• WatDabney@fedia.io
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    4 days ago

    Holy fuck I’m glad I’m not growing up now. This whole “incel” thong just makes me so fucking mad.

    We have a subset of adolescent males who are harassed amd bullied and depressed and self-destructive, and how does the rest of socirty respond? The best they can manage is to gridgingly say things like:

    You can both condemn their ideology and find it abhorrent and also remember that we need to have empathy for these people."

    Many people—women especially—might find that a tall order, and Beckett-Herbert understands that reluctance. “I do understand people’s hesitancy to empathize with them, because it feels like you’re giving credence to their rhetoric,” she said. “But at the end of the day, they are human, and a lot of them are really struggling, marginalized people coming from pretty sad backgrounds. When you peruse their online world, it’s the most horrifying, angering misogyny right next to some of the saddest mental health, suicidal, low self-esteem stuff you’ve ever seen. I think humanizing them and having empathy is going to be foundational to any intervention efforts to reintegrate them. But it’s something I wrestle with a lot.”

    How nice. You think maybe you should try to empathize with them and remember that they are human beings, but gee… that’s a tall order. You’re not sure if you can actually do it.

    And then you have the gall to wonder why they exist - how they got to be that way. You should, if you genuinely want to do something about them, be offering them help to deal with their struggles before they even get to that stage. But no - you won’t do that. Fuck them - they’re boys, so they’re on their own.

    We can care about the well-being of women and girls and also acknowledge that young men are struggling, too. Those don’t have to be at odds."

    So that’s the best you can do? You “care about” girls and women but can only maybe manage to “acknowleedge” boys and men? And you still don’t understand the appeal of the manosphere?

    "There is evidence that men who are short or not conventionally attractive are discriminated against in hiring.

    So right there - there is evidence that one of the things the incel community complains about is in fact true.

    But do you even acknowledge it? Nope.

    “But there’s also a lot of evidence suggesting that this actually affects women more. Women who are overweight face a greater bias against them in hiring than men do, for example.”

    You just breeze right past it and dismiss their feelings entirely, because girls and women have it worse.

    Seriously, you still don’t get how we ended up with a generation of boys who think the world shits on them and girls and women get preferential treatment? Even after you just shat on them and gave girls preferential treatment?

    Here’s va fucking news flash, since so many people are apparentlybtoo fucking stupid to figure itvout - if you all actually cared about thecstruggles boys are going through and listened to them and took them seriously and tried to help them, they wouldn’t have to turn to the manosphere to find someone who gives a shit about them.

    It’s not complicated, so you have no fucking excuse. Stop belittling boys and treating their problems as if they somehow don’t count.

    If the best you can manage is to maybe “acknoeledge” boys’ problems, even as you “care about” girls’, and you can’t even mention a problem boys experience without immediately shifting your focus away from them and to girls, then the boys aren’t the real problem - you are.

    • Shardikprime@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Holy shit an actual comment acknowledging the situation written about in the article?

      And not only that, but showing actual empathy?

      God-damn, this must be what finding actual gold feels like!

    • werty@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      They hate women, want to rape them and remove their rights, so women, utterly predictably, hate them back. It’s not complicated. Try telling black people to empathise with the poor little white supremacists more and see how far you get.

      Incels aren’t new btw. I tried to read 1984 recently and had to stop because the main character is an incel.

      • WatDabney@fedia.io
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        4 days ago

        I must’ve missed the part where Winston Smith hated women and wanted to rape them and remove their rights.

        Either that or you’ve blithely and inaccurately assigned a particularly noxious set of behaviors and beliefs purportedly engaged in and held by some members of a group to the group collectively, and thus to each and every member of it individually.

        Which is the very definition of bigotry.

      • WatDabney@fedia.io
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        4 days ago

        There was a time in our history when instant hatred of blacks was the norm too, and people then would’ve no doubt also been lost by any effort to fault the haters instead of the hated.

        And before you even go there, they also would’ve been able to trot out a list of reasons why their hatred was purportedly justified.

        At some point in the future (if we have a future) people will figure out that boys need and deserve help and sympathy because they too face hardships, and they’ll provide it for them, rather than just leaving them to deal with it on their own, then blaming them for turning to a bunch of toxic assholes who have made a comfortable living out of offering boys the help and support and affirmation they’re not getting elsewhere.

        Until then, unfortunately, I expect to keep seeing a large chunk of society alternately disregard boys at best if not outright condemn them out of hand, then cry about the fact that they’re turning to the manosphere for support and affirmation.