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Feb. 1, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:51
Incels: The Desperate Need for a Date
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Now, of course, with pornography and video games, that's the one-two punch to keep what would formerly be a bigger change out of the social marketplace.
But you understand this is why the incels are demonized, right?
Incels are demonized because incels have no stake in the social situation.
I'm not talking morals here.
I'm just talking about evolution, society, cause and effect.
So the incels, the men who can't get a date, they can't get a date.
They can't get a date because women's hypergamy used to be limited by a lack of resources, right?
So women would want the Chad, you know, like it's the good-looking guy with the giant house, the Darcy, the Christian Grey, you know, the vampire guy.
So they want the super hot guy with the giant house and the infinite resources.
Sure, I get that.
Yeah, why not?
Sure, absolutely.
And it's sort of like when I watched a movie, it's a pretty not-great movie called The Fisher King.
But I still remember this from many decades later.
There was a picture of an absolutely gorgeous woman reading Nietzsche.
Wouldn't you want an absolutely gorgeous woman reading Nietzsche?
Sure.
Yeah.
Why not?
Why not?
So women, the reason why nature programs women to aim for the very top and to, quote, not compromise, is that their desire to reach for the very top used to be limited by the sort of nightmare scenario that is described by Amanda Wingfield.
In The Glass Menagerie, where she says, oh, you don't want to become one of these old spinsters, barely tolerated, sitting in attics, not wanting to say boo to anyone, passed from place to place, some sister-in-law, some brother, nobody wants them there, and they have to hide themselves away and do whatever pathetic little services they can, and they're always at the mercy of other people's kindness, and it's a pitiful, desperate, awful, godforsaken life.
That's what...
Laura, the daughter, is facing if she doesn't get a man.
So women could, yeah, sure, aim for the top.
Yeah, aim for the top.
Absolutely.
Aim for the top.
But if you aim too high, you get nothing!
You get nothing.
If you aim too high and you don't want...
So, Laura, it's an example of this, right?
So Laura is a character, and you should probably watch the Paul Newman-directed one with a young John Malkovich and Karen Allen and Amanda...
Woodward.
It's really good.
I don't think that John Malkovich quite gets the Tom thing, but anyway.
So in the story, in the story of The Glass Menagerie, which is kind of modeled under the...
The writer had a sister who went kind of schizophrenic or crazy.
So there's a really overbearing mother.
There's a pathologically shy woman who's like 27 or 28 years old, which is really old, you know, back in the 30s for marriage.
And she has...
So many drawbacks, right?
She is super skinny.
She had Plerosi.
When she was younger, one of the characters remembers it is Blue Roses, right?
You had Blue Roses.
So she had Plerosi.
She walks with a limp.
She's got a kind of stutter.
She's pathologically shy.
And her mother is trying to get her to go to secretarial school so she at least have some kind of income and maybe meet a guy.
But she got too nervous to go to school.
She's like got this absolutely crippling social anxiety.
And so she basically just walked around in the freezing cold and went to movies and only pretended to go to secretarial school.
And her mother is completely full of despair that this, you know, half physically deformed, pathologically shy, skinny girl, you know, just stays home and dusts her collection, her glass menagerie collection.
It's all very, very pathetic and sad.
And there's lots of people in the world like this.
It's, you know, this is the...
Look at all the lonely people.
Ellen Rigby stuff, right?
They're everywhere, man.
You dip down into that world.
The last broken, leftover people.
Oh, man, it's brutal.
Absolutely.
It will break your heart to get one atom of the suffering that goes on under the cover of...
Like, below the radar of those who are socially competent is this entire fucking tribe of broken, washed-out, lonely, despairing people who just...
They're shuffling along day by day, and the reason being the reason they have to shuffle along day by day, only looking at the tips of their shoes as it waddles through the mud, is because if they zoom out and they see the shape of their lives as a whole, they won't want to live.
Like, they can only, like, the single issue, one thing at a time, no larger picture.
They avoid any kind of philosophy, any kind of larger picture, any kind of self-assessment or self-criticism, because if they look at their lives, it's just too empty and broken and useless and pointless.
For them to want to continue.
So, there's this whole world down there.
So, that was a sort of cautionary tale, right?
A glass menagerie.
It's a glass menagerie.
Because Laura, the young, well, not a 27-year-old woman in the glass menagerie, she was really into the football captain in high school, right?
She was really into the football captain in high school.
And she still remembers that one time he asked her to sign her book and he was nice to her, right?
There's another thing, you know, being nice in a world of desperately lonely people is Russian roulette, man.
I mean, maybe there are a lot of chambers.
Maybe there's only one bullet, but you keep spinning it, man.
Sooner or later, you're going to get a stalker because they're just people.
They're so desperate, so lonely.
These are the women who go to the doctor with ill-defined, I just don't feel great just because they want the doctor to...
Take their pulse and hold their hand like they're that desperate for any kind of human contact.
It really is.
You are water, a tall glass of water for people dying in the desert.
So she kind of bonded with the top guy, the guy who went out, the cheerleader, the football quarterback, because he was nice to her once, so she kind of fixated on that and did not end up going out with...
Guys who were at her level, right?
Because this woman is like, she's like a one, right?
In terms of like sexual market value, right?
She's not particularly pretty.
She's got a bad limp.
She had a childhood disease.
She's pathologically shy.
She has no social skills, right?
So, but that doesn't mean that she can't get married.
Ones exist because ones mated.
Ones exist because ones mated.
So women, yeah, they want to aim high.
Sure, everybody wants to aim high.
Everybody wants the genius supermodel with a billion dollars.
Sure, whatever, right?
Who cares, right?
All kids say, I'm going to be Bruce Lee when you see your first karate movie, whatever, right?
You see Rocky, and this is what started.
Rocky and Schwarzenegger pumping iron kicked off the whole muscle kick in the 70s for Schwarzenegger and then the 80s, I guess, for the Rambo stuff, right?
I'm going to be that.
And it's like, well, no, you're not.
I mean, these men are genetically gifted.
I assume they take a lot of supplements, and it's their job.
They train, you know, three, four hours a day.
It's their job.
So you're not going to be like that.
Just so you know.
Just so you know.
You're not going to be like that.
So women would aim super high.
That's fine.
It's great.
Love it.
And there would be a risk, right?
Which is, the higher you aim, the more likely you are to fail.
So, if you want the quarterback, you want the head cheerleader, you can go for that.
But if you fail, you might fail big.
You might fail really big.
And you might end up with nothing.
But there's no way that women can end up with nothing anymore.
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