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<\/p>\nIf nothing else, the controversial new documentary\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>\u00a0does a beautiful job of representing sadness. In an opening scene, one of the subjects of the film speaks in a voiceover about the pattern of his endlessly lonely days. An ugly cartoon figure known online as \u201cWojak\u201d acts out the life of this unhappy young man, who does nothing but eat, sleep, cry, masturbate, and post angry messages on the infamous online forum 4chan. Who would envy such a person?<\/p>\n
\u201cTFW No GF\u201d is internet slang for \u201cthat feeling when you have no girlfriend\u201d\u2014a feeling that the five subjects of the documentary know only too well. Though they are never actually referred to as \u201cincels\u201d, they are all involved in the incel subculture, an online community focused around the experience of being \u201cinvoluntarily celibate\u201d, typically defined as not having had sex for six months or more. Many self-defined incels have been celibate for much longer than that, usually as a result of some combination of physical unattractiveness and social anxiety. They are mostly\u2014but not exclusively\u2014white and male. They are also mostly young. The documentary\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>\u00a0offers an unusually sympathetic and intimate insight into the lives of five young, white, male incels, and as a result it has been flamed.<\/p>\n
The film critic Eric Langberg described the film as \u201cone of the most irresponsible docs I\u2019ve ever seen\u201d and\u00a0Variety<\/i>\u00a0accused it of \u201cgiving five incendiary attention seekers exactly what they want\u201d. A more positive review in\u00a0Jacobin<\/i>\u00a0was denounced by the American feminist Jill Filipovic, who tweeted that \u201c[t]here is apparently no bottom to making excuses for violent, racist, misogynist men who fantasise about killing women, and sometimes follow through\u201d. These critics of\u00a0TFW No GF\u00a0<\/i>condemn as dangerous the decision to foreground the voices of the film\u2019s subjects, exclude commentary from family members or cultural commentators, and underemphasise the violent acts committed by some incels.<\/p>\n
Incel subculture became the subject of media attention in 2014, when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 before committing suicide in Isla Vista, California. Rodger claimed that the act was part of a \u201cwar on women\u201d, and that he was motivated by his inability to attract a sexual partner. In 2015, another young man, Christopher Harper-Mercer, killed nine people, apparently in imitation of Rodger, and in 2018, Alek Minassian killed ten, writing on Facebook before his attack: \u201cthe incel rebellion has already begun!\u201d<\/p>\n
As a consequence of these atrocities, incels have been represented as dangerous extremists, and in some cases that characterisation is accurate. There is plenty of misogyny within incel subculture: since these men are brought together by their inability to attract a sexual partner, resentment towards women is not infrequently whipped up into outright hatred. Critics of\u00a0TFW No GF\u00a0<\/i>have suggested that this theme is not explored nearly enough, quite fairly pointing out that, although the director, Alex Lee Moyer, is a woman, the film itself doesn\u2019t feature any women, except for a few pornographic shots of female bodies that briefly pass across the subjects\u2019 computer screens.<\/p>\n
Critics are also right to point out that one of the producers of\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>, a crypto-anarchist and gun rights activist called Cody Wilson, has an extremely dubious history. Wilson was described by\u00a0Wired<\/i>\u00a0magazine in 2017 as one of the ten \u201cMost Dangerous People on the Internet\u201d, by virtue of the fact that he is the founder of a group, Defence Distributed, that sells DIY firearm blueprints, enabling anyone to 3-D print their own firearm components or even entire guns at home. Wilson is also a convicted sex offender, following an incident in which he paid a 16-year-old girl $500 for sex in a hotel room in Austin, Texas, in August 2018. Alex Lee Moyer acknowledges that Wilson helped her to gain access to the film\u2019s subjects, but otherwise downplays his involvement with the film. Nevertheless, his association with the project does its reputation no favours.<\/p>\n
Despite all of this, the film is nevertheless valuable in that it provides a sensitive perspective on the lives of young men who are\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0dangerous extremists, even if they live in worrying proximity to other men who definitely are. Thus the\u00a0New Yorker\u2019<\/i>s Jia Tolentino misses the mark when she writes of the subculture as a whole: \u201cIncels aren\u2019t really looking for sex; they\u2019re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDominion over female bodies\u201d isn\u2019t quite right, at least for most incels.\u00a0The esteem of their peers<\/i>\u00a0is closer to the truth, and incels\u2019 inability to attract a romantic partner is strong and painful proof of the lack of that esteem. A non-existent sex life is only the most obvious sign of a deeper problem that incels face, which is that they are constantly rejected by other people, male and female alike. Jordan Peterson, no fan of the incel subculture, puts it bluntly: \u201cIf you\u2019re a young man and all the women are rejecting you, who\u2019s got the problem? . . . If all the women are rejecting you, it\u2019s\u00a0you<\/i>.\u201d There is no sugarcoating that distressing self-realisation.<\/p>\n
While there is no doubt that some incels are misogynistic and aggressive and bring their unhappiness upon themselves, that\u2019s not true of all of them. The hard truth is that some people are ugly, and some are ugly and also have trouble with social interaction. These people struggle to find sexual partners because, sadly, scientific research reveals that beauty isn\u2019t really in the eye of the beholder. Sexual attractiveness is both objective and brutally hierarchical: some people win only because others lose. And if (as I do) you insist that no one should ever be pressured into unwanted sex, and if no one wants to have sex with incels\u2014well, then, here lies the problem. Some people will forever be unlucky in love, and they will probably be miserable about it.<\/p>\n
Blaming incels for their own misfortune is a lot easier than thinking hard about their conundrum. Because their conundrum is sad and difficult, which means that thinking about it is sad and difficult. What\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>\u00a0does very well is encourage viewers to engage with a topic that is often easier to ignore: what is it like to be one of life\u2019s losers?<\/p>\n
Many on the Left are so concerned by inequality linked to race, class, and sex, that they are unable or unwilling to think about how other forms of inequality might have just as much impact on a person\u2019s life. So they look at the young white men in\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>\u00a0and see only privilege and entitlement, forgetting that traits like intelligence, charm, and beauty are also very important in determining an individual\u2019s outcomes, even if they are less often spoken about.<\/p>\n
The impact of \u201clookism\u201d, in particular, deserves far more attention than it typically receives. The academic Francesca Minerva has found, for instance, that in the United States, physical attractiveness has more impact than race on male income. People who experience lookism suffer all kinds of adversity at disproportionate rates: they are passed over for promotion, struggle to make friends, are sometimes abused in the street, and of course struggle to attract romantic partners. Being born ugly is not a trivial misfortune.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the subjects of\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>\u00a0are not actually especially unattractive or unintelligent\u2014what they lack above all is charm and an ability to motivate themselves. Deprived of any externally-imposed structure, they drift from one temporary source of dopamine release to another. This may partly be a result of a tendency towards self-indulgence\u2014perhaps aggravated by incel ideology\u2014but there is also a graver political problem that\u00a0TFW No GF\u00a0<\/i>brings into the spotlight.<\/p>\n
In a would-be meritocracy like ours, the personality trait that is financially and socially rewarded above all others is a kind of \u201con your bike\u201d vim that most incels conspicuously lack. Watching\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>, I was reminded of a piece by the\u00a0Guardian<\/i>\u00a0journalist\u00a0\u00a0John Harris in which he described watching the 2005 Labour Party Conference speech given by Tony Blair:<\/p>\n
\u201cChange is marching on again,\u201d he announced, in that messianic tone that had begun to emerge in his speeches around the time of 9\/11 . . . \u201cThe character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.\u201d<\/p>\n
I watched that speech on a huge screen in the conference exhibition area. And I recall thinking: \u201cMost people are not like that.\u201d The words rattled around my head: \u201cSwift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.\u201d And I wondered that if these were the qualities now demanded of millions of Britons, what would happen if they failed the test?<\/p>\n
Set this beside a quote from \u201cKantbot\u201d, one of the subjects of\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>:<\/p>\n
People used to graduate and go get a job, and that used to work pretty well for them. But now that\u2019s impossible, you have no experience in anything, you\u2019re from a small-town background and you don\u2019t have any connections, so you end up living back at home, and your parents are telling you to apply to McDonald\u2019s or something because it\u2019s better than you staying at home.<\/p>\n
While of course it is possible for highly motivated people from humble, small-town backgrounds to make it big (that\u2019s the promise of the American Dream, after all), the truth is that, as Harris puts it, \u201cmost people are not like that\u201d. And a society in which any-one not blessed with unusual talent is condemned to misery is not a healthy one. More and more commentators are now starting to think about the suffering of meritocracy\u2019s losers, with two new books by David Goodhart (see page 20) and Michael Sandel published on the subject only last month.\u00a0TFW No GF<\/i>\u00a0is an addition to this emerging genre.<\/p>\n
Most responses to the film have asked us to either sympathise with or condemn incels, but I don\u2019t think we have to limit ourselves to either. Like it or not, there is a group of people (mostly male, mostly white) who are disaffected and angry, and they\u2019re not going away. Their suffering is real, and a consequence of societal problems as well as individual ones. They may be bigoted, obnoxious, and self-pitying, but they shouldn\u2019t be dismissed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u201cincel\u201d subjects of TFW No GF are not actually especially unattractive or unintelligent\u2014what they lack above all is charm and an ability to motivate themselves\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7175,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spare-rib"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9508,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions\/9508"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}