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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.
It is instictive. Women naturally fear men who have low quality genes. Rapists are often portrayed in media as rich men but in reality rape is a measure of last resort. Rape is the worst tactic for reproduction if a man has a choice. Women don't just find unappealing men not interesting, they find them revolting. Most guys don't really feel anything towards an unfortunate looking women. Life isn't meant to be fair, logically consistent or objective. We don't have a supremely rational and detached mind. We often rely on gut reactions based on what is evolutionarily advantageous. Throughout history women who avoided bottom tier men did better than those who befriended them.
This whole "incels/nice guys are actually rapists" thing gets trotted out every time this debate comes up, and I'm still not buying it.
So I clicked on the link and took a look. I don't disagree with the findings of that study, but I think there's definitely some nuance warranted here.
If we define 'sexual predation/assault' according to 21st Century feminist terminology, then the cited research is definitely correct. After all, I think it's self evident that it's usually not low-status men who make - and, presumably, get away with - 'inapproriate' sexual advances, do sexual acts without specifically asking for consent etc.
However, if we use the word 'rape' in the original / based / non-normie sense of the word, i.e. rape-rape (h/t to Whoopi Goldberg), a brutal and violent act, then I think we're safe to say that low-status men are more likely to perpetrate it.
Even with this disambiguation, I'm still not buying it. The phrase "low-status men" is kind of ambiguous, so I want to focus on the specific question of "who presents a greater risk of violent rape to a woman - an 'incel' or a sexually active man?" because the debate started with the claim that women think incels are evil specifically because they think they're rapists (or because they think they're more likely to be rapists than non-incels).
The Intersection of Men’s Sexual Violence Perpetration and Sexual Risk Behavior: A Literature Review:
The review is really long but I think I've made my point.
"Women think incels are evil because they think incels are more likely to be rapists" may be a factually true assertion, but several people in this thread seem to think that this belief is well-founded. It isn't. The more sexual partners a man has, the more likely he is to engage in risky sex, the more likely is to have concurrent sexual partners, the more women he's fucked on the first date, the more prostitutes he's had sex with - the greater the risk he is of committing sexual harassment and violence. Based on this evidence, women have far less to fear from the average incel than they do from a guy who has plenty of notches on his bedpost.
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