We Hunted The Mammoth
We live in an age unusually receptive to conspiracy theory — with a veritable army of QAnoners caught up in baroque, sadistic theories of retribution against political and cultural elites; with the vast majority of Republicans believing (or purporting to believe) that, actually, Donald Trump won the election; and with a cohort of Americans convinced that Bill Gates is planning to plant microchips in their bodies with a vaccine shot.
At times it seems like the incel movement is as much about celebrating pedophilia — sorry, ephebophilia — as it is about lamenting celibacy and railing against women. Incels rhapsodize over “jailbait” and “teen love,” and many of them seem to believe that they unless they have sex with a girl in her “prime” — that is, somewhere in the vicinity of 16 years old — their lives are essentially meaningless. Most incels are not themselves in their teens.
The Buddha, legend has it, spent his younger years living in an opulent palace that was also, in a way, a prison — designed to make sure he never saw the reality of suffering in the real world. But in his late twenties he decided he needed to see the world outside the palace walls.
By David Futrelle
Well, here’s a new one, or at least a new variation on an old theme: According to one prolific commenter on Incels dot co, women are responsible for turning men into pedophiles — sorry, ephebophiles — because only underage girls are into weird, incel-looking guys. The proof? The incel making this absurd argument has a 14-year-old female cousin who thinks Adam Driver is hot.
By David Futrelle
Stuart Pivar has a bad case of the blabbies, and we’re all the richer for it. Or possibly the poorer; I haven’t decided yet. Today, Mother Jones posted a long, sprawling, and exceedingly surreal interview with the octogenarian art collector/scientist/former best bud of Jeffrey Epstein, a man who clearly doesn’t know when it would be wiser to just shut his yap.
By David Futrelle
Self-described “involuntary celibates” want the world to pity them as decent men who have been cruelly denied sex by too-picky women who reject them for the tiniest of physical flaws. This is absurd in itself, but it’s made even more absurd by the fact that incels themselves tend to be pickier about women than any mythical Chad-chasing Stacy.
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By David Futrelle
In case you missed this horror when it appeared on Reddit last week, here’s an ingenious “solution” for incels oppressed by having non-porn-star sized penises.
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By David Futrelle
Homophobes and transphobes do so love their slippery slope arguments.
By David Futrelle
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the incel obsession with “Jailbait” stems from their pedophile — sorry, I mean ephebophile — fantasies, or if they’re just looking for an excuse to suggest that all the adult men out there having sex with adult women are secretly as sad and pathetic as incels are.
By David Futrelle
If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you probably know about The Ratio, the closest thing we have to an objective measure of the Extreme Badness of any particular tweet. If someone gets many times as many comments on a tweet than retweets and likes, chances are good that most of those comments are telling them that they’re full of crap. The higher the ratio of responses to retweets/likes, the worse the tweet.
