ve done shit that was steeped in patriarchy and toxic masculinity. When I did them, I knew I was doing them… I knew it was wrong, and I knew I could stop at any time and make amends; all I had to do was STOP. Amends consist of “I was wrong, and I’ll try not to act in that manner in the future,” and amends continue by me NOT ACTING IN THAT MANNER.
There is no “make [them] understand….” There is no “get back to where we were” There’s certainly no “forget about it and move on”
well, poo, I never did make the point I was prepping….
sorry, I have “old folx’ brain” and my reasoning skills are verry ‘trumped out”….
My parents had, just before mom filed for divorce… but maybe better adjective would be “icy”.
Some more on heavy petting:
In that previously-mentioned Little Red Schoolbook, there’s this bit when discussing masturbation where they suggest answering someone who advises you not to masturbate “too much” by asking “how much is the right amount then?” – in a similar way, I find myself tempted to ask what makes petting heavy, what is light petting, and how can you tell the difference.
@Lainy:
Absolutely! Feeling ashamed of an STI (or any genital issue, like UTIs, yeast infections, weird rashes or what have you) is not only bad for your mental state, it can also lead to them going untreated, making things a whole lot worse down the line (and possibly infecting others). It’s so important to give straightforward information both about the diseases themselves and about treatment options, without making people feel bad or dirty for having them.
(And this also reminds me – there needs to be more awareness about things like vaginismus, vestibulodynia and so on, and of course any equivalents from the penis-having side of things. People shouldn’t feel like they’re somehow “broken” or “wrong” because they have a medical issue.)
@ weird eddie
You don’t have to worry until you get to the stage where you go into a room, can’t remember why, and then when you go back into the original room you think “Oh yeah; fire extinguisher.”
@ penny psmith
It’s when your petting has an extra neutron