Besides sympathy, there is the issue of society becoming destabilized. Anything that leads to a significant number of unmarried males will cause huge social problems. This includes things that, for various reasons, we might otherwise want.
So there is a cost to polygamy, a cost to preferentially aborting female babies, a cost to women not needing men for survival, a cost to not sending men off to die in war, and so on. The result is a greater potential for violence and general mischief.
We tend to think of sex as low-priority compared to things like air and water and food. If we ignore the time scale though, and instead focus on what these things mean in an evolutionary sense, it is clear that they are equal. We need air... so that ultimately we can pass on our DNA. With a long-term perspective, it is clear that sex is on an equal footing with things like air and water and food.
When a good chunk of the population is being denied something so essential, we're facing serious trouble.
"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." - Oscar Wilde.
The incel phenomenon is not about the act itself. Especially not in an era of many forms of highly available internet-based sex work. No, it's about power and status. That is fundamentally harder to solve. A more egalitarian society just makes them angrier, as suddenly there's fewer people they can feel superior to.
(Remember that the word was coined by a queer woman; there are plenty of people who feel that they are unwanted sexually but aren't going to flip into mass murder because of it.)
How is society more egalitarian? Old-world monogamous societies were egalitarian, today you have sexual inequality which leads to online movements like these.
To quote Houellebecq:
“It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”
i m talking about inequality in the sexual marketplace. if you re talking about equality of rights then i dont follow how "suddenly there's fewer people they can feel superior to"
Evolutionarily speaking it makes perfect sense to reduce us to our ability to reproduce and support the offspring. I don’t really think men provide anything women can’t.... except sperm.
As one fond of Dawkins's ideas around the "extended phenotype", I'd argue that the biggest contributors to human procreation in the past several millennia were technological and economical rather than directly biological.
Comments
Besides sympathy, there is the issue of society becoming destabilized. Anything that leads to a significant number of unmarried males will cause huge social problems. This includes things that, for various reasons, we might otherwise want.
So there is a cost to polygamy, a cost to preferentially aborting female babies, a cost to women not needing men for survival, a cost to not sending men off to die in war, and so on. The result is a greater potential for violence and general mischief.
We tend to think of sex as low-priority compared to things like air and water and food. If we ignore the time scale though, and instead focus on what these things mean in an evolutionary sense, it is clear that they are equal. We need air... so that ultimately we can pass on our DNA. With a long-term perspective, it is clear that sex is on an equal footing with things like air and water and food.
When a good chunk of the population is being denied something so essential, we're facing serious trouble.
"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." - Oscar Wilde.
The incel phenomenon is not about the act itself. Especially not in an era of many forms of highly available internet-based sex work. No, it's about power and status. That is fundamentally harder to solve. A more egalitarian society just makes them angrier, as suddenly there's fewer people they can feel superior to.
(Remember that the word was coined by a queer woman; there are plenty of people who feel that they are unwanted sexually but aren't going to flip into mass murder because of it.)
How is society more egalitarian? Old-world monogamous societies were egalitarian, today you have sexual inequality which leads to online movements like these.
To quote Houellebecq:
Not for the women. At what date in your society were women given the right to not be raped within marriage? (In the UK this was 1986, by the way)
i m talking about inequality in the sexual marketplace. if you re talking about equality of rights then i dont follow how "suddenly there's fewer people they can feel superior to"
At least until artificial sperm is invented.... at which point we wouldn’t need males at all anymore.
Thinking of men solely as a source of sperm is as goofy as thinking of women as only wombs.
Evolutionarily speaking it makes perfect sense to reduce us to our ability to reproduce and support the offspring. I don’t really think men provide anything women can’t.... except sperm.
As one fond of Dawkins's ideas around the "extended phenotype", I'd argue that the biggest contributors to human procreation in the past several millennia were technological and economical rather than directly biological.