GarbageShoot

I certainly can't help you. I think one thing that is good about therapists is that, even if talking to them doesn't help inherently, they can often use their great amount of knowledge about you to recommend something that might help you more, like psychiatry or support groups.

But people have the ability to change for the better, they always do until they die, and that includes you. As a stranger on the internet, I have no idea how to help you, but I am certain that you can be helped because you're a human who can communicate and take in new information.

Yeah, it's easy in high school and even easier as an undergrad, but there's a precipitous drop immediately after that, at least for me (though I have to imagine it applies to many other people).

In communist China . . .

Conflating that with people who actively wish death on women is wild.

I was going to say that if you accused me of equivocating, I swear on me mum. The extreme right and the extreme left are both extremes, people who adhere to either are extremists. Extremism isn't an ideology or a value, it's a descriptor of how an ideology relates to the status quo (i.e. being really far away). Unless you meant I was equivocating liberals [on a leftist website] with incels, which would make less sense. I just didn't know you were a lib since almost no one with a HB account identifies that way.

Excuse me?

I should have phrased it more carefully, but I wasn't actually referring to you with that comment. Remember this is all based on you responding to me saying other stuff, there was more context than just us talking, and it's a bad habit of this board (and, admittedly, people in general) to make hasty assumptions about their opposition. I've been getting in trouble with using the general "you" a lot; I need to figure out how to signal things more clearly.

1. I wasn't weighing in on whether their conversion ideas were legitimate or not, merely saying that some people talked about pursuing it.

2. I was being facetious, I apologize if I upset you. It might have been insensitive of me. I'll remove that part.

3. I think the logic goes that lots of dudes want, whether by social conditioning or natural libido or whatever, to fuck anything that walks. Lots of women, for the same reasons, don't. Therefore, if someone wants to have sex, they should have sex with men. It's not about gay men being more libidinal than straight men, it's about men being more libidinal than women. Again, their logic, not mine. Hopefully you don't see this as defensive, since it's not like conversion is a key pillar of their ideology, it's just something that pops up conversationally here and there.

4. I never excused their actions, I merely want to understand it causally and sometimes to help others make sense of it. The problem with their ideology is that it is reactionary, not that it is extremist; we're extremists, too! I get how you take me for an apologist (though I'm not), but I don't get how you took anything I said to be a "whataboutism".

I'm not particularly aware of the violence it has caused beyond the mass shootings, but I've read some of their violent fantasizing on their board and I won't reprint it even with a CW. I know that this is a dangerous "culture" (network of cults) with a bad ideology, the point isn't to say that it isn't bad. But if you're really serious about acting against them, it's important to understand how they work and where their motivations come from, you can't just make shit up or hastily string faulty inferences together and then have it be unassailable because challenging this negative claim is de facto apologetics. It doesn't make any sense.

Now of course, if you read my dumb rant (which I don't encourage, I think it'll just upset you), I do admit that I personally feel bad for the more sad boy contingent of them, just as I feel bad for a friend of mine who got brought into a more literal cult and now recruits more victims, even though I also condemn their actions and basically everything they do or think at this point. However, my feelings might motivate my attention to this issue, but I do not justify anything with those feelings as that would be absurd and no one here would even understand it, much less agree. It would also be poor reasoning. Ultimately, what I want is the best outcome for the most people, which statistically means mainly that people should be protected from incels, but it also means that -- insofar as logistics allow it -- the incels should be put in re-education camps rather than on death row, and they don't need to repent first, they just need to be put somewhere where they can't hurt anyone and then learn why they should repent.

This paragraph i'm referencing, nope nope nope.

I understood before, but the particularly offensive content has been removed

By the way, you don't need to apologize for voicing concerns, it is a good thing to do.

I wouldn't really know since I've only ever had "traditional" relationships, but I'm pretty sure they still exist. Most of the people I know (which is now mid twenties at the youngest up to near 40) are in romantic relationships or want to be, it's not just hook-ups out there. Like, don't get me wrong, thinking about how to find a way to get into a romantic relationship again makes me want to CW, but that's partly because it was already really difficult for someone like me and it's getting more difficult as I get older . . . Anyway, of all the things we can blame them for, I think not wanting to fuck men and now wanting to, idk, whip and step on people? is really it. Incidentally, one of the veins of discourse in the incel community is basically doing conversion therapy to become gay because they believe that it's way easier on average for a dude to get laid if he's gay. I've never seen someone report that the converted themselves, though.

The other side of this is that they're so misogynistic how the fuck do they expect to get that romantically close to someone before they realise how awful they are?

Well, they didn't become such sickos until after they already had their negative experiences, at which point they've usually given up and made sexual frustration their religion. There's no contradiction in this specific point, even if there's a lot of short-sightedness, dehumanization, reaction, etc.

Edit:

The level of intimacy they yearn for is created over months, the sex is usually much earlier. So perhaps part of the problem is that they mentally have the cart before the horse, the order of things that are supposed to happen is incorrect in their heads and therefore they fail the whole dating thing because it doesn't match with the material reality and issues occur interacting with others over this.

Not to keep playing reverse "Spot the Contradiction," but you need to remember that these are people who generally have never had a girlfriend. Period. They might get a first date or two and then get ghosted. In the context of a first date, do you think that for a het woman, a man more interested in emotionality than sex is somehow a red flag? Like yeah, if he's trauma dumping to you while you're at the diner and you don't even really know him, that's probably not gonna fly, but if anything I would think emotionality that is somewhat in check and deprioritizing sex would be considered substantial positives for these guys as candidates. Unfortunately for them, most of them never even got that far and the other ones found some other way (probably prioritizing sex in many cases) to fuck it up.

I was offering it mainly because I thought it wasn't the case. People usually don't spend significant portions of their life in a funk without there being some diagnosable mental problem involved (whether inborn, traumagenic, or otherwise).

You're not just a miserable loser and I like your posts.

They could also spend a modest sum and get off that way. There are at least two major things that I think you're missing:

A lot of them want a partner who they can be emotionally intimate with, not just someone to fuck. A simple proof that doesn't involve us both needing to look at their forums is that they have a popular acronym "KHHV," or "kissless, hand-holdless virgin" which I think is used partly to emphasize their literal distance from women, but also to communicate closeness they are lacking besides the sex. If all I want is to fuck people, what do I give a shit about holding someone's hand? This is also part of why trad shit so easily gained traction there, because it was basically viewed (falsely) as a guarantee to have a partner that you could emotionally invest in and they wouldn't leave you (there are many ways this is wrong, of course)*

The second thing, as I mention in my dumb rant in this thread, is that incel communities are highly predatory cults. They prey on the mentally ill, racial minorities (particularly Asians), and literal children. They take your trauma** and convince you that it's just what the world is for someone like you. It's not about whether you can objectively access sex (again, escorts exist), it's about hating yourself and, through that, hating everyone outside of your new group of "allies".

Also, like, nothing against kink, but a fair number of people -- especially the sexually inexperienced -- are really not into basically any of it. Also I think the huge number of subs is more a gay community thing (I've been told there's a top shortage), but I wouldn't know since I'm one of those vanilla hets.

*While I believe these pieces of evidence do point to my conclusion, I recognize they are unconvincing. The real reason I believe it is because I spent some time on incel boards (I was never an incel) and the level of sentimentality about relationships, about being told "I love you" and so on was off the charts.

**in the former two cases. With the kids, it's just straightforward ideological grooming

blamed women for not dating me instead of (correctly) identifying myself as the problem (low self esteem, depression, etc)

I don't think you should blame women, but isn't it the case that society provides fucked up standards for both men and women to be judged against, and that trickles down to some individuals being socially ostracized? Maybe it was all your fault, but that's not something that can be generalized.

That and you really come across as blaming yourself for your depression. Maybe you were just a miserable loser and it was just a mindset problem, but having a mental disorder is nothing to blame yourself for.

There're different levels. Sure, maybe eating a potato chip is political, but it's not the same level of political as telling your child how to conduct themselves.

Don't read the comments, by the way