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Aug. 22, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:58
The Deep Nastiness of the "Incel" Slur - and the Damage Caused by "Alpha Males"
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Alright, so let's talk some basic facts about men and women.
This incel slur is really bothersome to anyone with kind of a heart or a head, for that matter.
And, you know, there's this usual thing, well, if you're bothered by incels, it's because you're an incel.
It's all nonsense. I'm happily married.
I never had any trouble getting dates when I was younger.
I was a good-looking, charismatic, charming, British-accented fellow in my general tour of the colony, so it's not that.
It's something much deeper that is troubling about this whole incel thing.
So for those who don't know, incel is, in short for, involuntarily celibate.
In other words, a man who wants, he's not a monk, he's not a MGTOW, he's a guy who wants dates but can't get dates in particular sexual activity, I suppose.
I was part of the problem when I was younger because as, you know, a tall, good-looking, athletic, charismatic, verbally acute young man, I was able to get dates with lots of girls.
And this was, you know, in hindsight, it's pretty horrible.
It was pretty nasty. Now, I mean, I played Dungeons& Dragons when I was a teenager in my sort of early to mid-teens.
So let's, I guess, be pretty frank and say...
I knew some of the men, or the boys at that time, whose sexual or romantic possibilities I was pillaging as a result of my own vanity and insecurity and being raised by a single mom and high emphasis on our selected hypersexuality and so on.
So I kind of get...
That I was definitely part of the problem when I was younger because this funny thing has kind of happened under feminism, right?
So this is the way that it used to work back in the days when you had monogamous pair bonding, right?
As the result of no welfare state, there was no birth control pill, there was Christianity, there was religion, there was enforcement from the elders and so on.
Like you wouldn't let your daughter...
Get involved to the point where she would have a child out of wedlock because in the absence of the welfare state, you as the, I guess, grandparent would have to take her in or force the guy to marry her.
It would just be a big mess. So back in the days of pair bonding, what used to happen is...
You ever do this thing when you are a kid?
I'm sure you did, right? So you go, you play baseball or you play soccer or whatever it is, and the kids are kind of mulled there.
You get two team leaders and then the team leaders kind of pick the kids that they want to be on their team.
It's kind of a humiliating process, but it's kind of important so that you figure out where you are in the pecking order.
Like if you want to be good at sports, but you're being picked later, then you want to practice and up your game and so on, right?
Now, That process of picking and choosing used to happen in the sexual market as well.
So what would happen is the high status males would get snapped up fairly quickly by the high status females.
And what that would do We'll just talk about a sort of female to male.
It would take the high-status males off the market.
So let's say, you know, you're tall, athletic, good-looking, come from a good family, maybe stand to inherit some money, you're smart, you're going to get well-educated.
So those men get snapped up fairly quickly.
There's a fierce competition for those, you could say, alpha males or high-value males.
And then they're off the market.
And then this is the second tier of males then get snapped up.
And, you know, you kind of just bid until you get someone who's going to stay with you.
And that process was really, really important because it eliminated the highest value males from the dating pool because they'd get snapped up pretty early.
Now... That's kind of changed now, insofar as the high-status males that women wish to hypergamy their way, like women want to date up, they want to marry up, which is one of the big problems in modern societies.
Women get more educated and earn higher incomes.
It means that there's a smaller and smaller pool of men for them to date, right?
A woman generally wants to date a man who makes more than she does, who's taller, who's good-looking, who's well-educated, and that's a very, very small number.
A small amount of the population of males, right?
To be, you know, tall, athletic, good-looking, wealthy, intelligent, from a good family, well-educated.
I mean, we're talking low single digits in terms of percent of the population, even more so if you wish to date within your own race.
So these high-status males stay on the market, and it's kind of like a A harem for them, right?
It's sort of like porn come to life in terms of their access.
And I remember I was in a play when I was in high school, Thornton Wilders, Our Town.
And I remember one of the girls at our after party got a little tipsy.
And I walked her home and dropped her off with her parents.
But before I did, as we were walking home, she said, Steph, you're gorgeous, but you flirt with everyone.
It's like, yeah, well... It's a little true.
And unfair, right?
And unfair to the average.
I was not a high-quality person necessarily in terms of great maturity and so on.
But, you know, it was unfair.
And so what's happened now is because the high-status males don't get taken off the market, what happens is they just continue to date and date and date.
And then you get... 80% of women chasing the 20% of men.
And then how do the women differentiate themselves from the other women?
Well, a lot of times what they'll do is they'll provide fairly early and easy sexual access in the hope of You know, activating the oxytocin or whatever it is, the sort of bonding hormone that happens with men and women during sex, hoping, I suppose, that she can lock down the deal to bag a permanent relationship with the high-status male by giving up sexuality.
And so really what's happened is that this sort of feminist live like a man and let's have a welfare state and all of that, what's happened is it's actually turned society into Into the kind of patriarchy that feminists believed exists in the past,
right? So, in other words, it has promoted, because, you know, the patriarchy idea is the idea that there are a small number of males who control society as a whole, and it's like the tip of the pyramid is testicular and so on.
And what's happened is by promoting all of this hypersexuality and lack of commitment and women trying to date and have sex like men, it's a complete disaster for women.
A complete disaster. Spread of STDs, anxiety, depression, unwanted pregnancies, misery in general, lack of capacity to pair bond, higher divorce rates, more unstable families, more children raised.
I mean, you couldn't really...
Other than sort of immediate sexual gratification through variety, there's almost nothing that has benefited society coming out of this sort of feminist movement.
And what it's done, of course, is it's now kind of created...
The harem-style, top-of-the-pyramid patriarchy with regards to sexual market value that it imagined existed before but didn't, right?
If it's pair-bonding, then it's not really a patriarchy because every man gets a woman.
Every woman gets a man who provides income if she wants babies, which most women used to.
I mean, 90-95% of women used to get married and at least try to have babies and so on.
So when there's a pair bonding culture, then, you know, every guy gets a girl, every girl gets a protector and a provider for her kids and all that if she wants them.
But now what's happening is that you have a supply and demand situation where...
A lot of women are chasing a small number of guys, which actually has created, in terms of dating, sexuality, a real patriarchy, in that men control access now.
And that is really a kind of disaster for women.
And what it's done, of course...
Is it has promoted this promiscuity among women because it's really, really hard to compete.
When there used to be this enforcement of, you know, don't give it up, don't have sex, you know, wait until marriage and so on, if that was socially enforced as it used to be, again, before the welfare state.
The welfare state has allowed women to behave like men a little bit because the man's investment in the act of procreation is, you know, 15 minutes, you know, some sperm and a snooze, right?
And then he can go off and go out about his business.
But of course, if the woman gets pregnant, then, you know, she's got the baby, she's got 20 years of investment.
It's like it's a huge deal.
Now, the welfare state has taken that resource...
Asymmetry out of the equation.
And now a woman can have a child without requiring a protector and provider as she used to.
And that has made female sexuality not as consequence-free as male sexuality, but it's gotten a lot closer, closer than it used to be.
So... When women used to enforce the no-sex rule, then women competed on the grounds for high-value males.
They competed on the grounds of being nice, being positive, being great conversationalists, being smart, being well-read, being cultured, knowing how to play piano, whatever it is, right?
Being a good homemaker and you know if you wanted to be professional that certainly was fine and if that's what the man wanted there was no issue with that.
And so women could compete in the absence of easy sexual access to women.
Women competed on the grounds of equality of character rather than access to vagina.
And moving...
Sexual market value from quality of character to access to sexuality has trivialized and really trashed the dating game in the West, which is why...
And of course, it's allowed women to become...
A lot more mean, a lot more coarse.
I see this on Twitter, the language that comes out of women, the coarseness, the crass sexual references, the constant threats of withholding, for me at least, unwanted sexual access.
I mean, it's very, very coarse.
And that's because women vote to gain resources from the state rather than woo and win resources from a voluntary protector and provider in the form of a man.
It's kind of like if you have a restaurant and the government guarantees you $20,000 or $50,000 a month in revenue, you don't have to be nice to your customers because the customers aren't the source of your revenue anymore.
This is like the Soviet style of restaurant where they get money whether people come in or not, and therefore the waiters who are sitting there smoking and playing cards or whatever, they get resentful when...
A customer comes in because they're going to get paid either way, but one way they don't have to work, right?
And so since women get paid without being nice to men, they don't have to be nice to men.
And unfortunately, civility has a lot to do with voluntarism and where relationships, particularly financial relationships, become coerced.
In other words, non-voluntary, not part of the free market, then behavior coarsens and people just become...
Rude and so on.
And, I mean, you could just think of your experiences when dealing with the tax department or the DMV or maybe even the post office versus dealing with sort of free market or more free market institutions.
Very, very different sort of situation.
The family has been socialized and socialism results in coarseness and meanness and pettiness and, you know, a lack of motivation for positive behavior.
So we have separated sexuality from commitment and we have destroyed the lifelong pair bonding that used to be at the foundation of our society.
And so now we have a lot of men who are kind of having a great time when they're young and I would count myself as one of those.
And men can survive promiscuity more than women can.
And we sort of simply have to understand the evolutionary realities behind that.
It's the before-mentioned investment, the asymmetry of investment in reproduction between men and women, right?
And so women's hearts are getting regularly broken and crumpled.
And I've nabbed an analogy from someone.
I'm not sure exactly who, but, you know, it's like sticky tape, right?
If you keep attaching and detaching scotch tape or sticky tape, it gets less sticky.
It's the same thing with pair bonding.
So because women want to date up and because the high value males are not going off the market but dangling commitment to women a lot of times in order to gain access to sexual favors.
And because if it goes wrong for the woman, she could just jump on the welfare state.
I mean, this is years ago.
I talked about this.
I was at a park with my daughter.
And I was pushing on the swings and I was listening to these two women who were there.
They had older kids who were playing in the park and they had sort of strollers with babies asleep.
And they were very frankly and very calmly talking about, well, you know, if you wait...
To have a baby until this time, then you get access to this benefit.
And then if you have this baby, then you can have this benefit.
And we're just calculating all of the benefits they could get from the government.
No talk of fathers, just resources, right?
Turning children from costs to income was a foundational disaster for the West.
But that's a whole other topic regarding the welfare state as a whole.
So there are a lot of men who are involuntarily celibate because you've got 80% of the women chasing 20% of the men or 90% chasing 10%, all that kind of stuff, right?
And it's a real tragedy.
It's a real shame. A lot of these young men as well have been raised by single mothers.
Now, you don't...
It's something I remember learning quite young or hearing about quite young.
If you're a child, you don't learn how to love by being loved, you know, in terms of how you function as an adult.
You learn how to love by watching your mother and your father...
Being in love with each other, right?
Being affectionate and going back and forth and seeing the inevitable disgruntlements and occasional conflicts that, you know, bubble up in marriage from time to time and seeing them negotiate and work that out.
That's how you learn how to love.
And so boys who grow up without fathers don't see how a man interacts with a woman.
They don't see an adult romantic functional relationship.
Now, of course, it's not like if there's a father there, it's automatically functional, but you kind of get the idea, right?
So if you grow up without a father, you just lose like 20 years of seeing the language of how men and women interact.
And you don't learn how to interact with women by interacting with your mother as a single mom, son, boy, right?
Any more than you can learn, say, Japanese by just hanging around Japanese people.
You have to have a translator.
So translation from masculine to feminine comes through the father.
So a lot of times these young men...
Well, it's a couple of things.
So first of all, they don't a lot of times know how to interact with women because they grew up without a father.
And also, of course, what's happened is because so many of the...
Young women are chasing the high sexual market.
Men, it's kind of not worth it to groom, to, you know, this is the neck beard thing, right?
The beard that goes all, like lack of grooming and so on.
It kind of makes sense. Like, why would you bother?
If you don't have a job interview, why would you bother shaving?
And if it doesn't really matter because the girls are all chasing the high-value alphas, so what's the point?
You might as well stay in and play video games and fap and whatever it is, right?
I mean, so that is also part of it.
The other thing, too, is that because...
If a lot of the qualities of character have diminished for women in terms of how they sort of attract men, then of course, well, if it's not qualities of character, why would you be interested in a woman, right?
If you're a man. I mean, come on, we know this basically.
If the woman is not a nice person, if she's not a nice woman, if she's not a gentle and kind and courageous and virtuous and moral and blah blah blah, if she doesn't have the qualities of character, then why would you be particularly interested in spending time with her?
Well, of course, the only answer is sexual access.
So as sexual access becomes the greater bait for the hook of commitment for women, then they become less valuable in terms of longer-term relationships, neurotic and insecure and aggressive and just all this kind of stuff.
Because we all need reasons to tame our mammal, bestial nature.
We all need reasons to do that.
I mean, we can go either way as a species and we can see when society goes haywire how quickly we descend to barbarism.
So, what's happened is that women have to offer up sexuality as a substitute for qualities of personality, and that means, of course, that when they wish to punish a man, then they threaten to withhold sexuality.
In other words, feminism has made relations between men and women to be, fundamentally these days, among young men and women for the most part, about sexuality.
Sexuality. About sexual actions.
It really coarsened things and made things very gross and semen-y and liquid-y.
It's just flesh. It's meat.
Just meat. Rather than any kind of higher faculties you call the soul or spirituality or abstract consciousness and so on.
And so what's happened is the women...
Have this situation where they attempt to hook a man into a longer-term commitment by providing sexual access.
But that's put them into the role of sort of quasi-cult recruiters, right?
So in a cult, they will love-bomb you, right?
So a cult will... This is why when people say you're a cult leader, it's like, hey, man, people get annoyed at me all the time.
It's pretty much the opposite cult.
People will tell you what you want to hear.
They'll love-bomb you. Everything's great.
You're the best ever, blah, blah, blah.
You know, never trust any person or outfit or outlet or news or whatever that doesn't Fairly regularly annoy and challenge you because it means they're just manipulating you by telling you what you want to hear.
But what's happened is, you know, when you have sex with a woman, you get this bonding hormone and so on.
So it's kind of like a love bomb, right?
It's kind of a deep hole remote control situation, as I said, on Twitter, right?
So women then have to provide sexual access in an attempt to activate the oxytocin bonding of the male.
And that's really, really bad.
It's bad for men, it's bad for women, because that's all designed to pair-bond you to take care of children.
Like, why are there men? Why are there women?
Why is there a sexuality? Why do we have jigsaw puzzle-naughty bits that fit together so enjoyably?
Because of reproduction, because of children, and attempting to hijack that.
For hedonism is a great disaster.
I mean, sex is like the sugar of life.
You know, a little bit is fine in the right proportion, but if you live your life for it, man, you get pretty sick pretty quickly.
So, yeah, I just wanted to talk about the insult thing.
It's really quite an insult.
Men have it very, very tough these days because of the patriarchy that has been created by feminism, and women have it very, very tough.
The solution is a complex conversation, and I look forward to continuing to have it with you.
Stefan Molyneux, hope you're doing well.
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