30-year-old incels suffering from arrested development should be allowed to have sex with 14-year-olds because “mentally we’re still teenagers,” incel insists

And yet a woman who acted like a teenager would certainly not get any of their empathy (I am sure they have no respect for adult littles), possibly accused of riding the cock carousel. They certainly wouldn’t accept female physical or sexual abuse on the grounds that the woman is clearly emotionally immature.

Without double standards, some people wouldn’t have any.

Realistically, how would you even determine someone’s mental age?

I don’t think mental age is a thing. A teenager with a disability is not in any way a six year old mentally. Their brain does not work like a six year old’s, even if they can’t read or add. It’s the same thing emotionally, too. Someone could throw tantrums, but that also doesn’t make them six. When we treat intellectually disabled people as equivalent to “normal” children, but younger, we are failing to understand who they actually are. And most will quite quickly demonstrate that by getting into trouble that the younger kid they supposedly are is incapable of.

okay lets just be honest though. This isn’t a disabled person. This is a man trying to justify why it’s okay for him to be a sexual predator.

I have yet to meet an incel that is actual autistic or anything. They are just part of a cult that tells them if random women don’t start getting naked and offering them sex off the streets then they are autistic. They don’t even want a girlfriend, they want a fleshlight.

Also, I and almost every other autistic person I have ever met don’t act like this. The ones that act even close, are the ones that are allowed to get away with ever bad behavior because they are autistic. And they have all been males.

@Dave

This reminded me of an interesting (and I imagine stressful) job a friend of my partner does, where he has to assess whether the relationships between people with disabilities such as Downs Syndrome are consensual and positive for both parties, due to the vastly differing abilities and perspectives within (and without) diagnostic groups. As you say “mental age” is probably not that helpful a factor to consider in these circumstances, as it’s too nebulous.

As far as incels using mental age to justify their pedo ring, it’s a queasy combination of scarily disturbing, incredibly stupid and full-body cringe pathetic. Which just about sums up their entire subculture!

Okay, this is just insulting to 14-year-olds. I actually have met 14-year-olds with more compassion and intelligence than these guys. How dare they malign teenagers!

It’s only natural that missing out on a developmental milestone (taking each other’s virginities at ~13-14) leaves us forever stunted in that mental stage.

Its almost as if he’s implying the only way to gain the emotional maturity required to have any sex at all is by having sex well before you are emotionally mature enough to handle it.

I’ve had wet dreams that made more sense than that argument.

@Malintzin: Yay! I was able to sort of be first!
I tend to focus on the hypocrisy in my comments for the same argumentative parsimony (or laziness) that guides conservatives to do it: I don’t even have to address any of the facts of any of their position, they have to admit that at least one of their two inconsistent positions are false. But I hope that doesn’t come off like a “gotcha” that cedes the field to them. Their positions are obviously vile. I just rarely find myself in the headspace that can develop an argument against a manospherian of the type this site tracks. Even a neo-Nazi will sometimes hide their perfidy behind some kind of argument that independently deserves analysis (like how we should actually balance support for ethno-national movements against colonialism with human rights and universalism). But the manospherian just usually pukes self-servng hate.

That having been said, I want to formally develop an argument at some point that hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug, of conservatism. The hypocrisy for conservatives isn’t fundamentally a coincidence or a failure of individual argument. It’s built in to a simple fact: Their actual maxim is “Mine rules for thee but not for me” or, as I prefer to put it, “Fuck y’all, I’ve got mine”. Even if one raises the point, they rarely comprehend it or change their view. It barely even bothers them. They really just want rights for themselves that others don’t. But even someone like an incel recognizes that it looks really bad, makes them look like blinkered moral children, to say, “I straightforwardly think that women should not be treated like men, morally. I think different rules should apply to women, because men are powerful and power is good”. 

I’ve found that a huge part of responding to any right-wing argument basically comes down to stripping away the lies they’ve used to get to protecting themselves and others from the realization that their fundamental belief is moral nihilism.

@Elaine: I have a friend who, after going deep down the alt-right rabbit hole, also started
accepting incel nonsense. He had had a girlfriend, and a child. He ruined his relationships with both because of his own bad behavior. While I feel that intellectual charity compels me to accept that at least some of the people we see here really are suffering from some seriois mental or physical disability or illness (not that any of that would be a justification or explanation, or a reason to not hold them accountable – what’s that personal responsibiltiy conservatives pretend to believe in again?), the fact that the only examples I ever encounter match exactly what you describe here compels me to agree. And, again, I notice that when these people try to make the normie right wing arguments, they just love to talk abotu personal responsibility and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps… but their own mental age and their own (supposed) struggles against misandry? Nope!

@Robert: As with so many of these discussions, if we held right-wingers to both their supposed beliefs in harsh Daddy-type justice and their supposed beliefs in how awful men or white folks or whoever they supposedly are stanning for are, it would be an admission that they should be profiled, put onto watchlists and even imprisoned. But, again, that would require them to not hold the actual belief that they hold: that they get to have power by definition and others get to cope with their power by definition.

@Buttercup: I don’t even accept that. I am willing to bet that a lot of these guys would actually hate having to spend time with an actual 14 year old they couldn’t just abuse. And a lot of them probably did date in high school, or have opportunities. Maybe I’m being too generous, but I really doubt many of them are actually pedophiles or hebephiles by orientation. They just want an excuse to find someone they think they can hurt and control. And, yes, as Surplus points out, a trophy they could put on their proverbial wall, which is why they want society to accept and applaud them for their grossness.

@Fred B-C:

That having been said, I want to formally develop an argument at some point that hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug, of conservatism. The hypocrisy for conservatives isn’t fundamentally a coincidence or a failure of individual argument. It’s built in to a simple fact: Their actual maxim is “Mine rules for thee but not for me”

It has been my experience that typical conservative worldviews are a fertile ground for hypocrisy, mainly due to the ease of justifying exceptions to their own views in the name of protecting themselves, or their families, or their “tribe” (however they define that), which in the end is what they’re *really* supposed to be doing, according to their worldview. And that “protection” is defined differently than how liberals would use the term – it’s about doing and being the “correct” things (according to “objective” beliefs which they can’t actually agree on except in broad outline) and protecting others from doing and being the wrong things. For example, protecting their kids from being gay. For that matter, their typical definition of “freedom” is different – the freedom to stamp out “nefarious influences” which could “tempt” people away from the “wrong” path (such as, for example, liberal beliefs).

There’s a religious (or at least religiously-influenced) element to it too; “what they do is on their soul, not yours” doesn’t work as an argument because that’s seen as a form of “depraved indifference” which very much does stain their soul if they could have “done something” to prevent those in their family/tribe from “falling into the darkness”.

Now, conservative beliefs, regardless of what form they take, are very much rife with double standards; but double standards are not themselves hypocrisy, they’re just arbitrary. (That’s a thinking trap a lot of liberals fall into; yes, engaging in double standards would be hypocrisy if someone with a typical liberal worldview did it, but that’s a feature of liberalism, not an inherent property of double standards.) The hypocrisy comes from the fact that they create a bunch of double standards for society as a whole and then sometimes except themselves from those – triple standards, essentially – but that’s barely a blip on the sin-o-meter when it’s in service of “protection” and “freedom” (as they define those things) which are seen as the highest good. This contrasts with the typical liberal view that hypocrisy is *always* a major sin.

None of that should be taken as me respecting conservative views as “equally valid”. Short of borg-style brainjacking everyone into becoming utter slaves to one particular flavor of conservatism, that’s just a recipe for endless suffering and conflict.

@Snowberry: 

It has been my experience that typical conservative worldviews are a fertile ground for hypocrisy, mainly due to the ease of justifying exceptions to their own views in the name of protecting themselves, or their families, or their “tribe” (however they define that), which in the end is what they’re *really* supposed to be doing, according to their worldview. And that “protection” is defined differently than how liberals would use the term – it’s about doing and being the “correct” things (according to “objective” beliefs which they can’t actually agree on except in broad outline) and protecting others from doing and being the wrong things. For example, protecting their kids from being gay. For that matter, their typical definition of “freedom” is different – the freedom to stamp out “nefarious influences” which could “tempt” people away from the “wrong” path (such as, for example, liberal beliefs).

Agreed almost entirely. And since conservatism is an ideology that is about protecting the tribe, as I said, feature not bug.

However, you’ll notice that the definition of freedom they use is somewhat mutable. When it’s convenient for them, when they want to talk about a lack of intrusion into their llives, they will come closer to everyone else’s definition of freedom. The freeze peacher may be a contemptible disingenuous hypocrite, but their purportedunderlying notion of unlimited speech rights is (at least on paper) an exaggeration of a rational, balanced notion of rights taken from liberals. When it comes to Cliven Bundy or Waco, government overreach is bad. When it comes to creationism, governments forcing kids to learn a particular idoelogy different from their parents is bad. Etc. If you examine Tea Party rhetoric, there are some authentic appeals to everyone else’s notion of freedom in there.

Where I suspect we’ll agree is that that’s not their actual operant definition of freedom. That’s the definition of freedom they use to arrive at the conclusion of being able to be oppressive while never being oppressed back. The public-facing definition is the propagandistic one.

There’s a religious (or at least religiously-influenced) element to it too; “what they do is on their soul, not yours” doesn’t work as an argument because that’s seen as a form of “depraved indifference” which very much does stain their soul if they could have “done something” to prevent those in their family/tribe from “falling into the darkness”.

True, except that they will offer that notion for their own group as a defense. They will happily appropriate the idea that we should all leave each other alone and mind our own business. Sean Hannity could attack Obama’s faith but defend Trump’s “faith” and argue that no one should know who was truly faithful in their heart… because Trump was in the in group. What’s actually going on is both that they think that the weak should be policed and the powerful should not, because winners are good (otherwise they wouldn’t be winners), and that they don’t actually think that the problem the liberal identifies is that bad, but don’t want toa dmit it. So Trump may obviously be a Biblically ignorant cheating hedonistic dolt, but he makes us feel good, and that’s what the Bible was actually supposed to do. Obama makes us feel bad, so it doesn’t matter that he’s obviously more faithful than Trump.

Now, conservative beliefs, regardless of what form they take, are very much rife with double standards; but double standards are not themselves hypocrisy, they’re just arbitrary. (That’s a thinking trap a lot of liberals fall into; yes, engaging in double standards would be hypocrisy if someone with a typical liberal worldview did it, but that’s a feature of liberalism, not an inherent property of double standards.)

But the double standards are always paired with doubled behavior and doubled policy demands. Which is hypocrisy.

More importantly, the point is the argument from their hypocrisy. They accept premise A in one argument and not premise A in another. They can’t believe both premise A and not premise A; both cannot be true. But I suspect we agree that the conservative *is* internally consistent. They just don’t believe premise A or not-premise A. They believe premise E, and lie about premise A.

The point isn’t about how bad hypocrisy makes someone. The point is that it’s the very presence of an illogical double standard in the first place, and what that ends up doing. “I can kill you with impunity” is only a possibly rational argument if “I” am morally better than you. But that in and of itself is evil, and irrational. The hypocrisy shows the worldview as being false, evil and dishonest.

And I will again note the hypocrisy here too, the hypocrisy about the hypocrisy. Liberal hypocrisy, or the perception thereof, loudly bothers them. So they do think hypocrisy is a major sin. When liberals do it.

The point is that the actual worldview is “Might makes right”, but even they know that that is an evil thing to believe, so they have to delude themselves into thinking they don’t actually believe it.

@Fred-B-C: are you familiar with this quote?

Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

@Fred B-C:

But the double standards are always paired with doubled behavior and doubled policy demands. Which is hypocrisy.

Unless you’re talking about something very different that I am, no, it really isn’t. One of the fundamental beliefs of (most) liberals is that we should treat all people, and all functionally identical situations, the same unless there’s overriding circumstances, and in that case those overriding circumstances should be treated the same regardless of who’s experiencing them. Basically, if more than one set of standards apply to a situation, then there’s a hierarchy of precedence. (Though in some cases we don’t all agree on how that hierarchy should be structured, which can cause some serious headaches.) Engaging in double standards by someone who takes such a stance would be inherently hypocritical. (Of course conservatives like to turn it back on us, but in the process clearly demonstrate that they don’t understand what liberals consider to be overriding circumstances and why.)

However, conservatives themselves mostly don’t harbor any such belief; it would be perfectly in line with conservatism to declare that brown-haired people are banned from libraries and auditoriums, which imposes separate behavioral demands, and different average outcomes. It’s just completely arbitrary. That being said, it’s also perfectly in line with conservatism in allowing a few specific brown-haired people inside such places despite the ban if it serves a “greater good” despite the inherent hypocrisy in ignoring their own double standards.

But hypocrisy is inherently forgivable in their eyes, particularly if some perceived good comes of it; “lying for Jesus” is a thing, after all. You have to both establish “no, hypocrisy is really bad, actually” and what is actually inherently hypocritical, unless your intent is to preach to the choir. And one more point I didn’t make in the original message: Liberals mostly believe that all privileges should be limited in scope, not inherent, and earned in a fairly reasonable and non-arbitrary manner; this is a single-standard view. Conservatives believe that some privileges *should* be inherent (and for that matter, don’t typically conceive of inherent privileges as privileges) or realistically achievable only by certain segments of the population, and often quite broad in scope in some cases, but not all, to boot. This is the double-standard view. Both are entirely consistent, both are value-judged as “good” by those who hold those respective views. Under the double-standard way of thinking, a little hypocrisy is occasionally necessary, so it’s easily forgivable; under the single-standard way of thinking, even a little hypocrisy often wrecks things, so it’s not. This is *why* you have to clearly establish that “no, hypocrisy is really bad, actually”, and preferably do so in a manner which doesn’t simply take single-standard views for granted as being more moral/ethical – it’s a values judgement that not all of your audience is going to share.