Crafting a Healthy Masculinity (Part 3): On Jeffrey Epstein, Incels, and the Quest for Status

I've been following the Jeffery Epstein case for a while, though my introduction was still fairly recent – there was an excellent brief series on him from Robert Evans on Behind the Bastards. I also recently listened to the Turn That Off! podcast's two-parter on the incel phenomenon/subculture. Perhaps I listen to too many podcasts, but the cross-pollination between the two has been useful and interesting. I feel like I'm ready to at least broach the topic of sexual ethics in this series on Healthy Masculinity, which is a necessary topic.

Okay, so here’s what an incel is, for those of you lucky enough not to know: they’re what happens when pickup artists advertise self-help courses in the IMDB database for this movie. The socially-awkward people who buy into it learn it’s a scam, and then radicalize, using terminology from The Matrix by way of Neoreactionary thought. Or perhaps the Neoreactionaries got their thought from the incels. I don’t know.

Of course, that would require the link between them – and both are topics related to sexual behaviors and thinking in men – to be about sex. Don't get me wrong, there is a sexual element to what is going wrong here, and there is certainly a viciously misogynistic element to it – and, as I have said, a thing is what it does – but the root for both the sexual misconduct of the powerful and the sexual frustration of the relatively powerless doesn't seem to lie in sexual desire. No, the issue is something else entirely.

As a side-note, I'm not a fan of the term “incel” – I feel it's an ugly sounding word, but it's the word that these people apply to themselves. Though, of course, it was appropriated from a queer woman of color, who ran the website “Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project” by the toxic people that apparently hung out in the IMDB forum for the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin.” Originally, it referred to potentially a very real issue – the inability for some people to bring themselves to act on a desire for romantic attachment. This goes beyond not being able to “seal the deal”, and is something that might need to be covered at some point. That point is not here, though.

The issue I'm speaking about here, the root cause of both phenomena, power itself. Or, more aptly, status. Or, yet more particularly, male obsession with status and its expression.

A man like Jeffrey Epstein satisfies his desires flagrantly and nauseatingly because he believes his status protects him from repercussion. A man like Elliott Rodger commits a mass murder because he feels he has been shamed. The cause common to the two incidents is status, and a lack of concern for women and their autonomy and safety is just the vector, not the cause.

This image, like almost any other crudely drawn MS paint image that is posted on the internet, has received oh, so many, variations.

Consider, for example, the obsession that incels have with so-called “Chads” – individuals that they cast as paragons of masculinity. There's been a certain amount of speculation that this indicates a certain degree of repressed homosexual attraction on the part of the incels. While I'm not going to deny that this might be a factor for some of them, I see it more as a factor of perceived power and status. The incel imagines a strict, biologically-determined hierarchy, and that the Chad is higher in it, this leads to obsession and resentment.

Consider, also, the fact that men like Jeffrey Epstein and Louis CK (whose actions I still feel upset about – I enjoyed Louis and his stand-up, but I just can't enjoy them any longer,) were enabled in their abuses. The latter through an informal network of friends and allies hushing up any would-be accusers, and the former through the implicit protection of law enforcement due to his close association with the rich and powerful. Their status protected them, and they were free to entertain the excesses of their desires to their heart's content.

I have no doubt that many people in the incel subreddit would trade places with pre-accusation Jeffrey Epstein in a heartbeat. Because that's that they wanted out of life. They are two manifestations of the same phenomenon, under different conditions.

Piotr Kropotkin was friends with Emma Goldman. I’m going to guess he wouldn’t tolerate sexual assault — and what good, contemporary anarchist theory isn’t derived from his work?

A quick, informal survey of political discourse in incel spaces shows a tendency towards the authoritarian end of the political spectrum. There are fascists, there are maoists, there are leninists. What I'm finding very little evidence of is any anarchist incels. Sure, there are some mentions, but the vast majority of the less than a page of results on google seem to be in either joke posts or in Afrikaans (for whatever reason. I can't read Afrikaans, so I'll ignore those for the moment).

So I'm comfortable saying that a lot – certainly not all, but a lot – of the more conventional problems we have are due to an obsession with hierarchy, due to the fact that there is an embrace of more hierarchic thinking and an avoidance of anti-hierarchic thinking in the so-called “incel community.” This is not to say that there is no such thing as anarchist sexual misconduct – I liked “The Temporary Autonomous Zone” but I tossed it aside as soon as I found out about the author’s other work, never to acknowledge it as a valid theory: anything that could be used to justify that was something I couldn't go along with. Moreover, this was when I was in high school – and if something is bad enough to make a high school-aged testosterone-fueled goblin (to borrow a term from this week’s guest columnist) throw something aside that he thinks is interesting, then you know that it has issues.

This isn't the be-all-and-end-all of sexual ethics, but it might be the best starting point: the sexual and the romantic are not grounds for any kind of status. So long as everyone is safe, clear-headed, and consenting, it should have no bearing on your status in a social group or society at large.

Of course, I note now that I borrowed a term from this week's guest writer, and have brought hormones into the mix. Not to essentialize, but it seems that there are studies that link higher levels of testosterone more with status-seeking behaviors than with risk-taking behaviors as has long been thought. It could just be that, insofar as biochemistry is concerned, masculinity and hierarchization are intertwined. Which is possibly more something to note for transmasculine individuals than cismen, because the danger there comes with the sudden onset of urges toward status-seeking behaviors instead of dealing with them all one's life.

Or you could just put all of your energy toward crime and get really good at art on the side, like Caravaggio. (Portrait by Ottavio Leoni)

However, being in possession of a tendency doesn't mean that you have to act on it. There are many men who are quite happy to leave aside the pursuit of higher status. I think, however, that the pursuit of status is not necessarily a bad thing. The pursuit of status can lead to developing a craft or art form to its highest level, and excellence gained in pursuit of status is no less valid than excellence gained through pure love of the art or craft being practiced.

No, the problem comes when status is assumed to have a transitive effect. When we assume that a great actor is a great politician, or that a wealthy person is necessarily a smart one, or – if we accept that sexual performance is grounds for any kind of status – that a Casanova is necessarily someone with worthwhile thoughts (or necessarily not).

Healthy masculinity hinges on understanding that status is not transitive.

It also hinges (this is a construct with a lot of hinges; needs must, for it to be flexible) on understanding that respect – as in treating someone as a human being – and respect – as in treating someone as an authority – are different things. Let's call these two different qualities “respect” and “deference.”

Many men seem to think that they are entitled to treat others as subhuman (without respect) as a response for failing to treat them as an authority (without deference). This disconnection is, I think, at the root of the objectification that is foisted upon women so often: since she didn't treat me as someone important, as the protagonist of my story, she is a prize to be won or booty to be conquered.

This is important to consider, because the world needs no more people like Jeffrey Epstein or Elliot Rodger. The point isn't to accrue power and status, but to have esteem for yourself in a way that doesn't depend on harming or objectifying other people.

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