Jake Davison, who shot five people dead in a Thursday night shotgun spree before turning the gun on himself, didn’t leave behind a manifesto.
The 22-year-old Plymouth (UK) virgin was more of a YouTube guy, posting assorted rants on the site bemoaning his life and offering his opinions on women (cruel and picky but not, he thought, very smart) and his future prospects (not good, he was sure; he felt old and ugly and washed up at the ripe old age of 22).
He scattered his opinions across Facebook and Reddit as well, launching into tirades against his mother, whom he called “vile” and “abusive.” (All of these accounts have been shut down as of this writing, but you can find traces of what he said in the press coverage of his murder spree; meanwhile some of his videos have been saved and reposted on the Incels.is forum.)
His mother was the first person he shot in his murder spree; in the end he killed two women, two men and, most horrifically, one three-year-old girl.
Most of Davison’s rants — whether about women or his own seemingly worsening life — could almost have been pasted word for word from incel discussion forums. He may have been fervent in his beliefs, but he wasn’t original.
He lamented that he had missed the joys of teenage romance, something that he would never be able to recapture.
“Let’s say I get with a woman my age,” he declared.
She’s had a million relationships. Likely been destroyed and broken and torn apart by a fucking Chad. She’s probably completely incapable of loving anyone like she did when she was 16, 17, 15, when she first got with that fucking Chad.
This weird glorification of teenage love (and teenage girls) is common among incels. (I’ve written about this in a number of posts, and will elaborate on Davison’s obsession in a future post.) It’s not clear how Davison was able to reconcile his fantasies of underage sex with his Qanon-style belief that the government is full of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who need to be put down. Davison was not only an incel but was also something of a Trump-worshipper and gun fanatic who dreamed of moving to the US some day, so it’s not all the shocking to see QAnon-ish conspiracy theories mixed up in his brain with thoughts of Chad and Stacey.
But if we set aside his Trumpian enthusiasm — fairly atypical for incels who are generally not very political –most of what he set forth in his posts and videos was standard issue incel. The biggest difference I can see between Davison and your typical incel is that he actually carried out his fantasy of a Elliot Rodger style “day of retribution.”
Despite his weight worries (he was a bit plump) and his belief that he was ugly and getting uglier, Davison was a fairly typical-looking young man, a sort of Seth Rogan-esque stoner dude who might have had a chance with women had he only trimmed his beard a little more often. It would have helped a lot more if he hadn’t been quite so angry and misogynistic and self-loathing; like most incels, Davison blamed his looks for his lack of success with women, though the real problem was all the poisonous bullshit stuffed in his head.
The most energetic coverage of the shooting spree comes in the British tabloids — among them The Sun, which described incels as “a sinister death cult of miserable, sex-starved loners linked to a string of terror-style attacks.”
A little over-the-top, but … true.
Davison is picking up fans on Incels.is, with some comparing him positively with Elliot Rodger, the original mass-killing Incel “saint.”
“What a hero,” wrote MisterMeme. “I hope he is in heaven rn.”
“We were past overdue for a new ER, [Elliot Rodger]” added Metabuxx.
“Yes I can say it this time,” Lookscel cried out.
ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
A new ER
“It was a long drought but finally it’s ER season again,” added CrackingYs happily.
Over on The Black Pill Club, another incel hangout, one especially edgy commenter wrote that he had “read that a 5 year old whore is among the dead which is very pleasing to hear.” (Actually, she was three years old, which is even worse.)
That’s about all I can take on this right now. I will be back, probably tomorrow, with more thoughts on incel obsessions with “teenage love.”
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@ .45
You apologized when I said you should. No more need be said.
I have commented before about what I do in life and what I prefer on this blog when relevant to the topic of David’s posts or on open threads.
I despise NiceGuys so much. The only thing I like is their *tears*.
I apologize to everyone for saying that stuff earlier that I shouldn’t have. I did read what everybody responded and I am sorry.
Entitled Gross Creep who just posted is still and always will deserve only contempt.
I am going to make extra effort to look amazing tomorrow and am planning an awesome and amazing outfit to celebrate his tears.
@Howard
My dude, I’m gonna take the charitable approach because everything else I wanted to say has already been said. Doesn’t mean I don’t think you aren’t exactly the Entitled Gross Creep the others have been calling you, you definitely are, but by my optimistic estimate there’s a 0.05% chance you might actually learn from what just happened here and grow the fuck out of it. Those odds may improve drastically if you can actually listen and take notes. So far you haven’t, but hey, y’never know !
Make no mistake, your looks have nothing to do with how unattractive you are. And before you jump on to your next point, I will add that your looks aren’t even the reason you turned out morally unattractive. In fact, you’d be even worse if you were the exact shade of physically “attractive” that you want to be. In fact I would be willing to gamble the price of a beer that you’re actually conventionally attractive and just feel the need to blame your lack of success on something that you have no control on, rather than admit that your gross attitude is why people find you gross. That’s how it usually goes with Incels and “Nice Guys”.
But I said I’d be charitable, so I’m gonna give you some life advice.
Stop thinking about sex or relationships. Stop making them your goal. “Ascending” would not make you any happier. What you very obviously need is friends. Better friends than the ones you may have right now – if you have people in your life who agree with those horrendous views of yours, you need to ditch them and move on. If you have people in your life who don’t agree but still put up with your sorry ass, go find them and apologize for acting like a fucking asshole. If there’s people who gave up on you because of that attitude, leave them the fuck alone, you already burned that bridge. Build a real social life. Talk to people whether you find them attractive or not, and if you do find them attractive, DO NOT make that the reason you talk to them. Make. Some. Friends. Judge them solely on the content of their character and forget about your damn boner for just a second. I’m not even saying you must not find them attractive, I’m saying you need to make yourself a good friend before you even think about becoming a good date. Then if you find those friends attractive, you can let them know somewhere down the line, while being ready for rejection, and ready to keep being a good friend even after rejection happens.
And none of what I just said excludes what the others have said, everything you judged Stacey on revealed so much more about yourself than it did about her. Drop that attitude, drop the beliefs that caused that attitude, and for fuck’s sake leave her alone because every single time you opened your mouth so far you gave her more reasons to react the way she did. And I might personally find that extremely entertaining to watch, but you obviously don’t, so maybe stop handing her the stick you think she’s beating you with.
Build a real social circle and I absolutely guarantee that the rest will come naturally at one point or another. Here’s a little secret about attraction : our brains are wired in a very strange way, and it’s very common to find someone physically unattractive up until the point you get to know them more. Once your mind starts finding someone attractive, your eyes tend to follow suit, and “ugly” becomes “beautiful” even on the physical front. And I said it’s strange, but it’s really not, and I guarantee you’ve already experienced it before – maybe not necessarily with people, it also works with pretty much everything else. And it works both ways : be a better person and people will find you more attractive, give “unattractive” people a chance and you will find they start looking better the moment they open their mouth and say something beautiful. And it also works in reverse, which if you’ve been paying attention is definitely what happened with you here – you made yourself look extremely ugly with that attitude, and I guarantee it’s also what happened every other time you were rejected.
But again, that should NOT be the reason you go out and make yourself approachable. You should do it for the sake of being a good person, and forget about the “reward”. If only because if you do it for said reward, well you’re not really a good person, and make no mistake, people can and WILL find you out no matter how well you think you’re hiding it.
As a very dear friend of mine says : as a general rule, assume you’re way more transparent than you think you are. Your true motivation will always transpire, and the only thing you can do about that is make general compassion your true motivation.
Lastly, if I were you I’d stop trying with this community, you’ve kind of worn out everyone’s patience at this point, including mine – just because I took the time to drop you a wall o’text of life advice doesn’t mean I got the energy in me for another, so read it very carefully and take notes, then go and take that knowledge out into the real world. Don’t assume any compassion or advice we offered you was for your own benefit, there are others lurking who need that information if only so they can deal with the trolls in their own lives, and we do it for them first and foremost.
@Stacey
Holy crap, last time we talked you mentionned that this happens to you a lot, and you weren’t false-advertising 😀
Sinkable John has written pretty much what I would’ve done this morning, but he said it better.
I will add … @Howard, when you say “give me a chance” and talk about what that means, it does sound like “give me a chance” translates to “give me what I want.” Women, like a lot of other people, aren’t always that transactional. Edit: And to labor the point, women aren’t dolls. They want what they want, and it isn’t always the same from woman to woman. No gender is a monolith.
I strongly second Sinkable John’s suggestions about making some friends, and focusing on friendship alone. When Mr. Parasol first moved here from his hometown, he was away from his family and from friends he’d known since grade school. But he didn’t want to stay lonely. He joined a board gamer’s group (he plays Monopoly so well I refuse to play against him) and made some friends because of that shared hobby. He even dated a couple of women he met that way. None of them were me, but I’ve met them and they all told me how happy they were he’d found the partner who was right for him, because they cared for him as a person even though they weren’t a good match for anything long-term.
What that group of friends did for him was help him feel less lonely and gave him a way to spend time with people in a semi-structured setting. It helped him avoid the trap of growing bitter and resentful because the world wasn’t nicer to him.
@ howard
I don’t want this to look like a pile-on. People have already made all the relevant points very well. But I just want to add this. It’s not a dig; it’s meant as a bit of advice. So you can avoid such pushbacks in future. Assuming you heed it of course.
Professionals in close protection talk about something called ‘pre incident indicators’; but that’s just fancy talk for what the rest of us call ‘red flags’.
Here’s one of them:
Now, does that seem familiar?
The thing is, a lot of the time such tactics are very successful. That’s notwithstanding that women are usually very aware that people are trying that. They have that gut feeling from years of experience. But they override that anyway. That’s all to do what the conditioning not to be seen as unkind or paranoid. It’s especially the case with people who hold themselves out as progressive, as you can use an aspect of oppression and thus try to create cognitive dissonance. So something like “because I’m neuroatypical, poor, fat…etc”. And it’s even harder to resist when people do the sad puppy thing. Ironically, men blowing up and becoming aggressive on rejection actually makes it much easier to tell someone to naff off.
But sometimes women will just spot the attempt and tell the perpetrator where to shove it right from the start. And more power to their elbows when they do. It’s their absolute right, and attempts at further guilt tripping, whether aimed at he individual, or women as a whole, will rightly get called out.
So does that help you understand the reactions you got?
Test
@ howard
I don’t want this to look like a pile-on. People have already made all the relevant points very well. But I just want to add this. It’s not a dig; it’s meant as a bit of advice. So you can avoid such pushbacks in future. Assuming you heed it of course.
Professionals in close protection talk about something called ‘pre incident indicators’; but that’s just fancy talk for what the rest of us call ‘red flags’.
Here’s one of them:
Now, does that seem familiar?
The thing is, a lot of the time such tactics are very successful. That’s notwithstanding that women are usually very aware that people are trying that. They have that gut feeling from years of experience. But they override that anyway. That’s all to do what the conditioning not to be seen as unkind or paranoid. It’s especially the case with people who hold themselves out as progressive, as you can use an aspect of oppression and thus try to create cognitive dissonance. So something like “because I’m neuroatypical, poor, fat…etc”. And it’s even harder to resist when people do the sad puppy thing. Ironically, men blowing up and becoming aggressive on rejection actually makes it much easier to tell someone to naff off.
But sometimes women will just spot the attempt and tell the perpetrator where to shove it right from the start. And more power to their elbows when they do. It’s their absolute right, and attempts at further guilt tripping, whether aimed at he individual, or women as a whole, will rightly get called out.
So does that help you understand the reactions you got?
@ howard
I don’t want this to look like a pile-on. People have already made all the relevant points very well. But I just want to add this. It’s not a dig; it’s meant as a bit of advice. So you can avoid such pushbacks in future. Assuming you heed it of course.
Professionals in close protection talk about something called ‘pre incident indicators’; but that’s just fancy talk for what the rest of us call ‘red flags’.
Here’s one of them:
Now, does that seem familiar?
The thing is, a lot of the time such tactics are very successful. That’s notwithstanding that women are usually very aware that people are trying that. They have that gut feeling from years of experience. But they override that anyway. That’s all to do what the conditioning not to be seen as unkind or paranoid. It’s especially the case with people who hold themselves out as progressive, as you can use an aspect of oppression and thus try to create cognitive dissonance. So something like “because I’m neuroatypical, poor, fat…etc”. And it’s even harder to resist when people do the sad puppy thing. Ironically, men blowing up and becoming aggressive on rejection actually makes it much easier to tell someone to naff off.
But sometimes women will just spot the attempt and tell the perpetrator where to shove it right from the start. And more power to their elbows when they do. It’s their absolute right, and attempts at further guilt tripping, whether aimed at he individual, or women as a whole, will rightly get called out.
So does that help you understand the reactions you got?
@Howard
Not much to add, but like Sinkable John, I’m going to be optimistic about your motivations and give you a simple theoretical example of how your very first post here was chock full of sexism.
Suppose you see a guy you don’t know getting into a nice car on the street in front of you. You say “hey, nice car!” and the guy gives you the side eye and says “fuck off.”
If your immediate response is “jeez, guys are assholes,” instead of “jeez, that guy’s an asshole,” then you’re being sexist. Just like if the guy was Black and your immediate response was “jeez, Black people are assholes,” then you’re being racist. (And if your response was “jeez, Black guys are assholes,” then you’ve got a two-fer.)
I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t jump to “all guys are assholes” IRL, and if true, that should give you some data on where to start working on your personal issues and prejudices (if you want to; no one’s going to throw you in prison just for being a sexist asshole, but you shouldn’t be terribly surprised if no one wants to date you when you’re being a sexist asshole).
…also, because this kind of shit argument pisses me off on a very deep level:
As kupo, Victorious Parasol, and IgnoreSandra already pointed out, feminist talk about body positivity has fuck all to do with sexual preferences. For example, if someone isn’t sexually attracted to large women, that isn’t inherently a problem for feminists; it becomes a problem when folks start talking about “landwhales” and “no fatties.” Just like it would be problematic if StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved said “no m-words” (referring to the common slur against little people, in case you don’t know) or called you a shrimp or something.
But she didn’t, because she’s not an asshole.
@howard
I am a hot conventual attractive 23 year old woman with an hourglass figure and big breast. I am married to a sexy, attractive, muscly marine whom I love with all my heart. we have been married for almost two years now, If I wasn’t “allowed” to turn down ever man who was nice to me I never would have met him. if I settled for something less them him, I’d be deeply unhappy. That is why it’s okay for women to reject a guy even if he’s “nice” to them. because they don’t have to settle for some smuk that does nothing for them.
@Elaine
Man, two years already? It seems like only yesterday I was offering you advice on your wedding dress.
Wait, what? Weren’t we chatting about Elaine’s upcoming wedding like three weeks ago?
Ah well, if I’m feeling old I’m taking you all down with me.
@Victorious
It will be two years this October. it’s hard to imagine that because a few months after our wedding after he returned to base, covid started to spread and I have actually had little time to spend with him the last 2 years.
@Alan
Who’s uncle Phil?
@Elaine
In Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Will Smith’s character is a teenager who is living with his uncle Phil in Bel Air.
@
Dalillama
Ah okay, I watched reruns of the fresh prince growing up but I didn’t remember what the uncle’s name was at all. I remember cousin Hillary and Will’s girlfriend Lisa because well…. I had super big crushes on them before I realized I was Bi. Which makes sense because on of the most beautiful women I have ever seen is Hally Berry with short hair. Black women with pixy cut hair styles are apparently my hot button.
Just the fact that anyone would describe a 3 year old (or a 5 year old) as a “whore” makes me physically ill. It just proves women and girls don’t have to do anything to be called a slut or a whore, they just have to exist