Raising kids these days must be a real minefield with all this toxic culture being so accessible.
Fundamentalist religion is at the top of the toxic culture, and it has been around since before the incel term.
Anyone offering easy answers to complex questions should be suspect. And that does largely incriminate all religious groups around the world. They often espouse seemingly decent and benign ideologies. But unfortunately the mindset that latches on to those things, idealogues; are the danger. Even if the ideology themselves aren't necessarily.
Usually, it's just another term for the same thing, I would say.
How can we help them make more friends? How can we get them involved in real-world activities that will diminish their time spent online?
By locking them into suburban houses with no places to go without being driven by their parents, until they're old enough to drive. 🇺🇸🇨🇦
And then making cars impossibly expensive, teenage boys uninsurable as drivers, wages hilariously low, and reliable transportation a prerequisite for employment.
Those profits aren't going to make themselves!
It was never gonna work out forever. Capitalism is really young and has never really been sustainable.
I used to go to school by bike with friends, nowadays there is car traffic congestion to drop off kids at school
Yeah. Not to mention how much time, effort and money it takes for parents to shuttle kids around to create some semblance of social life. The more difficult it is, the fewer people do it. Growing up in commie blocks, it was impossible to go out the entrance and not bump into some kids playing. You'd go on the balcony and get yelled to come down by some kids outside. We walked alone to school since kindergarten. There were multitudes of small local stores to buy yourself a treat and share it with the other kids. Even the least attentive parents had their kids get socially functional by society. This sort of thing is possible in some places in North America but I think it's the exception rather than the norm.
The middle school I went to in the 90's had bike racks. They were old and corroded, most were kinda shoved to the side. I never once saw a bike locked to them, and I got the feeling that you'd get in trouble if you did.
That school was about 60 years old, and was once the town high school, it was in amongst the residential side of town. They opened a new middle school out on commercial land back behind the Best Buy out on the stroad that's only known by its US route number. They installed no bike racks there.
Sooooo… when are we gonna admit that men’s mental health is unfortunaly heavily tied to their career prospects?
No, not yet?
Okay I’ll keep waiting.
sigh
…
It's capitalism.
Men's well being wouldn't be tied to career prospects if it weren't for the rat race we are all brainwashed into since birth that is capitalism.
You have worth as a human beyond your capacity to produce profit.
Yeah and the reason young men are finding it hard to have real life friends and end up on uncle forums is because we lost most of our “third spaces” thanks to them not making money and shutting down or being underfunded or closed if they were publicly owned.
Ontop of this the constant algorithms that push specific topics to people over and over due to it keeping them on the platform and therefore generates income.
It does feel like 75% of this problem could be fixed by stopping corporate greed and fixing our local communities as whole.
I went to a Humans vs. Zombies Nerf war at a university campus a few weeks ago. A couple hundred people, real strong mix of men, women, and others. A healthy mingling of people who were clearly gun hobby adjacent and a lot of openly queer folk, which I think is really quite encouraging to see. Everyone had a good time, no issues the whole day. Good vibes all around.
At the end of the event, the student organizers tearfully announced that the school administration had decided to ban all blaster events on campus going forward. Fuck us all for trying to have a healthy good time, right?
Well, everybody in the manosphere is a toxic idiot/asshole, no matter what particular brand of stupidity they follow. It does feel very similar to religion, though. Some sects might be more violent, but they all follow some made-up shit.
Seems like a huge part of the problem is equating "self-worth" to "getting laid".
Putting your dick in a woman doesn't make you any more of a man / successful / worth more than anyone else.
Societal expectations need to be rejected. Oh, success is measured by your ability to get married, have a house, and raise your 2.5 children? For a vast majority, NONE OF THAT IS CURRENTLY SUSTAINABLE AND/OR OBTAINABLE. So why bother? Right?
I get it. It ain't right, but I get it.
It's literally the most natural thing in the world to equate reproductive effectiveness to worth. All life is "worth" their reproductive effectiveness. So not having sex is very relevant to our entire existence as a species.
As such, our mental faculties put a heavy punishment in the form of mental pain, i.e. "self-worth attached to getting laid", on this whole thing.
This has very little to do with societal expectations. It's simple biology. Not getting laid is supposed to be one of the worst things for an organism.
You're rationally right with what you say, but it's simply not very relevant. Rationality does not help with our most deeply rooted biological desires. The only thing that helps is getting them fulfilled, i.e. having sex.
Everything you wrote is nonsense. Pointing at a process that often occurs - evolution - and then working backwards to claim that organisms must feel pain when they don't reproduce is completely antilogical. Evolution may be caused by feelings of pain or suffering when otganisms don't reproduce, or it could be something completely different. You are putting the effect before the cause.
Trying to do evolutionary psychoanalysis on something as cognitively complex as a human is practically guaranteed to give you wrong conclusions. What's more, this sort of bullshit is part and parcel of a lot of bioessentialist rhetoric, so if I were you I would definitely consider revaluating a few things.
I'm asexual. Can't relate, I guess.
EDIT: Wait, that's even shittier!! People unable or have difficulty reproducing are worth less to society?? I may be a bit naïve, but I don't believe that's a majority of society believes something like that. That's disgusting.
Yeah sure, but it's also one of the most natural things in the world to bite people
Putting your dick in a woman doesn’t make you any more of a man
Yeah, puting a man's dick in you makes you more of a man.
Assuming a penis weighs about 0.1 kilograms^1, and the average weight of a man is around 90 kilograms[^2], we can assume that you will be roughly 0.11% more man!!!
(BY MASS)The measure may be different if we calculate by a change in volume.
[^2]: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320917 ; https://www.healthline.com/health/mens-health/average-weight-for-men
It's simple math, really.
"It's important to remember that it's not zero-sum. We can care about the well-being of women and girls and also acknowledge that young men are struggling, too. Those don't have to be at odds."
Reading these comments makes understanding why the world is in its current state, extremely easy
Keep preaching and applying that brand of empathy guys, it will surely pay off eventually
The simple fact is no one really cares about the plight of men, and this is obvious when you look at social service funding and especially homeless shelters.
We are in a 'bare branch' crisis, and back when this happened in medieval China, whole gangs of angry unmarriable men would form raider bands and just pillage and rape until they were put down by the military. It happened so often that warring states would purposely stage useless battles with massive losses on both sides to keep down the 'bare branch' population so they didn't get to rioting levels.
Maybe the fact that warfare is no longer culling the most desperate, lonely, and impressionable men has let to such a large population of unfocused, angry, lonely, and fundamentally unlikeable males.
It's mainly because biologically we evolved to have kids and die on a hunt, our evolution pressures just aren't capable of handling a male population without a certain degree of unnatural casualty.
It's pretty easy to give up trying to build a future for yourself when it has been made abundantly clear to you that your future is not part of the grand plan.
Holy fuck I'm glad I'm not growing up now. This whole "incel" thong just makes me so fucking mad.
We have a subset of adolescent males who are harassed amd bullied and depressed and self-destructive, and how does the rest of socirty respond? The best they can manage is to gridgingly say things like:
You can both condemn their ideology and find it abhorrent and also remember that we need to have empathy for these people."
Many people—women especially—might find that a tall order, and Beckett-Herbert understands that reluctance. "I do understand people's hesitancy to empathize with them, because it feels like you're giving credence to their rhetoric," she said. "But at the end of the day, they are human, and a lot of them are really struggling, marginalized people coming from pretty sad backgrounds. When you peruse their online world, it's the most horrifying, angering misogyny right next to some of the saddest mental health, suicidal, low self-esteem stuff you've ever seen. I think humanizing them and having empathy is going to be foundational to any intervention efforts to reintegrate them. But it's something I wrestle with a lot."
How nice. You think maybe you should try to empathize with them and remember that they are human beings, but gee... that's a tall order. You're not sure if you can actually do it.
And then you have the gall to wonder why they exist - how they got to be that way. You should, if you genuinely want to do something about them, be offering them help to deal with their struggles before they even get to that stage. But no - you won't do that. Fuck them - they're boys, so they're on their own.
We can care about the well-being of women and girls and also acknowledge that young men are struggling, too. Those don't have to be at odds."
So that's the best you can do? You "care about" girls and women but can only maybe manage to "acknowleedge" boys and men? And you still don't understand the appeal of the manosphere?
"There is evidence that men who are short or not conventionally attractive are discriminated against in hiring.
So right there - there is evidence that one of the things the incel community complains about is in fact true.
But do you even acknowledge it? Nope.
"But there's also a lot of evidence suggesting that this actually affects women more. Women who are overweight face a greater bias against them in hiring than men do, for example."
You just breeze right past it and dismiss their feelings entirely, because girls and women have it worse.
Seriously, you still don't get how we ended up with a generation of boys who think the world shits on them and girls and women get preferential treatment? Even after you just shat on them and gave girls preferential treatment?
Here's va fucking news flash, since so many people are apparentlybtoo fucking stupid to figure itvout - if you all actually cared about thecstruggles boys are going through and listened to them and took them seriously and tried to help them, they wouldn't have to turn to the manosphere to find someone who gives a shit about them.
It's not complicated, so you have no fucking excuse. Stop belittling boys and treating their problems as if they somehow don't count.
If the best you can manage is to maybe "acknoeledge" boys' problems, even as you "care about" girls', and you can't even mention a problem boys experience without immediately shifting your focus away from them and to girls, then the boys aren't the real problem - you are.
They hate women, want to rape them and remove their rights, so women, utterly predictably, hate them back. It's not complicated. Try telling black people to empathise with the poor little white supremacists more and see how far you get.
Incels aren't new btw. I tried to read 1984 recently and had to stop because the main character is an incel.
I must've missed the part where Winston Smith hated women and wanted to rape them and remove their rights.
Either that or you've blithely and inaccurately assigned a particularly noxious set of behaviors and beliefs purportedly engaged in and held by some members of a group to the group collectively, and thus to each and every member of it individually.
Which is the very definition of bigotry.
We need a new Judo craze in America.
What happens when you do Judo?
You become confident, and typically very humble. You also get fit AF.
What happens to guys who are confident, humble, and fit AF? They are viewed positively by women.
It’s hard work but very fun. You do need decent health insurance though because it’s easy to get injured. The younger you are when you begin, the easier it is.
You can do BJJ instead but that’s way more expensive and not always so humble.
I took kung fu as a teen and I remember my teachers telling me a story about how the grandmaster essentially beat up a homeless person for asking for money.
I think they were trying to communicate how badass the grandmaster was but it just made him seem like a dick.
Oh yeah confidence by physical appearance, the best kind of confidence... Let's hook up him in modern society, maybe we should teach him that there exist plastic surgery too...
Confidence and being humble starts when you accept yourself aa you are and you value that. The hyper fixation of the current state of society of creating gym bros is the opposite.
The only thing about judo is the Zen part, that most of the centers don't teach. Because they are hyper fixated on creating gym bros.
Someone that bases his confidences on what he does is not confidence. Confidence is a self appreciation and it does not depend on what you do.
Society is fucked up if the tip for helping young boy to be confident is to send them all to do martial arts. And I'm especially talking about western martial arts that deviate so much from the original meaning that they have in China or Japan.
Incel is just a pejorative that makes them get even more blackpilled. Use "emotionally unstable" or even "constitutionally weak", because if they knew the real issue, they'd be more predisposed to actually fixing themselves so that they can also get laid.
Also, legalize sex work. Just get them laid. Watch the alt right and fascism crash harder than a drunk driver speeding at night.
Aren't these guys misusing blackpilled? I thought it was specifically for suicide not just going NEET? Which like we should talk about but not through this corporate productivity-washed drivel.
If you also didn't know
"Not in Education, Employment or Training", its an acronym for people that don't go to school, don't work and are mot looking for work.
"De-radicalization is a noble, worthy line of research," she said. "But the existing evidence from that field of study suggests that prevention is easier and more effective than trying to pull these people out once they're already in." Potential strategies might include fostering better digital and media literacy, i.e., teaching kids to be cognizant of the content they're consuming online. Exposure time is another key issue.
The education system world-wide is quite bad. Yes, it's better than nothing, but still, its not good. Media and online literacy are part of the smallest subset of curriculums. As a whole, the education system fails at preparing most people for life. It's even bad at preparing people for a vocation, its seemingly intended goal.
With better education, traditional mindsets would be much less common. I mention this because in my opinion the major cause of being an involuntary celibate and considering that status a problem, is traditionalism. That attaches self-worth to achievements in life and tightly couples success with partnership and parenthood.
Better education creates more free thinkers and independent individuals who are not easily controlled or swayed by popular narrative. They are not immune to it, nobody is, but giving humans a toolset for critical reasoning can go a long way.
What a terrible article. NEETS and lie flat movement has almost no overlap with incels.
Ostensibly the whole world has been online for enough time now. Yet everyone continues to demonstrate a remarkable lack of ability to grasp internet cultures.
It makes no sense. Like trying to explain technology to my elderly grandma. Except she knows she's very old and out of touch. What's everyone elses excuse. It's made even worse because everyone else thinks they are digitial culture savvy.
i wish i would go back to those days where i never heard of incels
That's just ignoring the problem though. We agree there's a huge society level problem here right?
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