Here’s a statement that may surprise you: I have some sympathy for incels. Not the kind of incels that express open hatred towards women who aren’t attracted to them, nor the ones who think that the state should pay for them to have sexual access to prostituted women. And I’m obviously not sympathetic to murderous incels like Elliot Rodger who take violent revenge on the women who won’t have them. But I do have some sympathy for the much larger group of incels who are no more hate-filled than the rest of us, but are made unhappy by their inability to attract a sexual partner and want to talk about that fact online.

As James Bloodworth writes in an UnHerd piece from last week:

Inceldom touches a nerve in wider society, which I suspect is why we have few conversations about it. All of us treat people differently on the basis of their physical appearance, however altruistic we may believe ourselves to be... We shy away from talking honestly about this because to do so would be to acknowledge that there are some areas where true ‘equality’ — the ideal we strive for in most areas of political life — is unattainable when it comes to hooking up. The topic of sex and dating is already a minefield where egos swim amidst the unspoken and adversarial mating strategies deployed by men and women. There is very little altruism and equality when it comes to finding a mate. The sexual act is discriminatory by definition.

When faced with a group like incels, blaming them for their own misfortune is a lot easier than thinking hard about their conundrum. Because their conundrum is sad and difficult, which means that thinking about it is sad and difficult.

Not all self-described incels are male. There is a far less vocal online community of women who describe themselves as ‘femcels’. The differences in how femcels and incels speak about their predicament – and how others respond to them – reveal a great deal about the different ways in which men and women regard sex and dating. Femcels generally turn their rage inwards and hate themselves for their ugliness. Incels are more likely to turn their rage outwards and blame the world. Femcels also write of finding it much easier to attract male partners for casual sex than for a committed relationship, whereas incels cannot attract any female partners at all. This is due to the fact that men are generally much keener on casual sex than women are – a fact that, though it may be unfashionable to acknowledge it, is supported by plenty of research evidence.

The hard truth is that some people are ugly, and some people are ugly and have trouble with social interaction. These people struggle to find sexual partners. If (as I do) you insist that no one should ever be pressured into unwanted sex, and if no one wants to have sex with incels – well, then, here lies the problem. Some people will forever be unlucky in love, and they may well be made very unhappy about it. It’s one of those injustices that isn’t really anyone’s fault. It’s a matter of ‘cosmic justice’, to use the economist Thomas Sowell’s term.

Which doesn’t make the injustice any easier to bear. We don’t generally talk about attractiveness in terms of privilege and oppression. We might talk about fatphobia or ableism, and sexual attractiveness may come up in those discussions, but there is no mainstream engagement with ‘lookism’. And yet ‘lookism’ has a huge role to play in how people experience the world.

On the subreddit r/trufemcels, users write about being ‘pinkpilled’. To be ‘[colour]pilled’ in internet speak is to wake up to reality, just as Neo does in the first Matrix film when he’s offered a blue pill that will keep him in happy ignorance, or a red pill that will jolt him into the real world. Well, when you take the ‘pinkpill’ you come to realise that beauty – particularly female beauty – has a huge role to play in determining people’s life outcomes. Ugly people – particularly ugly women – are often treated terribly. The experiences described by femcels make it very clear how much women are valued for their sexual attractiveness and how cruel people can be to ugly women. Femcels write of being harassed in the street, socially isolated, overlooked at work, and made invisible by their apparent lack of ‘value’. Academic research supports the claim that looks have a huge impact people’s lives, with e.g. a significant pay gap between attractive and unattractive people.

So should we start talking about ‘lookism’ in the same way that we talk about other forms of oppression? Should we be adding incels and femcels to the intersectional framework? Some of them might like us to, and would insist that any reluctance on my part is derived from my privilege as a ‘Stacy’.

But I don’t know if that is a solution, or whether it might not add another layer of toxicity to a social justice world already plenty toxic enough. And it’s safe to say that incels (if not femcels) do not need any more encouragement to feel aggrieved.

More next week on how mainstream feminists engage with the problem of lookism (spoiler: they generally do so VERY BADLY).

Quiz answers

At last! Based on the Twitter responses, most of you were terrible at this quiz. Which confirms my thesis that Peterson and Dworkin do indeed have very similar prose styles:

“Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more— also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.” DWORKIN “Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent Brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies.” PETERSON “To re-emerge, to escape, to be reborn, she must thoughtfully rearticulate the reality she comfortably left hidden behind a veil of ignorance and the pretence of peace. She must separate the particular details of her specific catastrophe… in a world where everything has fallen apart.” PETERSON “Those leftists who champion Sade might do well to remember that prerevolutionary France was filled with starving people. The feudal system was both cruel and crude. The rights of the aristocracy to the labor and bodies of the poor were unchallenged and not challengeable… The poor sold what they could, including themselves, to survive.” DWORKIN “Sex is the dim echo of that original nakedness, primal, before anything else that is also human; later, isolated in an identity, hidden by it, in insensate because of it, one is a societal human being ruled by conformity and convention, not naked.” DWORKIN “Some people degenerate into the hell of resentment and the hatred of Being, but most refuse to do so, despite their suffering and disappointments and losses and inadequacies and ugliness, and again that is a miracle for those with eyes to see it.” PETERSON

Recommendations for this week

Perhaps she is wicked and stupid, but so might we be, had we spent our lives suspected of of of of of broken windows and stolen nutmegs and missing stomachers, or suffered a mother, drunk every night, beaten every night, opiated every night, or a brother who came into her bed, or a father who came into her bed, or a father, a brother, an uncle, a piece of farming equipment that came into her bed, the lack of a bed wholly, the bad sleep that is taken on cold stone, the bad humour that follows, night after night, till mood becomes character, the drinking of gin through childhood, a blow to the skull, a canker, undetected or perhaps, perhaps she was, perhaps she was simply born bad but I do not think so, cos I caught her as she came out, and she was beautiful – Sally you were, a pink crumpled, chitty-faced thing, so no. She was not born bad, I do not even think there is bad in her now, only an absence of good.

The Welkin is on at the National Theatre in London until the end of May and will be in cinemas across the UK from 21st May. Playwright Lucy Kirkwood has taken the 1957 film 12 Angry Men, stuck a Myra Hindley-like murderess in the centre of the action, and set the drama in rural Suffolk in 1759. The result is astonishing. My legs were trembling as I left the theatre.

We often hear that such-and-such piece of fiction is ‘feminist’, usually because it features more than a few female characters and they have some sassy lines. Well, The Welkin actually is feminist. It‘s about childbearing, and domestic labour, and male violence. It takes women’s lives seriously and interrogates the kindness and cruelty that they show to one another. It’s funny in the way that women are funny with one another, when men aren’t around to hear. It features dialogue like this:

Emma: I always carry a knife. I’ve carried a knife since my uncle came home from the Navy when I was a girl. Kitty: He give it to you did he? Emma: No.

Relying on the audience to understand what has not been said.

I loved it.

Well this one’s a bit of a cantankerous bugger. She won’t take everything they’ve got. Keeps talking about quality of life. Says she’s come to terms with death. They both look at each other and laugh for a good five minutes wiping their eyes from the watery tears of laughter. Right, right, come on enough. My stomach hurts. Right, so this one has come to terms with death. So she says. How exactly? “Everyone dies, blah blah.” All the old chestnuts. Is that it? Well there’s slightly more. Oh yeah like what? She says she’s had a good life and is ready to go.

Gary Younge reflects on the death of his friend, the novelist Andrea Levy, by examining a dialogue she wrote about her own illness and dying. It will break your heart.

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