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#and I responded 'He's a queer person getting to choose his own outfits for the first time ever.'
shitpostingkats · 6 months
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Yes, Ai, you're intentionally dressed like a fruit salad, we GET it.
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novelwritingtrash · 4 years
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When Harry Styles played the O2 Arena in 2018, his fans illuminated the cavernous venue in the colours of the LGBTQ Pride flag. Coordinated by a social media account called The Rainbow Project, each seating block was allocated a different colour, so that when Styles played the song Sweet Creature, an enormous rainbow emerged from the crowd. I was there, and it was pretty magical. But it was also emblematic of how Styles’s fanbase views their idol: as a queer icon. 
There’s arguably never been a better time to be an LGBTQ pop star. Acts such as Sam Smith, who came out as non-binary earlier this year, Lil Nas X, the first gay man to have a certified diamond song in America, Halsey, queer boyband Brockhampton, pansexual singer Miley Cyrus and Kim Petras, who is transgender, have all enjoyed an incredible year, bagging the biggest hits of 2019.
Still, when Styles shared Lights Up, the lead single from his forthcoming second solo album Fine Line, there was a collective intake of breath. The song and video - in which he appears shirtless in what looks like a sweaty orgy as both men and women grab at him - was heralded as a “bisexual anthem” by the media and fans on Twitter, despite not really making any explicit or obvious statements about sexuality or the LGBTQ community. Instead, Lights Up was just another example of the queer mythologising that occurs around Harry Styles.
As a member of One Direction, Styles was – aside from Zayn Malik – the group’s most charismatic and enticing member. From his first audition on The X Factor to the band’s disbandment in 2015, the teenager from Cheshire managed to elevate himself and his celebrity swiftly rose to the A list. Helping him along was speculation about his private life: during his tenure in the band he was romantically linked to everyone from Taylor Swift to Kendall Jenner.
But there were two other rumoured relationships that dogged Styles more than the others. The first was his close friendship with radio DJ Nick Grimshaw. Styles and Grimshaw were often photographed together, and there were anodyne showbiz reports about how they even shared a wardrobe. 
Inevitably, rumours suggested they were romantically linked. In fact, so prolific was speculation that during an interview with British GQ, Styles was asked point blank if he was in a relationship with Grimshaw (he denied any romantic relationship) and, in a move that upset many One Direction fans, if he was bisexual. “Bisexual? Me?” he responded.  “I don't think so. I'm pretty sure I'm not.”
The second, and perhaps most complicated of rumours, was that he and fellow bandmate Louis Tomlinson were in a relationship. Larry Stylinson, as their shipname is known, began life as fan-fiction but mutated into a wild conspiracy theory as certain fans – dubbed Larries – documented glances, gestures, touches, interviews, performances and outfits in an attempt to confirm the romance. Even now, four years after the band went on “hiatus”, videos are still being posted on YouTube in an attempt to confirm that their relationship was real.
For Tomlinson, Larry was fandom gone too far. He has repeatedly rejected the conspiracy. Styles, meanwhile, has never publicly discussed it. In fact, unlike Tomlinson, whose post-1D career trajectory has seen him adopt a loutish form of masculinity indebted to the Gallagher brothers, Styles has largely leant into the speculation surrounding his sexuality. Aside from the GQ interview, Styles has told interviewers that gender is not that important to him when it comes to dating. In 2017 he said that he had never felt the need to label his sexuality, adding: “I don’t feel like it’s something I’ve ever felt like I have to explain about myself.”
Likewise, during his time touring with One Direction, and during his own solo tours, the image of Styles draped with a rainbow flag became ubiquitous. He has also donated money from merchandise sales to LGBTQ charities. His fashion sense, too, subverts gender norms: Styles has long sported womenswear, floral prints, dangly earrings and painted nails. 
Nevertheless, Styles’s hesitance to be candid has met with criticism. He has been accused of queer-baiting - or enjoying the benefits of appealing to an LGBTQ fanbase without having any of the difficulties. I’ve written before about how queer artists, who now enjoy greater visibility and are finding mainstream success, have struggled commercially owing to their sexuality or gender identity. 
Styles, who is assumed to be a cisgender, heterosexual male, doesn’t carry any of the commercial risk laden upon Troye Sivan, Years and Years or MNEK, who all use same-gender pronouns in their music and are explicitly gay in their videos. His music – with its nods to rock’n’roll, Americana and folk ­– doesn’t feel very queer, either. Looking at it this way, the queer idolisation of Harry Styles doesn’t feel deserved.
“The thing with Harry Styles is that he often does the bare minimum and gets an out-sized load of credit for it,” says songwriter and record label manager Grace Medford. For Medford, who has worked at Syco and is now part of the team at Xenomania records, Styles’s queer narrative has been projected on him by the media and his fans. “I don't think that he queer-baits, but I don't think he does anywhere near enough to get the response that he does.”
Of course, Styles does not need to explain or be specific about his sexuality. As Medford puts it: “he's well within his rights to live his life how he chooses.” However, he has also created a space for himself in pop that allows him that ambiguity.
It’s a privilege few pop stars have. Last year, Rita Ora was hit with criticism after her song Girls, a collaboration with Charli XCX, Cardi B and Bebe Rexha, was dubbed problematic and accused of performative bisexuality. Even though Ora explicitly sang the lyric “I'm 50-50 and I'm never gonna hide it”, she was lambasted by social media critics, media commentary and even her fellow artists until she was forced to publicly confirm her bisexuality.
But the same was not done to Styles when he performed unreleased song “Medicine” during his world tour. The lyrics have never been confirmed, but the song is said to contain the line: “The boys and the girls are in/ I mess around with him/ And I'm okay with it.” Instead of probing him for clarity or accusing him of performativity, the song was labelled a “bisexual anthem” and praised as “a breakthrough for bisexual music fans”.
Of course, there’s misogyny inherent to such reactions. But there’s also something more layered and complex at play, too. “There's such a dearth of queer people to look up to, especially people at Harry’s level,” posits Medford. “With somebody who is seen as cool and credible and attractive as Harry, part of it is wishful thinking, I think. 
“The fact is, he was put together into a boyband on a television show by a Pussycat Doll. And he has rebranded as Mick Jagger’s spiritual successor and sings with Stevie Nicks; he's really done the work there. Part of him doing that work is him stepping back and letting other people create a story for him.”
One only has to look at how Styles’ celebrity manifests itself (cool, fashionable, artistic) in comparison to that of his former bandmates. Liam Payne (this week dubbed by the tabloids as a chart failure) has been a tabloid fixture since his public relationship with Cheryl Cole and relies on countless interviews, photoshoots and even an advertising campaign for Hugo Boss to maintain his fame. 
Styles, meanwhile, doesn’t really engage with social media. He also rarely appears in public and carefully chooses what kind of press he does, actively limiting the number of interviews he gives. Styles’s reticence to engage with the media and general public – perhaps a form of self-preservation – has awarded him a rare mystique that few people in the public eye possess. 
This enigmatic personal, along with his sexual ambiguity, his support of LGBTQ charities and his gender-fluid approach to fashion, creates the perfect incubation for queer fandom. It also provides a shield against serious accusations of queer-baiting. As Medford argues: “Harry's queer mythology has been presented to and bestowed upon him by queer people whereas other acts feel like they have to actively seek that out.”
Ultimately, the way that Styles navigates his queer fandom doesn’t feel calculated or contrived. For Eli, an 18-year-old from Orlando who grew up with One Direction, seeing Styles “grow into himself” has been important. He suggests that Styles’ queer accessibility has helped to create a safe space for fans. “Watching him on tour dance on stage every night in his frilly outfits, singing about liking boys and girls, waving around pride flags, and even helping a fan come out to her mom, really helped me come to terms with my own sexuality,” he explains.
Vicky, who is 25 and from London, agrees: “To be able to attend his show with my pansexual flag and wave it around and feel so much love and respect - it's an amazing feeling. I'm aware so many queer people can't experience it so I'm very grateful Harry creates these safe spaces through his music and concerts.”
There’s appeal in Styles’s ambiguity, too. Summer Shaud, from Boston, says that Styles’ “giving no f----” approach to sexuality and gender is “inspiring and affirming” for those people who are coming to terms with their own identities or those who live in the middle of sexuality or gender spectrums. “There’s enormous pressure from certain gatekeeping voices within the queer community to perform queerness in an approved, unambiguous way, often coming from people with no substantive understanding of bisexuality or genderfluidity who are still looking to put everyone into a box,” she argues. “Harry’s gender presentation, queer-coding, and refusal to label himself are a defiant rebuke of that “You’re Not Doing It Right” attitude, and that resonates so strongly with queers who aren’t exclusively homosexual or exclusively binary.”
Shaud says that the queer community that has congregated around Styles is another reason she’s so drawn to him. “Seeing how his last tour was such an incredible site of affirmation and belonging for queers is deeply moving to me, and as older queer [Shaud is 41] I’m so grateful that all the young people growing up together with Harry have someone like him to provide that.” 
In fact, she argues that there’s a symbiotic relationship between Styles and his queer fans. She cites an interview he gave to Rolling Stone this year in which he said how transformative the tour was for him. “For me the tour was the biggest thing in terms of being more accepting of myself, I think,” Styles shared. “I kept thinking, 'Oh wow, they really want me to be myself. And be out and do it.’”
All of the queer Harry Styles fans I spoke to agreed that it really didn’t matter whether their idol was explicit about his sexuality or not. “It’s weird that people scrutinise people who don’t label [their sexuality] when they have no idea what that person feels like inside or, in Harry’s case, what it’s like to be under the public eye,” argues Valerie, who is 18. “It's an individual choice, not ours,” agrees Vicky.
Ollie, 22 and from Brighton, takes a more rounded view, however: “On one hand, I think that quite simply it isn’t any of anyone else’s business. On the other, if you place yourself in the public eye to the level of fame that he has then you should be prepared to be probed about every minute detail of your personal life, whether you like it or not – you should at least be prepared to be questioned about it.” Still, he says that the good that Styles does is what’s important: “He brings fantastic support and attention to the community, whether he is actively a part of it or not.”
Arguably, the ambiguity and mystery that surrounds Styles only allows more space for queer people to find safety in him and in the fandom.
Still, if fans are expecting a queer coming of age with new album Fine Line, they will be disappointed. Lyrically, he doesn’t venture into new territory, although there are some new musical flares. He also seems like he’s started to distance himself a little from the ambiguity, too. “I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows,” he told Rolling Stone. “I can’t claim that I know what it’s like, because I don’t. So I’m not trying to say, ‘I understand what it’s like.’ I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.” Having said that, within weeks Styles appeared on Saturday Night Live playing a gay social media manager, using queer slang and even wearing an S&M harness.
And so the cycle of queer mythologising continues, and is likely to continue for the rest of Styles’s career. And maybe things will change and maybe they won’t.
“If you are black, if you are white, if you are gay, if you are straight, if you are transgender — whoever you are, whoever you want to be, I support you,” he said earlier this year. “I love every single one of you.” In a world where LGBTQ rights are threatened and there’s socio-political insecurity, perhaps, for now at least, that’s enough.
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accidentalharrie · 4 years
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maybe you or one of you followers has access to the telegraph article about Harry "Why does the world want Harry Styles to be gay" I don't know what to think about this headline and I really want to read it but its online only for subscribers
Here you go, Nons. (I hesitate to post this but…)
When Harry Styles played the O2 Arena in 2018, his fans illuminated the cavernous venue in the colours of the LGBTQ Pride flag. Coordinated by a social media account called The Rainbow Project, each seating block was allocated a different colour, so that when Styles played the song Sweet Creature, an enormous rainbow emerged from the crowd. I was there, and it was pretty magical. But it was also emblematic of how Styles’s fanbase views their idol: as a queer icon.
There’s arguably never been a better time to be an LGBTQ pop star. Acts such as Sam Smith, who came out as non-binary earlier this year, Lil Nas X, the first gay man to have a certified diamond song in America, Halsey, queer boyband Brockhampton, pansexual singer Miley Cyrus and Kim Petras, who is transgender, have all enjoyed an incredible year, bagging the biggest hits of 2019.
Still, when Styles shared Lights Up, the lead single from his forthcoming second solo album Fine Line, there was a collective intake of breath. The song and video - in which he appears shirtless in what looks like a sweaty orgy as both men and women grab at him - was heralded as a “bisexual anthem” by the media and fans on Twitter, despite not really making any explicit or obvious statements about sexuality or the LGBTQ community. Instead, Lights Up was just another example of the queer mythologising that occurs around Harry Styles.
As a member of One Direction, Styles was – aside from Zayn Malik – the group’s most charismatic and enticing member. From his first audition on The X Factor to the band’s disbandment in 2015, the teenager from Cheshire managed to elevate himself and his celebrity swiftly rose to the A list. Helping him along was speculation about his private life: during his tenure in the band he was romantically linked to everyone from Taylor Swift to Kendall Jenner.
But there were two other rumoured relationships that dogged Styles more than the others. The first was his close friendship with radio DJ Nick Grimshaw. Styles and Grimshaw were often photographed together, and there were anodyne showbiz reports about how they even shared a wardrobe.
Inevitably, rumours suggested they were romantically linked. In fact, so prolific was speculation that during an interview with British GQ, Styles was asked point blank if he was in a relationship with Grimshaw (he denied any romantic relationship) and, in a move that upset many One Direction fans, if he was bisexual. “Bisexual? Me?” he responded.  “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I’m not.”
The second, and perhaps most complicated of rumours, was that he and fellow bandmate Louis Tomlinson were in a relationship. Larry Stylinson, as their shipname is known, began life as fan-fiction but mutated into a wild conspiracy theory as certain fans – dubbed Larries – documented glances, gestures, touches, interviews, performances and outfits in an attempt to confirm the romance. Even now, four years after the band went on “hiatus”, videos are still being posted on YouTube in an attempt to confirm that their relationship was real.
For Tomlinson, Larry was fandom gone too far. He has repeatedly rejected the conspiracy. Styles, meanwhile, has never publicly discussed it. In fact, unlike Tomlinson, whose post-1D career trajectory has seen him adopt a loutish form of masculinity indebted to the Gallagher brothers, Styles has largely leant into the speculation surrounding his sexuality. Aside from the GQ interview, Styles has told interviewers that gender is not that important to him when it comes to dating. In 2017 he said that he had never felt the need to label his sexuality, adding: “I don’t feel like it’s something I’ve ever felt like I have to explain about myself.”
Likewise, during his time touring with One Direction, and during his own solo tours, the image of Styles draped with a rainbow flag became ubiquitous. He has also donated money from merchandise sales to LGBTQ charities. His fashion sense, too, subverts gender norms: Styles has long sported womenswear, floral prints, dangly earrings and painted nails.
Nevertheless, Styles’s hesitance to be candid has met with criticism. He has been accused of queer-baiting - or enjoying the benefits of appealing to an LGBTQ fanbase without having any of the difficulties. I’ve written before about how queer artists, who now enjoy greater visibility and are finding mainstream success, have struggled commercially owing to their sexuality or gender identity.
Styles, who is assumed to be a cisgender, heterosexual male, doesn’t carry any of the commercial risk laden upon Troye Sivan, Years and Years or MNEK, who all use same-gender pronouns in their music and are explicitly gay in their videos. His music – with its nods to rock’n’roll, Americana and folk ­– doesn’t feel very queer, either. Looking at it this way, the queer idolisation of Harry Styles doesn’t feel deserved.
“The thing with Harry Styles is that he often does the bare minimum and gets an out-sized load of credit for it,” says songwriter and record label manager Grace Medford. For Medford, who has worked at Syco and is now part of the team at Xenomania records, Styles’s queer narrative has been projected on him by the media and his fans. “I don’t think that he queer-baits, but I don’t think he does anywhere near enough to get the response that he does.”
Of course, Styles does not need to explain or be specific about his sexuality. As Medford puts it: “he’s well within his rights to live his life how he chooses.” However, he has also created a space for himself in pop that allows him that ambiguity.
It’s a privilege few pop stars have. Last year, Rita Ora was hit with criticism after her song Girls, a collaboration with Charli XCX, Cardi B and Bebe Rexha, was dubbed problematic and accused of performative bisexuality. Even though Ora explicitly sang the lyric “I’m 50-50 and I’m never gonna hide it”, she was lambasted by social media critics, media commentary and even her fellow artists until she was forced to publicly confirm her bisexuality.
But the same was not done to Styles when he performed unreleased song “Medicine” during his world tour. The lyrics have never been confirmed, but the song is said to contain the line: “The boys and the girls are in/ I mess around with him/ And I’m okay with it.” Instead of probing him for clarity or accusing him of performativity, the song was labelled a “bisexual anthem” and praised as “a breakthrough for bisexual music fans”.
Of course, there’s misogyny inherent to such reactions. But there’s also something more layered and complex at play, too. “There’s such a dearth of queer people to look up to, especially people at Harry’s level,” posits Medford. “With somebody who is seen as cool and credible and attractive as Harry, part of it is wishful thinking, I think.
“The fact is, he was put together into a boyband on a television show by a Pussycat Doll. And he has rebranded as Mick Jagger’s spiritual successor and sings with Stevie Nicks; he’s really done the work there. Part of him doing that work is him stepping back and letting other people create a story for him.”
One only has to look at how Styles’ celebrity manifests itself (cool, fashionable, artistic) in comparison to that of his former bandmates. Liam Payne (this week dubbed by the tabloids as a chart failure) has been a tabloid fixture since his public relationship with Cheryl Cole and relies on countless interviews, photoshoots and even an advertising campaign for Hugo Boss to maintain his fame.
Styles, meanwhile, doesn’t really engage with social media. He also rarely appears in public and carefully chooses what kind of press he does, actively limiting the number of interviews he gives. Styles’s reticence to engage with the media and general public – perhaps a form of self-preservation – has awarded him a rare mystique that few people in the public eye possess.
This enigmatic personal, along with his sexual ambiguity, his support of LGBTQ charities and his gender-fluid approach to fashion, creates the perfect incubation for queer fandom. It also provides a shield against serious accusations of queer-baiting. As Medford argues: “Harry’s queer mythology has been presented to and bestowed upon him by queer people whereas other acts feel like they have to actively seek that out.”
Ultimately, the way that Styles navigates his queer fandom doesn’t feel calculated or contrived. For Eli, an 18-year-old from Orlando who grew up with One Direction, seeing Styles “grow into himself” has been important. He suggests that Styles’ queer accessibility has helped to create a safe space for fans. “Watching him on tour dance on stage every night in his frilly outfits, singing about liking boys and girls, waving around pride flags, and even helping a fan come out to her mom, really helped me come to terms with my own sexuality,” he explains.
Vicky, who is 25 and from London, agrees: “To be able to attend his show with my pansexual flag and wave it around and feel so much love and respect - it’s an amazing feeling. I’m aware so many queer people can’t experience it so I’m very grateful Harry creates these safe spaces through his music and concerts.”
There’s appeal in Styles’s ambiguity, too. Summer Shaud, from Boston, says that Styles’ “giving no f—-” approach to sexuality and gender is “inspiring and affirming” for those people who are coming to terms with their own identities or those who live in the middle of sexuality or gender spectrums. “There’s enormous pressure from certain gatekeeping voices within the queer community to perform queerness in an approved, unambiguous way, often coming from people with no substantive understanding of bisexuality or genderfluidity who are still looking to put everyone into a box,” she argues. “Harry’s gender presentation, queer-coding, and refusal to label himself are a defiant rebuke of that “You’re Not Doing It Right” attitude, and that resonates so strongly with queers who aren’t exclusively homosexual or exclusively binary.”
Shaud says that the queer community that has congregated around Styles is another reason she’s so drawn to him. “Seeing how his last tour was such an incredible site of affirmation and belonging for queers is deeply moving to me, and as older queer [Shaud is 41] I’m so grateful that all the young people growing up together with Harry have someone like him to provide that.”
In fact, she argues that there’s a symbiotic relationship between Styles and his queer fans. She cites an interview he gave to Rolling Stone this year in which he said how transformative the tour was for him. “For me the tour was the biggest thing in terms of being more accepting of myself, I think,” Styles shared. “I kept thinking, ‘Oh wow, they really want me to be myself. And be out and do it.’”
All of the queer Harry Styles fans I spoke to agreed that it really didn’t matter whether their idol was explicit about his sexuality or not. “It’s weird that people scrutinise people who don’t label [their sexuality] when they have no idea what that person feels like inside or, in Harry’s case, what it’s like to be under the public eye,” argues Valerie, who is 18. “It’s an individual choice, not ours,” agrees Vicky.
Ollie, 22 and from Brighton, takes a more rounded view, however: “On one hand, I think that quite simply it isn’t any of anyone else’s business. On the other, if you place yourself in the public eye to the level of fame that he has then you should be prepared to be probed about every minute detail of your personal life, whether you like it or not – you should at least be prepared to be questioned about it.” Still, he says that the good that Styles does is what’s important: “He brings fantastic support and attention to the community, whether he is actively a part of it or not.”
Arguably, the ambiguity and mystery that surrounds Styles only allows more space for queer people to find safety in him and in the fandom.
Still, if fans are expecting a queer coming of age with new album Fine Line, they will be disappointed. Lyrically, he doesn’t venture into new territory, although there are some new musical flares. He also seems like he’s started to distance himself a little from the ambiguity, too. “I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows,” he told Rolling Stone. “I can’t claim that I know what it’s like, because I don’t. So I’m not trying to say, ‘I understand what it’s like.’ I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.” Having said that, within weeks Styles appeared on Saturday Night Live playing a gay social media manager, using queer slang and even wearing an S&M harness.
And so the cycle of queer mythologising continues, and is likely to continue for the rest of Styles’s career. And maybe things will change and maybe they won’t.
“If you are black, if you are white, if you are gay, if you are straight, if you are transgender — whoever you are, whoever you want to be, I support you,” he said earlier this year. “I love every single one of you.” In a world where LGBTQ rights are threatened and there’s socio-political insecurity, perhaps, for now at least, that’s enough.
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nebris · 6 years
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The Rage of the Incels
Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy.
Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of the people I talked to were virgins by choice. Some were not, sometimes for complicated, overlapping reasons: disability, trauma, issues related to appearance, temperament, chance. “Embarrassed doesn’t even cover it,” a thirty-two-year-old woman who chose the pseudonym Bette told me. “Not having erotic capital, not being part of the sexual marketplace . . . that’s a serious thing in our world! I mean, practically everyone has sex, so what’s wrong with me?” A twenty-six-year-old man who was on the autism spectrum and had been molested as a child wondered, “If I get naked with someone, am I going to take to it like a duck to water, or am I going to start crying and lock myself in the bathroom?” He hoped to meet someone who saw life clearly, who was gentle and independent. “Sometimes I think, why would a woman like that ever want me?” he said. But he had worked hard, he told me, to start thinking of himself as a person who was capable of a relationship—a person who was worthy of, and could accept, love.
It is a horrible thing to feel unwanted—invisible, inadequate, ineligible for the things that any person might hope for. It is also entirely possible to process a difficult social position with generosity and grace. None of the people I interviewed believed that they were owed the sex that they wished to have. In America, to be poor, or black, or fat, or trans, or Native, or old, or disabled, or undocumented, among other things, is usually to have become acquainted with unwantedness. Structural power is the best protection against it: a rich straight white man, no matter how unpleasant, will always receive enthusiastic handshakes and good treatment at banking institutions; he will find ways to get laid.
These days, in this country, sex has become a hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, and, like any hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, it often makes people feel very bad. Our newest sex technologies, such as Tinder and Grindr, are built to carefully match people by looks above all else. Sexual value continues to accrue to abled over disabled, cis over trans, thin over fat, tall over short, white over nonwhite, rich over poor. There is an absurd mismatch in the way that straight men and women are taught to respond to these circumstances. Women are socialized from childhood to blame themselves if they feel undesirable, to believe that they will be unacceptable unless they spend time and money and mental effort being pretty and amenable and appealing to men. Conventional femininity teaches women to be good partners to men as a basic moral requirement: a woman should provide her man a support system, and be an ideal accessory for him, and it is her job to convince him, and the world, that she is good.
Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable. And, as women gain the economic and cultural power that allows them to be choosy about their partners, men have generated ideas about self-improvement that are sometimes inextricable from violent rage.
Several distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation. The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave women certainty and company in these convictions. And the Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with.
In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.
The incel ideology has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and  lamented his own virginity.
The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.
If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”
On a recent ninety-degree day in New York City, I went for a walk and thought about how my life would look through incel eyes. I’m twenty-nine, so I’m a little old and used up: incels fetishize teen-agers and virgins (they use the abbreviation “JBs,” for jailbait), and they describe women who have sought pleasure in their sex lives as “whores” riding a “cock carousel.” I’m a feminist, which is disgusting to them. (“It is obvious that women are inferior, that is why men have always been in control of women.”) I was wearing a crop top and shorts, the sort of outfit that they believe causes men to rape women. (“Now watch as the level of rapes mysteriously rise up.”) In the elaborate incel taxonomy of participants in the sexual marketplace, I am a Becky, devoting my attentions to a Chad. I’m probably a “roastie,” too—another term they use for women with sexual experience, denoting labia that have turned into roast beef  from overuse.
Earlier this month, Ross Douthat, in a column for the Times, wrote that society would soon enough “address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed or despairing.” The column was ostensibly about the idea of sexual redistribution: if power is distributed unequally in society, and sex tends to follow those lines of power, how and what could we change to create a more equal world? Douthat noted a recent blog post by the economist Robin Hanson, who suggested, after Minassian’s mass murder, that the incel plight was legitimate, and that redistributing sex could be as worthy a cause as redistributing wealth. (The quality of Hanson’s thought here may be suggested by his need to clarify, in an addendum, “Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!”) Douthat drew a straight line between Hanson’s piece and one by Amia Srinivasan, in the London Review of Books. Srinivasan began with Elliot Rodger, then explored the tension between a sexual ideology built on free choice and personal preference and the forms of oppression that manifest in these preferences. The question, she wrote, “is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question.”
Srinivasan’s rigorous essay and Hanson’s flippantly dehumanizing thought experiment had little in common. And incels, in any case, are not actually interested in sexual redistribution; they don’t want sex to be distributed to anyone other than themselves. They don’t care about the sexual marginalization of trans people, or women who fall outside the boundaries of conventional attractiveness. (“Nothing with a pussy can be incel, ever. Someone will be desperate enough to fuck it . . . Men are lining up to fuck pigs, hippos, and ogres.”) What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.
It is men, not women, who have shaped the contours of the incel predicament. It is male power, not female power, that has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire. Women—and, specifically, feminists—are the architects of the body-positivity movement, the ones who have pushed for an expansive redefinition of what we consider attractive. “Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy,” Srinivasan wrote, “may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel—as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy—inadequate.” Women, and L.G.B.T.Q. people, are the activists trying to make sex work legal and safe, to establish alternative arrangements of power and exchange in the sexual market.
We can’t redistribute women’s bodies as if they are a natural resource; they are the bodies we live in. We can redistribute the value we apportion to one another—something that the incels demand from others but refuse to do themselves. I still think about Bette telling me, in 2013, how being lonely can make your brain feel like it’s under attack. Over the past week, I have read the incel boards looking for, and occasionally finding, proof of humanity, amid detailed fantasies of rape and murder and musings about what it would be like to assault one’s sister out of desperation. In spite of everything, women are still more willing to look for humanity in the incels than they are in us.
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels
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