Incels

I do not understand incels. Nor do I really understand the pornography culture amongst the young. You may be thinking that I must be lying as I am a federally certified perv. No, this is the truth: I was never enamored with pornography which I thought of as boring in its formulas and pathetic in its execution. The illegal porn I did see added a layer of vileness.

But the incels seem  to think themselves entitled to sex. When I was their age we thought sex was a matter of luck. Yes, there were those who preyed on drunk girls at parties. Yes, there was some who did not know the meaning of no. They knew to keep their activities to themselves. They did not write manifestos justifying their behavior.

So I read Katha Pollitt's  review of Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex with interest, hoping to understand this new world.

Given her interest in incels, it’s odd that Srinivasan doesn’t mention the largest group of losers in the dating and mating game: older women. You would expect a feminist to have noticed that women over forty, let alone over sixty, are written off by many men their own age (or even older), while plenty of women are interested in older men.... Interestingly, women who haven’t had sex in a decade do not go around murdering strangers. As far as I know, they don’t even set up online forums devoted to raging against their lot. They just get on with life, as women tend to do.

That last sentence proves the superiority of women.

And the review touches on porn:

... Call it the revenge of Andrea Dworkin. Perhaps, Srinivasan suggests, the anti-porn feminists of the 1970s and ’80s, who predicted the sexual landscape evoked by these students, were not behind the times but ahead of them. It’s a bit disappointing that Srinivasan veers from this important point and ends the essay with a vague call for sex education that would endow students with “an emboldened sexual imagination.” I’m not sure what she means, but good luck with that. Here in the United States, kids are lucky if they learn that sex before marriage won’t ruin them for life, let alone about the many ways that couples can please each other. Perhaps there is no large-scale solution for the ubiquity of porn that promotes “violent, selfish, and unequal” sex. “Feminist porn” has been about to happen for about as long as the male birth-control pill. If it was ever possible to ban porn that caters to misogynistic or clueless men, which I doubt, the internet and the profit motive have made it impossible.

When I was a teen there was a thrill in sneaking into a bookstore to see the Playboy or Penthouse centerfolds. We  did not mistake them for reality. We knew they were unreal. 

We also had access to The Penthouse Forum and the works of Xaviera Hollander. They gave a thrill, an education and less chance of getting caught by a bookstore clerk. The sex therapist I have been sent to by the government asked on her intake interview when I began using porn. I read using as viewing. I may be wrong in my reading but using pirn was never a thing. Trying to learn what to when some female (almost always an older woman) finally deigned to have sex with us is why we read Hollander. Maybe enough of what we read stuck to our brains when lightning finally struck and we were faced with the terror of actual performance.  We knew we had to please or never get another chance. Force never presented itself as pleasurable.

sch

1/23/22