It's not because they're lonely. It's not because they can't get laid. It's the misogyny, stupid.
The last several days have brought a renewed rise in questions about incels — people who identify as "involuntary celibates" — after Alek Minassian, the suspect in a deadly April van attack in Toronto, was linked to the community. On the day of the attack, he posted on Facebook, "Wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan.... The Incel Rebellion has already begun! ... All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!" That was a reference to the shooter who killed six people in Isla Vista, California in 2014.
In a YouTube video before the carnage, Rodger had stated, "I've been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection, and sex and love to other men but never to me."
Ask any female to talk about an experience she's had with male entitlement, and she'll likely be pressed to name just one. It manifests in that guy who goes from catcalling you to calling you an ugly bitch in the span of three sidewalk steps. It's the repulsive dudes who fancy themselves pick up artists, and believe in creeds like "Diss Fatties Bang Hotties." It's the manager at work who says you should smile more. And on the grand scale, it's the men so enraged that women may not choose to have sex with them that they kill them. So no, Ross Douthat, I don't think your fanciful case for sex robots is the answer here.
Loath as I ever am to invoke Douthat's brand of singular not-getting-itness, his New York Times column this week — followed by a doozy of a tweet-splain thread — merited special eye rolling. In his Wednesday plea for "The Redistribution of Sex," Douthat made a weary proposal for "sex robots" and asked, "If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?" Because it is.
Grotesquely, the inspiration for this dystopian vision was "the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified 'incel' — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved." First of all, I feel like maybe Douthat doesn't fully understand the meaning of fornication in this context. Second, whaaaaaat?
He went on to cite Amia Srinivasan's recent London Review of Books essay that asked, "Does anyone have the right to sex?" and noted her discussion of "groups with whom The London Review’s left-leaning and feminist readers would have more natural sympathy — the overweight and disabled, minority groups treated as unattractive by the majority, trans women unable to find partners and other victims, in her narrative, of a society that still makes us prisoners of patriarchal and also racist-sexist-homophobic rules of sexual desire."
It's really something the way Douthat can barely hold his nose to mention the monstrous "left leaning and feminist" among us, but it's outstanding that he can then go on to leap from "the overweight and disabled" to internet trolls.
You want to have a conversation about sexual agency for marginalized groups, I am there for it. Surrogacy, self-pleasure, community: awesome. We are all entitled to healthy, safe, consensual sexual expression. But (grudgingly hoists megaphone): YEAH, THESE GUYS DON'T WANT THAT.
This isn't rocket science. Men who idolize mass murderers do so because they hate women. They feel they have a right to their bodies. It enrages them when women do not behave in a sexually conciliatory way toward them. It enrages them that other men can obtain what they cannot, because they don't see sex as a mutually pleasurable experience but as a reward they have been deprived of. They see themselves apart from the "Chads and Stacies" and "normies" — their version of the popular kids — and take comfort in posting memes about evil females and their precious man spaces. Oh, no, you've got us all wrong, they argue, I just want a nice girlfriend, and why can't these ungrateful bitches understand that?
Douthat's willful ignorance is telling. He hilariously believes that "The sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration." Because nobody wanted to screw good-looking people before disco and the Pill were invented. He sees the sexual economy in blanket terms, ignoring that the perpetrators of mass violence are generally not, say, women in wheelchairs. He visualizes "commerce and technology . . . harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incels." My dude, these guys don't want to BUY sex. They want to be GIVEN sex. A big part of the incel mindset is a revulsion of women who are sexually independent. As Jennifer Wright noted recently in Harper's Bazaar, "There’s a lot of slut-shaming." No hypothetical robot is going to cure that.
Not content to let one dumpster fire of a column be sufficient word salad for the week, Douthat then followed up his thoughts on Twitter, magnanimously offering to explain his ideas in a manner "less amenable to misinterpretation." According to Douthat, "The 'incel' phenomenon isn't just reducible to its toxic violent misogynistic form; there's a large sexless population (not just young and male but female, older, gay, etc.) caught in a psychic vice btw the culture's obsession w/sex and its absence from their lives."
Pokemon Go was a "phenomenon." This is not that. And remind me the last time an elderly lesbian committed a mass murder because she felt lonely? Just please go take a look at what these guys are actually talking about, in any of their sad little internet hidey-holes. Look at their fury at women. Their distrust of them. Their rage that women don't respond to them in the manner they want.
It's fair to say that a great portion of the adult human population finds itself at one time or another going through what we used to call back in the day "a dry spell." The frustrated longing for companionship, for partnered sexual pleasure, is such a universal desire that it's the plot of roughly half of all movies. But mentally healthy people — whatever their age, size or physical abilities — figure out how to deal with it in appropriate ways.
In much the same way that the story of the Golden State killer suspect quickly became a tale of how a breakup with his fiancée spurred ten years of multiple rapes and murders, the story of men like Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger has already been perverted to one in which gender-based terrorism is indicative of what Douthat tellingly calls "our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility." Hot take: Women, especially when they're setting boundaries around unstable, dangerous people, don't make men turn into mass murderers.
Plenty of rapists and sexual abusers have wives and girlfriends. Violence that is based on animosity toward women is not about desire or loneliness. It's about power and control. Access to a body — human or not — doesn't fix deep rooted pathology. And if it were just one overpaid New York Times blowhard who didn't understand that, maybe it wouldn't matter so much. But this notion that if we just accommodated these fellows, just understood them and were nice to them and gave them what they demand, is part and parcel of a little something we like to call rape culture. And sex workers, porn stars, all the Stacies in the world and even assembly line sexbots are not responsible for or to pathetic, angry men.
An earlier version of this story erroneously reported the number of Rodger's victims. This has been corrected.
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