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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.
I would substitute "fail" rather than "refuse". No man chooses to be 5'6".
Shame their parents weren't willing to indulge in a little HGH before their bones ossified.
It worked wonders for Messi.
I always have a mild hangup about dating girls who are significantly shorter than me (and of course, most are, unless you're Nordic, 6' might not be quite as remarkable in the West as it is in India, but it still falls into tall). If I'm serious enough to want kids with them, as I was with my ex, I am scared shitless at the possibility of my son(s) coming out short. I know being tall has been incredible for me, I have my charms regardless, but even average men are often hard countered by women setting 6' in their bio, or even implicitly in person or social settings (though women are certainly not the best at gauging it, hence so many guys who are 5'10" getting away with, they just recognize "tall"). And I've read research to the effect that taller men are trusted and respected more, and even paid better (!), just look at the heights of successful politicians versus the average male in their locale, or the average height of CEOs.
Now, if I had a daughter, that would hardly be a concern, but if it's a boy and he's not looking like he'll turn out at least as tall as I am, well, if I can't prescribe the HGH myself, I know someone who knows someone and so on. I guess the genes for height were there all along in our family, looking at me and my brother, though my dad probably spent at least half his adolescence malnourished. But knowing firsthand how much that matters, no way am I going to let my sons turn out short. I'd rather lop my legs off at the heels and give it to them as platforms.
I have bad news for you. If you are the tallest in your family, your kids are most likely going to regress to the mean.
Unless your parents and their siblings and cousins, etc, were all that terribly malnourished, it's most likely you're an outlier.
My brother is a mere half inch shorter than me, a source of merciless mockery from my end. Well, it's good natured, it's not like he's suffering, being actually hot, to the extent that he has most of the girls in his med school after him, and all the gay guys, including a professor.
Very luckily for him, he's borderline asexual so doesn't give a shit about women. I wish I was so lucky, so I cherish every advantage I get. If there was a pill that shut off my libido without other side effects, I'd take it regularly and PRN.
Once can be a coincidence, twice is
enemyfriendly action. If you count my very large extended family, I'm not the tallest, but that's more evidence the genes are percolating in their somewhere. Nutrition certainly made everyone taller over the ages, but it is not remotely enough to account for 6 extra inches alone, not when the genes aren't helping. After all, I did once have a CT brain and they didn't find a pituitary adenoma, though that would have made me both tall and milkable.Besides, even if it's a fluke, the solution remains the same. Yay, more HGH, what can it not do?
This is actually what is at the root of the dispute between men and women. That men only like women because "all I am to you is a hole for you to stick your dick in". Without that desire, men don't care about women and don't want to interact with them. Of course women are going to resent being treated as a sex doll. We want men to like us for ourselves, to be interested in us as a unique person, not an interchangeable set of tits'n'ass.
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. If men only like women because SEX and nature prodding us all to reproduce the species, while women want LOVE besides/outside of sex again because of nature and forming groups to support and raise the new offspring, then we're all screwed because the traditional guard rails around sex/love = marriage and kids are being torn down and melted for scrap and we're getting nothing in return except unhappiness.
If we were all ape troupes back on the savannah, with one dominant male monopolising the females and the less dominant males sneaking around for sex, it might work out: males get sex or fight each other for access to females, females get offspring and support from other females in the troupe and genes from the winners of the male struggles. But we grew big brains on top of our instincts and we want seventeen contradictory things at once.
I do believe women can be interesting as people to men. It's just that, without sexual attraction in play, they have to compete with the other men on that front.
Maybe women find it naturally harder because they aren't interested in the same things as men to connect with them platonically as well as their male friends. Maybe most women never learn to be interesting due to having sexual attraction on their side. When I match with a woman on a dating app and see an empty bio or something that barely provides any hooks for a conversation, I am certainly overcome with an intense wave of apathy, no matter how hot she is.
I don't think that women and men should necessarily have the same interests; I don't see why men shouldn't have their own little clubs and women theirs, but I also see why that was lobbied against because there were advantages to being 'all boys together' networking. I think "your spouse should be your best friend as well" and the whole laundry list of requirements makes marriage tougher, because no one person can be all-in-all to another.
But if men and women can't be friends and have mutual interests outside of sexual attraction, I think that's bad for society as well; if both sexes are only looking at the other sex in terms of "do I find them fuckable?", then they don't see that person as a person, merely as a list of requirements to be ticked off and if failed, then not even considered. Yeah, I'm influenced here by Catholic teachingson human dignity and the idea of a person as a whole person, not a convenience and lifestyle add-on.
A lot of it is that now we are so used to choice, and a range of options, and maximally making our lives more convenient and to our own requirements, all over the entire range of experience, that we're shoving relationships into the same "I want to order off the menu and add in the secret sauce and can I get the special offer deluxe?" mindset of choice, choice, choice or else it's all wrong and someone is to blame.
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