Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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“Hypergamy” and “the hindbrain impetus” descend from the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology, whose conclusions regularly validate the presumptions of capitalism, despite the fact that homo sapiens is hundreds of thousands of years old and capitalism is a 500 year old baby. Within the framework of capitalist realism, it makes sense to imagine that women are simply reproductive machines seeking to maximize their ROI: a gender of mechanical harpies whose primal instincts gear them toward perfect efficiency.
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inceldom is that it relies on the same “sexual marketplace” logic that women have long been forced to accept—that men are hunting for the most beautiful available woman, meaning you won’t land a good one unless you’re thin but not too thin, pale but not too pale, and you better not develop dishpan hands or he’ll leave you. These days, young incels obsess over their jawlines, worrying that if they don’t hit some arbitrary beauty standard, they won’t ever be loved by shallow women on the prowl for the sexiest available man.
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this is not really different from the way women have long been told they need to trick men into loving them. Until about five minutes ago in cultural terms, men were the ones who were considered animalistic and guided by their “hindbrains,” men who only cared about “one thing.” Whether it’s men or women (or both) who are re-imagined as mindless, ROI-seeking animals, the perception comes from the same set of capitalistic assumptions: that sex, like everything else, is a market, and you are in competition, and someone can only love you for your waist, or your jaw, so it had better be maximally optimized—“looksmaxxed,” in incel terms.
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The truest expression of neoliberalism is the belief that the entire sphere of human relations is naturally governed by market forces, the god that interpenetrates all. In this understanding, everything belongs to and can be explained by the market, and competition is zero-sum. This is what incels think is happening along every spectrum; that women are not only withholding sex in favor of a better market option, but also out-competing them in the workplace.
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The distance from the antifeminist ‘red pill’ [conviction that you have discovered some secret underlying unwoke truth about reality] to the racist ‘red pill’ was not so far,” she writes. “Each, in its own way, represented conspiratorial worldviews, in which the rights of women or minorities were a zero-sum game, promoted by sinister actors to deprive men and whites of their due.” The most common expressions of racism are a doubled fear of brown people taking away 1) white women and 2) white men’s jobs. It’s winner-take-all anxiety, the fear that if you (or the collective you, however imagined) can’t compete you will be replaced; in other words, the logic of the market distilled.
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Sex is transactional because much of human life has been made transactional, thanks to capitalism and other oppressive systems before it. But sex—much like friendship, or family relations—does not, by any means, have to be transactional. The existence of sex work might seem to complicate the issue, but it really doesn’t, no more than than the existence of restaurants complicates home-cooked meals. It’s quite probable that the inequities that we see in both uncompensated domestic relationships and compensated sex work do not arise from some kind of “natural” transactional quality innate to human relationships, but from a lack of economic freedom, fairness, and respect.
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Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.” Possession of a girlfriend is understood as a solution and an end; loneliness mixed up in the acquisition of objects, in which women are the highest prize.
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“other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”
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Can we neatly slice apart “alienated because capitalism” from “acts like a jerk”? This is an old debate; as Robinson calls it “the ancient sociological question of ‘structure versus agency.’ Are our outcomes,” he asks, “determined by the social structure in which we find ourselves or by the choices made by us as free individual agents? This question can become extremely contentious, because the “all agency” perspective (anyone can pick themselves up by their bootstraps) seems a cruel lie that blames people for a failure to overcome impossibly unfair barriers, while the “all structure” perspective seems to treat people as pure victims with no agency.”
✏️ Another good source of conflict and debate. The extremes are all agency or all structure, and where does one lay blame/accountability along this spectrum. Are you a helpless victim of capitalism, simply reacting naturally to other people’s bad ideas, or are you a person with agency, who is hurting people on purpose because you enjoy their pain? Are you the only one who is allowed to respond to terrible pressures in unjust ways? 👓 conflict
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just because someone is aware of the cruelty and inequity of capitalism doesn’t mean they’re opposed to it. This is one of the dangers of trying to find common ground with incels, and reactionaries in general: yes, they too have identified the problem, but they have their own answer, which is not the same as ours.
✏️ Like how even white supremacists might think capitalism is bad, but their end goal or solution is still a longing for a past when men were men and lesser people knew their place.
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socialism will not give anybody a girlfriend; it can’t hand women out as a nationalized good, because women are human beings and not a public utility. Socialism can’t make anybody likeable, or kind, or loved; socialism can’t get you laid. It’s not a shortcut. It may make certain things easier, by providing a milieu in which being kind and nurturing is socially rewarded rather than mocked and despised. In fact, it may bring about a sort of sexual revolution for men: in which, rather than having to regard every element of existence as a move in a zero-sum game for domination, it would become acceptable to simply have feelings, enjoy things, and pursue whatever makes you happy. But it will be impossible for socialism to ever free your life of all loneliness, romantic conflict, alienation, and unhappiness. You’ll still have to do all the hard work of being a person.
✏️ Love looking at socialism this way.
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No one’s irredeemable, but they have to be willing to do the work, and people who are concerned about the fate of incels have to stop apologizing for them in advance, or demand for them a sympathy they refuse to extend to others.
✏️ They have to do the work, and they have to realize that they’re not singled out for being trodden upon. The women they prize face this every day.