These ideas were laundered to smell a bit better

Talia Lavin notes with what a light heart men can ask hey now if we talk about fairness in the distribution of wealth, income, health care, housing, why can’t we talk about it in the distribution of access to women’s genitalia?

Let’s reconstruct this sequence of events, shall we?

Shortly before he committed mass murder on April 23, Alek Minassian, 25, logged on to Facebook. “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161,” he posted. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

It looks like typical online bullshit, but he wasn’t joking or playacting or bullshitting; he meant it.

A few days later, a tenured professor of economics at George Mason University, Robin Hanson, published a post entitled “Two Types of Envy” on the blog Overcoming Bias arguing that incels might have a salient point to contribute to the national discourse. As Hanson put it, “Those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”

By the same token, those with much less access to domestic servants to scrub their toilets and get rid of all the dust might like redistribution along this axis.

Yesterday, Douthat — that incorrigible chinstrap-bearded prophet of pedantic reason — published his own thoughts on the issue, entitled “The Redistribution of Sex,” positing that the idea of sex as a redistributable resource is “entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern sexual life,” and blaming “sexual liberation” for inceldom and its victims.

It appalls but does not surprise me that neither of these august ideologues sought even once to examine a primary source on the issue. That neither of them bothered to emphasize that it is not incidental that incel ideology has led to multiple massacres. It is far easier to write an abstract consideration of the economics of sex and a generalized bemoaning of contemporary mores than to face the glaring and obvious truth: Inceldom is an ideological system premised in its entirety on a poisonous, irrational, and thoroughgoing hatred of women.

Along with a conception of women as not fully human in the way men are fully human.

Do you want to know how incels would like to redistribute sex?

Take them at their word. Here’s a quick segment from an incel manifesto that began making the rounds this weekend after it appeared on r/badeconomics, and which lays out a few clear principles for a sex-redistribution matrix. Among the ideas on offer are banning makeup – a means of feminine deceit – and suggesting a system of state-mandated “sexual-market value cards” measured on a one-to-ten scale. The proposal culminates in the following: “Women with more than 9 sexual partners and single moms should be forced by the state to date and have sex with incels that can’t get any women despite the above changes.”

I wonder if an open program of state-mandated mass rape, à la The Handmaid’s Tale, would make it into the crisp pages of the New York Times. It’s a good thing these ideas were laundered to smell a bit better.

The Times launders terrible ideas through Ross Douthat the way Trump launders money through compliant lawyers.

I wish Ross Douthat had had my weekend: After tweeting about incels — in a state of fairly earned horror, I tweeted a screenshot of the mass rape manifesto mentioned above — a number of them discovered my Twitter account.

(That is, after she tweeted about incels, a number of them discovered her Twitter account. Watch those dangling participles, folks.)

That’s when I found out what incels like to call women they consider slutty. The term is “roastie,” and it’s short for “roast beef,” and it derives from a physics-and-anatomy-illiterate understanding of female genitalia. Their theory, you see, is that a woman who has too many sexual partners (perhaps even more than nine!) suffers from an excess of friction, and her labia begin to resemble the folds of a roast beef sandwich.

And so, dear reader, for hours and hours, incels tweeted photos of roast beef at me, intending to shame me for my distended pudenda. I was disgusted at first. Then I got angry. Then I wanted Arby’s.

But if women are so gross, why do the incels want to use them for sex? Why not just put all that talent to work creating a hand-held vagina instead?

But that’s by the way. The real point is why is the Times laundering incel ideology?

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