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Are Republicans shamelessly sexually-humiliating their opponents enough to win this election?
I’ve long held the belief that the opposite of slut-shaming is incel-shaming. A woman's reputation is damaged if she sleeps around, but a man's reputation is damaged if he is deemed a weird incel who can’t get laid. Recently, the Democrats launched a “weird incel" attacking strategy against JD Vance. Tim Walz alluded to a fabricated story about JD Vance fucking a couch in his first speech as VP. This is wholly fabricated: the origin is a twitter user who made up a paragraph from Vance's book, something easily checked. But the meme was astroturfed regardless, and Walz shamelessly referenced it in his first speech. Last night, 5 of the top 10 default posts on Reddit’s /r/All were references to Waltz’s remark.
The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation. There’s talk about Trump being a “bully”, but nothing he has said has come close to the shameless slander against Vance. Calling Hillary “crooked” is par for the course of political messaging and doesn’t actually impact her reputation. Making fun of McCain for being captured as a PoW also doesn’t really affect McCain’s reputation, and if anything harms Trump’s. Trump usually exaggerates something true, but the attack against Vance is wholly false in origin.
I checked in on the incels over at 4chan to see what were saying about this. And I actually found an insightful analysis:
It can also be noted that the attack against Vance has an element of sexual harassment. What would our “cultural elites” (D) say if Republicans went all-in on a story about Kamala Harris violating the intern’s Oval Office laundry machine? Or that she used a priceless piece of White House memorabilia as a dildo without cleaning it off after? This would just be shameless sexual harassment, right? But so is the official DNC strategy against Vance. It’s harassment for the purpose of humiliating someone sexually to change voter perception via shame response.
It's odd to me because it seems like such a bad attack. The idea of a young man fucking anything and everything inanimate is not weird. I've heard many comedians or just "funny guys" on podcasts/standup talk about this all the time and they always get laughs. Hell, American Pie's main character fucked a pie and it was simply a joke and I don't recall any big hubub about Jim's character being too weird because he fucked a pie. Though that was a long time ago, I don't remember American Pie showing up as one of those movies that you "forgot" was bad because it fell outside the overton window now. When I saw that Walz used it as an insult I honestly just felt secondhand embarrassment.
The whole "weird" angle of attack seems really bad in general because it doesn't say what they want it to say. If they want to tar Vance for something made up just say he molested someone. If they want to tar republicans for being gross then call them gross, as an insult for anything against the left-leaning the word is already used that way anyway. Weird just doesn't work in my opinion. Comes out somewhere along the lines of calling an old man lame. Yeah, maybe the old man is lame, so what? The word is not insulting enough. Most people probably identify as weird in some way when they're probably not weird at all but since it's not really a pejorative and was in fact celebratory in most cases before this sudden shift. Hell, most of these people probably worship Weird Al and their favorite Radiohead song is Creep, hey there's another better word than weird.
But I feel like the way that the astroturfing is turned up to 11 right now there's a feedback loop going on where it's nearly impossible to tell if a strategy is working or if everyone's just nodding and agreeing with the strategy because, to me, the crux of it all working is getting the majority of people to say that it's working.
Do you actually believe that? It's such a weird thing to say. Doing that for real absolutely has big incel energy. And the movie's pretty neckbeardy even as a movie.
Believe? I guess. I've heard from many men talking about experiences like this that it seems very normal to do from like 12-16 but not normal to talk about. I suppose it becomes less normal the older you get but I don't know how old Vance is supposed to have been in the fake excerpt. And I suppose it is "incel energy" but I don't think that that is altogether weird. Most men when they're younger are incels. It's really only weird to be an incel if you're like mid 20s and above. I can't really speak to how "neckbeardy" American Pie is but I really think that's a reach, unless we're just calling anything that's lowbrow neckbeardy, now.
(Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what neckbeardy means but to me that codes as autistic and much more concerned with fantasy/sci-fi and in-universe lore being consistent with source material. Though, like incel, neckbeard has never been clear as an insult for anything other than this person believes differently than me and this makes them bad human beings. incel being you are like this but can't have sex and neckbeard basically being you are like this but also ugly and being ugly is a bridge too far. Similar to cuck in that it feels like more of an insult that's trying to make friends with other insulters rather than actually make an accurate insult. Which, I guess, weird falls into now.)
I wonder about your background. Where have you "heard from many men" about having sex with random objects?
(Nah, autistic people aren't neckbeards. Autistic people are precious innocents. Neckbeards are creepy. Vile, dangerous, pathetic, gross, freaks...)
I've heard this from the radio, comedy specials, podcasts, youtube videos, and men posting about it on forums. I used to listen to Loveline every night and it seems to me it's as common or less common than a woman using a vegetable as a makeshift dildo, certainly not beyond the pale.
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To this day, humping my bed remains my preferred masturbation method. But, I already know that I'm an extremely weird individual. Always have been, always will be.
We've ended up in an unusual situation where disaffected libertarians and social conservatives have both been grouped under the same heading of "rightist", simply because that's how the left has chosen to label them, despite the internal divisions between those two camps. It's not a particularly stable coalition. But either way, if the Republican party gets reshaped into the Party of Weird, then I'm more than happy to embrace it.
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Some people on Mongolian basket weaving forums definitely engineer all sorts of, ahem, devices to this end, I've seen literal manuals involving IIRC gloves and water beads? (for better or worse I don't have the exact link on hand) There's a "community" for everything, the old wisdom seems relevant.
Also, this is the second instance of
weirdbreathless, gushing hatred of the outgroup I've seen here in 24 hours (the first one above my comment got deleted?), which reaffirms my belief that the "weird" attacks are indeed landing spectacularly - and not just on the target demographic. The media sure know how to pick 'em, gotta hand it to them.More options
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