This was in my high school and early college years, later on in life I was able develop romantic relationships with them and healthy platonic relationships. I’ll be upfront and say a lot of the times if a straight dude hates women vehemently, it’s probably because he’s not getting laid or able to form any semblance of a romance with a woman.
It's good that you've gotten over these impulses, but i have to disagree on using sexual frustration as a general explanation for misogyny. Our gender roles and their policing have material causes. They are holdovers from forcing unpaid reproductive labor on women, and from connecting a man's desirability to his economic success. Women's unpaid labor was a necessity to grow and maintain the workforce, and their ideological subjugation was a consequence of that. Re-inventing man as the breadwinner and woman as his prize for financial success was not the idea of some incel, it was a logical result of economic conditions, propping up and maintaining the status quo.
This is not to say that sexism started with capitalism - it was there before, and these earlier forms had a material foundation as well (such as controlling women's sexuality to guarantee the transference of generational wealth to a proper heir - before paternity tests were a thing, this was achieved by keeping a watchful eye on women so they don't cuck you and let all your land go to some other man's offspring). And some of the ideology that grew around these pre-modern conditions, such as misogyny rooted in Christian dogma, is a holdover from these earlier times. And likewise, we have seen new forms of sexism, new forms of gendered opression in the last decades, changes that align with the transition to late capitalism, where growing the reserve army of labor became a greater concern (leading to a liberal-feminist discourse where a woman's degree of emancipation is measured in her economic success), where the commodification of beauty, romance, sexuality and gender expression was perfected more and more (leading to entire industries built around body policing), where capitalism needed to put on a friendly, woke face and co-opt women more instead of outright subjugating them. The ruling ideology of gender is a complex, historically grown, contradictory ideology. But it is, in most of its aspects, one that has direct materialist roots.
It is not possible to truly move beyond that by just getting everybody laid. A lot of married men are sexist. MGTOW's core demographic are divorcees. If internalized rage at one's virginity was all there was to this subject, we wouldn't have domestic abuse of romantic partners, we wouldn't have this whole tradwife thing, we wouldn't have the very basic fact that being a mother damages your career in ways being a father doesn't.
Yes, that seems at odds with your own experience. Partially, that's because you are talking about your personal situation, i'm talking about the situation of society as a whole. Partially, that's because the ideological superstructure erected on these material foundations takes on a life of its own - the discourse around women in videog*mes is not a direct result of the economic base, it is a distant offshoot of the directly system-maintaining ideology.
If we truly want to end sexism, if we truly want to liberate women, we need a world were reproductive labor is no longer gendered - and no longer unpaid. As long as we don't have that, we'll always fall back into ideas that arose from that basic division.
Misogyny is multi-faceted, you are correct. But sexual frustration is definitely a path to misogyny aided and abetted by online content.
Your last paragraph. I don’t think that would eliminate sexism, but it would be the single most important step in liberating women. Misogynist, when confronted with true liberation of women, may in fact radicalize in the short term
I fully agree on that. Revolutionary class politics are the prerequisite for making marginalized groups not margianalized any longer, not an insta-fix that will magically make all bigotry go poof.
I do not want to deny the importance of psychological factors, either, or write off anyone's lived experience. Ideology affects people's thought processes, and therefore their actions as well, every minute every day. Critique of ideology is crucially important and something we shouldn't forego for a vulgarized, reductive view of materialism.
What i'm saying and why i've written out that post and these replies is that when we look at ideology, we must not stop at ideology. It is just the totallity of OP's conclusion that i object to. Yes, personal frustration is an important factor in bringing people under the fold of misogynist ideology. It is even actively capitalized on by campaigners who want to promote movements that incorporate these ideologies. It is a very powerful angle to work with if you want to recruit people and then drive them towards certain actions, or certain political preferences. But all of that is happening on the individual level. That is what's closest to us and what therefore seems most important and impactful at first, because it's right there before our eyes. But we should always aim to move beyond that, to look first at our social relationships and then at how these tie into a greater societal framework and finally at the material base that societal framwork has been built upon.
Sorry, i have no idea if i'm making any sense, i just had my first bong hit of the day lol
It makes perfect sense. It gives me doomerism to think about how the left doesn’t have structures in place (the “structures” that exist seem to be center left streamers like old contra and Hbomb videos, and now hasan type figures - which includes v*ush)
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This is p good analysis I think
I get your points about how our society has placed us in these weird roles, but I think you're conflating frustrated virgins with angry divorced MGTOW dads. It seems like OP is in the former. The topic gets complex because the angry divorced dads often become the internet mentors to the incel guys by saying things like "my wife stole everything from me so you should avoid what I did!" It also doesn't help that if you're a shy/nerdy/geeky guy, society has been pretty much hammering into you that you gotta be an "alpha to get chicks." Although there's a recent uptick in "nerd culture" and normalization of once derided stuff, there's still the fetishization of traditional beauty standards (i.e. the "hot nerd guy" who plays games but also has a six pack and nice pecs). None of this excuses misogynistic behavior, but it does contextualize it. It seems like OP's diagnosis of sexual frustration may indeed partially apply in some cases (i.e. young, nerdy, outcast kind of guys who never really learned how to socialize).
No, i'm saying that the frustrated virgin, the angry divroced MGTOW dad, that these both take their individual frustration and latch onto existing ideology that permeates vast parts of our culture and has, at its core, nothing to do with their personal relationship status. These emotional issues are extremely important on the individual level, they are driving factors in manosphere recruiting, but that all comes in at a much later stage.
I see. It seems you're pretty well read up on anthropology. It seems like, as you said, that treating women as prized property has been around since way before capitalism. So do you think the angry, frustrated male thing might be something that has just been a part of human history, whether part of "human nature" or not?
I think the popular notion is that it's been around since the agrarian revolution, when you suddenly have the concept of land as inheritable property and generational wealth comes into play.
Angry, frustrated men are an easy pick when you're looking for soldiers, so yeah, that seems likely. That's just an emotional state where a lot of people are receptive to being offered a target to lash out at. My guess is that every form of charismatic rulership could, and in many cases has, utilized emotions as powerful and as easy to stoke as anger. I also think that's a really dangerous thing to do as a movement, government etc. because once you go all in on driving people into a frothing rage, you end up with a bunch of planless berzerkers who tazer their balls or trample each other. I actually view that as one of the inherent flaws of fascism, that they rely so much on their followers being made more and more emotionally malleable. It's definitely not how you win wars. But it's a very easy way to start them.
Talk about "alpha" lol.