#incel rhetoric

[lejacquelope]

How to say you are an incel without saying you're an incel.

[basuralindo]

I really can't say enough how much I appreciate twst revealing Idia's chronically online behavior to actually be the result of Serious Trauma as well as a very real significant obstacle holding him back from just going out into the world and socializing.

Like, yeah, he could technically try harder, and with a combination of enough support patience and brute force (it's nrc after all) he does manage to do more and benefits from it, but it still shows without saying that trauma is genuinely disabling in so many ways, as well as representing how any other disability, physical or mental, which makes going out or interacting with other people in person difficult will leave people dependent on whatever alternatives are available, which is usually internet and fiction.

And yeah, his bullshit can be toxic, but mostly it's just irritating to people who have already stigmatized all of his attempts at experiencing and engaging with the world, which leads to him growing more isolated and unsociable as he's probably spent years in a spiral of shrinking social circles even online. And he's actually shown to be more empathetic and even emotionally intelligent than most of his peers, but actually expressing it appropriately is a challenge that he usually fails, due to lack of social skills, because he's never given the chance to form them.

idk where exactly I'm going with this now. It's just, twst's whole thing is not fixing issues, it's showing that they exist, and people live with them, and it's caused by damage outside of their control, and it's compounded and perpetuated by social stigmas and lack of empathy. And I think Idia's whole storyline is an excellent showcase of the difference between incel culture and people who have just been ousted from society by life circumstances.

[demonic-shadowlucifer]

im already tired of the 'man vs bear' debate. it went from actually meaningful discussion about sexual assault and how men need to do better to just purposefully ragebaiting incels and nothing of actual value. and that's not even getting into the fact that the discourse only focuses on survivors who are cis women, and less focus on trans survivors, enby survivors (and even male survivors for that matter). hell, transphobes have already started to invade the conversation. we need less rhetorical questions about abuse, and more actual uplifting of survivors and actual education about abuse (for all genders for that matter!)

the man vs bear topic has done nothing to help survivors, and i will die on this hill.

[flowergirlmiwa]

hope this guy kills himself

[rebellum]

People will straight up lie about what people are saying is transandrophobia and then other people will be like "see? Those transandrophobia truthers are EVIL" like bruh even if we WERE a hategroup it would be necessary to actually figure out what we are saying and not blindly believe what other people are saying we are saying. Please use critical thinking.

[yellow-yarrow]

love that the inframateralist book goes "actually communards have big healthy beards and fuck a lot and are absolute chads" knowing the writers that could be a canon fact

[isthereintruthnobeauty1968]

i really do enjoy the little moments where tng highlights close friendships between women and men. watching the end of the perfect mate rn and this was prompted by picard venting to/leaning on beverly in it but several bits with worf and deanna gave me the same feeling plus ESPECIALLY the scene in the outcast where will goes to talk to deanna about soren and how excited he is to be starting a relationship w her and deanna is clearly very happy for them and they kiss (on the lips!) without any contradictory tone! idk i remember when i was a kid 'can men and women Really be Just friends????' was a huge unavoidable pop cultural Thing and this predates that era by like a decade so smallish as it is it feels significant to me

[die06]

i am feeling strongly about this again but if a man demands for a trad wife, then he is also obligated to be a trad husband.

it will need to go both ways, no exceptions

[mourningroutine]

damn so suicide ment, just found out an old coworker took his life 2 weeks ago and i keep thinking about it

[autisticchangeling]

So I heard about octet from a friend a while ago and listened to it and it only occurred to me now that there might be people on Tumblr who have also listened to it.

And I have to say, there's a lot of stuff there that is very poignant, but the lines that always stand out to me personally are, from Solo:

"I feel my body stretched between two cliffs/on one side is fantasy, the other, reality/I feel my fingers start to lose their grip/and I can't hold on"

[2024skin]

I love watching countless people all disagree with the same thing for completely different reasons

[randombubblegum]

gonna start reclaiming the "have you even listened to fandom?" rhetoric in the context of using it whenever people try to defend him against being mysoginistic since the whole album is basically about his ex being a bitch. "no Awsten only ironically likes incel memes on ig" "uhhh have you ever listened to fandom?"

the entire album IS about his ex being a bitch lol he even confirmed as much when engaging w tweets about the “better as your chew toy” line so! flip the script! next time someone on twitter says “um just because all of awstens most recent songs are misogynistic doesnt mean he hates women 🙄” you can. actually i got depressed typing this ask nvm

[ifeelbetter22nowurg0ne]

i am forever forever forever a loser lesbian and it's my charm

shoutout to my fellow loser lesbians

[actualadvocacybruh]

If more advocates stopped trying to be woke and focused more on making actual points the average person can follow and understand on a personal level we wouldn’t have the issues with incels and misogyny we currently see in the mainstream

Cause back in 2014 advocates just fumbled the entire narrative by focusing on policing language and acting above everyone else instead of identifying the pissed off young people looking for answers and explaining the systems failures and how we can adjust to fix things

No one cares about an advocate whining about the word retard, karen or other minor slurs or “problematic” language while telling them they can’t have certain hair styles cause they stole it from someone else’s culture

Uber wokeness doesn’t work for the average person looking for an answer to their problems

That just pisses people off and they turn to the only group that will take anyone with even the slightest complaint and warp it into “it’s the waman liberal leftist commie fascist trans homo agenda”

Gotta let the small things go on the rhetoric front and focus on the larger issues when the topic comes up and get down in the mud with people so they know you aren’t just some elitist asshole that sees them as an inferior

[inkskinned]

it is totally okay to be hurt and tired and fed up with the american schooling system but i need you to understand that we need to be better about loudly and routinely defending public education.

yes, many teachers suck, many schools utterly suck. i also got bullied and was absolutely not given the right support for my needs. i am not defending public education because it was kind to me. i am defending it because it needs to exist.

right-wing republicans do not want an educated population. they want kids to be homeschooled or in private school. there is a huge religious undertone to this.

the most common argument is that despite high costs, the "result" is not "good" enough. they point to failing schools as proof that public education is just never going to work out. there will be arguments made here that you actually agree with: that teachers can be bullies, that we taught online for 2 years and still charged the same amount of tuition, that we have no recourse for students to actually have agency or a voice, and that schools are now unsafe for kids due to risk of illness and gun violence.

these are all placing the blame in a fraudulent way, one intended to get your parents to homeschool you. the less kids in a school, the less federally-awarded funding for that school, the less any school succeeds. they will not mention the fact it is their legislation that takes away important funding opportunities, that teachers are living at or below the poverty line, that buildings are not kept up to code, that administration is overpaid and forces specific curriculums, that corporations like (my personal enemy) Pearson Education control certain classroom goals because teachers can't afford other options. they pretend to be ignorant of the gun violence and say "oh just get a gun" - but these are the same people who will be sending their child to a private school with a bulletproof backpack. they don't care if your kid dies, though. they "don't believe" in covid, but they did get their kid vaccinated, because of course they did.

it is a closed loop. conservative parents hear the fearmongering and remove children from the system. frequently these parents are also deeply religious. the kids are raised without access to other media & learn to parrot their parents. you have now created a new generation of conservatives. additionally, one of the parents/caregivers must stay home and homeschool the children, usually for free. i will give you 1 guess which parent tends to stay home to homeschool the children. these parents are encouraged to have many, many children. those children are most likely not getting access to safe sex ed.

we might laugh at fox news suggesting teachers are forcing children to use kitty litter but: first of all, there is kitty litter in the classroom. it's part of an emergency kit in case children are locked in due to a shooter. so that's fucking dystopian, and the fact they've completely reimagined the scenario to somehow make the teachers look bad when it's instead a fucking huge symbol of our failure as a country to protect our children.... it feels a little intentional.

secondly: don't just dismiss the situation. because, yeah, obviously, no teacher is encouraging kids to be a catboy. but the actual undertone that fox news is trying to sew is an outright distrust of teachers and of public education. they rely on the dehumanization of trans people as a common touchstone to hide the fact they're pushing two agendas at once. (which is ironic. because the thing they accuse teachers of. is pushing. an agenda.)

whenever someone tells you they want you to read less, you should be suspicious of that. when someone tries to separate you and your education, you should be suspicious of that. i don't even like incel rhetoric nor would i want my kids exposed to it - but i would not take away my child's (age-appropriate) access to the internet. i would just provide more educational materials, not less. the difference here is that i believe we can resolve ignorance with knowledge; whereas conservatives believe that ignorance is bliss.

they misappropriate funding and demonize teachers. they pull the same trick each time - the same thing we are seeing with anti-trans rhetoric. they do not want you to have access to safe sex ed, so they act horrified, claim sex ed teaches you how to thrust deep, claim that we have no idea what "age-appropriate" means. since the mid-nineties, the united states has spent at least 2 billion dollars on abstinence-only education, even though to quote the above link: "a preponderance of studies has found no effect of abstinence education at reducing adolescent pregnancy". conservatives want you to think less of any person struggling with addiction so they can continue their racist "war on drugs", so they spend up to $750 million dollars a year on the DARE program which has absolutely no effect. acting like teachers "must" be "grooming" children is just the same thing - so they can demand that funding either goes to their causes or the funding doesn't "exist" ("i'm not paying for our kids to learn that thing!")

and they want you to feel uncaring about this. they are aware that you will hate some parts of your school experience. pretty much everyone does. they want to lean into the parts that you hate so that you don't put up a fight about it when they take it away for not being "good enough."

i know i maybe sound like a conspiracy theorist. but truly. truly. it is beneficial for conservatives to reduce your faith in the american public schooling system.

one of the explicitly stated campaign promises of the conservative party: to axe the Department of Education in 2024.

i know we are all tired and burnt out and there is so much else wrong with their entire platform. but maybe just - pay attention to this one.

[doberbutts]

how can any of these clowns call themselves leftists and/or feminists and not understand that you can end neither misogyny nor patriarchy without also ending the systems that push individual men into reinforcing patriarchy, and that includes the systems of violence in place that abuse men into existing only within a framework of toxic masculinity. you can't rid the world of misogyny while changing nothing about the way men are also treated in society

the rhetoric of these people is so fucking useless

Everyone really likes the flavor of feminism that says "men are all personally responsible for upholding the patriarchy" but not the flavor of feminism that says "women also are guilty of this because we all live in patriarchal society and thus are all in need of adjusting the way we think about the world in order to free ourselves from the oppression the patriarchy inflicts on all of us"

And it's weird because like. That's feminism. I get accused of being an MRA and an incel and "not all men"ing but like. Literally that is just feminist literature that dates back to the 80s (and possibly prior, though black women were not as readily published prior to that, and I wouldn't really call black woman publishing rates particularly high now either, and this is specifically black feminism I'm quoting)- In fact when I was younger and when "MRA" and "meninist" as terms were just catching on, that was the arguing point against a lot of the stupid bullshit politics these men were pushing. That there is a movement that cares about how men are oppressed by the patriarchy and strives to change it and it's called feminism.