There's one major problem with the whole incel / "sexual marketplace disruption" / hypergamy story. While there is a rise in male sexlesness, the reasons are not what Mark here believes they are.
The US federal government conducts studies of the population, including the General Social Survey, the National Health Survey, and the National Survey of the Family. They show a very mixed picture.
The general consensus is that the number of men who didn't have sex in the past year has risen from a fairly steady average of 17% to 21% last year. The number of men who've never had sex has risen from 9% to 12%.
Both of these rises have happened over the past decade from record lows the year just before the Great Recession, crossing the average mark four years later and continuing steadily to current record highs.
There are a number of possibilities for the rise of year-over-year male sexlessness. The Institute for Family Studies result points to an economic anxiety, but not the kind the Trumpists trumpet.
Young men are simply more aware of their economic precarity. Either they or their parents lost jobs, homes, and savings. They're unwilling to engage in "family-forming activities." That's one explanation.
Another is Internet saturation. In 1996 we watched a fascinating phenomenon: broadband penetration at the county level was strongly correlated with a reduction of sexual assault, sometimes as high as 50%. See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601/evidence-mounts-more-porn-less-sexual-assault
The weak consensus is that the availability of Internet pornography satisfied (or at least) exhausted young men who would otherwise be inclined to take their frustration out on others. I suspect this is the same phenomenon writ large.
There was a lot of news last year about how young men are preferring and enjoying the easy and dramatic dopamine rewards of video games to the effort of finding work, resulting in a drop in work engagement. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/upshot/why-some-men-dont-work-video-games-have-gotten-really-good.html
I suspect this phenomenon of sexlessness is similar: there are enough distractions in a young man's life that he could literally look up from his X-Box controller to realize, "Oh, heck, I didn't get laid last year."
The first cinematically capable consoles came out in 2005. The recession gave young men an excuse to play a lot of games and… some of them just never stopped.
Besides, getting laid is complicated. Difficult. Rife with emotional labor at a time when women are asking men to be as skilled at it as women are. Mark's bitching amounts to: "We want to go back to the time when callous masculine autopilot was acceptable."
So yes, there's a small but significant rise in male sexlessness, but it's reasons are not the story Mark wants to hear. What accounts for the noise level? For that, we can blame 4Chan and the Isla Vista murders.
Ordinary, healthy people can get emotionally wedged into a state of mind completely broken from reality. Cults rely on this fact. Back before the N-chan anonymous forums, emotionally damaged guys generally fumed in silence.
4Chan gave them a place to fume together. Out loud. Incel boards gave these sad men a reason to get out of bed in the morning and exert themselves, if only at the keyboard, to ever-more-depraved depictions of women and relationships.
Then Isla Vista happened, and then Toronto. Their ideas broke out into the open. NYT pundits asked seriously about it without asking if the underlying assumptions were correct. They weren't.
Meanwhile, the Incel chatrooms continue to be festering pools of terrorism. The young man who shot up his high school in Texas this week shot his ex-girlfriend first: https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/997647699192270848
These "lone wolf" killers are, either on the incel boards or on incel-adjacent "bitching about women" forums on video game sites. The most broken men are being given their targets. See: https://psmag.com/social-justice/how-white-american-terrorists-are-radicalized
The simple fact is that incels have always been with us, but now they have a place where they kind wind each other up until one of them breaks and commits murder. Misogyny needs to be monitored just as much as white supremacy or Christian nationalism.
The rest of the men need to buck up and learn to take on the hard work of relating to women fairly and openly. That's the whole story. Everything else is just whining.
The US federal government conducts studies of the population, including the General Social Survey, the National Health Survey, and the National Survey of the Family. They show a very mixed picture.
The general consensus is that the number of men who didn't have sex in the past year has risen from a fairly steady average of 17% to 21% last year. The number of men who've never had sex has risen from 9% to 12%.
Both of these rises have happened over the past decade from record lows the year just before the Great Recession, crossing the average mark four years later and continuing steadily to current record highs.
There are a number of possibilities for the rise of year-over-year male sexlessness. The Institute for Family Studies result points to an economic anxiety, but not the kind the Trumpists trumpet.
Young men are simply more aware of their economic precarity. Either they or their parents lost jobs, homes, and savings. They're unwilling to engage in "family-forming activities." That's one explanation.
Another is Internet saturation. In 1996 we watched a fascinating phenomenon: broadband penetration at the county level was strongly correlated with a reduction of sexual assault, sometimes as high as 50%. See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601/evidence-mounts-more-porn-less-sexual-assault
The weak consensus is that the availability of Internet pornography satisfied (or at least) exhausted young men who would otherwise be inclined to take their frustration out on others. I suspect this is the same phenomenon writ large.
There was a lot of news last year about how young men are preferring and enjoying the easy and dramatic dopamine rewards of video games to the effort of finding work, resulting in a drop in work engagement. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/upshot/why-some-men-dont-work-video-games-have-gotten-really-good.html
I suspect this phenomenon of sexlessness is similar: there are enough distractions in a young man's life that he could literally look up from his X-Box controller to realize, "Oh, heck, I didn't get laid last year."
The first cinematically capable consoles came out in 2005. The recession gave young men an excuse to play a lot of games and… some of them just never stopped.
Besides, getting laid is complicated. Difficult. Rife with emotional labor at a time when women are asking men to be as skilled at it as women are. Mark's bitching amounts to: "We want to go back to the time when callous masculine autopilot was acceptable."
So yes, there's a small but significant rise in male sexlessness, but it's reasons are not the story Mark wants to hear. What accounts for the noise level? For that, we can blame 4Chan and the Isla Vista murders.
Ordinary, healthy people can get emotionally wedged into a state of mind completely broken from reality. Cults rely on this fact. Back before the N-chan anonymous forums, emotionally damaged guys generally fumed in silence.
4Chan gave them a place to fume together. Out loud. Incel boards gave these sad men a reason to get out of bed in the morning and exert themselves, if only at the keyboard, to ever-more-depraved depictions of women and relationships.
Then Isla Vista happened, and then Toronto. Their ideas broke out into the open. NYT pundits asked seriously about it without asking if the underlying assumptions were correct. They weren't.
Meanwhile, the Incel chatrooms continue to be festering pools of terrorism. The young man who shot up his high school in Texas this week shot his ex-girlfriend first: https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/997647699192270848
These "lone wolf" killers are, either on the incel boards or on incel-adjacent "bitching about women" forums on video game sites. The most broken men are being given their targets. See: https://psmag.com/social-justice/how-white-american-terrorists-are-radicalized
The simple fact is that incels have always been with us, but now they have a place where they kind wind each other up until one of them breaks and commits murder. Misogyny needs to be monitored just as much as white supremacy or Christian nationalism.
The rest of the men need to buck up and learn to take on the hard work of relating to women fairly and openly. That's the whole story. Everything else is just whining.
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