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I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t see any reason that sentence would be true.
The rise in dating apps exist because people like dating and technology tends to facilitate things we like doing.
I didn’t say it was easy or clear. I said it wasn’t any less easy or clear that social rules in general, which also contain ambiguity, the possibility of mistakes that will cause embarrassment or hurt feelings, and the necessity of reading non-verbal cues.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t see any reason that sentence would be true.
The rise in dating apps exist because people like dating and technology tends to facilitate things we like doing.
This is not the reason people give for why they use them.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t see any reason that sentence would be true.
The rise in dating apps exist because people like dating and technology tends to facilitate things we like doing.
This is not the reason people give for why they use them.
People give a lot of reasons for using them. The main reason that isn’t also applicable to in-person dating is that there is a brief emotional validation that comes from matching with someone.
I’m still not seeing the connection between the complication of dating relative to the complication of other social interactions. The rise of Amazon doesn’t prove that the social environment of navigating a retail store is more complicated than other social environments.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
Social rules in general are fairly straightforward and easy to fake one's way through, even for the socially awkward, as long as they remain passive.
Don't ever raise your voice. Always try to make eye contact. Avoid encroaching on other people's personal space. Be polite. Let other people guide conversations; when someone asks what you did last weekend you say "I read a few books, played some video games" rather than launching into a long and excited story about how you raided Mythic Whatever on your Warrior and then providing a detailed synopsis of the SFF book that you just read. You ask other people how their weekend was, and you make appropriate noises of interest or sympathy as they recount what they did. Ask only for what is obviously reasonable, and if told 'no' just stop there.
It's easy to follow social rules as long as you remain passive, reacting in a polite and pleasant manner to the world. And you have to stop there, not taking an active role. Because you'll fuck up anything else, because you lack the ability to read people.
For a man to ask a woman out, at some point he needs to be active. He can't just react to the world, he needs to actually demonstrate interest and ask the woman out. It's a different set of rules, one in which a person needs to actually be able to read a lot of different cues. A woman can generally remain passive, since the social rules of the western world say that the man is the one who is expected to do the asking. Basically, our North American social rules tend to actively punish women who take the active role; they either get labeled as unfeminine or sluts or both or worse. As a result, men pursue women. And the easy to follow "just stay passive" social rules that even most socially awkward people can follow suddenly do not apply at all.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
+11
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I would say the biggest risk is the emotional investment. It's not just being active, it's the loss of control of a social situation. Look at the previous posts about how women wanted to be approached, but then when they thought through the implications, realized they didn't want that. They desired the interaction, but at the realization of the loss of control, balked. (Often, the reluctance is well founded)
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
Social rules in general are fairly straightforward and easy to fake one's way through, even for the socially awkward, as long as they remain passive.
Don't ever raise your voice. Always try to make eye contact. Avoid encroaching on other people's personal space. Be polite. Let other people guide conversations; when someone asks what you did last weekend you say "I read a few books, played some video games" rather than launching into a long and excited story about how you raided Mythic Whatever on your Warrior and then providing a detailed synopsis of the SFF book that you just read. You ask other people how their weekend was, and you make appropriate noises of interest or sympathy as they recount what they did. Ask only for what is obviously reasonable, and if told 'no' just stop there.
It's easy to follow social rules as long as you remain passive, reacting in a polite and pleasant manner to the world. And you have to stop there, not taking an active role. Because you'll fuck up anything else, because you lack the ability to read people.
For a man to ask a woman out, at some point he needs to be active. He can't just react to the world, he needs to actually demonstrate interest and ask the woman out. It's a different set of rules, one in which a person needs to actually be able to read a lot of different cues. A woman can generally remain passive, since the social rules of the western world say that the man is the one who is expected to do the asking. Basically, our North American social rules tend to actively punish women who take the active role; they either get labeled as unfeminine or sluts or both or worse. As a result, men pursue women. And the easy to follow "just stay passive" social rules that even most socially awkward people can follow suddenly do not apply at all.
Good post.
What you are describing is that people’s coping mechanisms for social anxiety don’t necessarily work with dating, and that’s true. I wouldn’t describe that general passivity as a healthy approach to social interactions in general.
It should also be noted that women’s passive role in initiating dating is paired with social conditioning against saying no to social requests, which is its own special nightmare cocktail.
Being bland, boring and noncommittal is actually not what “socially skilled” people do. A person with good social skills will be able to describe their video gaming hobby in detail without boring people.
Bad conversation:
“What did you do this weekend?”
“Read a little I guess. Played some games.”
“OK.”
Good conversation:
“What did you do this weekend?”
“I met up with my old college gang to do some raiding in classic WOW, it’s getting harder to get together especially since so many people have kids now.”
“I know the feeling, I feel like my old friends don’t have time for me now either.”
“Then I read a sci-fi book about a society where emotions are against the law. It really made me think about how modern society is starting to become more hostile to anyone who expresses passion or creativity that goes outside the norm.”
“I think I read that book in college. Listen, I’ve got a book club meeting this Saturday. Want to come along?”
Being bland, boring and noncommittal is actually not what “socially skilled” people do. A person with good social skills will be able to describe their video gaming hobby in detail without boring people.
I don't disagree in the slightest.
I'm not saying that the person with the bad conversation has good social skills. I'm saying that they stay generally within typical social rules and generally don't creep out everyone around them.
As I said, they fake their way through.
Shadowhope on
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Very interesting to see that there’s a shift from it being more polite to ask people out in person to it being more polite to ask people out over dating sites. That sounds highly alienating.
Our culture needs to have a clearer definition of the difference between harassment and asking out.
Only ask people out:
1) if you have a social connection to them that warrants that level of familiarity
2) they are in a social space that invites that sort of contact and haven’t already given you signals to not do it
Neither of these are actually very clear.
I really feel one of the problems I dealt with and kind of still do is how do you ask someone out? As there is a lot of self doubt that goes into this thought and conversation.
There are no real guides or helpful things I was shown when I was growing up about how do you do this?
These days there's a lot of just trying to "accidentally" your way into things to get around this.
That is how I did it just trying on purpose on the other hand caused a lot more problems than I would have liked or known.
A lot of the advice on dating that I was given by my father and step-mother when I asked them were things that people here would say NOT to do.
For example, when I told my step-mother that the woman I had went on a date with and had been texting me a lot ghosted me her advice was to go where she worked and ask her what was going on (I didn't do that).
My dad would often tell me "just do what comes naturally". Nothing ever came naturally to me, though, and I'd wager a lot of the things women say men do that they don't appreciate are things that come naturally to them.
I've been thinking for a long time about how to put it, how I feel about "just do what comes naturally."
The best I can come up with is to imagine that you're color-blind. You go to a place, where there a number of events happening. At the front desk, they tell you to go into any event that takes place behind a green door, but to avoid opening any red doors. The consequences for trying to open a red door could be nothing and get laughed off, or they could be pretty bad for everyone. And you try to explain "I'm really sorry, I'm color-blind. I can't actually tell if any given door is green or red." And the person at the front desk is trying to be helpful, but they keep repeating "The doors are bright green and bright red. It's all very straightforward, just look at the door before you try to go in."
It's not surprising that a disproportionate number of incels identify themselves as autistic or otherwise mentally ill.
While there is scant research on the incel community, a recent survey of about 300 active participants on incels.me offers some insight into their users. They are young ― over 66 percent said they are under 25, like Peterson ― and almost two-thirds said they don’t have any real friends. Over half said they have considered plastic surgery. Most said they have mental health issues like depression or neurological differences like autism.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I'm not saying that the person with the bad conversation has good social skills. I'm saying that they stay generally within typical social rules and generally don't creep out everyone around them.
Ironically, people who are very bland and non-committal about everything come across as creepy. Because you can't get a handle on them.
People are not only full of their own emotions, traumas, fears, misunderstandings, and so on, but all of those heaped upon them by history and the people around them.
Moreover, relationships come with huge risks, especially if they are extremely important to you, or you don't have a lot of people and resources.
Even if someone starts off fine, if they deal with enough hostility like the incel/pua/etc. set, religious groups touting shame, or just any number of other bad experiences, they're likely to pick up some defensive behaviors.
I'm not saying that the person with the bad conversation has good social skills. I'm saying that they stay generally within typical social rules and generally don't creep out everyone around them.
Ironically, people who are very bland and non-committal about everything come across as creepy. Because you can't get a handle on them.
Exactly the hell that some people live in.
No matter what you do, it's wrong.
And getting back to my color-blindness analogy, you end up walking past all of the doors, wondering if they're red or green, and you hear people going "What the fuck is wrong with that guy? They're just doors. Does he not understand how doors work? Man, stay away from him, he's creepy."
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Right now, one of the main problems is that the incel community understand they're being shamed, but they assume they're being shamed based on the stigma of being virgins or the stigma of their appearance (which they're convinced they have no control over), rather than for their extremely toxic attitudes (which they do have control over). It's impossible to help them with their problems if they refuse to correctly identify what the problem really is.
False dichotomy. Just because they're shamed over their misogyny doesn't mean they aren't also being shamed over their appearance or virginity.
Blackpill is classic labeling theory. Label people with a deviant role and some of them will say "fuck it, I guess this is my life now." In this case, the deviant role can be summed up by the word "creep," at least in the way that MRAs use it: a sexually undesirable man whose very attempts to talk to women are met with disgust.
That rationalwiki article lays out the usual counterargument against the MRA & incel definition of "creep:"
What some call "creep shaming" is actually pointing out a variety of inappropriate behaviors, including, but not limited to: persistent and/or disrespectful sexual propositioning (including cold-propositioning),[2] assuming that women are seeking their attention, failing to read obvious body language that expresses a lack of interest on the part of the targeted woman, and failing to take "no" for an answer.
'if you don't want to feel like a creep, don't do creepy things.'
As the excellent Atlantic article linked upthread observed, there isn't really clear mainstream agreement on what sorts of courting behaviors are acceptable, and the list of behaviors deemed unacceptable by some significant portion of the population is increasing:
Simon wasn’t particularly eager to get into another serious relationship right away, but he wanted to have sex. “My first instinct was go to bars,” he said. But each time he went to one, he struck out. He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.
...
Simon said meeting someone offline seemed like less and less of an option. His parents had met in a chorus a few years after college, but he couldn’t see himself pulling off something similar. “I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality. “No one approaches anyone in public anymore,” said a teacher in Northern Virginia. “The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with,” said a 28-year-old woman in Los Angeles who volunteered that she had been single for three years.
This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment. (Among older groups, much smaller percentages believe this.)
PUA and blackpillers are both predicted by labeling theory, they just react in opposite ways. PUA says "asking women out is creepy, but keep doing it anyway because eventually it'll work" while blackpillers are saying "asking women out is creepy, so might as well die alone."
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I don't believe it has ever been acceptable to hit on women in bars. Unless it's a single's night. I've been going to bars for more than 20 years, and my impression is that everyone is there *with* someone. Exception: if you are in a group and hit it off with someone then that's a good time to ask them out. But don't just stroll over to a girl minding her own business and proposition her.
However the girl on the volleyball team? That would be a socially acceptable time to ask someone out. It's only creepy if he asks a lot of times or gets weird and angry if she says "no."
As for the 28-year-old-woman who is waiting forlornly for Mr Right to ask her out, my advice is that she should ask guys out. Unless they are positively antediluvian in their attitudes, they love this, because most men hate always having to be the chaser.
Sometimes men get confused about the way women like to do relationships. "Want to go to the coffee shop tonight to see a folk band?" is OK and "Wanna fuck tonight?" isn't. They see someone get called "creepy" for doing the latter, and assume that all approach is verboten.
For guys that genuinely ARE only after "one thing" definitely keep it to the dating sites where you can both be upfront about this, because it is never going to be acceptable to just randomly proposition women.
Being bland, boring and noncommittal is actually not what “socially skilled” people do. A person with good social skills will be able to describe their video gaming hobby in detail without boring people.
Bad conversation:
“What did you do this weekend?”
“Read a little I guess. Played some games.”
“OK.”
Good conversation:
“What did you do this weekend?”
“I met up with my old college gang to do some raiding in classic WOW, it’s getting harder to get together especially since so many people have kids now.”
“I know the feeling, I feel like my old friends don’t have time for me now either.”
“Then I read a sci-fi book about a society where emotions are against the law. It really made me think about how modern society is starting to become more hostile to anyone who expresses passion or creativity that goes outside the norm.”
“I think I read that book in college. Listen, I’ve got a book club meeting this Saturday. Want to come along?”
Here's the same scenario, played out in the mind of somebody with untreated social anxiety made worse by their participation in an unhealthy online subculture:
Countering this sometimes requires going really deep in the details of social skills coaching. For example, in your scenario, the hypothetical WoW fan spoke for two sentences and then gave the other person a chance to respond. Something as simple as knowing how long to talk - giving neither too much nor too little detail - isn't automatic for a lot of people. It has to be learned.
Some people learn it through experience. But one of the recurring themes about incels is that they're frequently social shut-ins. And as many other folks have observed here, incel communities promote a cult-like suspicion towards any social contact that might deconstruct the axioms of the group (including therapists).
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t see any reason that sentence would be true.
The rise in dating apps exist because people like dating and technology tends to facilitate things we like doing.
This is not the reason people give for why they use them.
People give a lot of reasons for using them. The main reason that isn’t also applicable to in-person dating is that there is a brief emotional validation that comes from matching with someone.
I’m still not seeing the connection between the complication of dating relative to the complication of other social interactions. The rise of Amazon doesn’t prove that the social environment of navigating a retail store is more complicated than other social environments.
Your link isn't even asking the right question is the problem. It's actually hard to find surveys that do.
The article linked above talks about it some;
So why do people continue to use dating apps? Why not boycott them all? Simon said meeting someone offline seemed like less and less of an option. His parents had met in a chorus a few years after college, but he couldn’t see himself pulling off something similar. “I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality. “No one approaches anyone in public anymore,” said a teacher in Northern Virginia. “The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with,” said a 28-year-old woman in Los Angeles who volunteered that she had been single for three years.
And yet online dating continues to attract users, in part because many people consider apps less stressful than the alternatives. Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up (We’ve each opted in; I’m at least a little bit interested in you). The first time my husband and I met up outside work, neither of us was sure whether it was a date. When you find someone via an app, there’s less uncertainty.
As a 27-year-old woman in Philadelphia put it: “I have insecurities that make fun bar flirtation very stressful. I don’t like the Is he into me? moment. I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn’t work out, fine, but there’s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.” Other people said they liked the fact that on an app, their first exchanges with a prospective date could play out via text rather than in a face-to-face or phone conversation, which had more potential to be awkward.
Anna, who graduated from college three years ago, told me that in school, she struggled to “read” people. Dating apps have been a helpful crutch. “There’s just no ambiguity,” she explained. “This person is interested in me to some extent.” The problem is that the more Anna uses apps, the less she can imagine getting along without them. “I never really learned how to meet people in real life,” she said. She then proceeded to tell me about a guy she knew slightly from college, whom she’d recently bumped into a few times. She found him attractive and wanted to register her interest, but wasn’t sure how to do that outside the context of a college party. Then she remembered that she’d seen his profile on Tinder. “Maybe next time I sign in,” she said, musing aloud, “I’ll just swipe right so I don’t have to do this awkward thing and get rejected.”
Dating sites are unambiguous and constitute what is essentially a safe space where you can express interest in someone openly and it's totally socially acceptable.
To swing this back around to the topic, there's a reason a group of people who basically wallow in their inability to make social connections with the other side also like to describe themselves as things like "autistic" (ie - terms used by people for problems about one's inability to easily casually communicate with others) It's a way to make the problems they have be something they have no control over and isn't their fault. But the way in which they express that is through a lens of "I have trouble interacting with others to begin a romantic relationship".
shryke on
+3
JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
I don't think all social rules are equally complicated. I think it varies by how involved you are.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t see any reason that sentence would be true.
The rise in dating apps exist because people like dating and technology tends to facilitate things we like doing.
This is not the reason people give for why they use them.
People give a lot of reasons for using them. The main reason that isn’t also applicable to in-person dating is that there is a brief emotional validation that comes from matching with someone.
I’m still not seeing the connection between the complication of dating relative to the complication of other social interactions. The rise of Amazon doesn’t prove that the social environment of navigating a retail store is more complicated than other social environments.
Your link isn't even asking the right question is the problem. It's actually hard to find surveys that do.
The article linked above talks about it some;
So why do people continue to use dating apps? Why not boycott them all? Simon said meeting someone offline seemed like less and less of an option. His parents had met in a chorus a few years after college, but he couldn’t see himself pulling off something similar. “I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality. “No one approaches anyone in public anymore,” said a teacher in Northern Virginia. “The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with,” said a 28-year-old woman in Los Angeles who volunteered that she had been single for three years.
And yet online dating continues to attract users, in part because many people consider apps less stressful than the alternatives. Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up (We’ve each opted in; I’m at least a little bit interested in you). The first time my husband and I met up outside work, neither of us was sure whether it was a date. When you find someone via an app, there’s less uncertainty.
As a 27-year-old woman in Philadelphia put it: “I have insecurities that make fun bar flirtation very stressful. I don’t like the Is he into me? moment. I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn’t work out, fine, but there’s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.” Other people said they liked the fact that on an app, their first exchanges with a prospective date could play out via text rather than in a face-to-face or phone conversation, which had more potential to be awkward.
Anna, who graduated from college three years ago, told me that in school, she struggled to “read” people. Dating apps have been a helpful crutch. “There’s just no ambiguity,” she explained. “This person is interested in me to some extent.” The problem is that the more Anna uses apps, the less she can imagine getting along without them. “I never really learned how to meet people in real life,” she said. She then proceeded to tell me about a guy she knew slightly from college, whom she’d recently bumped into a few times. She found him attractive and wanted to register her interest, but wasn’t sure how to do that outside the context of a college party. Then she remembered that she’d seen his profile on Tinder. “Maybe next time I sign in,” she said, musing aloud, “I’ll just swipe right so I don’t have to do this awkward thing and get rejected.”
Dating sites are unambiguous and constitute what is essentially a safe space where you can express interest in someone openly and it's totally socially acceptable.
To swing this back around to the topic, there's a reason a group of people who basically wallow in their inability to make social connections with the other side also like to describe themselves as things like "autistic" (ie - terms used by people for problems about one's inability to easily casually communicate with others)
Ok, it’s entiely possible this is my fault, but I’m just not following the connections here
1) dating sites, which are quite popular, make a potentially uncomfortable social interaction essier and safer
2) the generation growing up now struggles with matching traditional social norms to their present situation, which is probably why 1 is true
Thing is, though, often the guys bemoaning that women aren't interested in them because they like WoW and ewwww nerd etc. But they are the same people who make women who would like WoW not want to get involved, or those who are involved feel marginalised, excluded and harassed (because they are).
I see it all the time in wargaming. "We want more women to play but we don't want to regulate our behaviour to acceptable levels, we don't want women to be represented in the games..." Basically these people think the problem is with women, with their appearance and status obsessed girl minds, they aren't interested in this cool cerebral fantasy they only like beefy guys who treat them mean!
Incels feel very much like an extension of the "Nice Guy" to me, entitlement plus unwillingness to make personal changes and improvements plus a very, very low opinion of what women are interested in = I'm involuntarily celebate because I was not born with the assets that women arbitrarily like and that's not my fault, obviously, it's a combination of genetic fate and the failings of the capricious female gender.
Thing is, though, often the guys bemoaning that women aren't interested in them because they like WoW and ewwww nerd etc. But they are the same people who make women who would like WoW not want to get involved, or those who are involved feel marginalised, excluded and harassed (because they are).
I see it all the time in wargaming. "We want more women to play but we don't want to regulate our behaviour to acceptable levels, we don't want women to be represented in the games..." Basically these people think the problem is with women, with their appearance and status obsessed girl minds, they aren't interested in this cool cerebral fantasy they only like beefy guys who treat them mean!
Incels feel very much like an extension of the "Nice Guy" to me, entitlement plus unwillingness to make personal changes and improvements plus a very, very low opinion of what women are interested in = I'm involuntarily celebate because I was not born with the assets that women arbitrarily like and that's not my fault, obviously, it's a combination of genetic fate and the failings of the capricious female gender.
It is also not a coincidence that every woman in that picture is young, thin and traditionally attractive. When misogynist groups like incel stalk about “women,” there is often a tacit implication that those are the only women that exist.
Thing is, though, often the guys bemoaning that women aren't interested in them because they like WoW and ewwww nerd etc. But they are the same people who make women who would like WoW not want to get involved, or those who are involved feel marginalised, excluded and harassed (because they are).
I see it all the time in wargaming. "We want more women to play but we don't want to regulate our behaviour to acceptable levels, we don't want women to be represented in the games..." Basically these people think the problem is with women, with their appearance and status obsessed girl minds, they aren't interested in this cool cerebral fantasy they only like beefy guys who treat them mean!
Incels feel very much like an extension of the "Nice Guy" to me, entitlement plus unwillingness to make personal changes and improvements plus a very, very low opinion of what women are interested in = I'm involuntarily celebate because I was not born with the assets that women arbitrarily like and that's not my fault, obviously, it's a combination of genetic fate and the failings of the capricious female gender.
It is also not a coincidence that every woman in that picture is young, thin and traditionally attractive. When misogynist groups like incel stalk about “women,” there is often a tacit implication that those are the only women that exist.
If we diagnose the problem as us living in an increasingly isolated society difficulty in dating isnt the only place we see it.
Further to this point there's reason to think that rates of depression and chronic anxiety have increased even after we assume some degree of better diagnosis and reporting. It seems likely to me that we've simply built a society thats profoundly shitty to be a part of.
Thing is, though, often the guys bemoaning that women aren't interested in them because they like WoW and ewwww nerd etc. But they are the same people who make women who would like WoW not want to get involved, or those who are involved feel marginalised, excluded and harassed (because they are).
I see it all the time in wargaming. "We want more women to play but we don't want to regulate our behaviour to acceptable levels, we don't want women to be represented in the games..." Basically these people think the problem is with women, with their appearance and status obsessed girl minds, they aren't interested in this cool cerebral fantasy they only like beefy guys who treat them mean!
Incels feel very much like an extension of the "Nice Guy" to me, entitlement plus unwillingness to make personal changes and improvements plus a very, very low opinion of what women are interested in = I'm involuntarily celebate because I was not born with the assets that women arbitrarily like and that's not my fault, obviously, it's a combination of genetic fate and the failings of the capricious female gender.
Blackpillers are beyond making personal improvements, but that's not true of all incels. The incel terms "looksmax" and "gymcel" and websites like Looksmax and Lookism refer to incels trying to improve their personal appearance.
That said, if you take the Venn diagram of "bodybuilding Internet communities," "cosmetic industry," and "incels" that intersection is a cesspool of pseudoscientific bullshit. At best, some of them become gym rats and the physical exercise does them good. Too often they spend money on unproven and unnecessary cosmeceuticals and shame each other over, as the oft-quoted meme goes, "a few millimeters of bone."
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
If we diagnose the problem as us living in an increasingly isolated society difficulty in dating isnt the only place we see it.
Further to this point there's reason to think that rates of depression and chronic anxiety have increased even after we assume some degree of better diagnosis and reporting. It seems likely to me that we've simply built a society thats profoundly shitty to be a part of.
I rather suspect there's a negative feedback loop going on here. Focusing on the possibility that those negative feelings are part of a greater, unbeatable pattern increases anxiety and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nocebo effect and all.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t see any reason that sentence would be true.
The rise in dating apps exist because people like dating and technology tends to facilitate things we like doing.
This is not the reason people give for why they use them.
People give a lot of reasons for using them. The main reason that isn’t also applicable to in-person dating is that there is a brief emotional validation that comes from matching with someone.
I’m still not seeing the connection between the complication of dating relative to the complication of other social interactions. The rise of Amazon doesn’t prove that the social environment of navigating a retail store is more complicated than other social environments.
Your link isn't even asking the right question is the problem. It's actually hard to find surveys that do.
The article linked above talks about it some;
So why do people continue to use dating apps? Why not boycott them all? Simon said meeting someone offline seemed like less and less of an option. His parents had met in a chorus a few years after college, but he couldn’t see himself pulling off something similar. “I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality. “No one approaches anyone in public anymore,” said a teacher in Northern Virginia. “The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with,” said a 28-year-old woman in Los Angeles who volunteered that she had been single for three years.
And yet online dating continues to attract users, in part because many people consider apps less stressful than the alternatives. Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up (We’ve each opted in; I’m at least a little bit interested in you). The first time my husband and I met up outside work, neither of us was sure whether it was a date. When you find someone via an app, there’s less uncertainty.
As a 27-year-old woman in Philadelphia put it: “I have insecurities that make fun bar flirtation very stressful. I don’t like the Is he into me? moment. I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn’t work out, fine, but there’s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.” Other people said they liked the fact that on an app, their first exchanges with a prospective date could play out via text rather than in a face-to-face or phone conversation, which had more potential to be awkward.
Anna, who graduated from college three years ago, told me that in school, she struggled to “read” people. Dating apps have been a helpful crutch. “There’s just no ambiguity,” she explained. “This person is interested in me to some extent.” The problem is that the more Anna uses apps, the less she can imagine getting along without them. “I never really learned how to meet people in real life,” she said. She then proceeded to tell me about a guy she knew slightly from college, whom she’d recently bumped into a few times. She found him attractive and wanted to register her interest, but wasn’t sure how to do that outside the context of a college party. Then she remembered that she’d seen his profile on Tinder. “Maybe next time I sign in,” she said, musing aloud, “I’ll just swipe right so I don’t have to do this awkward thing and get rejected.”
Dating sites are unambiguous and constitute what is essentially a safe space where you can express interest in someone openly and it's totally socially acceptable.
To swing this back around to the topic, there's a reason a group of people who basically wallow in their inability to make social connections with the other side also like to describe themselves as things like "autistic" (ie - terms used by people for problems about one's inability to easily casually communicate with others)
Ok, it’s entiely possible this is my fault, but I’m just not following the connections here
1) dating sites, whi.l/'l/[]ch are quite popular, make a potentially uncomfortable social interaction essier and safer
2) the generation growing up now struggles with matching traditional social norms to their present situation, which is probably why 1 is true
Therefore
3). Incels call themselves autistic
"Autistic" as a label is something people use for themselves on the internet as a way of saying "I have bad outcomes in social situations and I don't like it but it's not my fault." ie - "I go up to talk to people and they think I'm weird or creepy. But it's not my fault, it's nothing I have to change about myself. I'm on the spectrum and so my social awkwardness is innate and people have to accommodate me".
We were talking about how the ambiguity in the rules of social interaction lead to people being anxious about the situation, which helps fuel young men who turning to things like the incel movement to deal with the results of that. And what we would expect if that social awkwardness and ambiguity was the issue for many of these people is that, being young internet-savvy men, they would label themselves something like "autistic" because that's how that word is used among people who talk to each other on the internet a lot.
Thing is, though, often the guys bemoaning that women aren't interested in them because they like WoW and ewwww nerd etc. But they are the same people who make women who would like WoW not want to get involved, or those who are involved feel marginalised, excluded and harassed (because they are).
I see it all the time in wargaming. "We want more women to play but we don't want to regulate our behaviour to acceptable levels, we don't want women to be represented in the games..." Basically these people think the problem is with women, with their appearance and status obsessed girl minds, they aren't interested in this cool cerebral fantasy they only like beefy guys who treat them mean!
Incels feel very much like an extension of the "Nice Guy" to me, entitlement plus unwillingness to make personal changes and improvements plus a very, very low opinion of what women are interested in = I'm involuntarily celebate because I was not born with the assets that women arbitrarily like and that's not my fault, obviously, it's a combination of genetic fate and the failings of the capricious female gender.
It is also not a coincidence that every woman in that picture is young, thin and traditionally attractive. When misogynist groups like incel stalk about “women,” there is often a tacit implication that those are the only women that exist.
We regularly acknowledge that media images of thin, white, young warp womens' perceptions of their own bodies.
I think it's a natural corollary to assume they warp mens' perceptions of what a normal woman looks like.
We base our expectations of personal appearance from our experiences - exposure to human faces and bodies conditions us to build up a mental model of what the typical person looks like. Media images pull that conditioning to be a whiter, thinner, and younger than the real-world average.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
+11
VariableMouth CongressStroke Me Lady FameRegistered Userregular
Incels have the toxic idea that a man is judged by the beauty of his woman. So a plump, awkward woman would never make a fitting mate, because she wouldn’t instantly impress other men. Ultimately they are all about impressing other men. This is one reason why they admire Donald Trump so much. Donald Trump has married three jaw-dropping women. This makes him superior in their minds.
I don’t think the rules of dating are all that more complicated than any other social rules. Which I completely understand are also difficult for some people.
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t see any reason that sentence would be true.
The rise in dating apps exist because people like dating and technology tends to facilitate things we like doing.
This is not the reason people give for why they use them.
People give a lot of reasons for using them. The main reason that isn’t also applicable to in-person dating is that there is a brief emotional validation that comes from matching with someone.
I’m still not seeing the connection between the complication of dating relative to the complication of other social interactions. The rise of Amazon doesn’t prove that the social environment of navigating a retail store is more complicated than other social environments.
Your link isn't even asking the right question is the problem. It's actually hard to find surveys that do.
The article linked above talks about it some;
So why do people continue to use dating apps? Why not boycott them all? Simon said meeting someone offline seemed like less and less of an option. His parents had met in a chorus a few years after college, but he couldn’t see himself pulling off something similar. “I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality. “No one approaches anyone in public anymore,” said a teacher in Northern Virginia. “The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with,” said a 28-year-old woman in Los Angeles who volunteered that she had been single for three years.
And yet online dating continues to attract users, in part because many people consider apps less stressful than the alternatives. Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up (We’ve each opted in; I’m at least a little bit interested in you). The first time my husband and I met up outside work, neither of us was sure whether it was a date. When you find someone via an app, there’s less uncertainty.
As a 27-year-old woman in Philadelphia put it: “I have insecurities that make fun bar flirtation very stressful. I don’t like the Is he into me? moment. I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn’t work out, fine, but there’s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.” Other people said they liked the fact that on an app, their first exchanges with a prospective date could play out via text rather than in a face-to-face or phone conversation, which had more potential to be awkward.
Anna, who graduated from college three years ago, told me that in school, she struggled to “read” people. Dating apps have been a helpful crutch. “There’s just no ambiguity,” she explained. “This person is interested in me to some extent.” The problem is that the more Anna uses apps, the less she can imagine getting along without them. “I never really learned how to meet people in real life,” she said. She then proceeded to tell me about a guy she knew slightly from college, whom she’d recently bumped into a few times. She found him attractive and wanted to register her interest, but wasn’t sure how to do that outside the context of a college party. Then she remembered that she’d seen his profile on Tinder. “Maybe next time I sign in,” she said, musing aloud, “I’ll just swipe right so I don’t have to do this awkward thing and get rejected.”
Dating sites are unambiguous and constitute what is essentially a safe space where you can express interest in someone openly and it's totally socially acceptable.
To swing this back around to the topic, there's a reason a group of people who basically wallow in their inability to make social connections with the other side also like to describe themselves as things like "autistic" (ie - terms used by people for problems about one's inability to easily casually communicate with others)
Ok, it’s entiely possible this is my fault, but I’m just not following the connections here
1) dating sites, whi.l/'l/[]ch are quite popular, make a potentially uncomfortable social interaction essier and safer
2) the generation growing up now struggles with matching traditional social norms to their present situation, which is probably why 1 is true
Therefore
3). Incels call themselves autistic
"Autistic" as a label is something people use for themselves on the internet as a way of saying "I have bad outcomes in social situations and I don't like it but it's not my fault." ie - "I go up to talk to people and they think I'm weird or creepy. But it's not my fault, it's nothing I have to change about myself. I'm on the spectrum and so my social awkwardness is innate and people have to accommodate me".
We were talking about how the ambiguity in the rules of social interaction lead to people being anxious about the situation, which helps fuel young men who turning to things like the incel movement to deal with the results of that. And what we would expect if that social awkwardness and ambiguity was the issue for many of these people is that, being young internet-savvy men, they would label themselves something like "autistic" because that's how that word is used among people who talk to each other on the internet a lot.
I think there is an aspect to this phenomena of worthlessness that these young men feel which plays into diagnoses of ADD, ADHD and autism. I guess I'll just be clear on this and expose myself to criticism since there's not really a way to describe it otherwise.
The 'median' young boy is not the same as the 'median' young girl. Perhaps this is entirely from socialization and reinforcement when the child is a baby, perhaps not, but it doesn't really matter. The children we have to deal with are not the same. Boys are more active, less focused and more energetic. They develop motor skills and strength faster, and emotional control MUCH slower. They require more time spent on active play and in environments where noise, motion, and so on are tolerable. Combine this with massive cutbacks to recess, active times and sports at schools over the last 20 years, add in the huge lack of male teachers to serve as role models for boys, and add another dash of increased focus on testing at a young age and you end up with a situation where modern elementary schools are often just places where boys go to be diagnosed with ADHD and Autism. Girls are underdiagnosed with both conditions, since they tend to present differently, but boys are over diagnosed (boys are diagnosed 4 times as frequently as girls for ADD and related, 5 times as frequently as girls for autism spectrum conditions).
So we create (or have) all these young men who have been diagnosed with these conditions, and then we as society are AWFUL at understanding what that means and treat/portray them as broken. They also struggle to thrive in school, and this can enforce this 'genetic destiny of failure' story that the men tell themselves. Boys can also believe they have these conditions, even when they actually do not, if they struggle in school. Which again can create this perception of a genetic destiny.
To close off this path of recruitment into dangerous communities like incels, we need to invest more in our schools again, and bring back smaller class sizes, and increased recess which will allow more flexible learning options for more students and we need to do a better job of understanding that a diagnosis of ADHD or Autism is like a 'diagnosis' of being clumsy, or loving running. Its a real thing, but its not a fundamentally bad thing over which we need to exclude and isolate people. It's just a thing which is part of who they are.
While some Incels will certainly lie about being on the Autism spectrum, I think that it should be considered a real possibility that people with poor social skills and a restricted set of interests and behaviors might really actually generally be telling the truth about their condition. There are hundreds of thousands of people in America on the Autism spectrum. Not everyone gets therapy, and not everyone who gets therapy gets effective therapy, and not everyone who gets effective therapy gets sufficient effective therapy to fulfill all needs.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
+16
BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
While there are undoubtedly some incels on the far end of the spectrum, and obviously if we're just going with a less toxic 'lonely hearts' definition a lot of people with Asperger's will have trouble in their love life, most of the stuff I've seen on the various reddits suggests incels have enough social conception to come up with mental models for other people in ways that Asperger's groups just don't. The more autistic you are, the more you find the world incomprehensible rather than coming up with ways to assign blame to women specifically because of how sexual selection in mammals works.
Incels have the toxic idea that a man is judged by the beauty of his woman. So a plump, awkward woman would never make a fitting mate, because she wouldn’t instantly impress other men. Ultimately they are all about impressing other men. This is one reason why they admire Donald Trump so much. Donald Trump has married three jaw-dropping women. This makes him superior in their minds.
Its a very strange philosophy if you think about it for 5 seconds.
Effectively it says that the ONLY thing of value for men OR women is sex. That men will always be willing to have sex with any woman who wants to have sex with them, and women will always try to have sex with any higher ranked man. Nothing else matters. Relationships ARE sex, that is the only thing of value there.
It seems to me that the outcome of believing that would be one of two things.
1) If it is legal, just turn to prostitution and tell all the men who aren't doing so that they are idiots, because you are getting all the value of relationships for only the fiscal cost
2) Just be willing to have sex with any woman who would like to have sex with you, regardless of how she looks, because sex is the only thing of value
Like, I would expect the outcome of TRULY believing the incel base philosophy if prostitution was illegal would be awkward young men having sex with retirees. All the old men are dead, and if this is a pure market situation where sex is the only currency, then there are a lot of horny 75 year old women out there.
"Got diagnosed with autism/ADHD by a female teacher not wanting to deal with unruly boys and was just given a bunch of pills that fucked me up and that's it" is an story that I saw a lot on that corner of the Internet, FWIW.
Posts
We should really start a thread on it.
The growth in dating apps suggest this is wrong and it's not actually that easy or clear.
I don’t see any reason that sentence would be true.
The rise in dating apps exist because people like dating and technology tends to facilitate things we like doing.
I didn’t say it was easy or clear. I said it wasn’t any less easy or clear that social rules in general, which also contain ambiguity, the possibility of mistakes that will cause embarrassment or hurt feelings, and the necessity of reading non-verbal cues.
This is not the reason people give for why they use them.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-digitally/201610/the-surprising-truth-about-why-people-use-tinder
People give a lot of reasons for using them. The main reason that isn’t also applicable to in-person dating is that there is a brief emotional validation that comes from matching with someone.
I’m still not seeing the connection between the complication of dating relative to the complication of other social interactions. The rise of Amazon doesn’t prove that the social environment of navigating a retail store is more complicated than other social environments.
Social rules in general are fairly straightforward and easy to fake one's way through, even for the socially awkward, as long as they remain passive.
Don't ever raise your voice. Always try to make eye contact. Avoid encroaching on other people's personal space. Be polite. Let other people guide conversations; when someone asks what you did last weekend you say "I read a few books, played some video games" rather than launching into a long and excited story about how you raided Mythic Whatever on your Warrior and then providing a detailed synopsis of the SFF book that you just read. You ask other people how their weekend was, and you make appropriate noises of interest or sympathy as they recount what they did. Ask only for what is obviously reasonable, and if told 'no' just stop there.
It's easy to follow social rules as long as you remain passive, reacting in a polite and pleasant manner to the world. And you have to stop there, not taking an active role. Because you'll fuck up anything else, because you lack the ability to read people.
For a man to ask a woman out, at some point he needs to be active. He can't just react to the world, he needs to actually demonstrate interest and ask the woman out. It's a different set of rules, one in which a person needs to actually be able to read a lot of different cues. A woman can generally remain passive, since the social rules of the western world say that the man is the one who is expected to do the asking. Basically, our North American social rules tend to actively punish women who take the active role; they either get labeled as unfeminine or sluts or both or worse. As a result, men pursue women. And the easy to follow "just stay passive" social rules that even most socially awkward people can follow suddenly do not apply at all.
Good post.
What you are describing is that people’s coping mechanisms for social anxiety don’t necessarily work with dating, and that’s true. I wouldn’t describe that general passivity as a healthy approach to social interactions in general.
It should also be noted that women’s passive role in initiating dating is paired with social conditioning against saying no to social requests, which is its own special nightmare cocktail.
Bad conversation:
“What did you do this weekend?”
“Read a little I guess. Played some games.”
“OK.”
Good conversation:
“What did you do this weekend?”
“I met up with my old college gang to do some raiding in classic WOW, it’s getting harder to get together especially since so many people have kids now.”
“I know the feeling, I feel like my old friends don’t have time for me now either.”
“Then I read a sci-fi book about a society where emotions are against the law. It really made me think about how modern society is starting to become more hostile to anyone who expresses passion or creativity that goes outside the norm.”
“I think I read that book in college. Listen, I’ve got a book club meeting this Saturday. Want to come along?”
I don't disagree in the slightest.
I'm not saying that the person with the bad conversation has good social skills. I'm saying that they stay generally within typical social rules and generally don't creep out everyone around them.
As I said, they fake their way through.
It's not surprising that a disproportionate number of incels identify themselves as autistic or otherwise mentally ill.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/unmaking-of-an-incel_us_5b11a9aee4b0d5e89e1fb519
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Ironically, people who are very bland and non-committal about everything come across as creepy. Because you can't get a handle on them.
Moreover, relationships come with huge risks, especially if they are extremely important to you, or you don't have a lot of people and resources.
Even if someone starts off fine, if they deal with enough hostility like the incel/pua/etc. set, religious groups touting shame, or just any number of other bad experiences, they're likely to pick up some defensive behaviors.
No matter what you do, it's wrong.
And getting back to my color-blindness analogy, you end up walking past all of the doors, wondering if they're red or green, and you hear people going "What the fuck is wrong with that guy? They're just doors. Does he not understand how doors work? Man, stay away from him, he's creepy."
False dichotomy. Just because they're shamed over their misogyny doesn't mean they aren't also being shamed over their appearance or virginity.
Blackpill is classic labeling theory. Label people with a deviant role and some of them will say "fuck it, I guess this is my life now." In this case, the deviant role can be summed up by the word "creep," at least in the way that MRAs use it: a sexually undesirable man whose very attempts to talk to women are met with disgust.
That rationalwiki article lays out the usual counterargument against the MRA & incel definition of "creep:"
'if you don't want to feel like a creep, don't do creepy things.'
As the excellent Atlantic article linked upthread observed, there isn't really clear mainstream agreement on what sorts of courting behaviors are acceptable, and the list of behaviors deemed unacceptable by some significant portion of the population is increasing:
PUA and blackpillers are both predicted by labeling theory, they just react in opposite ways. PUA says "asking women out is creepy, but keep doing it anyway because eventually it'll work" while blackpillers are saying "asking women out is creepy, so might as well die alone."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
However the girl on the volleyball team? That would be a socially acceptable time to ask someone out. It's only creepy if he asks a lot of times or gets weird and angry if she says "no."
As for the 28-year-old-woman who is waiting forlornly for Mr Right to ask her out, my advice is that she should ask guys out. Unless they are positively antediluvian in their attitudes, they love this, because most men hate always having to be the chaser.
Sometimes men get confused about the way women like to do relationships. "Want to go to the coffee shop tonight to see a folk band?" is OK and "Wanna fuck tonight?" isn't. They see someone get called "creepy" for doing the latter, and assume that all approach is verboten.
For guys that genuinely ARE only after "one thing" definitely keep it to the dating sites where you can both be upfront about this, because it is never going to be acceptable to just randomly proposition women.
I suspect "let's all give our anecdotal experience of how to date" is not going to be particularly helpful anyway
Here's the same scenario, played out in the mind of somebody with untreated social anxiety made worse by their participation in an unhealthy online subculture:
Countering this sometimes requires going really deep in the details of social skills coaching. For example, in your scenario, the hypothetical WoW fan spoke for two sentences and then gave the other person a chance to respond. Something as simple as knowing how long to talk - giving neither too much nor too little detail - isn't automatic for a lot of people. It has to be learned.
Some people learn it through experience. But one of the recurring themes about incels is that they're frequently social shut-ins. And as many other folks have observed here, incel communities promote a cult-like suspicion towards any social contact that might deconstruct the axioms of the group (including therapists).
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Your link isn't even asking the right question is the problem. It's actually hard to find surveys that do.
The article linked above talks about it some;
Dating sites are unambiguous and constitute what is essentially a safe space where you can express interest in someone openly and it's totally socially acceptable.
To swing this back around to the topic, there's a reason a group of people who basically wallow in their inability to make social connections with the other side also like to describe themselves as things like "autistic" (ie - terms used by people for problems about one's inability to easily casually communicate with others) It's a way to make the problems they have be something they have no control over and isn't their fault. But the way in which they express that is through a lens of "I have trouble interacting with others to begin a romantic relationship".
I don't think all social rules are equally complicated. I think it varies by how involved you are.
Ok, it’s entiely possible this is my fault, but I’m just not following the connections here
1) dating sites, which are quite popular, make a potentially uncomfortable social interaction essier and safer
2) the generation growing up now struggles with matching traditional social norms to their present situation, which is probably why 1 is true
Therefore
3). Incels call themselves autistic
Thing is, though, often the guys bemoaning that women aren't interested in them because they like WoW and ewwww nerd etc. But they are the same people who make women who would like WoW not want to get involved, or those who are involved feel marginalised, excluded and harassed (because they are).
I see it all the time in wargaming. "We want more women to play but we don't want to regulate our behaviour to acceptable levels, we don't want women to be represented in the games..." Basically these people think the problem is with women, with their appearance and status obsessed girl minds, they aren't interested in this cool cerebral fantasy they only like beefy guys who treat them mean!
Incels feel very much like an extension of the "Nice Guy" to me, entitlement plus unwillingness to make personal changes and improvements plus a very, very low opinion of what women are interested in = I'm involuntarily celebate because I was not born with the assets that women arbitrarily like and that's not my fault, obviously, it's a combination of genetic fate and the failings of the capricious female gender.
It is also not a coincidence that every woman in that picture is young, thin and traditionally attractive. When misogynist groups like incel stalk about “women,” there is often a tacit implication that those are the only women that exist.
And Lord help you if you fall out the paradigm.
Further to this point there's reason to think that rates of depression and chronic anxiety have increased even after we assume some degree of better diagnosis and reporting. It seems likely to me that we've simply built a society thats profoundly shitty to be a part of.
Blackpillers are beyond making personal improvements, but that's not true of all incels. The incel terms "looksmax" and "gymcel" and websites like Looksmax and Lookism refer to incels trying to improve their personal appearance.
That said, if you take the Venn diagram of "bodybuilding Internet communities," "cosmetic industry," and "incels" that intersection is a cesspool of pseudoscientific bullshit. At best, some of them become gym rats and the physical exercise does them good. Too often they spend money on unproven and unnecessary cosmeceuticals and shame each other over, as the oft-quoted meme goes, "a few millimeters of bone."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-latest-manosphere-subculture-is-the-gymcel
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
"Autistic" as a label is something people use for themselves on the internet as a way of saying "I have bad outcomes in social situations and I don't like it but it's not my fault." ie - "I go up to talk to people and they think I'm weird or creepy. But it's not my fault, it's nothing I have to change about myself. I'm on the spectrum and so my social awkwardness is innate and people have to accommodate me".
We were talking about how the ambiguity in the rules of social interaction lead to people being anxious about the situation, which helps fuel young men who turning to things like the incel movement to deal with the results of that. And what we would expect if that social awkwardness and ambiguity was the issue for many of these people is that, being young internet-savvy men, they would label themselves something like "autistic" because that's how that word is used among people who talk to each other on the internet a lot.
We regularly acknowledge that media images of thin, white, young warp womens' perceptions of their own bodies.
I think it's a natural corollary to assume they warp mens' perceptions of what a normal woman looks like.
We base our expectations of personal appearance from our experiences - exposure to human faces and bodies conditions us to build up a mental model of what the typical person looks like. Media images pull that conditioning to be a whiter, thinner, and younger than the real-world average.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think there is an aspect to this phenomena of worthlessness that these young men feel which plays into diagnoses of ADD, ADHD and autism. I guess I'll just be clear on this and expose myself to criticism since there's not really a way to describe it otherwise.
The 'median' young boy is not the same as the 'median' young girl. Perhaps this is entirely from socialization and reinforcement when the child is a baby, perhaps not, but it doesn't really matter. The children we have to deal with are not the same. Boys are more active, less focused and more energetic. They develop motor skills and strength faster, and emotional control MUCH slower. They require more time spent on active play and in environments where noise, motion, and so on are tolerable. Combine this with massive cutbacks to recess, active times and sports at schools over the last 20 years, add in the huge lack of male teachers to serve as role models for boys, and add another dash of increased focus on testing at a young age and you end up with a situation where modern elementary schools are often just places where boys go to be diagnosed with ADHD and Autism. Girls are underdiagnosed with both conditions, since they tend to present differently, but boys are over diagnosed (boys are diagnosed 4 times as frequently as girls for ADD and related, 5 times as frequently as girls for autism spectrum conditions).
So we create (or have) all these young men who have been diagnosed with these conditions, and then we as society are AWFUL at understanding what that means and treat/portray them as broken. They also struggle to thrive in school, and this can enforce this 'genetic destiny of failure' story that the men tell themselves. Boys can also believe they have these conditions, even when they actually do not, if they struggle in school. Which again can create this perception of a genetic destiny.
To close off this path of recruitment into dangerous communities like incels, we need to invest more in our schools again, and bring back smaller class sizes, and increased recess which will allow more flexible learning options for more students and we need to do a better job of understanding that a diagnosis of ADHD or Autism is like a 'diagnosis' of being clumsy, or loving running. Its a real thing, but its not a fundamentally bad thing over which we need to exclude and isolate people. It's just a thing which is part of who they are.
While some Incels will certainly lie about being on the Autism spectrum, I think that it should be considered a real possibility that people with poor social skills and a restricted set of interests and behaviors might really actually generally be telling the truth about their condition. There are hundreds of thousands of people in America on the Autism spectrum. Not everyone gets therapy, and not everyone who gets therapy gets effective therapy, and not everyone who gets effective therapy gets sufficient effective therapy to fulfill all needs.
Its a very strange philosophy if you think about it for 5 seconds.
Effectively it says that the ONLY thing of value for men OR women is sex. That men will always be willing to have sex with any woman who wants to have sex with them, and women will always try to have sex with any higher ranked man. Nothing else matters. Relationships ARE sex, that is the only thing of value there.
It seems to me that the outcome of believing that would be one of two things.
1) If it is legal, just turn to prostitution and tell all the men who aren't doing so that they are idiots, because you are getting all the value of relationships for only the fiscal cost
2) Just be willing to have sex with any woman who would like to have sex with you, regardless of how she looks, because sex is the only thing of value
Like, I would expect the outcome of TRULY believing the incel base philosophy if prostitution was illegal would be awkward young men having sex with retirees. All the old men are dead, and if this is a pure market situation where sex is the only currency, then there are a lot of horny 75 year old women out there.