So you’ve heard about the whole GameStop thing, right? The denizens of a stock trading subreddit have collectively levitated the stock price of troubled game retailer GameStop up roughly a kajillion percent since last fall, screwing over several hedge funds that were betting on the company’s stock going down the toilet. (You can get all the gory details of what’s going on here.)
While most outside observers seem to find the entire situation pretty fucking funny — rooting for the retail investors getting one over the hedge fund assholes for once — others saw it as a symptom of the “unruly mob” taking over trading. (Never mind that traders have always been an unruly mob.)
One of those most concerned about the GameStop story — and its possible future ramifications — is Scott Galloway, a tech/business guru who teaches marketing at New York University and who, judging from the pictures of him I’ve seen online, could probably beat up your dad.
Anyway, this Chadly professor blames the whole GameStock thing on … incels.
He elaborates a little more in several followup tweets:
Now, there are a few problems with this, er, analysis. One is that we don’t actually know the demographics of those promoting and/or buying GameStop stock. Indeed, when the New York Times spoke with several recent GameStop buyers they ranged from a 16-year-old high school student (incel status: unknown) to a married couple in their late twenties (incel status: highly unlikely).
But a columnist for the GuardianUS had a more pointed critique:
I can’t help but be reminded of the creepy talk about “sexual redistribution” we saw back in 2018 after the Toronto van attack brought the issue of incels to the fore. I wrote a piece for Vice at the time detailing some of the darker implications of the idea that sex could be redistributed like government cheese:
George Mason University economist Robin Hanson suggested in a now-infamous blog post that “involuntary celibacy” and “sexual inequality” in general could be fixed, and violence reduced, if we as a society set out to “redistribute” sex more equally.
How, exactly, Hanson thinks this could be done isn’t clear, though his post vaguely referenced the idea that “[s]ex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.” After some critics pointed out that this “direct redistribution” of sex sounded an awful lot like government-sponsored sex slavery, Hanson added a defensive update to his original post. “Sex choices are influenced by a great many factors and each such factor offers a possible lever for influencing sex inequality,” he wrote, suggesting “promoting monogamy and discouraging promiscuity” as two options. “Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!” …
Just over a week after the van attack, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat entered the fray, piggybacking off of Hanson’s bad ideas in a column arguing that “the sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.”
If society doesn’t clamp down on this kind of “promiscuity,” Douthat ominously warned, the inexorable “logic of late-modern sexual life” would inevitably lead to a Hanson-esque “sexual redistribution” that today’s casual-sex-havers might find a tad horrifying. Either that or everyone would turn to sex robots; Douthat was a little vague about it all. In the Spectator, a few days later, columnist Toby Young seconded the sexbot solution, arguing that “robot girlfriends” could be a “workable” cure for “sexual inequality” and incel mass murders.
Feminists responded to the “redistribution of sex” talk with a mixture of horror and wonder: horror at the real-world implications of this strangely abstract and antiseptic discussion, wonder at the sheer obtuseness of those pushing the idea. “We can’t redistribute women’s bodies as if they are a natural resource,” Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker, “they are the bodies we live in.”
If Scott Galloway has a better way in mind to redistribute sex to allegedly sexless stock traders on Reddit, I’d like to hear it, because as of right now — with sex robots more than a few years into the future — Hanson and Douthat’s terrible ideas are the best we’ve got, and they are breathtakingly bad.
The real problem isn’t that some stock traders aren’t having sex; it’s that we rely so heavily on what is basically a lightly regulated casino to take care of financing businesses — and providing for our retirements. Let’s get to work on reforming that and leave Redditors to take care of their sex lives without any form of public assistance.
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I heard about this on Twitter. The idea is to punish the investors who are “shorting” companies’ stocks (betting on them to lose money) by instead making those stocks go up. So in that sense it’s ordinary folks against the rich, but Elon Musk (and maybe other famous people I don’t know about) tweeted some things that brought its profile up.
Though I’m not a fan of Musk. He acts like any other whiny, entitled billionaire. Remember when the kids in the cave in Thailand were rescued and he threw a fuss because people didn’t use his idea to rescue them?
Also. I know a few people who have electric cars, but not one who has a Tesla. It’s just out of their price range. (My parents have the little Mitsubishi MiEV. Their richer neighbours? A Nissan Leaf.)
Anyway, back to the post topic, I saw quite a few women on Twitter talking about investing in this too. Actually, this was AMC not GameStop, but it was part of a related movement. It wasn’t just “sexless young men” (and how does he know about their sex lives??)
Do people here invest in any stocks? I’d be interested in “green” investments (other than Tesla). Last year I made about $150 with $5,000 of mutual funds, but I closed that account when I saw the #1 company they were investing in was Enbridge, and other oil companies were high on the list.
…And yeah, this is super middle-class of me to be able to afford that. (I say middle class because of education & access to stuff – I’ve never made more than $20K a year but I don’t really need to.)
@Surplus
I’m a woman, but I was raised in a manner more typical of a boy because cisnormativity. From my own life and others around me, a few differences I’ve observed are:
Note that a lot of these are very culturally dependent and may vary from place to place, I’m speaking from my own perspective only.
As for the second question, I think that we should be moving towards raising all children in a way which is both individualized (as needed by the child, for instance disabled or neurodivergent children may need different things than abled neurotypical children) but also which is not divided based on the (presumed) gender of a child. However, the way in which we raise girls also has lots of issues, as mentioned above. Teaching children to submit or dissuading them from sports or dominance wouldn’t be beneficial, for instance. So, while there are issues with the way we raise boys, I think ideally we need to re-evaluate our ideas of childrearing completely.
@epitome
Nor am I. He’s also notably misogynistic and transphobic, and over all sounds like any other internet troll, just wealthier.
Some people have an automatic word association between “Incels” and “Reddit,” ironically because they are the one group that Reddit has tried to remove the most often. This guy goes onto social media but only to promote his brand and I bet he has a certain list of people and publications he considers worthy of his attention which doesn’t include Reddit. Indeed I wonder if he’s projecting the sex thing. There is at least a stereotype that full time stock investors are wannabe Chads, and even some science showing male investors take riskier investments than female investors.
There is a lot of resentment towards the ultra-wealthy, and this situation makes people happy because it sounds like an online movement managed to hurt the most devious of the ultra-wealthy. A lot of people see how “shorting” works and hate it. Even though the people on that subreddit are not the poorest of the poor it is still seen as a victory of the poor over rich, which are in short supply. The idea that somebody will petition congress to prevent this in the future is itself a hot issue since people are unsure if Biden will actually help the poor.
I’m just glad no one is calling this “Gamestop gate”
I’m still waiting for the GateGate.
Heated trader moment.
I don’t know about this gamerstopgate thing; but it might be time to start shorting the Trump brand.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tower-buildings-value-real-estate-prices-2021-1
Cry moar, stock market Chad. So the peasants did something that slightly inconvenienced you and your pals for once.
I think it’s rather more likely that people of all ages, genders, and amount-of-sex-having are stuck inside their houses thanks to the plague, spending more time online, and found something amusing they could do to annoy the oligarchs from the couch.
I was surprised GameStop is still in business too. I’ve never forgiven them for buying ThinkGeek and making it less cool, more incel/corporate. I don’t think I’ve been in one since the heady early days of “dammit where can I get a Wii”. Bought same and some games, never went back.
@Herbert West
Apparently there was a “GateGate” in the UK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebgate
@Elaine
I recommended to him that he stop touching himself and stop watching porn for a year, if he abstained from the things that were causing him harm and messing with his brain like this, then it will help him reconnect with reality of things again. Needless to say, he didn’t want to do that.
Maybe what he needs is not so much to abstain from those things as to find healthier viewing material, so to speak? I know a lot of it is really subjective, but if the problem is that he’s watching porn that gives him unrealistic expectations of women or sex in general, maybe he could look for some of the stuff that caters more to women and couples that shows a more realistic perspective on sex and relationships while still being erotic.
I wish I could give some recommendations, but a lot of what I watch is trash, I just know that it’s trash and don’t let it color my perspective of how healthy relationships are supposed to function. Maybe helps that I’m not a guy, but I also don’t want to be presumptuous and act like the only thing guys enjoy is the sexist junk that doesn’t care about the woman’s pleasure.
Students are forced to use poor quality online resources for education. Our Internet is not ready to accept more information