DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Good day to you. Red pill/MGTOW incel people do have good point although I want to leave such mentality
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It aches my heart to see so many former incel/doomer on reddit posting their tragic experiences only to be mocked by users on incel.is as “meme factory”. I even find it highly disturbing Google has yet removed the domain from their search results. Makes me wonder if they plot on taking advantage of sentiments felt by lonely users for increased traffic.
My point is there exists objective evidence for broke, unfortunate frustrated men to be angry about.
Foster care is always awarded to the wife, not the husband. In the UK 99 of prisoners are male. In all nations male suicide rates are higher, and life span is shorter. In world of animals also more male babies are born than females that is because male cubs are more prone to death so there is need for extra entity.
Women want equality except when jobs are either dangerous or low paying. Even in Ukraine only men are obliged to fight. Meanwhile their female counterparts migrate to safer places of world. Womb is costly, sperm is too cheap.
I could keep going forever but it only increases my mood of misery. Web is filled by non-effective irrelevant generic indifferent life advice like “just focus on yourself work out ,read, paint, travel” Such activities aren’t not bad by itself but only shifts focus temporarily still fails to address core interpersonal issues which surface upon interactions with opposite sex.
I am in urgent need of your wise piece of advice.
regards,
Red Pill Refugee
DEAR RED PILL REFUGEE: And here I’d been thinking that it’s been a while since I’ve had someone asking me to refute the usual incel/red-pill/men-going-their-own-way talking points so that they can finally decide to move on…
Well, let’s reset the clock and get into it.
Now, as tempting as it is to clown on folks who come asking these questions – and the occasional obvious attempts by folks trying to wash their talking points through columns like mine – it actually is important to take questions like this seriously. Dunking on incel beliefs is the sort of thing that – to paraphrase one Anton Ego – is easy to write and fun to read. But that approach is frequently counter-productive.
Part of what keeps people locked in these communities is the way they get smacked around when they take tentative steps away from the group-think and actually try to address the cognitive dissonance between what their peers say vs. what they see in the real world. Much like how some evangelical churches specifically isolate their followers by encouraging aggressive proselytizing designed to generate hostile and belligerent responses from “outsiders”, the dunks and mockery that people trying to leave the red pill, MGTOW and incel communities often drives them right back. The fear – a not unreasonable one, to be sure – is that they’ll never be allowed to grow past those mistakes and thus they’d rather stay in the community than face the humiliation of having to admit that they were part of it.
So with this in mind, and to drag this back to your question, RPR: the points you’ve brought up are actually valid. The issues you bring up – such as the question of child custody after divorce, suicide rates for men being higher than women and more men being incarcerated than women are very real.
The problem, however, is that this never gets at the actual reasons for these conditions. And it’s not – as the saying goes – because sperm is (biologically) cheap and eggs are expensive. The problem is that the people who bring up these talking points never dig even slightly into why these conditions exist. It’s just taken as writ that it’s some inherent unfairness against men, at which point the questioner stops interrogating their own assumptions.
(Incidentally, that bit of evopsych is frequently quoted and just as frequently misapplied. Whenever it’s brought up as proof of why humans do anything, you should look at the conclusions with deep suspicion, and I include my own older writings in that.)
It also is notable that the people who bring up these questions are rarely asking for solutions. More often than not, what they’re doing is just complaining. When they talk about how high the incarceration rate is for men, how men are more prone to complete suicide attempts or to die in risky or dangerous jobs, there’s rarely any actual attempt to wrestle with these issues. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a lot of people who pose these questions to others think that the answer is to increase the number of women in prisons or who die in unsafe working conditions rather than, y’know, investing in judicial reforms, increased safety regulations and enforcing the laws that already on the books.
But before we even get to that, let’s actually dig into the truth of these statements that get thrown around as articles of faith – such as the fact that women get primary custody of children in divorce proceedings. This is actually not the entire truth; women tend to get primary custody of children in divorce proceedings because in the overwhelming majority of straight divorce cases, the parents mutually agree to give primary custody to the mother without the involvement of the courts. Men rarely ask for primary custody, and when they do, they’re more likely to actually get it.
Much of this is because in most cases, the mother is, in fact, the primary caregiver of the children. This isn’t a matter of opinion; this is both something that is regularly agreed to be the case by the parents, and statistically factual. In recent studies, it was found that married fathers on average spend around 6 hours per week as the primary child care activities while mothers spend 13 hours per week. If the father is the primary breadwinner of the family, he’s more likely to be out of the house more frequently than the mother and have fewer hours to devote to child care – which also factors into custody arrangements. And in many cases, the fathers don’t seem to actually care about custody until the divorce.
Now, one could argue that legal and judicial bias plays a role here – and you’d be correct. In many states and countries, it was a matter of law to prefer giving primary custody to the mother. This has actually changed, as many states passed laws to take a neutral stance over child custody preference, but in cases where custody is challenged in court, judges often lean towards giving the mother custody. But the reason why this bias exists is because society as a whole tends to define child care as a maternal role. And the people who are most likely to promote and enforce that role… are men. I mean s--t, I remember the sheer number of movies and TV shows in my lifetime where the premise was the inherent comedy of a man as the primary caregiver for children or playing a nurturing role instead of the role of “father”. And the people who wrote, produced and greenlit those movies and shows: all men.
The same thing applies to things like men dying in dangerous jobs; the reason why men die in mining jobs or working as longshoremen or other high-risk industries and why men die in combat roles in the military isn’t that women “refuse” to take those jobs. Quite the opposite in fact; in almost every case, you will find that there were actual laws passed that forbade women from working in those industries and in those roles. Those were laws passed by men, while women actively campaigned to have them repealed. Even when those laws were repealed and women were technically allowed to work in those roles, they were frequently harassed, intimidated, threatened and even assaulted until they quit – often with the tacit approval of management or commanding officers. There have been a multitude of quite high-profile legal actions by women to be given the right to work high-risk jobs, to take combat roles in the military and to otherwise have the same rights to risk their lives for pay as men.
In fact, at the time of this writing, Democrats in the U.S. Senate put forth an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill that would mandate women having to sign up for selective service at age 18, the same as men do. This amendment is being opposed by conservative male senators like Josh Hawley and Roger Wicker. So it’s disingenuous and ignorant at best to state that women want equality except in these cases.
But what about higher rates of male incarceration, higher rates of death by violence and higher rates of completed suicide attempts? These are equally easy to explain. It’s not a matter of women having it easier or judicial bias; it’s a matter that men are far less likely to seek out help for mental health issues such as depression than women, far less likely to even acknowledge that there is a problem and are far more encouraged to respond to conflicts with violence. And again, it’s not women who are telling men that they shouldn’t go to therapy or to respond to everything with their fists. It’s men.
(I would also note that when the issue of incarceration rates are brought up, the fact that it’s primarily men of color who have higher rates of incarceration is pointedly left out… which is its own can of worms).
When incels or MGTOWs and the rest complain about actual societal issues causing harm, they’re correct in as much as that these issues exist and are a serious and significant problem that often goes overlooked. But what they leave out or ignore is that these are all entirely the result of restrictive, toxic ideas and beliefs about how men are supposed to be, and the voices complaining about them are the same ones who laugh, dismiss or actively hinder attempts to fix them. S--t, the person who invented the term “toxic masculinity” wasn’t some fire-breathing 2nd Wave Dworkinite radical feminist, it was Shepard Bliss, the founder of the mythopoetic men’s movement.
How many Red Pillers or MGTOWs do you think would accept the idea of, say, being better communicators and being more in tune with their emotions – or at least emotions that go beyond rage, lust or stoic indifference – as the solution to their loneliness issues? How many would push back against the idea of deeper, more emotionally intimate and open relationships between male friends as the cure for the loneliness epidemic for men? How many point to greater gender equality as the problem as opposed to a willingness to grow, change and actually treat women as potential partners, rather than submissive servants who shouldn’t be allowed to outshine their male partners?
The same goes for incels. It’s true that there are men who struggle with the ability to find and foster relationships with women, for a multitude of reasons. However, much of the reason why they struggle and continue to struggle isn’t some inherent unfairness of the universe that they don’t measure up to bulls--t and artificial standards of masculinity. The problem is in no small part that they don’t see those standards as artificial and bulls--t. Instead of recognizing that the system that they’re trying to be part of is almost custom-designed to harm and exclude them, they are pissed off that they are failing the system. The hate they feel is turned inward at themselves for not living up to standards that literally no human on earth can actually measure up to and that punishes them for even the slightest deviation, rather than recognizing that the system is the problem.
It’s like the way that people continue to misunderstand the point of Fight Club (and come on, you had to know Fight Club was going to come up): Ed Norton’s character is never happier or more at peace with himself when he’s allowing himself to cry and express emotions. It’s when he (via his alter ego as Tyler Durden) decides that the solution to their problems with the system is that they need to recreate the same system, but more so that his life falls to s--t and gets progressively worse as the movie goes on.
As I said: the issues you mention are real, those concerns are legitimate. But the conclusions you’re drawing from them are at best ignorant and incorrect and at worst an attempt at gish-galloping rather than an honest and good-faith discussion of the problems. Because the ultimate reason for why these situations exist isn’t that “women have all decided that it should be so”. It is the case that society has decided that men are an expendable gender… it’s just that the people who decided this were other men. To paraphrase Kieron Gillen (who was, himself, paraphrasing Laurie Penny): patriarchy doesn’t mean “rule by men, it means rule by fathers, and most men will never be allowed to become fathers.”
Now this doesn’t mean that the solution to the struggle of trying to meet women and form relationships is to become a thunderous radical determined to bring down masculinity. Nor does it entail a belief that all men are evil and bad and all things male are to be avoided at all costs – no matter what the Red Pill fellow-travelers might say.
Rather, the first step is to recognize that so much of the reasons why you – and people like you – struggle are the bulls--t restrictions on how men are “supposed” to be and how much it limits men’s emotional, social and spiritual growth. Much as a bird in a tiny cage will end with deformed and atrophied wings that leave it unable to fly, a man trapped in the “man box” (to use Tony Porter’s term) is going to find himself stunted and restrained. Learning to both recognize that the box exists in the first place and to step outside that box is the first step towards the growth and improvement needed to actually access your potential and to become someone who can be a full-fledged partner in relationships.
Asking these questions is a good first step. But the next step is to actually look for the actual answers to how those circumstances came to be and why. Once you see just how much these toxic ideals have poisoned you, your friends and your community, it’s hard not to see its effects in so many areas. And to be sure: it is a struggle to break out of those beliefs, in no small part because we’ve all grown up in it for so long that we don’t realize it’s there. It’s the classic “fish have no word for water”. But once you do, and once you start challenging and testing those supposed “rules” and realizing how many of them are fake, you can start to grow to the man you were always meant to be.
It’s time to let go of the chains that’ve been holding you back, to slip those restrictive tethers and finally let yourself soar.
Good luck.
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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com