Every so often a woman writes something online that makes me want to punch her until my fist comes out the other side of her head, but I can’t do that, because they’d send me back to prison.
This time around, what got my Irish up is an article with the verb-free headline “The Pandemic of Lonely Men Not Women’s Problem,” which was written by a certain Melanie Allen, whose looks are, thankfully, not my problem.
Here are some choice nuggets of supreme self-unawareness from Ms. Allen, who of course has to include in her bio that she loves her cats:
Journalists nationwide are covering the hottest new pandemic that gets them clicks: the pandemic of lonely men. . . . Major publications like Psychology Today, and BBC’s Science Focus have covered the problem, saying COVID destroyed men’s social lives in particular, and the endemic of loneliness in men causes them undo [sic] hardship and suffering. . . . Men fail to understand that they aren’t competing with other men. They are competing with the happiness and fulfillment a woman can provide herself. And they’re failing spectacularly. . . . With advances in women’s rights, women gained the ability to take care of themselves. . . . Men think they can continue to be lazy, incompetent users while attracting a desirable partner. They believe women should flock to them solely based on the fact that they’re a man. Men must step up and contribute if they want to attract a mate. . . . They must enhance a woman’s life rather than make it more difficult.
The idea that men need to “step up” to alleviate their gnawing romantic loneliness was echoed in a 2022 Psychology Today article by Dr. Greg Matos called “What’s Behind the Rise of Lonely, Single Men”:
Men need to address their deficits to meet healthier relationship expectations. . . . Men have a key role in this transformation but only if they go all-in. It’s going to take that kind of commitment to themselves, to their mental health, and to the kind of love they want to generate in the world. Will we step up?
It makes you want to step on the face of anyone who tells you to step up.
Repeat after me: Whenever men have a problem, it’s men’s fault. And whenever women have a problem, it’s also men’s fault. It’s mystifying how men just can’t catch a break in this patriarchy.
Then again, there’s a very weird and pervasive online subculture that is ostensibly designed to address and alleviate this double standard but only winds up cementing male loneliness by blaming all of men’s problems on women. As a result, men who immerse themselves in this subculture end up even more bitter and lonely, fairly ensuring that their problems will never be solved. Some of them wind up as mass shooters.
I am referring, but of course, to the established “incel community.” I’ve been mocking them for some time now. Many readers seem to understand why I mock this community, but others don’t, so I need to hash out my terms here and distinguish between a regular ol’ “incel” and a self-identified member of the “incel community.”
The word “incel” is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate.” In other words, it’s someone who wants to get laid but can’t. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise doesn’t understand that the “wants-to-get-laid-but-can’t” part is baked into the word.
In my late teens and early twenties, I was an incel who endured bleak phases of crippling loneliness. I desperately wanted a girlfriend, or even a woman to wink at me every once in a while, but I always came up empty. Never once, though, did it occur to me that I should blame women for this problem.
I have abundant sympathy for men who desire a mate, or even a girlfriend, but can’t find one. My criticisms of the “incel community” are strictly confined to the established online network of self-identified incels who are mired in an acutely miserable online support group that only reinforces their problems.
A poster on Kiwi Farms summarized the crucial difference between incels and the “incel community” a couple years ago:
Incels™ (with a capital I and a trademark symbol) are a cult. I mean that in a 100% literal sense. They have their own saints, their own jargon, their own purity tests, they disown/punish apostates (just look at how they react to incels who eventually escape/have sex), and most importantly, they prey on lonely people. I feel like most people don’t understand this about cults. Cults don’t target stupid people, or evil people, they target LONELY PEOPLE. . . . I think a major issue that has perpetuated the incel problem has been the mixing of the term to mean both the cult of Incels (the killers and their followers) and guys who just can’t get laid. I would say the majority of incels fall into the later [sic] group, they’re just socially maladjusted men who are struggling with dating.
Because of my experiences when I was younger, I would never mock some poor sap who seeks female companionship but can’t find it. My beef with the “incel community” is that it seems custom-built, almost maliciously so, to ensure that incels remain incels until death.
The boilerplate response to my criticisms of this acutely pathetic online circle jerk is that I have no idea how awful women are these days and that I am horrifyingly unaware of how the dating scene has changed dramatically since the 1920s, or whenever it was that my boomer ass was out fishing for chicks.
Sure. I have no idea how awful women are these days. I definitely didn’t write an entire book about how the most violent and malicious woman I’ve ever met sent me to prison after her endless threats and assaults finally led me to give her a taste of her own medicine with extreme prejudice.
And until about four years ago when I finally found a good woman, I certainly wasn’t living alone and cruising those crushingly depressing dating apps, dipping my wick in an exhausting string of overmedicated, unemployed, self-absorbed, endlessly whiny and entitled cooches who seemed to exist merely to create problems and stir up chaos just for the fun of it. And the scariest thing of all was that no matter how zonked-out and aimless their lives were, none of them seemed the least bit bothered by their plight. Fact is, women have automatic governmental and societal support whenever they break a fingernail or stub their toe, whereas men who experience any kind of misfortune or loneliness are laughed at and told to “step up.”
Just yesterday, The Hill published an article titled “Most young men are single. Most young women are not.”:
Young men commit suicide at four times the rate of young women. . . . As of 2022, Pew Research Center found, 30 percent of U.S. adults are neither married, living with a partner nor engaged in a committed relationship. Nearly half of all young adults are single: 34 percent of women, and a whopping 63 percent of men.
That “whopping” disparity can be explained by the rise of lesbian relationships and the statistical fact that young women, money-grubbing bleeding gashes that they are, aren’t above dating older and wealthier men, whereas young men, for obvious biological reasons, aren’t attracted to older women whose eggs have already fossilized.
I’ve been writing since the early 1990s about how appalling the gender double standards have been and how men have been scapegoated for everything wrong that happens between men and women, no matter how screamingly guilty the woman is in any given situation.
But even I didn’t think things would get this bad.
We have a whole generation of young men who are desperately lonely but don’t get a drop of sympathy because they’re living in a culture that blames men for everything.
What I’m trying to say is that I care. I care so much that I harbor a seething disdain for the carnival-barking clowns who exploit male loneliness by offering schemes and alibis which cause such soul-smashing loneliness to metastasize with every tick of the clock. Just like feminism creates lonely cat ladies, the established “incel community” creates miserable men. It’s just as bad for men as feminism has been for women. No, it’s even worse, because whereas female self-pity seems to be encoded in their DNA, men should know better than to fall into that trap.
By Jim Goad