Ask A Genius 416 – Unable, Cannot, Don’t Want To
October 18, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Obviously, you know about Incels.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Right, I didn’t know about them until the attacks in Canada.
Rosner: I didn’t either. It means a creepy guy who can’t get laid.
Jacobsen: Or a resentful guy who can’t get laid, it could be the nice guy but turned bad.
Rosner: Yes, it is all rolled into a creepy guy. Once they call themselves an incel, it is bad. When guys are faced with not being able to get a girlfriend, there are several reactions that they can have, “Maybe, someday, I am only 15 or 18. Most people eventually find partners.”
Another reaction that I had starting too early. I didn’t do anything about it. It didn’t work for me, for a long time, “What can I do to make myself more worthy of getting a girlfriend?”
Jacobsen: At the same time, it puts women on a pedestal and can be unhealthy too. It can be a barrier because it is a turnoff.
Rosner: You have to be reasonable about it. But you cannot be reasonable until you have educated yourself.
Jacobsen: If a guy or gal are looking for a long-term relationship, men need to know that, in general, financial stability is the most important, according to surveys.
Rosner: I started in high school. They are not looking for financial stability. You can be patient. You can address it by trying to improve yourself and trying to learn more about social relations or, the third thing, simply guys getting hostile and predatory.
They get really mad. They feel entitled to sex.
Jacobsen: You can see demographic trends. If you look at mass school shootings, 92 of the 94 in a decade and a half long period in the United States were men. Most were aged 17. 2 weren’t.
The most probable group are young men aged 17 who are white by a race or Caucasian by ethnicity. This may come out of the Incel community. Even though, if you take into account that there are more white males than other males in North America, the majority of them will be white males, still.
Rosner: I agree with that to some extent. But a bunch of guys may gravitate to simply wanting a killing spree, wanting to do this thing. A lot of them find an issue to justify the killing spree.
The Incel thing can be one of those things. You can go with ISIS, the Incel thing, or being screwed over at work. But it is a chicken and egg thing. Which came first? The ISIS affiliation, the Incel thinking, the being pissed off at your boss, I would say in some cases that the urge to kill a lot of people – as a cool way to go out – came first.
Jacobsen: I suspect the Incel community is minor and still reflective of a larger phenomenon. If you look at the Kurdish community, one ravaged by war. In many stories, these can be people who have gone through a trauma but react in the manner of building culture rather than being reactionary.
It was pointed out to me. That rape as a tool of war remains prominent. The boys and men are killed off. The girls and women are raped. It is the state and the soldiers feeling as if they own the female form or women and girls.
Incel communities reflect this. They feel entitled to sex with people simply for their existing.
Rosner: They reflect attitudes but are a small example of what can happen.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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Rick Rosner 