This is a great piece, that really understands modern sexual politics and makes several important points that comprehends power better than any feminist or conservative examination. The below is one of the few pieces that realize that, sexually, young women hold vast power. Many young women know that, too, and so the, “Oh, I was just a little baby, I didn’t know what I was doing, tee-hee” is (mostly) just an effective smokescreen strategy to excuse bad behavior — now, strangely, enabled by over-35 women who absolutely despise the market competition.
Sexually speaking, there’s an order of magnitude more demand for young (18–23) women than men of that age, and so this period of time is unpleasant for most men. It’s so much so that societies have to invent ways to deal with it: prostitution is an old one, and martial culture (giving young men a source of worth) is another. College is yet another technique that tries to handle it, by culturally and geographically isolating 18–22 year olds so young men have a chance. Mostly, though, this problem is managed privately using wealth transfer, especially around social and cultural capital where there’s enough ambiguity to make it socially acceptable. Young men from privilege get set up, by their parents and inherited networks, with precocious career advancement to give them esteem, build their confidence, and make maximize their “eligibility” when they hit the golden score of male sexual attractiveness (25 to 44) and look for marital partners. The rest of the young men can go die, as far as conservative patriarchal societies like our late-stage corporate capitalism are concerned.
I like this because it doesn’t pity or condone the incels, but attempts to understand them. Their situation sucks, and even though they diagnose it incorrectly and have terrible solutions, the unfucked are correct in that they are fucked.
Incels are not the men running the world, of course. They’re not drinking any milkshakes. In fact, they’re triple-threat losers. They’re sexual losers because of their social alienation and self-sabotaging tendencies, perhaps inherited from our puritanical culture’s views of sex as dirty (amplified by an envy of the mature and less inhibited). They’re social losers because toxic masculinity says in no uncertain terms that low-status, unsuccessful men are worth less than garbage and ought to be viewed with suspicion. They’re economic losers because the high-autonomy middle-class jobs (which would be fantastic plum positions by today’s standards) have been replaced by technologically surveilled and menial subordinate work. They exhibit toxic masculinity in their odious attitudes toward women, but they’ve also been crushed by it.
When you realize that people like Amanda Marcotte and incels are two sides of the very same diseased coin, a lot becomes clearer. They both deserve one another.