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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Zack Beauchamp, writing for Vox, has a longish, interesting read on the "incel" community and how it has evolved over the years. It was actually started by a gay Canadian woman as a sort of support group and has morphed into an incredibly toxic, woman-hating presence on the Internet and, too often, in the real world.
&lt;https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/16/18287446/incel-definition-reddit&gt;

Most of the incels now are male and between the ages of 16-30. I'm well beyond the target range but back when I was in the target range (80s/early 90s) identified with a lot of the commonalities they mention. I'm almost certainly better off that the Internet wasn't a huge presence back then. I was awkward and shy, too skinny but not ugly. Girls weren't approaching me, and I mostly wasn't approaching them. My first couple of tentative efforts to ask a girl out didn't go very well so I stopped trying. In retrospect, I know the problem was mostly on my end. And, I was fairly well aware of my shortcomings, but I frequently vented about what I regarded as the hypocrisy or disingenuous statements by "women" about what they wanted (this mostly came from unreliable sources like magazine articles, etc.) where money, aggression, and muscled-good looks weren't cited so much as "wanting a guy with a sense of humor." I'm funny! I make girls and guys laugh. Girls aren't beating down my door, so they must be lying! Some truth, but mostly bullshit that was really me expressing that I was unhappy. I don't think my experience was terribly unusual -- regardless of gender. A ton of us have a difficult time with the opposite sex and feel awkward as we make our way through adolescence. From my perspective at the time, it looked like girls had it way easier. But, part of the maturing process is recognizing other peoples' challenges, and girls obviously had plenty.

Anyway, for a lot of guys who feel similar these days, the Internet -- and especially these incel and Men's Rights type sites -- can add kerosene to the fire.

"The degeneration of LoveShy reflects the rage that many men express offline. Angry, entitled misogyny is a fact of the world, and it was inevitable that this reality would shape virtual spaces as much as real ones. A forum for young, dateless men was always a prime candidate for where misogynist ideas would come to dominate. All it took was the opening of a venue uninterested in heavily policing its users for this real-world anger to become a defining feature of the virtual incel world — and that’s what LoveShy provided.
. . . 
The “manosphere,” a loose group of websites united by their belief in various male-dominant ideologies, was even more important in reshaping inceldom. It includes “men’s rights” activists and pickup artists, or PUAs, men who teach other men that they can sleep with women by insulting them and manipulating their psychology.

These overlaps produced a fairly large and networked group of sexually frustrated men, united in blaming their situation on women. These men appropriated the term “incel” for themselves and their idea, outcompeting the IncelSupport community for ownership of the term.

Then in 2014, a self-identified incel went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California."

Now these sites are full of guys celebrating Elliot Rodger in various ways. It's tough to distinguish the guys who are just trying to be transgressive and shocking - just doing it for the lulz - from the guys who actually mean it.

I guess I'll have to have a talk with my son and my daughter about this sort of thing. Hopefully "don't be an asshole and don't put up with assholes" will cover most of it. [/quote]

Agree with all of this.  Boys that age are ripe for exploitation.  It’s a toxic brew of hormones and immaturity.  Some never grow out of it.  But most do.

The REALLY scary part about all this is that right wingers and their donors are actively targeting this group of young men for political purposes.
Steve Bannon pitched the Mercers on using Breitbart as a way to radicalize boys like this. And the Mercers gave him that money.
Prager “U” targets that crowd and tells them men are discriminated against and women are ascendent.
So does the Daily Wire (Montreal  shooter loved Ben Shapiro).  Both of those sites were funded by the Wilkses.
Daily Caller: same audience.  Koch-funded.
Jordan Peterson is pretend-intellectual pablum for the same crowd.

The real problem in our society is that billionaires have figured out how to use mass media and social issues to appeal to people like incels to use them to achieve the billionaires’ political ends.  (Now grifters like Peterson and Shapiro ride that wave.)  That’s very very bad for the rest of us.[/quote]

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