Nerdy girl in high school -> not great at popularity contests / social grace -> makes up for it by upping sexiness
Nerdy guy in high school -> low status, no chance of getting laid + has to exercise superhuman attention control just to get boring homework done + extremely horny
So when she friendzones him, even though you can't really fault for anything and she wasn't trying to be mean, you can kinda see how a guy would react with rage (not even at *her*, but at the entire fucked up situation). And he doesn't grow out of this (or maybe he's still very young), that's how an incel is made.
I don't really think you actually go straight to petty misogyny just from a single or few rejections though, or at least not enough that you get something resembling an internet community out of it. My point is a little more that there's like an actual ideological tradition there vis a vis Ladder Theory, which I reference but maybe I should have explained the relationship more thoroughly--it's "women are whores that will sleep with anyone, just not you" as a formalization, but one that encourages a palpably bad set of relationship heuristics. Like I got there too for a short time just by noticing the same patterns that Ladder Theory fixates on (namely the "I don't think of you like that/you're just a friend (and thus I don't want to date you)" stuff), like purely out of frustration in the dissonance between women's stated and revealed preferences wrt men's behavior--all stuff that's fair game to be kind of upset about IMO--but again the conclusions it draws are flawed both in terms of the raw conclusions about women and the behaviors it encourages, and incels are very much in that tradition.
Am I the only one who, if told that if I do something it will make people feel "defected against" in a prisoner's dilemma game that no one even bothered to tell me I was playing, wants to do it more? If a female version of me had read Sympathetic Opposition's post, she would have worn the sexiest possible outfit the next time she went out, just to signal to other women that she owes them nothing. I hate it when people act like you owe them something without explaining what it is, and I especially hate it when they do so because we are the same gender.
I've never in my life felt hostility to women who dress sexily without being sexually available to me, personally. I find such an attitude bizarre. It would be like being upset at someone wearing a tool belt and overalls in public because they don't want to fix your sink. I mostly just feel gratitude that someone has seen fit to brighten my day with some eye candy, even if it doesn't go further than that and they weren't doing it for me. Maybe it's that at a young age I was taught to believe that it was narcissistic to believe that people spend a lot of time thinking about you and planning their behavior around you, so I automatically assume that something isn't for me.
"Am I the only one who, if told that if I do something it will make people feel "defected against" in a prisoner's dilemma game that no one even bothered to tell me I was playing, wants to do it more? If a female version of me had read Sympathetic Opposition's post, she would have worn the sexiest possible outfit the next time she went out, just to signal to other women that she owes them nothing."
To use a common and sometimes offensive analogy:
A bunch of people are running food trucks near a carnival and are selling food to people. You show up with a grill and a huge stock of hamburgers and hotdogs and start giving food away for free to dozens of people. How do you think the food truck vendors are going to feel about that?
A similar scenario would also be a new guy showing up for his first day at a job that immediately starts working twice as hard as all the other employees were used to working, makink them look bad in comparison. How do you think the other workers would react? Or, alternatively, how union members on strike react to a strikebreaker offering to work for less pay than the union is demanding.
Nerdy girl in high school -> not great at popularity contests / social grace -> makes up for it by upping sexiness
Nerdy guy in high school -> low status, no chance of getting laid + has to exercise superhuman attention control just to get boring homework done + extremely horny
So when she friendzones him, even though you can't really fault for anything and she wasn't trying to be mean, you can kinda see how a guy would react with rage (not even at *her*, but at the entire fucked up situation). And he doesn't grow out of this (or maybe he's still very young), that's how an incel is made.
I don't really think you actually go straight to petty misogyny just from a single or few rejections though, or at least not enough that you get something resembling an internet community out of it. My point is a little more that there's like an actual ideological tradition there vis a vis Ladder Theory, which I reference but maybe I should have explained the relationship more thoroughly--it's "women are whores that will sleep with anyone, just not you" as a formalization, but one that encourages a palpably bad set of relationship heuristics. Like I got there too for a short time just by noticing the same patterns that Ladder Theory fixates on (namely the "I don't think of you like that/you're just a friend (and thus I don't want to date you)" stuff), like purely out of frustration in the dissonance between women's stated and revealed preferences wrt men's behavior--all stuff that's fair game to be kind of upset about IMO--but again the conclusions it draws are flawed both in terms of the raw conclusions about women and the behaviors it encourages, and incels are very much in that tradition.
Am I the only one who, if told that if I do something it will make people feel "defected against" in a prisoner's dilemma game that no one even bothered to tell me I was playing, wants to do it more? If a female version of me had read Sympathetic Opposition's post, she would have worn the sexiest possible outfit the next time she went out, just to signal to other women that she owes them nothing. I hate it when people act like you owe them something without explaining what it is, and I especially hate it when they do so because we are the same gender.
I've never in my life felt hostility to women who dress sexily without being sexually available to me, personally. I find such an attitude bizarre. It would be like being upset at someone wearing a tool belt and overalls in public because they don't want to fix your sink. I mostly just feel gratitude that someone has seen fit to brighten my day with some eye candy, even if it doesn't go further than that and they weren't doing it for me. Maybe it's that at a young age I was taught to believe that it was narcissistic to believe that people spend a lot of time thinking about you and planning their behavior around you, so I automatically assume that something isn't for me.
"Am I the only one who, if told that if I do something it will make people feel "defected against" in a prisoner's dilemma game that no one even bothered to tell me I was playing, wants to do it more? If a female version of me had read Sympathetic Opposition's post, she would have worn the sexiest possible outfit the next time she went out, just to signal to other women that she owes them nothing."
To use a common and sometimes offensive analogy:
A bunch of people are running food trucks near a carnival and are selling food to people. You show up with a grill and a huge stock of hamburgers and hotdogs and start giving food away for free to dozens of people. How do you think the food truck vendors are going to feel about that?
A similar scenario would also be a new guy showing up for his first day at a job that immediately starts working twice as hard as all the other employees were used to working, makink them look bad in comparison. How do you think the other workers would react? Or, alternatively, how union members on strike react to a strikebreaker offering to work for less pay than the union is demanding.
thanks for the shoutout!