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A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.
I have seen men get accused of being immoral for complaining about and criticizing women online, but I do not think that I ever have seen a man get accused of being immoral just for not doing well with women.
What makes you think that economically successful but sexually unsuccessful men are being routinely suspected of lacking in moral virtue?
You're missing a key piece of the puzzle, which is that people who complain about and criticize women online are called incels. This includes well-adjusted, married conservative men on twitter. "Incel" does not really mean something about being alone, it really does mean immoral anti-feminist.
Sure, but OP is implying that men are routinely getting called immoral just for being economically successful while at the same time socially unsuccessful.
I'm not saying that it's good that guys get called immoral just for criticizing women online, I'm saying that I'm not sure OP is actually right that what he claims tends to happen actually happens often.
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https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
Admittedly our culture has moved on from this specific discourse, but in 2013-4 the "Nice Guy™" debate was all the rage. The essence of the debate was intelligent, gainfully employed but nerdy men complaining about being unsuccessful with women, sometimes for the claimed reason that they are "too nice" or "women don't go for nice guys". In some cases the claim was a bit hard to take seriously ("fuck u u dumb whore ur ugly anyway") but in other cases the lonely men in question gave every indication of being kind-hearted individuals who treated men and women alike with unshakeable respect and decency.
The stock retort from feminists in this era was "of course women go for nice guys. If they went for assholes they'd be all over you", an argument which still occasionally gets trotted out as recently as this year on this very site. Note what this framing implies: that if a man is romantically unsuccessful with women and has the temerity to feel even a little bit upset or frustrated by this, he must be a bad person i.e. exactly what the OP is talking about. This was a key tenet of internet/nerd feminism for years.
The one caveat I add to this discourse is that "nice guys" were being "nice" in specifically the way society had taught them to be. Respect women's boundaries, don't talk over them, don't yell at them, open doors for them, treat them as 'equals,' and never, ever, ever hit them.
That is, they did each and every one of the behaviors that they were explicitly and implicitly told would eventually get them romantic interest from women in their vicinity, even if the guy wasn't particularly handsome, physically fit, wealthy, etc. And for huge swaths of them, this didn't pan out, and they literally watched as guys who transgressed against the behavioral norms were 'rewarded' with attention from sexually attractive women.
So basically, their entire strategy was failing and they could either invest in it further and try harder, or try and figure out why it wasn't working.
In this view, for many of the 'nice guy' men the anger was caused by the complete mismatch between the expectations they'd been sold and their actual experience and was merely being directed at women since... where else would it go?
It wasn't the case that men were putting on these nice-guy masks solely to pick up women. They were earnestly adopting the persona and living it out, only to learn this had given them a distinct handicap in the sexual marketplace. Which was quite the betrayal.
If you haven't already read this short story, I think you will love it: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/
I feel that in my soul, even if my situation wasn't so extreme.
Only missing piece was mentioning how he'd been raised mainly by his mother and his dad was either absent or extremely passive in the relationship.
The running theme always seems to be the lack of a positive model of masculinity and assertiveness to learn from so they become an anxious, uncertain doormat and revert to passive behaviors (which he may have learned from dad!) that are unlikely to succeed, but won't get them scorned or attacked.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. I would also strongly recommend Tulathimutte's first novel, Private Citizens (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Private-Citizens-Tony-Tulathimutte/dp/0062399101). It's consistently laugh-out-loud funny, piercingly perceptive and compulsively readable (I read the whole thing in 2 days).
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Hmm. Around that time I simply concluded that what the disability theorists called desexualization didn't just apply to visibly disabled or deformed people but also to very low-status or unattractive ones as well, and that the RtR crap was just one more kind of desexualization: how dare you even want sex or relationships: know your place. Now. This applies to unattractive women just as well, it just manifests differently.
RtR?
Radicalizing the Romanceless
Oh durr, thanks
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