I don’t know, but this comment from @Hermes@hexbear.net has given me some stuff to think about.
People should not think less of you on the base of the amount of sex you have, and you shouldn’t either.
This is a nice thought, but insults based on amount of sex are absurdly common. I have seen quite a few people on this site who still do these insults, and it doesn’t get removed when I report it. The incel article from a while go was about how we should critique incels for their misogyny rather than them failing to have sex, I see this as pretty similar to the arguments about not body-shaming fascists in that most of the people who will get hit by the insult are not the actual target. From what I remember, that article good job explaining why these insults are harmful and how they hurt a lot of people who they really shouldn’t, unfortunately the discussion on that post was very off topic. In my experience, most people who have sex fail to recognize that not everyone who is celibate is an incel (“If so many terrible people have sex and you can’t, that must mean you are worse than they are!”).
I would say that insults based on amount of sex a person has should not be allowed, but I am very pessimistic about this actually leading to a change in site culture.
Once again, please assume good faith, even if you disagree with the take. If you think I mean something weirdly reactionairy by this post, ask me wether that is what I mean, instead of just saying that’s what I mean please.
I don’t want this to become a strugglesession, I just feel like this would be a good discussion to have. If this does become hostile, then please lock/remove it mods.
No opinion on the matter, but can I just say that calling famous and powerful men incels, or trying to redefine the meaning of “incel” as “generalised misogynist” is a foolish endeavour that makes us look like idiots to whom words have no meaning everytime we do it. The word incel has a meaning, it’s literally shorthand for “involuntary celibate”. Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, etc are definitely not incels. This is obvious to everyone. They are misogynists of course, but by definition they are not incels, which is/was a word that referred to a specific type of misogynist that blames society for their celibacy, which does not apply to rich and powerful men, obviously. It’s just bad propaganda, and calling rich and powerful men incels honestly reads like cope at the state of a society that rewards the type of behaviour they engage in.
I’m on the fence, people like Tate are attached to the Incel political movement whether or not they fit the literal meaning of the word.
Like you’re correct in that they’re not literally celibates, what that’s not really what “incel” means anymore in common context.
Yeah but calling them incels doesn’t actually damage them. They don’t view themselves that way, and they certainly have utter contempt for actual incels that have trouble because of looks, height, etc. It kind of reminds me of argument “it’s okay to call white supremacists n*ggers! it’s actually using the word aGaInSt ThEm!!! hahahahah i’m so smart” argument. It’s honestly mega cringe and deeply unserious.
Agree with your first two sentences, but uhh what’s is going on with the rest of your comment? I’ve never heard that argument and don’t see the need to insert that into the comment. Maybe I’m lucky that I’ve never heard that before.
It does remind me of the discourse around “Karen” or “boomer”… saying that someone in their 20s could be “boomer” or a some guy could be a “Karen”, when that’s not really what people think about when you use those terms or how they were intended to be used. Not really a fan of filtering out “incel”, but we should still be clear on terms.
Instead of blanket banning everything and making this place into an over modded hellhole (it’s already a shadow of its former self) why not just take it on a case by case basis? Are the mods just lazy and don’t want to do anything but start a monthly struggle session?
I don’t see how turning the site into a hugbox is going to help the revolution
You’re on a 7 month old account, the fuck do you know about old Hexbear?
Your account is only about a year old, so what do you know about old hexbear?
I don’t know much, other than during the initial Reddit ban this place was too toxic for me to stick around, so I stayed on Reddit instead of coming here. I didn’t end up coming back until federation when the moderation had improved.
I was on the sub, and here on chapo.chat’s first day, and yet this is my first comment on this account.
Not saying it’s the same case for the person you’re replying to, but account age isn’t necessarily “time spent on the site”.
Honestly I think it’s projection. Or they can’t even conceive that someone may have been a lurker without an account or practiced actual digital hygiene and created a new account for opsec, etc.
The words on their profile directly above where it says 7 months are “I’ve been here for awhile despite the account age” so I’m guessing that’s the case.
The linked thread does not include a single derogatory use of the word incel, every time it is brought up it comes from people who struggle with the common usage of the term and call out virgin shaming. I find this to be represenative of the site in general, from my experience on here incel is exclusively or almost exclusively used for the sect of ideologically committed online ultra-misogynists, not for “person who doesn’t have sex”. The virgin shaming, body shaming and ableism that are inextricably linked to reactionary, non-feminist callouts of incels are all against site policy and are, from what i see, removed reliably by mods. I fully stand behind that. As a queer person i do have criticisms of hexbear’s site culture in regards to sex, but these are that the site can be both aggressively sex negative and still too lenient on purging misogynists.
Speaking of which, this thread leaves me with the clear impression that you are making up a problem that doesn’t exist. It comes off as an attempt at tone-policing and silencing feminist critique, and of you placing a protection of fragile masculinity above the safety concerns of women. I exclusively call people incels when they are the ideologically committed kind, i do not use the term when i do not mean these particular online communities and i view that as the common usage of the term on this site. Nothing about that is problematic. There is no reason to protect the incel community, there is no reason to feel pity for misogynists, there is particularly no reason to make the self-descriptor of a very specific hate group a “no-no word”. Doing so needlessly complicates accurate designation of some of my worst enemies, some of the biggest threats to my safety in my day to day life, one of the main reasons why i do not use most online spaces anymore and the flat-out main reason why i cannot be part of non-queer nerd communities any longer. Gamergate and its consequences would’ve been impossible without incels. 4chan would not have gone the way it did without them. Incel culture has poisoned most of my hobbies and made it impossible to engage in them without hand-picking and vetting the people i do that with. And even that seems like a trivial afterthought when i think about what incels have done to other women. These shitheads have killed people. There have been actual acts of terrorism motivated by their ideology. Where is your concern about that? Why should i assume good faith from you when you make a thread like this after your behavior in past struggle sessions? I see a clear pattern here and i’m not ok with it.
Thanks for posting this, I struggled with finding the right words to explain why the op bothers me so much and your comment made it clear to me. Virgins are not a systemically oppressed group. Incel is a term for a specific ideology but could be used as insult. Using it as insult is mean but that doesn’t make it a slur. The ideology it describes is dangerous and harms women, it is important that the ideology gets called out continuously for the safety of the women that might fall victim to people who subscribe to that ideology.
I mean, just to make it clear: I am absolutely, 100% against shaming people who don’t have sex, be that because they are involuntarily celibate, asexual, in a longterm relationship where one or both partners just do not have much of a libido anymore or w/e. There definitely is a repressive, ideological component around mocking people who don’t get laid, it is commonly rooted in a patriarchal understanding of sexual “conquest” and bragging rights, frequently intertwines with forms of systemic opression like ableism and allonormativity etc.
That should be called out, and from my experience, it usually is on here. Outside of hexbear, i’ve also seen people use the word incel in ways that legitimately piss me off. But on here? It’s a descriptor for a women-hating online subculture that builds an identity around being intrinsically unfuckable because they do not meet or think they do not meet criteria purported by other adherents of the “redpill” or “manosphere” ideology. It makes sense to be able to identify them, just as we can correctly identify other subsets of that anti-feminist movement like MGTOW / fathers’ rights activists, PUAs / Tate-style hustlegrind pyramid scheme subscribers and so on.
I think it is a misnomer insofar as incels are all volcels. If they were cool it would work out eventually. Given that incel is, I think their preferred nomenclature it would be weird to restrict it on those grounds.
If incel just means misogynist, why does incel have so much more bite? The connotation of incel is imo three things: misogynist, sexless, and the latter fueling the former.
When one calls Andrew Taste an incel, first and foremost they are declaring him a misogynist. However, it doesn’t stop there, otherwise misogynist would suffice, so at least one of the two other connotations are intended. Making fun of people because they turn lack of sex into misogyny? Sure go off. But I fear a lot of people are implying the other connotation, making fun of people because of their lack of sex. Unfortunately it’s not always trivial to tease the meaning out of every use.
As a virgin, idrc either way. I’ve never been one to care about implied or unintentional indirect digs about sex.
As someone who used to play the ‘women’s’ role in a relationship with a self identified incel, the word incel to me means misogynist in a specific way that manipulates women into dating them. Honestly if the word were to be banned I’d find it a huge shame because every woman should be aware of the term so that they can protect themselves and not take it lightly like I did when they come across someone that self-identifies as one.
When one calls Andrew Taste an incel, first and foremost they are declaring him a misogynist.
I also think doing this is just foolish because by definition men like Andrew Tate are not incels. But I already wrote a whole comment on that.
Honestly most of hexbear is really bad when it comes to incels. They don’t really understand them, and don’t offer anything constructive or anything in the way of praxis in order to tackle the issue. It’s just “be cool man!!!” as if it’s that easy. Sure anyone can be a good person, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into intimacy with the other sex. There’s a reason why the PUA guys get a following: it’s because some of the techniques for self-improvement actually work. And I don’t mean “just be yourself” or “just be confident” because anyone who says that is deeply unserious and honestly needs to learn to view the world outside of their own sphere of conceivability. But I’ve learned that actually having a real discussion about those topics here is a waste of time, and honestly the fash are gonna keep increasing their ranks with the lonely frustrated men. So I guess it’s better to leave or learn some self defense I guess.
I get what people are saying re: “incel” as a literal term/contraction vs. the colloquial understanding of the term, but at least in my case that doesn’t fully work out. In general, my first instinct is to process things very literally and rigidly, and I have to manually go back in my head to revise and find the “proper” meaning. I generally do find the proper meaning, it just takes a bit of legwork. Don’t really know if this is a ND thing or if I’m just a little weird.
So when I see “Incels don’t deserve compassion” or similar sentiments there’s always friction in reminding myself that when the speaker says “involuntarily celibate person” (which I consider myself to be) through that contraction they (hopefully) don’t actually mean that but a highly specific group of harmful people. And that’s a more harmful experience than I’d like to admit for a variety of reasons, not least of which being gender stuff. But people don’t seem like they’d be super receptive to that, and I guess it’s because it’s fairly low on the list of things to worry about in the grand scheme of things.
This suggestion is just running defense for incels - a group notable for their reactionary response to not having sex. A person is an incel when they decide misogyny is what explains their inability to have sex.
I’m a virgin and I’ve never had a problem with incel, just like I’ve never had a problem with cracker, because while semantically it does mean everyone who is a virgin against their wishes, it practically is only applied to those who abuse women. We of course can have a discussion about the misuse of the term and how that affects virgins but the word per se is not a problem as far as I can see.
But just a disclaimer: I’m a volcel, not an incel, so that probably changes some things.
People call Andrew Tate an incel. Say what you want about him, but he’s not lacking in the amount of sex had. The word just means sexist now
Making fun of people for not having sex, sure.
But the moniker incel is something this group of people have chosen for themselves.I agree with what you’re getting at here but I think we also can’t deprive ourselves of the ability to call a spade a spade on this one. I think the term incel should absolutely be fair game to disparage genuine self-identified incels or those who clearly fit the mold, but it shouldn’t be a term to lob around against people for an individual questionable take - this has the potential to do severe damage to sensitive/vulnerable comrades, a lot of whom are probably neurodiverse and fight RSD.
Use incel to talk about how /r/braincel users deserve the wall. Don’t use incel to disparage people for bad takes that are correctable with patient but firm dialogue.
The only people who identify as incels are the people who associate with the misogynistic ideology. Normal people just say they’re virgins. The word “involuntary” is the misogynistic part, it implies that they are being wronged by women/society.
The discussion is not about people identifying as incels, but about calling other people incels.
In that case, I would agree that we shouldn’t use the word interchangeably with virgin. I wouldn’t accept people using virgin as an insult either.
Ideological incels deserve to be called incels with all the contempt that entails.
Isn’t it harsh to say “haha virgin” to someone who hasn’t had sex though?
Yep. Good thing nobody’s suggesting doing that!
I mean in real life, I’ve seen it, for years. Sorry for making that clearer.
People definitely do, you just haven’t seen them, I have.
Report them and they’ll get banned, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with this thread.
Should have said in real life, not on here.
then report it. that kind of behavior is unacceptable. but calling an incel an incel is not that.
Should have said in real life. Not on here.
You don’t go around calling people incels just because they can’t get laid.
People are incels when they are politically and socially reprehensible enough to the point that nobody wants to interact with them, let alone fuck them.
Their inceldom comes from a place of entitlement, where they think they deserve sex but refuse to work on their own shit personality so that people might actually want to have a relationship with them.
They openly call themselves incels, and the term adequately encapsulates the fact that their sexual frustration comes from being scum of the earth unwilling to self-crit.
Throw em in the trash like last years IPhone call that bincell,
Evil tech start up, uber for illegal food called it finsell
No, but we should ban using the -oid suffix since it originates from an ableist term and we’ve banned other suffixes with similar origins.
I completely disagree. It’s used in a lot of technical and scientific circumstances. Such as describing Earth not as a sphere, but as an oblate spheroid.
There’s other terms on the wordfilter list that I have issues with, such as d=ge=erate, for the same reason. “D=ge=erate matter” is a very specific term in physics used to describe a type of matter commonly found in extremely dense objects like white dwarfs and neutron stars.
I didn’t think ”in a derogative way” needed to be specified because people could figure it out from the context, but maybe it should’ve been. Obviously I’m not asking for *oid to be added to the slur filter, just that using ableist terms ending in -oid shouldn’t be allowed.
I don’t think that is true unless I’m missing some context. It’s a widely used suffix in English.
I assume you’re referring to
cw slur
schizoid
?
I think a one-off ban of that term is sufficient…
The third definition on that page describes its use as a derogative. I’m fairly sure it originates from
CW:ableism
m*****loid, an archaic ableist term.
I see, well I would support banning terms like that, when the implication is basically “lesser human”. Just not trying to get banned when talking about asteroids and hemorrhoids lol
That’s my concern as well. There are many modern scientific, engineering, and technical terms that use older slurs in whole or in part, yet in their modern context are not at all slurs.
I’m wondering if there could be some sort of “soft” word filter. Instead of instantly replacing certain words, perhaps there could be an “auto-report” to mods about certain words. They could then make their own decision on whether the word was appropriate in the context of the discussion on which it was used.
It’s not like it’s absolute, a word doesn’t have to be automatically filtered for it not to be allowed here. “Bitch” isn’t filtered, but comments using it in a misogynistic way are still removed. It’s pretty easy to determine whether a comment has an ableist insult or the word “asteroid” in it.
