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Notes -
Yeah, the rise of incels seems to be the strongest evidence you can get that the sexual revolution failed on its own terms, rember, it promised to bring cheap, easy and free sex to all who wanted it, not just women.
I'm honestly unsure about the whole notion of "inceldom" but certainly there are people out there who were raised on the promise of "everyone can have love and sex; everyone has a right to love and sex; you deserve love and sex" and, for whatever reason, they're not getting that. Of course they feel aggrieved and cheated.
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I don’t think it’s actually good evidence.
The term basically correlated with the rise of the Internet, which from its start was an extremely nerdy space. Geeks complaining about getting girls is not a new phenomenon. Does it predate the sexual revolution? I would assume so, but I could also believe the transition from manufacturing and agriculture to service led to a segmentation of men. Then that’s really hard to separate from the postwar booms in sex equality and in contraception.
Either way, I think the term “incel” has gotten more popular due to its sneering value. As the Internet became more mainstream, its social games got further from weird subcultures and closer to high school. The nerdy virgin is a natural target! So I’d expect to see the concept skyrocket in popularity whether or not there were actually more sexless men.
Again, I’m not arguing that sexual dynamics are unchanged. I’m saying that if the term “incel” didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent it.
Agree that the term ‘incel’ is basically just a replacement for ‘nerd’ at this point, but pre-first sexual Revolution norms probably did advantage intelligent but not particularly charming or good looking men at least relative to today and probably relative to the ‘chads’ of the day. Now of course it also seems reasonable to point out that it doesn’t appear that anyone wants to go back to them except for a minority of fundamentalists.
Now I don’t think that post first but pre second sexual Revolution norms were a stable equilibrium but it does seem worth pointing out that setting our sexual norm clocks to 1950 AD would not benefit geeky men very much. Setting them to 1890 AD might, but I don’t think that’s what incel redpill types wanting to undo the sexual revolution actually want.
I wonder.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about Lord Byron, but pre-feminist society was clearly not immune to the sexualization of wealth and power. There were still haves and have-nots; it’s just that the haves were almost never women or poor. The rake was traditionally a nobleman. Catherine II of Russia is the leading example of a woman getting her pick of lovers, and it led the British to note her “masculine force of mind.”
This raises the question: if Lord Byron was boinking all the eligible ladies and chambermaids, were they removed from the marriage pool? Was his hypergamy creating a class of forlorn bachelors?
Or, for a darker version—did mass male casualties, as in the Napoleonic Wars, leave a cadre of incel women?
I think not, but can’t be sure why. Perhaps the have-nots just kept a stiff upper lip and devoted their lives to God. Or perhaps the necessity of a husband made for more slack in the system. Still, I find it hard to believe that today’s incels face a harder dating market than various historical periods.
I’m pretty sure that the rigid class structure of, say, the regency era created a relief valve by allowing scandalized women or men who couldn’t find suitable brides to marry below their station. Of course, one has to imagine that it’s more efficient for everybody to just pretend that one of lord Byron’s conquests ‘didn’t go past kissing, I swear’ in a lot of cases, too.
It seems like in general that the existence of mistresses is a similar phenomenon, and one should note that mistresses were almost never from the same social class as their married lovers. Hypergamy was an accepted method of upwards social mobility for both men and women(although with restrictions on it).
Your other point- about the napoleonic wars- seems well taken. I’d assume that yes, there were lots of French women who became prostitutes or lived with their sister and brother in law or whatever because they couldn’t find a husband, but that leads me to the general question of how well did higher male mortality rates balance out with deaths in childbirth? Unfortunately what the marriage market was like is only really documented towards the end of the period, when maternal mortality was in sharp decline.
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To identify the strongest evidence there is, I suggest going back to the comment that started this all: "There is an unstated (on the progressive side) premise among all people that casual sex is a bad deal for women and devalues or dishonors them in some way". The fact - and I think it's safe to treat this as fact at this point - that average, mainstream liberal women, and I imagine many of their male hangers-on as well share this view and are willing to voice it, although mostly anonymously - again, we're talking about average normies, not incels - says a lot.
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