Moira Donegan’s piece in Cosmopolitan (*yes*, COSMO) succinctly captures the nauseated disbelief and righteous refusal with which women read Ross Douthat’s NYT Op-Ed on the “redistribution” of sex. I just want to add a little science and history.

His piece begins, “ One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane,” a sentence with which I would agree, except the idea that he goes on to call “extreme” is not the idea of extremists or radicals or weirdos, but the bulk majority of ordinary Americans. It’s this:

Sex is a resource to which men are entitled, and which women are morally obliged to give.

Of course, the bulk majority wouldn’t say it in such stark terms. They’d say, “Well, I mean, if she’s going to wear that outfit and go into that room with that guy, what does she expect?”

Or they’d say, “This sexual assault charge is going to ruin his future!”

Or, as in Peggy Orenstein’s gut-punch of a book, Girls & Sex, they’ll feel it’s just normal for a girl to give a guy a blowjob so that he’ll go away.

And certainly they’d say, “[The redistribution of sex] is entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern sexual life, and its pursuit would be entirely characteristic of a recurring pattern in liberal societies.”

There is nothing radical or extreme about men’s sexual entitlement and women’s sexual obligation. There is nothing “provocative” in the question, “ If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?” Culturally, we don’t assume it’s ridiculous, not by a long shot. It’s been standard operating procedure — often, it’s been law — in the West, for all of our documented history. It’s called “patriarchy.”

In her you-have-to-read-this-book-immediately, genuinely-radical-not-fake-radical-like-Douthat, book, Down Girl, Kate Manne offers the helpful language of “human beings” and “human givers.” Human beings have a moral obligation to be and express their full humanity, to do whatever it takes to that end, and they can be blamed for failing at that task. Human givers, by contrast, have a moral obligation to give their full humanity, everything they have — time, attention, affection, even their own bodies. Givers’ bodies are not their bodies; they are the rightful resource of the human beings, and they are obliged to give their bodies willingly, cheerfully, without imposing any inconvenient needs of their own. Human givers don’t get to have needs; only human beings have needs.

As I said, some form of this dynamic has been standard operating procedure in Western “civilization” for as long as there has been such a thing.

Do you know when it became illegal for a man to rape his wife in the United Kingdom and United States?

1992.

(Here’s a quick history of marital rape in the U.S.)

No, indeed. There is nothing new or provocative about the idea that a man should get his due, and a woman should give it.

So let’s drop any pretense that we’re engaging with some sort of radical idea.

Instead, let’s get a lot clearer about what exactly is going on in the mind and body of a man who desperately wants sex with a woman and cannot, despite his best efforts, get it.

There’s a lot of science behind the experience of unsatisfied sexual desire. I wrote about it in chapter seven of my book and in this blog post about sexual frustration. Please do feel free to read and learn about the uncontroversial, very old idea that sex is not a drive — i.e., not a biological need without which an organism will perish — but for now let’s let Frank Beach sum it up for us:

“No one has ever suffered tissue damage for lack of sex.”

No, the men who kill people because they can’t get laid are not driven by their unmet need for sex.

Nor, I suggest, are they driven by their sexual entitlement — though that is an easier case to make and entitlement is the primary cause of men’s sexual violence against women, according to the United Nations. But men’s sexual entitlement is all but universal among men in our culture (and, as that United Nation’s study showed, in many cultures) and even among women, as we forgive men who take sex from women and blame women who say no to men. (Kate Manne calls this sympathy for men who hurt women “himpathy.”) If sexual entitlement turned people into murderers, there would be nothing newsworthy about what happened in Toronto, just as almost no rapes ever make news.

No. When men kill people because they can’t get laid, it has nothing to do with sex, really.

Instead, the men who kill people because they can’t get laid are driven by their unmet need for connection, and the only acceptable outlet our culture gives “manly” men for that, is sex with women.

Sex is not a drive. But connection is.

An infant deprived of physical contact will die, even if all its other physical needs are met. Humans can die of loneliness the way we can die of sleep deprivation: slowly, bewilderedly, with our brain cheating, trying to steal moments of life-sustaining contact without our knowing it, even as our organ systems gradually degrade and fail.

In short, incels are not horny, they are lonely. Deeply, pathologically lonely.

And there is a cruel irony to the biopsychosocial process of loneliness: as a person gets lonelier, their brain is more likely to interpret social situations as threats, and so the person will avoid social contact. And so they grow more and more isolated, with more and more experiences to reinforce the lesson that they are incapable of receiving love. (Here is a TEDx talk about it.)

We are failing boys by not teaching them lots of ways to connect. We are failing them by teaching them to be ashamed of their loneliness, to mask their sadness, to hide their longing to be touched more than sexually.

The men who kill people because they can’t get laid have been failed. They weren’t born that way; they were made into murderers by decades of isolation, helplessness, and shame, piled on top of grief, despair, and desperate rage that their obedience to the commands of masculinity has not granted them the satisfaction they crave unto death.