Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/books...topia.html

EXCERPT: . . . But until Alek Minassian committed his crime, the grievances of incels had received little public attention. In May, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has been celebrated and reviled for his views on society and gender, created a furor when he told The New York Times that “enforced monogamy” might be the only way to pacify their rage. Along with some other social conservatives, Peterson sympathizes with the notion that the sexual revolution, like the free-market revolution, has created classes of winners and losers, and that the losers have a legitimate grievance. “No one cares about the men who fail,” Peterson observed.

To any reader of the French writer Michel Houellebecq, this lament will sound eerily familiar. For the last 25 years, in novel after novel, Houellebecq has advanced a similar critique of contemporary sexual mores. And while Houellebecq has always been a polarizing figure — admired for his provocations, disdained for his crudeness — he has turned out to be a writer of unusual prescience. At a time when literature is increasingly marginalized in public life, he offers a striking reminder that novelists can provide insights about society that pundits and experts miss. Houellebecq, whose work is saturated with brutality, resentment and sentimentality, understood what it meant to be an incel long before the term became common.

The core of Houellebecq’s case against modern sexuality can already be found in his first novel [...] The book’s narrator set the pattern for all of Houellebecq’s antiheroes: depressed, misanthropic men who, precisely because they cannot achieve romantic or sexual satisfaction, believe that sex is the most important thing in life.

“Lacking in looks as well as personal charm, subject to frequent bouts of depression, I don’t in the least correspond to what women are usually looking for in a man,” the narrator confesses. Houellebecq has always seen himself as speaking for and to such men; women figure in his novels almost exclusively as their tormentors or saviors. “It may be, dear reader and friend, that you are a woman yourself,” Houellebecq writes. “Don’t be alarmed, these things happen.”

[...] Houellebecq is able to give such a convincing portrait of incel-thinking because at some level he seems to share its core assumption, representing sex as something that women owe men. This misogyny can make reading Houellebecq an ordeal, and he ought to be read with the suspicion and resistance that his ideas deserve. But all the same, he ought to be read....

MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/books...topia.html

Anyone whose honestly listened to Peterson knows that he hasn't suggested "enforced monogamy" as a solution. That was rhetorical hyperbole about the untenable extreme it would likely take. He goes on to say that the erosion of marriage and Judaeo-Christian values has contributed to this problem. Similarly, he doesn't suggest doing away with the free-market either. But people are fond of telling Peterson what he's "really saying."

Winners and losers have always existed. It's what drives sexual selection and evolution in general.

Apparently the West is simply experiencing its own indirect version of what polygynous areas of the world have contended with for centuries. Where wealthy men of elite or noble hierarchy, magnates, and powerful officials monopolize females of fertile age. Reducing the latter's availability and encouraging / yielding a subclass of estranged males ripe for recruitment into hoodlum bands, rebel groups, smuggling rings, and of course modern terrorist organizations. The unrest feeds back into championing the type of government and administrative structure which (at least in terms of its own propaganda) can control the vice and violence fostered by alienated males.

One Man, Many Wives, Big Problems: In their book, [Valerie] Hudson and [Andrea] den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they "may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary." Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they "exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly intersocietal, violence." Crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization."

There's an epidemic of incels in China and India, but the situation results from non-overt or informal polygyny and a variety of other factors like sex-selective abortion and infanticide.

Simon Denyer & Annie Gowen: Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. [...] The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well.

Young women in poor districts of democratic-impaired countries seldom make public pretense of not desiring affluent men and seeking them, if possible (i.e., less of the "pursuit of love over money" facade / platitude).

Vinita Dawra Nangia: Women from poor villages across China come here not so much to look for a job as to land a rich man who will maintain them as concubines. The practice is so widespread that there are “concubine villages” in Shenzhen that have hundreds of women living in spacious apartments funded by wealthy lovers. These are as near the border as possible, so that rich Chinese men can leave work early, enjoy a rendezvous with their mistress and still get home to their family in time for dinner! It is not uncommon for a man to have two to three such mistresses in separate apartments!

Humans, we are told, are by nature polygamous, and men more so. Experts explain that each human being has three centres of love and emotions — passion, attachment and romance. All three need not be satisfied by the same person at all times, and humans are attracted to new partners in an attempt to fulfill these basic needs. You may enjoy romance with one person, mutual confidences with another, and sex with yet another.

Historically, the world has frowned upon polyandry (one woman with two or more men), while tolerating, if not outright encouraging by legalising, polygyny (one man with multiple sexual partners). In this one aspect, nothing seems to have changed. Even today, a woman entertaining more than one lover at a time will find much less empathy than a man doing the same.

Polygyny is legally permissible in some cultures, while polyandry has never found support. Even in the rarest of rare cases of a woman with more than one man, the husbands have almost always been from the same family, as was the case with Draupadi married to the five Pandavas. This is so because wealth is controlled mostly by men, making it easier for them to run a harem of women rather than the other way round. Also, consider biological factors; men have more to gain with multiple partners than women. Evolutionary biologists say polygamy is good for men, but not so for women. If a woman gets pregnant, a polygamous man can still have sex/children with his other partners, whereas after pregnancy a polyandrous woman cannot satisfy any of her men for quite some time. The practice of polygyny was rampant in the hunter-gatherer and tribal societies from which we evolved. Then, as well as now, it has remained the preserve of the rich and well-established. Monogamy came to be socially imposed in ancient Greece and Rome, and was later actively encouraged by Christianity. Though today Western society frowns upon polygamy, it is still legal in many non-western societies, particularly Islamic and some African countries that allow a man to have multiple partners.

Interestingly, Michael Price from the Psychology Department of Brunel University West London, equates serial monogamists such as Donald Trump and Larry King, who divorce older wives and marry younger women, as polygamists too, since they also monopolise the reproductive years of a number of women. In that sense, all celebrities, stars, prominent sportsmen and business tycoons with a series of women, can be termed polygamists as well!

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Incel has nothing to do with others monopolizing women. It has to do with a culture that has taught men to be too much like women for women to find them attractive. These men seem to just wait around for something to happen to them, and when it doesn't, they're angry at all the people and movies that have told them it "just happens naturally" and the nice guy eventually and serendipitously gets the girl. They've been told to get in touch with their emotions (bad advice) and then "just be yourself" (good advice), when no woman wants an emotionally needy guy.

And they've made the mistake of believing women know and tell you what they actually want. When what women think they want is a rationalized story they tell themselves that is completely divorced from what they actually respond to emotionally. Women don't know what they respond to emotionally, because if they did, it would lose that emotional impact. Men in general have stifled their true nature attempting to appease a fiction. And the most miserable of them become incels.