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But an incel will typically want sex and love not only, and perhaps not even primarily, for their own sake. His rhetoric betrays a desire to have these goods for instrumental reasons: as currency to buy status in masculine hierarchies, relative to the “Chads.”
these men’s sense of entitlement to such affection and admiration is a trait they often share with the far greater proportion of men who commit acts of domestic, dating, and intimate partner violence.
their interest in having sex with “Staceys” is at least partly a means to an end—the end being to beat the “Chads” at their own game.
If an incel does start having sex, or gets into a relationship, who will he turn into? Contra several commentators, my guess is: not a nice guy.
an incel is an abuser waiting to happen.
Elliot Rodger was largely the latter: he never made a serious effort to go on dates,
he preferred not to run the risk of failure, instead stalking them from a distance.
While Beierle evinced his sense of entitlement to women’s bodies by reaching out and subjecting them to unwanted touching, Rodger evinced his by harboring deep resentments to the women who did not reach out to him (metaphorically and literally).
Incels are often virulent racists.
incels who are not white typically subscribe to white supremacist ideology.
There is a strong implication that celibacy has somehow been imposed on the incel, even forced on him, against his will.
Inasmuch as an incel regards himself as entitled to sex with women, and women as therefore obligated to have sex with him, he evinces an indifference to what would go against her will.
an incel clearly does acknowledge the mental lives of women, inasmuch as he wants—indeed, demands—to be desired and admired by them.
Incels are passionately invested in social hierarchies, including one that resembles the great chain of being, with god at the top, nonhuman animals at the bottom, and various ranks of human beings positioned in between them.
When accused of misogynistic behavior, men often respond by invoking their recognition of the humanity of their wives, sisters, mothers, or other female relatives.
Incels are not amoral (though they are, of course, highly immoral); they are deep believers in a specific moral order.
They feel that the world owes them certain favors.
More likely, they are looking for an unjust hierarchy to locate themselves on, thereby vindicating their preexisting feelings of inferiority and aggrieved resentment.
the women incels resent for these supposed sins are often just living their own lives and minding their own business.
when someone is in pain precisely because he has an overblown sense of entitlement to the soothing ministrations of others, which have not been forthcoming, stepping in to assuage his pain becomes an ethically fraught enterprise.
So strong is the continuity between the most extreme acts perpetrated by incels and the most extreme kinds of intimate partner violence that the two are sometimes mistaken for each other.
Of men like Clark, who post photographic evidence online of their crimes against women, law professor and privacy expert Lori Andrews commented, “They really expect viewers to empathize with them, to think they’re entitled to teach her a lesson.”
Even though he doesn’t seem to have been involved in any incel-like forum, or even to have directly imbibed their ideology, Devins’s murder was celebrated by incels on the Internet.
Two to three women are murdered by their current or former intimate partner every day in the United States, on average.
As the domestic violence expert Cindy Southworth put it, his subsequent crimes are “about dominating her world and wanting to be the only person who is important.”
Recall that himpathy, as I construe it, is the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behavior.
Misogyny takes down women, and himpathy protects the agents of that takedown operation, partly by painting them as “good guys.”
When the sympathetic focus is on the perpetrator, she will often be subject to suspicion and aggression for drawing attention to his misdeeds.
Erasure is a form of oppression, the refusal to see.
The loss of Turner’s “happy-go-lucky” and “easy-going” demeanor struck his father as being a travesty, rather than the appropriate outcome of his son’s criminal wrongdoing.
Turner’s father described his son’s crimes as a mere “20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”
After the trial it in fact emerged that Turner had leered at and made inappropriate comments to female members of the Stanford swimming team,
Two young women had also reported Turner to the police for being “touchy” with them, and dancing with them in a “creepy” way, at another Stanford party at the same fraternity—just one week before he assaulted Miller
Pagourtzis had reportedly increased the pressure until Shana stood up to him in class, embarrassing him in front of their classmates; he shot her a week later, along with seven others and two teachers.
Himpathy often radically distorts the framing of men’s violence against women, as well as children in some cases.
rape involves so much more than individual bad apples. It involves bad actors who are enabled, protected, and even fostered by a himpathetic social system.
In many jurisdictions in the United States, rape cases are being routinely disposed of by what is known as “exceptional clearance.”
They found that in almost half of these, police officers had used the designation of exceptional clearance to close the majority of rape cases.24
While extremely high rates of exceptional clearances in rape cases may be news to many people, there is a growing awareness—in liberal circles, at least—of the problem of untested rape kits.
evidence suggests that rapists commit between seven to eleven rapes, on average, before being apprehended.
of the rape kits that had previously gone untested, some 86 percent of the victims were people of color—primarily girls and women.
One explanation that has the virtue of not only parsimony but sheer coherence is that we regard certain men as entitled to take sex from certain women.
The most powerful of powerful men are deemed sexually entitled to “have” virtually anyone, with minimal repercussions.
For girls and women who are marginalized in multiple ways—in being Black, trans, or disabled, among other possibilities—the proportion of men who may rape them with impunity tends to be so large as to render their rape kit not worth testing.
Roxane Gay wrote, in her devastating memoir Hunger, of the teenagers who brutally gang-raped her during her early adolescence. They were “boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.”
something has changed about the perpetrators. The obvious factor is that they have gotten older, making it easier for people to cast them as “dirty old men”—albeit a more powerful variant of the ageist cultural trope, rather than a more pathetic figure.
The typical sexual assailant will commit his first offense during adolescence, according to self-report measures.
Yet when a woman came forward to testify that the English actor Ed Westwick, then age thirty, had raped her three years prior, a common attitude expressed on Twitter was: He’s too young and hot to be a predator.
If a woman faces this displaced aggression because she lives in a historically patriarchal world—in which men have long had, and continue to have, social permission to “act out”—she is still a victim of misogyny, according to my analysis.
In the most egregious instances, women will effectively be punished for being, and claiming to be, the victims of misogyny.