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I decided to share my theory (if we can call it that) about the origin of the ‘incel’ slur. I’m not claiming it’s terribly original or anything but I welcome your feedback about it because it’s a pure culture war phenomenon in my view and I wonder if my theory is sound.
To start with the obvious, pretty much every human community that ever existed have had concepts of the feminine and masculine as collections of desirable traits. This entails that men and women who refuse to live up to these ideals are disadvantaged in various ways. One way is social shaming. Again, let’s leave it that here; I’m aware that I could go off on dozens of tangents here and add dozens of qualifiers and interpretations to make my argument nuanced and elaborate, but I want to keep this concise.
One way to shame unmasculine men is to use the slur ‘nerd’ on them. This was the norm for a long time in Anglo-Saxon societies, and it sort of made sense. After all, nerds are interested in things and machines, not humans, who are anything but machines. The traits that make you a nerd, especially a hard-working and employable one, are exactly the traits that are useless, detrimental even, if you want to be a socially savvy, sexually successful cool guy. If you’re too boneheaded to correctly read the carefully calculated, covert signals women send out to you to indicate sexual interest without coming off to their social circle as dirty sluts, you’re not a real man. Especially if you’re also not interested in playing team sports etc.
At some point though, the Third(?) Industrial Revolution happens, and the computerization of science and the economy is in full swing. The men most disposed to become computer scientists and programmers happen to be nerds. Before that, programming used to be seen a lowly, dull desk job, basically not different from being a secretary, and a significant chunk of programmers were single women as a result. But now, society starts believing that learning to code is a secure path to having a high-paying career and the American Dream. It seems that only the sky is the limit in the digital revolution and the booming online sector. Young women come to realize that calling undesirable men ‘nerds’ just comes across as dumb and baseless to most people.
However, none of this means, of course, that unattractive male traits just disappeared, or that society is open to abandoning social shaming as a tool of controlling men. In fact, due to an unfortunate combination of the unintended(?) long-term consequences of feminist messaging and socially harmful, pathological trends like online porn addiction, endocrine disruptors, sedentary lifestyles, social atomization, the disappearance of male rites of passage and male bonding rituals etc., it seems that a growing segment of men are socially illiterate, repulsive and dull skinnyfat manchildren. Women no longer want to dismiss them as nerds, but they definitely want to dismiss them as…something.
At this point, due to online trends, society discovers the ‘incel’ term, and just starts using it as a replacement of ‘nerd’, basically. Later, online journos discover that the term was actually invented by some Canadian female college student 20 years earlier who was a romantic failure and started a long-defunct online message board for other college women in the same situation, who applied the term to themselves, not as a slur, and definitely not as something that conveys anti-feminist views etc., but all this is long forgotten and nobody cares anymore, so it doesn’t matter. Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.
This period is largely a feminist myth. If it existed, it was prior to 1960, when there were vanishingly few programmers at all.
(and before you mention ENIAC, programming that was definitely not a desk job)
It may be the whisper network distorting the idea that computer operators were female.
Operators became majority female in 1975, then almost 70% by 1986, though some of that may have been by separation of job titles rather than an actual change. I'm pretty sure the myth goes back to attempts by feminists to promote the idea, often relying on an article in Cosmopolitan by Grace Hopper which suggested programming was especially suited to women. Hopper, however, was recruiting, not describing an existing situation.
"operators" being more like telephone switchboard operators ?
Some were like that, some were more like typists. According to the 1974-1975 Occupational Outlook Handbook, there were keypunch operators and data typists, both of whom basically did data entry (but not directly to the computer -- to cards or to tape). There were also "console operators", who would switch the tapes and cards in and out. The handbook includes a picture of a console operator -- a woman -- loading a reel-to-reel tape.
The 1974-75 handbook breaks down the gender in a more detailed way than the summary statistics do -- 3/5 "console and auxiliary equipment operators" were men, 9/10 "keypunch operators" were women.
I'm only informed enough to use basic sociology as reference. When the social status of a specific profession appears to be dropping, men start leaving it, and it starts attracting women instead, especially single women. If society starts attaching higher status to it, such as what happened to the IT sector as a whole after, say, 1980 or 1990, it then attracts more men than women.
Still, the 70% figure from 1986 is kind of crazy, but I guess another part of it is that it became more common to hire single women to such positions after reliable contraception became accessible.
This is mere pravda.
The IT sector as a whole in the United States has, as long as such records have been kept, attracted more men than women.
That was 1950. It is more likely the increase in proportion of women was
A general increase in women's employment and
An increase in data-entry "operator" positions (typing, basically, for which women had been predominantly hired for decades) compared to the "console operator" type positions (which we know in 1974 leaned slightly male)
I'm not disputing that.
As far as I know, it's actually Sociology 101. Men are more likely than women to apply to jobs for the purpose of supporting a family or to position themselves as eligible for marriage. This means they're less likely then women to accept positions with bad pay/prospects, no matter what advantages may be on the table. So if people get the impression that the IT sector offers better prospects than they thought, which is basically what happened after the 1980s, it will attract more men than before.
Yes, that makes sense. The devil is in the details.
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