DATING SITES DO NOT CAUSE MISOGYNY.
The term Incel (involuntarily celibate) is relatively new and is used to describe men who want to have sex but cannot find a partner. The other day I saw a video where a so-called relationships expert said that women needed to drop their standards in order to find a man and that out of five positive swipes, a man may have one woman who he has coffee with and most ghost him.
First things first, there are plenty of people who have subscribed to dating apps only to find that they don’t find love on them, be they male or female, and they may find love with a person they bump into at the local supermarket.
While not every woman wants a man with movie star looks, a bank balance the size of a small country’s economy and whatever else, to suggest that a woman should lower her standards reeks of misogyny. A woman may want a man who has a job, but he doesn’t necessarily have to be a CEO. And let’s not forget that a woman who wants a man with movie star looks, a bank balance the size of a small country’s economy and whatever else has little chance of finding such a man on a dating app.
Some men who try and fail to find a partner may become radicalized and may be attracted to extremely misogynistic groups online. That, to me, is akin to a man who appeared on a program titled Nazi Super Grass who said that he joined a Nazi group after he had an argument with an Asian person in a carpark one day. He admitted that this group had been firebombing Chinese restaurants and that for him, the irony of one was that it was his favourite Chinese restaurant, and he used to take his wife there.
It is not purely the stuff of Mills and Boon for the seemingly awkward and seemingly unattractive teenage boy at school to miss out on a girlfriend in favour of a seemingly better-looking guy, and when he attends the 20- or 30-year school reunion, meets up with that girl, now a woman, who says that the other guy treated her badly, and awkward guy is still single, and the woman realizes that she would have been treated better by the awkward guy, and after the reunion, he asks the woman if she’d like to go for coffee and three years later, they get married.
Most Incels are not the seemingly awkward guy, some might be the unkempt person with the shaggy beard that’s never trimmed, the clothes that need washing and live in their mother’s basement; they are people who believe that it’s their right, as males, to have sex. Some may become radicalized, while others were already embittered and seek out such groups. Most Incels also cannot be convinced that they need to wait, and the right person will come along.