The Atlanta Spa shootings were the first major media introduction to the phenomenon of incels. Involuntary celibates who have given up any desire to have relationships with women. Some apparently have taken this position to one logical extreme, which is to punish the entire gender that they believe has rejected them.
For millennia, men who literally couldn’t relate with women well could simply ignore them and use sex workers (or even gay men) to fulfill their erotic needs. Some were closeted homosexuals living in fear. Others were hard-core misogynists. Woman-avoiding is not really new behavior. It’s not even new inside of long-term hetero-marriages of convenience either, especially in the pre-modern era when ‘not being married’ required vast wealth, priesthood, or some highly aberrant and eccentric symbolic social positioning (e.g. shaman, the hijras of India, the heart-broken widower, etc.).
What may be new is the rapid shift in expectations of male behavior, however. Expecting equal respect from men, we should remember, is new, modern request and expectation from women. For some men, it remains a revolutionary and threatening expectation.
Expecting romantic prowess and skill is also a relatively modern expectation of men by straight women. The code of romance is perhaps the real historical origin of ‘respect for women’, even though the intent was originally more manipulative than respectful. The code of romance appeared in a medieval era when displaying nurturing, caring and non-threatening cues to women were no doubt quite rare. To display these qualities acknowledged women’s desires for male behavior as well as their very real fear of rape, assault, and abuse by those incapable of a romantic bond.
The dependence on ‘romantic signaling’ as a trust-mark for a strange male sexual partner has never been higher than today among educated straight women. I don’t blame them. If I was a single female under the age of 40, as I’ve said many times in private, I’d be armed to the hilt in public with every possible weapon I could fit in a purse. This includes the first date with any ‘strange’ male.
Yet, most women rely on the cultural code of romance. Until Ted Bundy, this appeared to be a sophisticated, non-violent approach. Except that, occasionally, it just doesn’t work.
When romance appeared, like most counter-cultural trends, the majority sentiment was pretty much the opposite of romance. Romantic love was a rare behavioral reality until after WWII in this country. Somehow, this ‘fact’ seems lost on most of us. Romance was an elite game of the rich, a demand by elite women.
As the expectations for romantic treatment have grown in scope and depth, any man who is incompetent at displaying the right cues sticks out more and more. In fact, it is quite possible that the rejection rate for romantically incompetent men has never been higher than now. Even higher than it was for me as young, confused teen.
It’s easy to demonize ‘incels’ as a class of psychos. This is what Americans tend to do with any deviant behavior. We create a new pathological ‘group’ and shove these folks into it as if there is no sociological origin to the negative behavior. And we never admit that what we’re taggin as ‘deviant’ today was perfectly accepted in a prior era.
Autistic men are one group who struggle with the romantic code due to neurological atypicalities that affect most of their social life. There are more of these men today than ever before for reasons we do not yet fully understand. Regardless, the non-romantic behavior of these men leads to tons of sexual rejection. The latter can lead to frustration that transforms into an unhealthy, victim rage when the internet is made available to them.
It’s interesting that the recent ‘case study’ of the Atlanta Spa shootings doesn’t raise any of these issues at all, even though a great deal of the eye witness commentary about his bizarre public behavior and inability to maintain social relationships is easy to find within it.
The question I have is: is the Incel movement simply a violent reaction to unmanaged change in romantic expectations and the inability of our society to ‘handle’ high-functioning autistic adults who ‘passed’ more easily in a rougher, more male-dominated age? And, if so, what are we going to do to help these folks, and monitor the ones who have chosen a violent release of their real emotional frustration?